ADHD is classified as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, yet it remains invisible to observers who often misinterpret symptoms as laziness or lack of motivation. The condition involves executive dysfunction, where the brain's attention control mechanisms become dispersed and random, making sustained focus physically painful and causing internal conflicts between different brain regions. For individuals with ADHD, having a supportive social environment that understands and accepts their condition is crucial for recovery and self-acceptance. Cults like Scientology often misdiagnose ADHD through methods like auditing and rigid scheduling, which override rather than treat the underlying neurological condition.
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Critical Q&A - LIVE
Added:Well, all right. According to YouTube, we are now live. Let me just check and make sure all is well and good with our sound and video and everything like we always do when we get going here. Looks like we are.
>> Hi, welcome to critical Q&A for this uh July 19th year of our Lord 2026.
And uh let me just uh pop back over here.
And let's switch over to our chat box screen. Hello. Uh thank you for joining me again this week. Those of you who are here or coming and of course those of you watching in the future on replay. Uh I hope you enjoy today's Q&A show. I hope we have some good questions and all that. In fact, let's go ahead and set up our um question box uh there. Let's get here. Please put your questions here. I'm always so uh horrible at getting that started at the beginning of the show. So, now I've got that set up properly like it's supposed to be. Um all right, let's pop back over here and see what's what.
Um yes. All right. Good. Um lots to talk about today. Few things to get into. Uh first off, uh it's still burning up. Uh really, really hot, high 90s uh all week here in Denver. I hope it is I hope you guys are having an easier time of it than we are here. Wow.
weather occurred everywhere today. Uh but uh in in different ways and here it's been hot. Um yeah, we had the most interesting thing. Mel's sister last night we had her 50th birthday party at Benihana's and uh the power went out right at the end of our meal. Uh suddenly just the restaurant was dark and as a result I was surprised to learn that they could not get us uh charged for the meals. We could not pay for our meal. Nobody could. And they had to basically just kind of write off the entire uh evening uh profit from the restaurant because they couldn't process any credit card or card payments. And of course everybody pays that way now, right? Nobody's writing checks or paying cash.
So, we were uh able to at least get some cash together to give tips to the service, you know, the crew and everything. But, um but yeah, that was pretty wild. I don't know if that was at all connected with, you know, temperatures and everything, but apparently um the whole, you know, broomfield or something was experiencing big power loss yesterday. So, uh hope that's uh hope things are um are uh not that way in your area. Uh also, yes, note uh XJW. Um funny you mentioned, will the Headlies be interviewing me?
Yes, in fact, they did. Uh Claire interviewed me and today at uh two o'clock my time in two hours uh the premiere of that in of that interview will be going up on the Blownfor Good channel. So uh after you're done watching the Q&A here today with us, you can go over there and watch Claire interview me about um my new book uh this one over here, What Now? Uh practical guide for life after a cult.
and um and we talk about that and about you know the cult postcult experience and all that. Anyway, it was a fun uh interview and I hope you guys will check it out. So that is uh happening today.
Now the other thing is I have Fig Cam for you. Yes, I do. So let's go take a look at it. This is our little bundle of furry joy. And you can see his hairs have all been cut. He has uh he got some grooming last week. And he is just the cutest little poodle mix in all of Denver. Look at this little guy. There he is. Uh going to town on my hand as he does. He doesn't bite, but he likes to put his mouth on me. And uh and on Mel, too. She doesn't particularly like it as much, but he gets a little a little I I don't want to say bityy, but definitely mouthy. Uh, and we have been teaching him kisses, not bites. And so then he starts licking us like crazy with his little kisses. So, um, but he's really smart, really picking up on that. And it's so fun to watch him. You can see Mel's little legs there. It's so fun to watch him, um, learn and try to please us. He is really so, he's so sincerely trying to do what we want him to do. And it's so obvious to me when I watch him and how he watches us and what he what he tries to do listening to us and stuff that he he really does um he really is like that uh trying to please you know and I and if you can uh you know I don't know maybe your dogs like that too sometimes you know in their efforts to please they do ridiculous things um uh you know and sometimes we get a little bit like why are you doing that stop doing that, you know. But but when you can see that he's really just, you know, happy to see you, wants to be around, wants to play, wants to, you know, have a good time. He's just, oh god, I love our dog. Just absolutely love him. Um, so yeah. Yeah, I heard it's supposed to rain next week. Yeah, maybe. Maybe we'll get some rain. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But it's been wild. It's been wild times. In fact, I wanted to talk today um a little bit about some stuff I've been, you know, blabbering about or going on about for years.
But something's happened recently and I think I mentioned this to you all uh a few times or and talked about it in a few different ways, but I had a little bit of a different angle on it today and I wanted to to monologue a little bit about this among you know many many other things that I'm sure you guys want to ask me about that I am more than happy to get into. So fire away with your questions uh in the question box um as we uh and I be more than happy to to address what you want to know. I wanted to talk a little bit more about disability and um and ADHD stuff for real fast because I think it ties in so much with uh at least for me it has the ex my ex-cult experience. I've been out of Scientology for, you know, over a decade now. And to continue talking about the Excelult experience after that long sounds a little funny to some people's ears, but when you're raised in a group for decades, then you're going to have after effects that are going to go on and on and on for quite some time.
And you deal with it and you roll with it and you try to be aware of it. I'm not saying that I'm the victim of this stuff. I'm just saying that it's interesting. And um and one of the things that's really hit home to me recently has been the sort of pushpull fight of the social influence of having a condition or a situation or let's say a disability and ADHD is classified as a disability. Uh which I don't know that everybody knows. I don't know everybody is aware of that fact that it's actually classified under the disability act. and and it and if you have ADHD then you know how disabling it can be but to the outside it always looks like laziness or you know obstructionist or you know uh somebody who's just you know needs to pick themselves up by their bootstraps you know get their [ __ ] together stop being lazy stop slacking off why don't you just change your mind why don't you just you know fill in the blank everybody's got something to say. And it's always of this line of why don't you just?
And for those of us who have disabilities, we know that some days are a lot easier than others when it comes to what we just can do.
And it's really unfair because it's an invisible disorder. It's an invisible disability, right? And so people don't see it. All they see is your behavior and they look at other people who don't have that condition but are lazy, are slackers, are people who want to, you know, game systems or get away with stuff or just not work or just whatever.
They look at those people and they go, "Well, you're just like them, right?"
And this word just keeps popping up. Why don't you just, you know, you're just like, you know, and um and I it can affect a person's ability to learn, Vernon. Yes, it can act in a way as a learning disability, but I don't think it's classified as such. It might be. It might be. That's something I'm not familiar enough to know, but I know for a fact it gets in the way of one's ability to learn stuff because it is an attention deficit disorder.
And what that means is you are not in control of your own attention.
That is the weirdest thing to get people's head around sometimes what that really means. Exe the executive dysfunction. And I use my hand over the brain here because your executive functions in your brain are up on you know in the top kind of layer of your brain physically. And um and it gets dispersed. It gets random. It becomes um a seeker of novelty over uh priority.
Right? You might have a thing due tomorrow. You might have something you need to be working on. That's your priority. And your brain just doesn't care. It just is suddenly like, "Yeah, I get it, but I just can't. No, we're not going to do that right now. No, I don't want to put attention on that right now.
I need to put my attention elsewhere."
It is painful for me to have my attention on that right now. I can do it, but it hurts. It's literally like ah, you can feel your muscles tense up.
you know, I can feel my stomach, you know, like it becomes very, very difficult in the moment to continue to put your attention on something that you want to have your attention on. There's another part of your brain going, "Yeah, but we really want to do this." And another part of your brain going, "No, we don't." And you know, more often than not, that's the one that wins. And that's just one way that that this is experienced. This is not even, you know, the totality of how the how the disability works. And there and the reason I'm talking about this today is because I feel um I wanted to share something that I thought was really really important in how we go about dealing with this. And that is getting the people around us to really [ __ ] understand it because it's it has really dawned on me how important it is for any condition we're suffering from, any sort of situation we're suffering from. It's not a small thing to have the people in your world get it, agree with you, understand and accept that that is a thing. And if the people around you don't and are resistive and fighting and telling you you're wrong, you're a problem, that's not real, that's not true, that's not a real condition, you need to get new people around you because I it really hit me hard like wow because and the way it hit me was not because of because I have a bunch of people in my world who are not supportive of me. That's exactly the opposite for me. And it was realizing that that it took years of my wife and my friends actively supporting me in this before I gave myself permission to accept it.
over all the years of Scientology conditioning, decades of Scientology conditioning, it wasn't pre-cientology conditioning that was making me suppress or feel weird about or having a hard time with my ADHD.
Uh, and this applies also just as much to certain aspects of cyclic depression that I experience or certain modes of anxiety that I will experience from time to time. You know, I'm not a I'm not a a a a person who is who who catastrophizes their life or their conditions, and I'm not somebody who dwells on or or revels in the victimhood of this. I'm sharing this information hopefully to help those of you out there who might be watching at some point who are also struggling in a similar way. um you know perhaps in a postcult way where the conditioning we received in and out in and around the group was you suck. You're the problem.
Your reactive mind is the problem.
There's some external thing to you that is actually the cause of your condition.
It's not a neurodeivergent condition.
It's not a neurological condition. It's not a biological condition. In other words, it's in you. That's all those words really mean is that it's inside of you. It's something that is part of who you are. It's part of your makeup as a as a physical entity, right? So it it's as much a part of you as a broken leg would be and to you know and everybody sees the broken leg and understands immediately but they don't see the ADHD and they don't understand immediately. But when they do, right, I anyway in the conditioning from the cult, I couldn't let myself see this. And I and I and now that it's changed, it's changed so radically. My life schedule now is so different from how I kept trying to impose, you know, this kind of moralistic order that I kept trying to bring to my daily schedule. I should be eating three squares a day. I should be getting eight hours of sleep. I should wake up in the morning refreshed and ready to go. This was what I was this was the litany of standards or you know shoulds that I was giving myself every day and every single day I was making myself miserable about myself because these are standards I can't meet.
And I thought for a period of time when I was in the sea or I was meeting these standards and therefore why can't I meet them now?
And it took me so long and I think some of you struggle with this too realize that the environment around us was not supportive of us and was not allowing us to be who we are.
And it's not just, you know, when we talk about identity and how cults mess with our personality and our identity, it's not just the surface level identity stuff of, you know, dressing how you want or talking how you want. It's literally being who you are. And you're not allowed to be you in these groups.
It's unacceptable.
Who you are is unacceptable to the group. Therefore, who you are is unacceptable to you and you're constantly fighting yourself and fighting your own conditions and situations that you are powerless to really do anything about. You can't make a broken leg heal any faster than it's going to take to heal. You can will it and postulate it and intend it, but it's not changing anything about how fast that leg is gonna heal.
You can't change having ADHD.
You can't. It doesn't ever just go away cuz you will it. So, you know, so you have to learn to live with it.
And I can't believe it's taken me all these years to finally get to a place where I'm really cool with it and I get it and I'm not fighting it anymore, you know. And I just wanted to say some of those things because I think some of us out there really um struggle with that, you know. Um I do not see a borked camera gamma uh loots. I see a perfectly clear picture of me on the screen. So, I am a little confused about what might be coming across on the screen. If you're seeing a hazy version of me, um, that is unfortunate because I don't see that.
Um, don't know what to say. All right. Um, okay. So, that was what I uh that was just a little bit of what I wanted to say about that that sort of that social balance.
Really, my point of all of that rambling was to say that you really do need a support system around you that will accept who you are, not keep putting impossible standards on you of why don't you just, you know, why don't you just blah blah, you know, well, I blah blah, so you should blah blah. You know, if you're hearing a lot a lot a lot of that from the people around you, get new people. You don't need that. you just don't, you know, um you need people around you who get you for who you are.
And it's and it's um I I would, you know, I I would not rather be alone than than that than than I don't know. It's a tough it's a tough thing to say. There's no I I don't want to offer extreme stupid compar, you know, things. I just want to say that um pictures washed out a little. Okay.
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's the Maybe I have the lights on a little too bright. Um, yeah, interesting. Very interesting. Um, not sure what to say about that. I think I've reached the limits of my technical understanding of how to make the picture better because I'm I I I don't know what else to do. So, there we go. All right.
Uh, let us go ahead and start getting to your questions. We only have a few in the queue. Um, so throw some more at me.
Uh, and I will start with uh a question that I've actually prepped from the email line um that came in from Michael Yoder. And there it is. Okay. So, Michael asks, we we'll kick off with Michael's question this week. After listening to a lot of LR and Warner Hehart because Michael experienced both EST land Landmark and Scientology, uh I'm wondering if they were not only narcissists and perhaps dealing with uh flee, but that they were hard solopsists, i.e. they're really the only mind in the universe and we're all just figments of their imagination.
Thoughts? Yes, I have thoughts. I looked into uh this a little bit more today because I got a little bit curious about this. Salopypsism is an interesting interesting word. It means a few different things and I thought it might be worth some time today to talk about this both because Michael asked about it and because it's a word that comes up.
Uh Johnny attack likes using this word and um and we should be clear about what solopypsism is and what it isn't, where it goes, where it doesn't, right? Um because salopypsism is not narcissism.
Narcissism is a personality disorder.
Soism is not. Soism is one of two things. It's a philosophical position that has little to do with one's personality. And then there is a psychological soopsism. Uh and of course Wikipedia is our friend here today. So the first um place we will start with on this is um psychological soypsism. And now this is the this is when we're using this term to describe a psychological state. When we talk about one's mood or uh one's um one the the state of a person's nervous system when we talk about um perception or pain or belief we are talking about mental states psychological states and soypsism can fit into that um domain. Um it's when a person feels detached from external reality and perceives the world as existing only within their own mind.
Everything around me I I will perceive or believe is a product of my mind.
It's not something separate. I all of this is emitting from or a product of me um extended. And it's interesting, I think you all might find it interesting where this tends to appear um because narcissism isn't discussed anywhere in this article.
Extended periods of social isolation and confinement may contribute to the development of this condition. In particular, the syndrome has been identified as a potential concern for individuals living in space for extended periods of time.
Yeah. Isn't that interesting? When people talk about space sickness or going mad in space, this could be one of the things that happens to a person or in solitary confinement.
We talk about why, you know, that solitary confinement is a little bit of a mental death sentence for a person and when you put somebody in solitary for extended periods of time, you Robinson cruso that person, so to speak, into a jail cell and they have no human contact for a vast majority or all of their 24-hour daily cycle, you are condemning that person to eventual madness because this is one of the things that can end up happening to them. And it doesn't actually even take that long. Sometimes it's a little shocking how quickly a mind can break down if it doesn't experience or have its necessary social contacts.
It's really interesting and really really a window into understanding what human beings are all about. We need connection. And there's a lot of folks out there, especially in our hyperindividualism society these days, who really seem to worship at the altar of individualism and believe that, you know, I'm fully self-sufficient. You know, it's sort of the libertarian dream, the fantasy, right? I'm living fully self-sufficient.
Somebody somebody said, I I saw this recently that that libertarians are are like house cats that way. you know, they really fully believe that they're these independent creatures who are completely dependent on a system around them to support them that they have no understanding of at all. I thought that was a wonderful dig at libertarians. Uh but getting back to soypism overview here, the philosophical now there's now this is where there's there's a very interesting thing with soypism and I'm only going to talk about this and then get back to the question because I want to be clear about what this is.
Salopypsism isn't narcissism.
So salopypsism is this idea that the entire world springs from my mind right as a psychological state. It also interestingly enough is a philosophical position. And this is different from that mental thing. The philosophical definition of solopism is the idea that only one's mind is sure to exist.
That's different in a solopistic position. A person only believes their mind or self is sure to exist. This is part of self-existence theory or the view of the self. Individuals experiencing solopsism syndrome feel reality is not real in the sense of being external to their own minds. It's not real. It's not something that actually exists outside of my perception of it.
The syndrome is characterized by feelings of loneliness, detachment, and indifference to the outside world, but it is not recognized by the APA as a psychiatric disorder, but it shares similarities with depersonalization or derealization disorder, which is recognized. And this is where it connects to Scientology. This is where it connects to where solopism connects to Scientology's exteriorization to um other groups who are trying to induce a state of euphoria or awe have an whether we've talked about for years.
What does that mean?
this a depersonalization or derealization moment.
What is depersonalization?
It's when a person has persistent or recurrent feelings of uh being disconnected or detached from oneself.
the EP, the end phenomena, the end result, the product of L12, I believe it's L12, which is some of the most expensive auditing you can get in Scientology, are these L rundowns that you can only get at flag. There are three of them, and the EP of one of them is permanent exteriorization.
permanent permanent solopsism, right? Permanent depersonalization disorder. Hubard's literally trying to induce a disordered state of mind by creating a permanent exteriorization, right? This separation from your body, this dissociative state, right? There's different words we've used for this.
Today, I'm I'm talking about this this way. So we have this depersonalization thing. Um soism syndrome this psychological state is distinct from the philosophical solopsism that because in the philosophical position it's basically stating that nothing exists or can be known to exist outside of one's own mind.
That's a philosophical position.
You could posit that. You could say, "Okay, prove to me that this is not a manifestation of my mind. Prove that to me."
Right? Good luck.
It's hard.
It would be very hard to prove, wouldn't it? But it's right here. I'm holding it.
Oh, are you? But are you really?
But but drink it. You can taste it. But isn't those perceptions and experiences just in my mind? Prove to me it's something objectively different from me.
It would be really hard that you know you like scientifically that would be really hard. That's why it's in philosophy, right? Not over in physics.
Physics department hates [ __ ] like this, right? But the philosoph philosophy guys love this stuff.
So I do too. I think it's really fun um because you can kind of just laugh at the at at the antics of it, right?
Because it's kind of like, oh damn, that would be really hard to prove, wouldn't it?
So So then we come back to this question.
Um can or are Warner Heard or Elron Hubard soapsists? Are they people who believe that everything is springing from their own mind and they experience life as though consciously they are they are wandering around thinking as they live their life that everything is a product of their own mind.
Hubard's writings in his affirmations indicate he doesn't really think that. I think if Hubard actually believed that he would have written it down somewhere uh especially in those affirmations. I don't Hubard seemed to realize uh have a pretty solid um you know idea of theory of mind right the idea that other minds actually do exist independently of his own that's that thing that we all have to come to realize you know somewhere between the ages of about 3 and five we all have experience this moment of realizing that we're not the only thing in the universe and that everything around us is not a product of our imagination or a product of our of our existence. Um that's called theory of mind and it's sort of the anti-olypsist thing. It's sort of the moment you realize oh yeah right you sort of break because a newborn little baby you know or a new or a young child perceives the universe around them as everything exists for them. You know, they don't have that concept yet that other minds independently exist different from theirs and are engaged in their own mental activities for their own purposes that have nothing to do with a child.
That's a big moment of realization for I think you know most human beings. Um but it happened so young none of us really remember when it happened, right? But it did. You had a moment where that where that occurred to you.
Um, I suppose we're sort of positing here, right? Well, are, you know, would a hard solopsist have such a moment? I don't know. I I I kind of think not that, you know, when I when I when I combine those ideas together, I kind of go, "Oh, yeah. I don't think they really experience that, did they?" Because they continue to believe that that everything is a product of their own mind.
So it can become narcissistic. It can become very egotistical.
It wouldn't necessarily have to though.
You know, a person could believe that everything was a product of their own mind or or or the or the world was a was that without becoming super egotistical.
If you can imagine that, right? They might think of it tragically. They might think of it, you know, very uh it might be very lonely position for a person to have. Um yeah, I mean that would be the ultimate lonely place to be, wouldn't it? It would be very very tragic to believe that that was true. to be a soypist would would be a tragic position to have because how could you ever feel emotionally connected to anybody else, you know, or feel that they care about you when you are convinced they're just a product of your own mind, right? Man, that would be rough.
But I really don't think Wernner and Hubard would fit that description.
Wernern, I'm told by people who worked with him for years, um Warner was actively interested in the ideas of others and pursued them. He was keen to gather intellectuals and academics and people to him to inform him of what they were doing and truly was interested in what they had to say.
He wanted to know and understand what they were doing or working on and interact with those ideas and bring them into where applicable bring them into his world and certainly use them certainly take advantage of those ideas uh for whatever way he could. But that's a very very different thing from you know being a socist right. So I don't see in their behavior that technically speaking I don't really think that you know they were solopsists. I I it's a it's a very exact thing right now that we've broken it down and it's not your everyday kind of word and it's not something people sit around in the diner talking about right or around the kitchen table. They don't tend to bring up solopypsism as a thing. So, I wanted to go a little deep on it for once. Um, to go beyond the, well, he's just a soypist because he's incredibly self-absorbed.
Not necessarily.
We're when we talk about soypism, we're talking about actual cause. Now, we're talking about a causitive way, you know, in other words, um, why is this person so egotistical? Are they narcissistic?
Are they socistic? Are they just kind of lazy? Are they are they trained or conditioned to be that way? Or do they actually suffer from an actual mental disorder where they can't help themselves be be that way? Or do they actually hold a position deep deep deep inside of them that they are really the only person that really exists in this entire universe and everything comes from them? Do is that why they are so egotistical and narcissistic? Right. And that would be a really hard question to answer unless you could really get a person to open up and tell you their most deepest, darkest ideas about how about themselves and their how they perceive the world, right? And Hubard never opened up that way, but we have his affirmations and his and in his affirmations, he does open up quite a bit about a lot of very very deep beliefs that he has. We've gone over them in detail, line by line on this channel. And nowhere in there did Hubard ever say, infer or imply that he was the creator of the universe or that he was the only person that existed in the universe. Quite the opposite. Hubard talked about a guardian spirit. He talked about entities or uh elemental um beings or spirits and he talked about God as an as a separate entity from him.
So, I don't see solopypsism there at the end of all of that long-winded answer.
No, Michael, I don't I don't think so.
Um, and it's and and were they to be that way, I would again call it more of a tragedy than a moral judgment.
It would suck to be a solopscist if you have or desire empathic experiences with others.
You know, because if you were really a hard solopist that really held that position, then you would believe that every pleasurable conversation or experience you were having was a little bit of a form of masturbation, wouldn't you?
Like that would be awful to think you're the only one who could cause anything pleasurable to happen to yourself.
That's just one aspect of of of what that would mean for such a person, you know, because there's no other independent minds or or entities that ever exist for such a person. Man, what a lonely lonely tragic existence that would be, you know. All right, enough about that.
So, good. All right. So, now let's get to the rest of the questions you guys are popping in here and asking. Uh, starting with XJW Vernon. Uh, just going down from the top here. What will happen to voting this November since Trump wants to change mail and voting? Yeah, he does. And apparently the appeals court sort of uh overturned some sensible effort to stop Trump from doing that. Here's what I'm going to say about this and I'm going to tell you guys to be on alert, right? If you ever, you know, needed to be on alert, now would be a good time to do that. Um, we are being our democracy is actively, openly, blatantly being attacked, right?
Being that the acid that the the vats of acid have now come out. It's not just teaspoons or buckets. It's fullblown, you know, dump trucks full of of sulfuric acid is being brought out by the Trump administration and is all of the cronies uh of the Republican party, which is a party of traitors at this point. The GOP are traitors to our Constitution. And they all should be in jail at this point for what they're doing. They're trying to undermine and corrupt our entire system. They're doing it by through a great deal of propaganda. Please do not believe any of their [ __ ] The GOP, the the Republican party is blatantly lying to you right now. They are fear-mongering at a level that we have never seen anyone in this country ever do before that I've seen or am aware of. Um they are trying desperately to undermine our systems so that they can maintain power.
It's the most gross, coarse, traitorous, treasonous thing I've ever seen in the entire history of this country. What the Republican party is doing right now in real time and trying to undermine mail-in voting is one of the ways that they're going about this. Uh the whole save act and trying to take away people's citizenship, trying to take away people's rights, they are actively pursuing these measures. We are actively under attack internally by treasonous traitorous people. Okay. Um Oh, I just it just really really makes me mad. Um I'm furious that this is happening. So we need to fight back against it because it's not inevitable. It's not a forcertain thing at all that they are going to win. In fact, they have all the cards stacked against them. That's why they're trying so hard. That's why they can't hide anymore. They have to blow out all the stops. They have to do every dirty trick, every lie, every deception from the White House pulpit down to the lowest evangelical christofascist preacher.
that entire chain is in alignment that America needs to be destroyed, that the that the Constitution needs to be burned and that the Bible somehow is, you know, the only thing we need. And Russell VA um you know from the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, all that is leading this behind the scenes along with a lot of other cronies and sickopants and nonsensical people. our saving grace is these are the stupidest [ __ ] morons you have ever had anything to do with. These are stupid stupid people and they um don't know how to not be stupid. That's the thing about stupid people. They don't know how to not be stupid. Evil people don't know how to not be evil. They don't know how to hide it. And they're so desperate right now. They are really on the ropes.
They're they and they know it. that you if you think these guys are in the power and they hold all the cards, you're not.
No, that's not the way to think about this. Um, at least that's not the way I'm thinking about it, right? They are not in charge. They or they are in charge, but they are not in control, right? They don't own our systems. They can't corrupt our systems fast enough.
And they are trying desperately through propaganda and fearmongering to make you believe they have way more power and control than they do.
Your job as a citizen is to do the citizen thing. And um and it's only by us doing the citizen thing and being responsible as citizens in this country by being informed and showing up and doing the work of, you know, the bare minimum of what we're supposed to do.
Voting, etc., showing up at the town halls, protesting, you know, making your voice heard is what it is a citizen is supposed to do. So if you care about stuff, show it, right? And if you if you care about stuff and you're just sitting around at home posting on social media, then you don't really you're not living your values, right? You need to step up.
That's what it's going to take now to fight back against these people. Um they are at the end of the day just evil, [ __ ] up, indoctrinated Christofascist people.
That's it. They're not gods. They're not demigods. They're not, you know, super empowered people. They're evil, stupid people.
And they are so so desperate to stay out of prison right now because they know it's coming.
They know justice is coming for them and they are trying desperately to avoid that justice.
At the end of the day, that's really what I see going on is a bunch of craven little, you know, cowardly sick people who locked into a position of power and [ __ ] it all up. Pete Hegsth couldn't organize his way out of a wet paper bag.
You know, Stephen Miller is these are these are just not smart people, you know.
Um, but they're not the three stooges.
They're not, you know, they're keystone copish in a way, but they're also an existential threat to our nation.
So, the threat should be taken seriously, even if the people themselves are clownish morons, and they are, right? I could sit down with Stephen Miller and tie that guy up in knots of of of, you know, because his psychosis overpowers his reasonability, his his ability to reason, right? Pete Hegth has no reasonability. There's no reasonableness. There's no rational thinking going on with that guy. It's pure drugs and alcohol and and a and a psychotic mind. So there's not even like a rational person you're dealing with when you're when you're dealing with people like that, right? Um which is why they simply need to be moved out of the way. But organized together, they can get [ __ ] done even though, you know, they're so [ __ ] up. So that's kind of what I see we're dealing with with that.
And um you know, no, I don't think that they're going to to win, though. I think our systems and the push back that's happening at at the various levels is too strong. And I don't think they're I think MAG is falling apart. Right. And the other reason why I believe that is because Trump isn't isn't delivering at all to MAGA. They see it. They know he's not. They get it. They're starting to get it. Not not all of them, but enough.
Right. It's fracturing. It's fracturing really really hard right now. If you don't know that, look into it. Right.
Check it out. Um, MAGA is falling apart.
It's fall. It's dissolving right in real time, right in front of our eyes, too.
So, while these guys are trying to bring out the truckloads of of of acid to dump all over our system and destroy our systems, they themselves are melting.
You could say, right? I'm melting. I'm melting. Yeah, it's like that, right? It Trump is melting right in front of all these people because he hasn't delivered on a single thing he was going to give them. He's engaged in, you know, more wararm mongering and economic um devastation, right? Just go to that go get some gas.
You'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Go get some groceries. None of this was necessary. None of this needed to happen. And even MAGA gets it.
So that's encouraging. That's why they're going so crazy right now. So don't believe all the noise and hype.
Just please don't.
Right? Remember how many things just hearken back. Do this. Do this and I'll move on.
Remember all the things that Donald Trump has said over the last decade.
Try.
You won't remember even half of it, but try.
Maybe maybe you know Google like just get a list of all the [ __ ] this guy has said all the promises he's made all the things he said he was going to do that he didn't go anywhere near doing that none nothing resulted from that and then go look at everything they're trying to do and how the courts are reversing 90% of it not all of it but most of it most of it is being stopped before it can actually be implemented. But you're not necessarily paying attention or seeing or hearing that because of all the noise and the media is just doing nothing but throwing, you know, non-stop noise at you. So, you got to discern a little bit, right? This is where our media literacy comes in a little bit to see that there's an awful lot of noise, but there's not an awful lot of success in what they're trying to do. So, they're making the inroads they're making. And yes, they are doing horrible things to our wetlands, to our national parks, to um our regulations, our regulatory bodies. Um those things are real, but it's not as bad as you probably think it is. And a lot of what's happening right now is ultimately reversible by future administrations once we get there. But if you lose sight of the fact that we're going to have future administrations because you think this is the end, it's not the end.
Don't think it is. It's not. It's not.
Okay? They they want you to think it's the end. So you'll give up. And if I could summarize everything I just said into one necessary statement, it would be that.
Don't give up. That's what they want you to do. Okay, enough said. Exan, during your interview with Anna Clark Miller, it seemed you and her had a lot in common. Would you want to become a licensed therapist and do what she does someday?
I don't want to become a licensed therapist. I think if I did, I would be pursuing that goal.
I feel that putting myself in that position would hamper me in some ways. But that's an, you know, and that's a weird thing to say because then you're like, "Oh, so psychologists are hampered in some way, Chris." And it's like, well, no, that's not really what I mean. It's the structure, the licensing, the guidelines, the frameworks, the money you have to pay to do all of these things. It's the behind the scenes logistics of being a therapist I don't want. It's not the work I don't want.
It's everything else that's not the work that you have to do to be in that role that I kind of cringe. Push, you know, don't resist, right? But I don't want I don't want that. Um it's not because I don't it's not cuz I want to color outside the lines or get away with stuff.
And people would of course, you know, who want to be critical of me might might immediately jump to something like that. But that's not my point at all.
I've talked to too many psychologists behind the scenes who had to deal with pain for their own, you know, when when you get a complaint lodged against you, it's not necessarily a valid complaint.
I've watched facious claims made by ex Scientologists against people like Rachel Bernstein and her having to navigate dealing with that and it's a pain in the [ __ ] ass when somebody like Scientology has it in for you and they can get some people to go lodge some complaints and come after you.
You end up sorting it out because you didn't do anything wrong. But it's it's it's it's vexacious litigation except it's behind the scenes with licensing boards instead of civil courts. But it's the same kind of thing. And you have to pay as a psychologist or as a therapist to defend yourself and deal with that.
And I watched that process play out out in California. And I went, I'm never ever doing anything like that. [ __ ] that.
You know, I don't have time for that. I don't have money for that. I don't have the resources for that. And I sure as hell don't have the the mental patience and, you know, fortitude for it. I just don't I don't want to deal with any of that crap. So, I'd prefer not to, right?
Um I I I don't know what everybody's going to I don't know what anybody's going to think about my answer saying that, but that's the truth, right? Not to mention, it costs a lot and it's a lot of time to go through all the hoops you have to go through in order to to do that work. Um, you know, it's it's good work to do.
It's very good work to do, but it's hard. It's hard to do it. And it's only going to get harder as the years go on, by the way. Uh, we're going to end up with less and less therapists as time rolls forward for a while. Um, so that's that kind of that kind of sucks. Um, but it's it's what it's where my mind goes, right, in relation to that. Uh, you're absolutely right, Exionan, that Anna and I see eye to eye on so much stuff. And I know if I did pursue being a therapist, I could be a good one. I'm a good consultant. I work with people well. I produce good results. I know that's true. I'm not tooting my own horn just for the sake of tooting my own horn. I'm just I know that's the fact, right? Um, so I want to keep doing that. I want to keep working with people. No question about it. Um, but I just don't want all those other structures. Yeah. Okay. Uh, X Vernon, XJW Vernon, what could you have done as a Scientologist if you were diagnosed with ADHD? Uh, well, see, that's the thing. And as a Scientologist, you never would be and you would never accept the diagnosis.
You would get auditing or you would uh do ethics conditions.
You would do um TRS. You would do objective processing.
Lots and lots of objective processing.
Oh, you have a hard time uh being in control of your attention, you say?
Well, let's have you go touch some walls for a few more hours. Let's condition you to do what I tell you to do as the auditor and make you more and more dependent on external control. And that's how we'll manage your ADHD in a nutshell. That's what auditing would do to you and that would be not much of a solution.
If uh the other thing of course is you could join the seaorg, right? You could join staff or join the seaorg and again put your attention in the hands of somebody else. Put your entire physical existence in the in the hands of somebody else. we're going to get we're going to tell you what your daily schedule is and you're going to get in all kinds of trouble if you don't follow it. So sure enough, you'll learn to fit your round peg into that square hole and you'll follow that schedule and you'll do, you know, you'll report, you know, on time at at the four musters a day that we have the four roll calls right in the sea or at morning and noon and dinner and at night and you'll you know you you won't be awall. They'll show up and sometimes you'll even get into a hyperfocus mode and you'll get work done like you wouldn't believe.
You'll get you'll just be the most productive little little bee in the hive, right? Um but then the rest of the time it'll be a goddamn struggle session and you will wonder what is wrong with you that you can't fit in. But you got a rigid controlled schedule and a rigid controlled environment and nobody gives a [ __ ] what you think about it.
Here we go. Right? That's how to that's how Scientology deals with ADHD.
They just override it.
And if any of what I just said sounds like it makes sense or is a good thing, then I think you might want to listen to what I said again cuz that no, it's not good. It's not a good thing. Right?
That's what that's what I've spent all those ye all these years overcoming was all of that enforced conditioning and control. And when you leave a cult, you can feel like, oh my god, right?
Like all that control is off. The straight jacket has been taken off of you and you don't know what to do with your arms now. Wow. Look at all I don't know, man. They just keep flopping around, you know? You're like, get get under control. Yeah, they used to be like this and now they're just ah I got all this freedom and I don't know what to do with it. Right. And it can take a while to figure out is something wrong with me? And it's like no, you just haven't worked those muscles in a while is all you know.
So you got to kind of get it under control and it can feel really out of control for a long time and and it can feel really weird and sometimes I I love this analogy, right? cuz you know your arms are flopping all over the place cuz they're not in a straight jacket anymore. And sometimes you hit yourself.
You're just like, "Oh my god, this is horrible." Right.
I think that was a good way to put it.
Yeah. So, if you want a straight jacket for ADHD, you know that they got ways to do that. Uh OB again all the things I said, right? rigid scheduling conditions, uh, objective processing, PTS handlings, false purposes, evil intentions, expanded dietics. I mean, I got a laundry list of stuff I can throw at you, right? We can prep check it. We could um we could do some preassessments on on your ADHD or on your attention or on your uh TRS. Oh, we're going to give you TRs until the [ __ ] cows come home, man. You're gonna sit down and you're gonna do um you know TR0 and twohour blinkless, right? Because we're going to get your attention under your control.
So you're going to sit here and you're going to you're going to Gansfeld effect your way right over to cause over your ADHD, right?
Oh, all the stuff. Oh, we got we got so many tools we can throw at you and none of them are going to do a [ __ ] thing about your ADHD.
Not one of those things is going to touch it, right? It's just going to condition you to try to overpower it and your brain is not really going to cooperate.
It's just not it's not it's not capable of cooperating. That's the problem, you know. It's wild. Yeah. But that's what that's the kind of stuff they would do.
All right. Excion, it's a great question. It's a great question. If you don't mind me asking, have you ever tried Adderall or ketamine to see if it would help? I have not. No, I'm not going anywhere near Adderall. And ketamine? I'm I I haven't needed to. I know a girl that lives in Colorado that is prescribed Adderall and wants to give ketamine a try. Thoughts? Yeah, it whatever is going to work for a person.
I'm not saying that, you know, that everybody shouldn't do it, but Adderall I've got nothing but horror stories about. So, I always kind of That's between you and your doctor. Um, I've only, you know, seen the the goofy stuff that people get up to when they have a little bit, you know, uh, when they get on social media, when they're on aderall and stuff, right? I don't know enough about ketamine to really talk about it intelligently. It's really just a word I've heard. Um, so I I I I can't really answer much on on that line. My pat answer of course that I'll go back to is you know consult with your medical professionals and your health care your mental health care professionals and make sure you're talking to mental health care professionals. I really to this day I still have to put out there don't go get prescribed psychotropic medications by a general medical practitioner MD or a nurse practitioner who is not trained um in uh psychiatry.
Don't don't do that. Um, the psychiatrists are are bad enough in overprescribing. The MDs routinely overprescribed and routinely don't know enough about what they're prescribing to really understand um the positives, negatives, and and you know, of this stuff. Don't, please don't get prescribed by a general medical practitioner. Go see a psychiatrist uh if you can. Um, okay.
XJW Vernon, does Scientology have their books on Braille for blind Scientologist? No. No, they don't. No, there are no Braille Scientology books that I at least none that I've ever seen. I've never once seen um printed in Braille.
Yeah. No, they've never even made any efforts in that direction as far as I can remember.
No, I don't I don't think so. Not Not this cross. Not Not that I can recall crossing my path. I You know, I might be forgetting something, but I I don't think so.
Um Exion, isn't it funny that we use the book Alice in Wonderland on the concourse in which a little girl falls down a rabbit hole and then what's exactly where we went?
Yeah. You think that's a coincidence?
Is it is it really Hubard was asked a number of times why Alice in Wonderland and his answers never made any sense. He really no answered it. you know, he didn't really provide any answer as to why Alice in Wonderland was chosen. And it is an odd choice, isn't it?
I don't think that's a coincidence. I really, really don't. I think Hubard knew exactly what he was doing in choosing that book to choose phrases from. Now, it happens to be a pretty decent book as far as, you know, choosing bizarre things to say to somebody, right? We called him tortoise because he taught us. I mean, that's a line in that book. And you deliver it with good TR1 when you're doing your TRs, right? You choose these crazy lines uh from Alice in Wonderland and you say them as though they're something you're saying. Uh so, it's a good choice as far as that goes for that exercise. But your point is not lost on me and shouldn't be lost on everybody. It's a good one, right? It really is. um because it speaks to Hubard as a magician and I I we've talked about this, right?
The idea that magic is um is for Hubard from Hubard's point of view and we know this is true. This is not conjecture.
We know Elron Hubard believed in magic.
And we know that Elron Hubard as a magician believed that magic existed for him to be able to exert or manifest his intention or his will.
That was what it was all about for him.
That's the magic he was pursuing.
And and he believed it.
And why would he believe it? Because look at what people did when he told them to do it.
And Hubard was laughing at those people while they did it. He thought it was awesome. Especially when he could wrangle in the clever ones, the smart people, the intellectuals, the people with degrees, the people who he knew were way smarter than he was. But here they are dancing to his tune.
Oh, Hubard loved that. There was nothing I think I this is my conjecture now. I believe there was nothing that Hubard loved more than those moments when he knew he was getting one over on people.
And he could laugh in their face without them knowing he was laughing in their face at their own stupidity because they were stupid enough, gullible enough, weak enough as he saw them. That's how he saw them. Those are the word. That's why I use those words. I don't think that about those people. They're influencable.
They're capable of being lied to. That makes them human. But Elron Huard had a big thing on being better than everybody else.
And it was an incredibly passive, aggressive, covertly hostile method that Hubard would use where he would make you think he was helping you and he knew he was [ __ ] you over so hard right now and he could laugh at you in your face while he appeared to be laughing with you.
That's Elron Hubard from day one of Dionetics and Scientology.
That's how he knew he was conning people. That that thing he'd play, you know, and he thought it was great.
And Alice in Wonderland, this is a great question because it because it demonstrates exactly that. It sounds funny. It sounds like an odd coincidence. It's not.
Hubard knew exactly what he was doing.
Oh, yeah. I I I believe that's true.
Oh, is the World Cup happening? Okay, fair enough. I have not watched one World Cup game. This is The World Cup to me is one of those things where everybody's going gaga and crazy over something that I literally couldn't care less about. I don't care about the World Cup and I hope I'm not going to lose a bunch of you because I just said that.
It's kind of like when admitting that I when I tell people I don't like jazz music. Some of you just your heads explode, you know? You're just like, how could you not? It's okay. It's just I just don't. It's I I don't care if you like it. Go for it. Go knock yourselves out. Watch Macy or whoever, you know?
All I know about the World Cup is what I've seen from Reddit headlines. That is literally everything I know about the World Cup I learned on Reddit.
All right, Xion asks, "At first, how do you decide what information or stories you're going to spend your valuable time on and what you won't?
You know, that's a really interesting question because you try to nail it down to an answer and you just go, "Fuck, I don't know." Um, obviously I am interested in things that I think will be of interest to you guys.
I'm interested in learning about things for my own sake. Of course, I'm answering questions for myself before I'm answering questions for you guys.
Almost 99% of the time, I'm pursuing stuff that I just find really, really interesting. And I'm always pursuing stuff in the qu here's okay let me talk about this for a second since you asked um what interests me the things that interest me are why things work the way they do um I am a real first principles guy I really am I I've learned this about myself recently and it was a real good thing to learn about myself I'm very very interested in why the nature of things because I believe that if I can understand the nature of things I can understand why they act the way they do and my question has been for many many years now pursuing the question the answer to the question why do people act the way they do I'm fascinated by it I'm really really fascinated by why people act the way they do um this doesn't have to be your fascination but it is mine and most of what I share with you guys comes out of that um even the whole solopism thing right like why differentiate solypism from narcissism from dissociative personality disorder. Why why stretch apart those three things and make them different and distinct from one another when really they all look exactly alike to, you know, to the to the to a regular person in the world. Who cares?
Soism, narcissism, same diff, right? But it's not the same difference. And that's what intrigues me, right? Cuz because Yeah, because it does because it intrigues me because the because because it's not just what people do, but why they do what they do. What's driving that person to do that? It would be the difference between understanding a nippy dog versus a hostile biting dog. The nippy dog is playing. He doesn't intend any wrongdoing. He doesn't He's not evil, malicious trying to hurt you. He's just being a nippy little playful dog because dogs experience the world through their mouths. A great deal of what the dog a dog's experience of the world is through their mouth. Um much much much more so than human beings, right? We experience the world through hands and touching things and stuff like that. Dogs dogs it's all here, right?
Their paws are useful for for stuff, but it's it's the mouth, right? And so not knowing that, you could think a nippy dog and a biting dog are the same thing.
Well, look, they being nippy bitey, you know, but they're not. It's really different, isn't it? It's that kind of difference between solopypsism and narcissism, malignant narcissism versus non-malignant narcissism. Fascinates me.
So I go and learn the differences between these things because I want to understand where people are coming from, right? And that's what makes me decide where to put my quote unquote valuable time, right? Is is that is this gonna answer this question for me? Is this going to help me determine the nature of a thing better?
Will it help answer the question why or what function or what use does this have? What is the purpose of this thing?
You know, this is what intrigued me so much about the Aristotle stuff and the first principle stuff was, you know, the the the question of what is a chair, what is a what is a an oven for? What is a chair for? These are pretty easy questions to answer because we build them. So, we know what they're for. We we we put them together for the purpose of sitting or cooking stuff. But then you ask a question like what's a human being for?
Oh, I love that question because when it's asked in the same spirit as what is a chair for you go wait a minute a human what a human being is there something a human being is for? Is there some reason human beings exist?
What what is the nature of a human being anyway? Why are we here? What is that all about? What's what's a human being for? You know, ah I just love stuff like that. Love it. Makes because it because it gives me the springboard to find out so much about people and I don't know.
Uh I think of all the things in the world to learn about.
I think um I think people Thank you Petrina um I think of all the things in the world to learn about human beings are the most fascinating certainly the most complex there is nothing more complicated in our world than human beings and there's nothing more complicated within us than our brains but it's not the brain that fascinates me it's the whole thing it's the whole system that is a human being and it's not just the body that is a human being.
It's the social network too, right? It's the 90% monkey, 10%, you know, be thing that Jonathan Height puts out. And and and and sometimes I wonder whether the percentages aren't a little bit more skewed in the direction of sociality, you know. I I think it might be more like 7030 or something, you know, the more I think about it that we're intensely social creatures. Intensely so. and learning about that and learning, you know, how social we are. It it has a great deal of an effect like why why is that important? Why who cares? It's important because we put so much ump on personal responsibility. But how much can we be personally responsible for when it comes to conditions like ADHD? How much can we be personally responsible for in a world of social interaction and hierarchy where your place in the cast system or your place in society isn't really under your control? Is it?
You can be mobile to a degree, but is it under your control? Do you have the ability to start, change, and stop the thing at will? No, you don't. But it has everything to do with our mental health.
Where we are in the social system when we are being adversely affected by economic conditions, believe me, that has an effect on your mental [ __ ] health, doesn't it?
So, it's not just up to us as little individual units of life as to how we are or how we relate to the world.
endlessly fascinating to me where to draw those lines, how to think about this stuff. So, that's where my time goes is figuring that stuff out or thinking about or learning about that stuff. And every time I learn more, I keep learning about how little I know.
Every time I learn more, I keep being like, "Fuck, there's so much more to learn. There's so much more to know."
You know? I love it. I do. I love that.
All right.
It's a little Chris Shelton philosophy answer there, but um but that's where I'm coming from and where I try to put my time. The other thing, of course, as far as where I'm put my time is, um yeah, you're just asking in general about the information or stories I pursue. That's that's what drives me, you know, is it going to inform me better about how I can better help you guys and help myself?
Yeah, that's pretty much what drives me.
Uh, okay. So, that all being said, um, we're at the end of the questions in the queue right now, which is fine with me. If we wanted to wrap up right now, we could, but if you all have any other Oh, here's one more question coming in.
And if you guys have more, now would be the time to throw them in the queue.
Excion asks, "Did people look forward to muster?"
What did people look forward to muster when you were in the sea or could you get out of going? Um um nobody look forwards to muster. No, unless you have something to uh to say.
Let me see. Let me make sure. Yeah, that's on the screen. Okay, good. Just want to make sure that was up there. Um, oh, I'm glad you're here, Craig, catching me live. That's awesome. Um, okay. Musters in the Seorg. Let's talk about this for a second since you're asking about it. Um, so there are three or four musters a day in the Seaorg. And they're basically uh accountability roll calls, right? They want you to show up and be at a place at a time just like the military does because that's how you regulate and control people in their lives. And that's one of the best ways to do it, right? You make them show up at a certain place, certain time. And and and then of course you get to give announcements to the crew, uh to tell them what's up, to get them going, whatever. Or make sure you're coordinating with the entire body of people you need to coordinate with to set up a drill or set up a schedule thing or whatever. Right? So musters have a very you know you there there there's utility to to musters happening.
It's a necessary thing um in a group like the sea or in a group like the military right you need that kind of thing. Get everybody started up on the same page every day and that kind of thing. Um but no nobody was ever looking forward to musters and more often than not they were an interruption of your day. you know, when we would try to schedule them for after meals, so they weren't, you know, you weren't having to go up and get up in the middle of the day and go off and go to a muster. So, it would generally be after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Um, and sometimes you had a night muster for stuff if there was if people were in trouble or there was some, you know, or there was exercise time, we would do a muster before exercise time at the end of the night. account for everybody, make sure they're there, and then launch them off to jogging around the block or whatever it is they're going to go off and do before they go back to post in their exercise clothes uh to get more work done because you're never ever ever on top of all of the work you have to do. The seor is is too few people doing way too many jobs, way too many jobs for what they have to do, right? Um, so, so that's kind of what mustards are about.
Trying to think if there was anything else useful to say about it. Um, could you get out of going? Yes. If you were ex you could be excused from musters if a senior if you were working with a senior senior person, right? If you're in a meeting with an RTC rep, obviously you're not going to be at the muster.
You don't tell the RTC rep, "Sorry, sir.
I got to go to muster." Right? RTC rep's going to go, "Fuck off." Right? you're excused. Um, so if you're in so if you're, you know, if you're committing with somebody higher up, then you could be excused. Obviously, if you're in an auditing session or a word clearing session or some kind of metered activity where you're not, you know, it and people could get pissed and you could get a tongue lashing if you were in session or in a word clearing or doing something like that rather than being at the muster. Somebody might get I rateate with you, but it wasn't really under your control not to be there. You're not the one calling the shots when you're in a session. And if you're in an and if you're the auditor or the word clearer and the person has to keep going because the rules of auditing say you have to keep going, you can't just arbitrarily stop at 12:00 because it's time to go, right? You there are some places where you can, but there's some places where you can't. Somebody's in the middle. You got to get them through it. So that could be a valid excuse to not be at muster. And most of the time the auditors were not at musters. Even if they were out of session, they were still, you know, writing up sessions, doing admin, doing this, doing that. So most of the time the auditors got to skate out of being in sess being at the musters. Um, let's see.
That was about it. Yeah, I don't think there were any other exceptions to it or reasons why you could skate out of that than those reasons that I remember. At least not legitimately, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. Obviously, you know, if sometimes, you know, if you're off base, obviously you're not going to get back from muster if you're at the hospital or you're off on an event site doing setups or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it. Okay. So, there you go with that. All right. Um, good.
Well, I don't know, World Cup or otherwise is what it is. I will say something about YouTube lately and the internet in general that I've noticed and you guys tell me what you think about this. I'm curious about your feedback on this one.
Actually, I'd really really be keen to hear what you guys have to say back on this cuz I don't want to believe that this is just an excuse for having, you know, diminishing viewership on YouTube, but I do have diminishing viewership on YouTube. And I'm thinking that the platform itself is becoming pretty inshitified.
Um, I've noticed lately that uh Google searches that trying to find things on and off YouTube is really hard.
It used to be a lot easier. And I don't think this is old days fallacy. I really believe that the machinery of the internet is breaking when it comes to being able to find things you're looking for. And I think that's important because um Hey, Scientolog.
Hey, Holly. Um because I think my channel is suffering from that to a degree, right? I know people are I know I'm in a I'm in a very niche place, so I'm not expecting to ever go viral or have, you know, 10 million viewers or something, but I really believe my my reach is being limited by the YouTube algorithm these days by a few things.
One of them being that the search functions are being infected by, you know, mal. Um, how do I put this? Um, I think AI search results are really, really [ __ ] up the internet for all of us. And I don't just mean those little stupid summaries that AI gives you on Google searches or duck.go searches or whatever. I mean that AI slop is all over the internet and is therefore part of the indexing of the internet and therefore it's just cluttered with so much garbage that it's actually overloaded the systems. I think we're there. I think we've crossed a threshold, a line where the processing systems that give you search results or try to answer your questions are are are piled into I think so much junk is piled into the answers that we're left with crap answers. you can't even, you know, discern through the junk to get to the gold because you can't ever get to the gold because there's just piles and piles of crap there to search to. You know, I think that's one of the reasons that there's a problem there. And the other reason I think is because of that volume of AI slop that AI generated content has infected YouTube and as other platforms too, Instagram, Tik Tok, Reddit, they're riddled with bots and AI slop, right?
Stuff that humans didn't create.
You know, a human being goes, "Make me a video." And the AI goes, "Okay, top 20 movies of the last 10 years." and why they all suck or something, right? And here we go. An AI puts a script together and throws a bunch of clips together of these movies and there's a video for you and no human ever had to touch any part of it. And uh and there's an AI voice narrating it and there you go. And I can't tell you how many times in the last 2 months my wife and I have been sitting, you know, watching YouTube and here comes one of these videos and you just go, "Wait a minute. This sounds odd. This is weird. This doesn't seem like a human being talking to me right now." And it's not, you know, and you're just like, "What is this? What is going on right now?" And there's apparently hundreds of thousands if not millions of these videos being dumped on the internet on a daily basis all over the world by these, you know, AI slophouses that produce this stuff.
And I think it really is cluttering up the ability of people to find my work. I really do. And I and I don't know that that's You tell me what you guys think.
What's been your experience with it?
That's been mine. Um, and I'm really upset about it, but there's not, again, it's kind of one of those things of, well, what am I supposed to do about it?
You know, talk about a lack of agency.
Talk about a lack of control. How am I supposed to bootstrap myself out of that?
You know, it's impossible. So, you just kind of stuck with it.
All right. So, um, uh, Craig in Glasgow, you're asking me a question in the comments section. How did the crew get kicked out of the sea or fitness board? Do they have to do they have to the freeloaders yet? I do not know what you're asking me there.
Um, normally I want people to put the questions in the question box, but since we're at the end, I'll I'm I'm looking at the comment section here. Um, okay. What I can say, Craig, is that if somebody is found unqualified to be in the Corg for some reason, then they receive what's called a fitness board. And a fitness board finds them unfit to be there, right?
Right? It reviews their qualifications.
It's about three or four people, you know, who come together. They're appointed to be a fitness board for this person in this time. And they come together, go through the person's records, personnel files, etc. And determine whether they meet the basic qualifications for the CEO, right? Are they physically fit? Do they have a terminal illness? Are they crazy, psychotic, you know, low IQ? There's a whole, you know, list of stuff, right, that they have. And if you don't want to be there, you're not qualified to be in the sea or right? If you're like, I don't want to be here, you know, they don't really want you there. Um, they want to change your mind about that, but if you're adamant, then they can't change your mind and then they don't want you around. So, that itself would be an outqualification eventually. And out you go.
Um, when you get fitness sported and every single person who leaves the Seaorg, if unless they blow out the back door in the middle of the night, if they do the usual go through the channels kind of way of leaving the Seaorg, then they will get a fitness board every single time. Uh, you'll get FB as they say and uh and then you're on your way.
A fitness board is not an ethics or a justice action. You can also get an ethics or justice action done on you. In addition to your fitness board, you might also receive what's called a committee of evidence or a comm. And that's a disciplinary body that will punish you and you'll get ordered to security checking or you'll get ordered to do conditions or you'll get ordered to do 200 hours of amends on your own time. you know this kind of thing that that's what the committee of evidence does. A fitness board will never do that. It doesn't recommend disciplinary actions. It just yes, no, binary should the person be here or not. And that's the difference. Every single person who leaves the seaorg will get what's called a freeloader bill. This bill is not something that is subject to debt collection. It is not a legally binding bill. There is no threat. You cannot bankruptcy your way out of it. You don't have to. You don't have to worry about it. It's not that kind of debt. The The way the debt works is if you ever want to do Scientology again, you will need to pay that debt first.
And the debt, the freeloader debt is a charge for services rendered while you were a CEO or staff member. So you did on the job training, you did these courseworks, you did this, you got some auditing, here's what we're going to charge you for that because you got all that for free as a staff member, CORG member. Now you got to pay, right? Because you're a freeloader and you can't do any more Scientology until until you pay that bill back. But that's it. That's the only thing it obli it obliges you to. There's no there's it's there's no legal anything to the freeloader debt debt and that is um commonly misunderstood. That's why I'm um emphasizing that point. Okay. Um yeah, YouTube should definitely make a no AI rule. That would be well that would revolutionize YouTube.
That's for sure. YouTube would look like a very different place if you took all AI generated content out of it.
Especially because the other thing that YouTube is doing behind the scenes is using AI on every person's channel to give them uh tools to uh create new videos. They have YouTube AI plugged into your channel to give you recommendations of content to create right music to use, etc. they fully are trying to integrate AI into the YouTube platform for the creators. Um, and then wonder why they get nothing but garbage as a result. Because at the end of the day, AI is garbage. It gives you garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, right?
And um and the purveyors of this garbage um are too stupid to know that, right? Bottom line. um not a creative bone in their body unfortunately and that's really sad. Um I've I've had to learn my lesson through practical use. You know I've tested and tested and done and used and tried this and tried that with all the different AI platforms chatgptek etc. I've used um the even used the AI models that are on uh the Brave browser.
I think it's called Luma. Um and some other places where you think, okay, well, it's not surveilling you. It's not keeping records of you. Maybe this is a decent AI. Nah, cuz they're all running on the LLM, large language model, uh way of processing information, and that's not thinking. That's not intelligence.
But it's very very artificial, you know. So all you get is slop and garbage back. Uh upwards of 60% of the answers you'll get from any LLM at any time to any question you ask it. Upwards of 60% of the answer will be absolute garbage [ __ ] And that's rough because it will confidently lie to you.
It will not tell it to you as though you can easily discern what the [ __ ] is from the from the truth unless you're already a subject matter expert. And if you're already a subject matter expert, what are you asking AI for? Right? Uh because when you're a subject matter expert and you ask AI about something having to do with your expertise, you will see how errorridden it can be. Um and depending on the complexity of your prompts and and how deep you want to go with it. Um, but it can be really, really bad and it can be very, very convincing, which is why so many people buy into it. Um, they shouldn't, but they do because people are foolish. So, it is what it is, you know. All right.
Um, yeah, exactly. The pronunciation is also way, way off on those AI videos.
You can tell pretty quickly. Um, you know, in addition to the six fingers that it produces and the weird configurations, you get these kind of um, you know, mebis images of people's arms and stuff. You know, you're like, wait a minute, where does that arm begin and end? You know, stuff like that. It's pretty It's pretty wild. Um, and that's it. That's as good as it can do. It's never going to get better. That's the whole point. It's not This isn't a buggy technology that eventually is going to be perfect. It's buggy technology that by its again right first principles first principles oh I love it right I get to call back to Aristotle but that's the point right once you actually understand the nature of an LLM you understand it's never going to be intelligent and it's never going to give you right answers it can't it's it's it's incapable of doing either of those things and it you you're not reasoning with it.
You're not getting it to think when you're when you're talking to an AI, right? Like chat GPT or DeepSeek.
You're not talking to an entity that understands words in the way you do.
You're talking to a search box, a very, very advanced search box.
And eventually everybody will get their head around this. I repeat these things because it's clear to me that most people just don't understand this. And I'm and and I know you guys who come around hear this often, so I won't belabor the point or keep beating that dead horse, but it it it does um it does get to me. Um Shane asks a question, "Have you been developing your own model?" Uh-huh. Will you be writing a book about it? Uhhuh.
It's funny you should ask because um I'm actually wrapping. Okay, so right now what's happening is I am got all of the raw editing or raw video or sorry. Okay, start again.
All of the audio is recorded for my what now book chap the introductory chapter which is the longest chapter of the book and chapter 1 have both been fully edited and are ready for upload. This took me way longer than I wanted it to to get to and to get done. But those things are now done and I have a production line set up right here at this desk and I can and I'm going to whip through the rest of the chapters. It's not going to take a long time. Editing these these files is way faster than I thought it was going to be. It still takes I have to listen to every minute and I have to go through and cut out the ums and errors and gaps and all of that. But that's not hard work. And and I've already got all the filters and FX and everything laid out now on my on my what's called an FX chain. I've only got a couple little plugins I put in to to fine-tune the audio. And I'm saying all of this because I want you guys to know where I'm at because it's going to take me another few weeks to get it all done and get the audio book out.
When the audio book is out and done and published and the and that work is then complete, I will begin outlining my next book. And that book is kind of already halfwritten in my mind. And it is my book on the REM model. That will be the next book that comes out. I'm making no promises about when, but I am letting you know my production schedule is now. So, I will be on to that very, very soon. And I'm very very very much looking forward to it. I have a lot to say. It not it's not going to be uh as thick uh at least right now. The planning is to make it less thick than my first two books because I want it to be a kind of a not a I don't want it to be pamphlet sized.
I want it to go into the REM model in different ways. I don't want to talk about the REM model only as a a cult recovery tool, but this book will be all the different ways I can think of to use this model to help people in their lives, both as individuals or uh from a group or leadership perspective. How could the REM model be useful to people who are executives or leaders or in charge of people? What can it help them understand about the people under them?
and how to run them or deal with them.
And how does it help a junior person?
You know, Ira Chaiff's um genius in his work is um is the is intelligent disobedience and how to be a good follower. Every there's there's a million books out there about how to be a good leader and there are practically no books out there about how to be a good follower.
We suck at that side of things because everybody in America has this hyperindividualized idea that they're all going to be in charge of things and most people aren't, are they? Right? So, how do you become a good follower? And what does intelligent disobedience look like anyway? Right? So, that's Ira Cha's thing, but I'm going to get in on that, too. Right? because I think the REM model can be useful for understanding you know people above us as well as people below us on any you know social or command structure um so that's going to be part of it and um and we'll see where it goes you know we'll see what I can do with this I think it has a lot of uses the REM model is of course an explanation or model of how people behave why people behave the way they do um and it's not necessarily. By the way, here's something just between us girls that I'll definitely be putting in the book that I haven't really talked about at all uh a whole lot is the REM model is those layers are not the only layers of of of behavior for us, right? There is another layer uh you know in the REM model that's a little invisible on the model which is the physical layer. Um that's also validly part of what makes us do what we do. And I really only touch on it very very briefly in talking about the REM model so far. But it is something to understand about it. If you are tired or hungry in other words or you're physically you know otherwise incapacitated or you know damaged or or you know impaired in some fashion then that's going to radically affect your behavior too. You know and the more chronic the condition the longer term that's going to apply. So that's also an unspoken or unstated part of that REM model that I'll be stating in my book.
You know, just to add to it that this is not the only layers of things that influence our behavior, but mentally, you know, psychologically, I believe the REM model is a very very thorough explanation of why we do what we do, right? But I just wanted to add that physical layer too because I don't want to ignore that or think that that's not important. you know, it's not really your morality. And here's how I know this is true, right? Here's what I mean by this is I've said with the REM model that you have reason or rationality and you have emotions and you have a moral layer and all of these are driving your behavior. Um, you know, having to do with uh getting deeper and deeper into why you do what you do. But we all know if you're starving, those morals go out the goddamn window, right? you don't care about your morals or your emotions or any of that [ __ ] if you're starving right now, right? So, the physical layer also has something to do with, you know, driving us to behave the way that we do.
And I think that's worth acknowledging at least in all the talk about psychological, you know, motivations. We also have to remember we have this physical sort of layer too, you know. Um, so that'll all be in there and uh that book will be coming out. I'm I doubt that I will get the book done by the end of the year the way that I go. I I will try, but I doubt I'll have it done by then, but we'll see. We'll see what happens.
You know, I am a productive person and I don't I don't just sit around all day.
So, I I do have a lot of work I want to get done and I do want to get that book out. So, that's what's coming. in addition to whatever further work comes from the what now book because right now we're doing this book workshop and this isn't just a an aimless plug for this one of the reasons we're doing this book workshop is to get feedback directly from you guys so I can put together more work of on cult recovery maybe a class or you know some video series or something that might help facilitate cult recovery too based on the principles in the book. So I want to know what's working and what's not for you guys based on what I put together.
This this book is basically my collected wisdom from 10 plus years of recovering from cult and working with other people to do that. That's that's basically what this is. So, it's only as good as, you know, the feedback I'm getting from you guys as to how good it is for you. And that will help inform me as to what, you know, what else I should or could put out that might be of more use to people.
You know, would an illustrated guide, would more video work, would a master class? I, you know, I don't know. I don't know what other formats this might be presented in that might be useful to people and getting feedback from you guys is the best way to find out. So, I will encourage y'all to uh attend the book workshop. We are recording each week and uh we're about two or three weeks in right now. We are recording each of our meetings and you will have access to them if you sign up for it.
and um so you can see what we've covered already before and um and move forward to the end of it and eventually the whole thing will be available for paid Patreon supporters on my Patreon channel as well right for uh people after the whole thing is done by the end of this year we'll be finished with that whole workshop uh I think by September or October or something is when we have it timed out to finish and then we'll be you know kind of taking all that information we've learned from all those weeks of interacting with you guys and seeing where we want to go with that. So those are some future planning what we're doing right now. Uh so thanks for asking about that.
All right. And oh board black sheep has a question for me. What's your current life goal? Do you want to achieve something in particular? That's an interesting question um because it's actually something I've been thinking a lot about lately.
I used to, as you guys know, I used to be really hung up on on legacy and on um stomping my name into history, on you know, the fantasy of immortality.
I can only laugh at myself now.
really laugh hard. Um, so, so I don't have those goals anymore, right? I don't I don't want to be world famous or, you know, viral or, you know, get become an internet celebrity or something. These were goals I really used to have. I swear I really did. It was really funny. Um, oh, absolutely.
But, um, but as far as what I want to do, I just want to help people at this point. That's really what my life is about at the end of the day. That's what it's about. Um, I want to be somebody who helped.
When Mr. When when Fred Rogers talks about how in a tragic situation or in an emergency, look around for the helpers.
I want to be that group. I want to be in that group of people.
That's really for me. That's goal stuff.
That's like what I'm doing and what I want to continue to do and get better at it.
It's where I live. There's nothing I enjoy more than one-on-one with people to help them or teaching a group of people some things that will help them.
I'm all about that. I just I get off on it. I I love doing that. You know, there just isn't anything that brings me more personal warmth and satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment than knowing that I have been of assistance to others in a substantial way. So as much as I can do in that direction I want to do I I guess I I can't sit here right now and tell you why I want to do that or why that brings me so much satisfaction and joy.
I've thought about it a lot. I've thought about it in a lot of different ways. Um, is it ego? You know, am I just kind of a benign narcissist who just really wants to, you know what I mean? It's all about me. But it's not all about me, is it?
It's really all about other people. If anything, it's my struggle in life has been making things more about me, not less.
In a way. In a way. Um, I know some people would disagree with that statement and I get it. I totally get it. Uh, there isn't a particular thing anymore.
There isn't a goal set that will be met that h peak, I achieved it, right? It's all downhill from here. I It's not like that for me.
anymore in my life.
I would love to produce a best-selling book. That'd be cool. I'd really get off on that, right? If I could get a New York Times bestseller or something. Wow, that'd be a cool metric to achieve. But my life isn't going to be a failure if I don't do that. It would be a it would be a fun thing to do. It would be like a wow, look what I did, you know, kind of thing.
But that would be a means to an end for me, not the end. The goal isn't get on the bestseller list. The goal was get books, get my information, get my ideas into other people's hands so they can do something with it that makes their life better.
That's the goal. And there isn't really an end to that goal. There's no limit to that goal. But I'm not a failure if I don't accomplish that goal on a mass level.
I I can reach who I can reach and do what I can do. And and I can only do that. And I have no control over how many people I can reach. That's luck, circumstances, and opportunity that that that provide that much more so than my talent or skill. I bring the skill or talent that I have to what I do because I can't get there without that. But it's not that's not all there is, right? Any more than you know when somebody becomes a movie stars because of their raw talent [ __ ] right? It was luck, opportunity, and circumstances that created stardom, not their talent.
There's an awful lot of very, very, very talented people out there who are never going to see a day of stardom because the opportunity never presents itself.
So, I hope at some point that opportunity will present itself to me, right? But that's not that's not the goal for me anymore. And it was for a for a long time. It was the goal. I had aspirations that way. And I don't now.
And it's not because I'm um you know swallowing my disappointment or something like that. I don't feel that way. I feel very very different about it. In fact, I feel more like I came to my senses.
Um yeah. So, you know, I want to accomplish I want to accomplish being a good person in the world.
And maybe some of that is motivated by the fact that I thought for so many years that I was being a good person who wasn't really a good person.
So now that I feel like I actually have a real legit shot at at being a good person, I want to be that.
But I don't ever think about it that way. So I don't think that's what's motivating me. I think what motivates me is my interest in life and my interest in people and my interest in figuring things out and and then when I do figure stuff out, I want to share it with everybody. I just want everybody to know what I know. I just want everybody to to to to get the goodies out of life. I want you to have the fun stuff. I want you to to to to get all the toys and and get all the understanding that's there to be gotten because there's so little of it to get in this world. There's so little things that we could actually be certain about about ourselves. And I want to find those things and ferret them out and and and get my head around them and and get that information to you so you can have the the benefit of that, too.
And that appeals to some people and doesn't appeal to a lot of people for whatever reason. And that's fine. I'm still going to do what I'm doing because it's of of of of the greatest interest to me and the best way I know how to spend my time when I'm not playing Age of Wonders 4.
So that's what I've got for you on that.
Thanks for asking. I you know I I I wonder sometimes these personal questions I I wonder if I you know what I how I come across. I have no idea. I really don't. And I stopped I I wonder now. I don't obsess. I'm not I'm not freaked out about what you guys think about what I have to say anymore. I just But I wonder I hope it's useful. I hope it is. Okay. Um so that's what we got for this week. Let's go ahead and wrap up. This was great. This was fun. Thanks guys for your questions as always. Your support, your viewership, your understanding, all of it. I really, really appreciate it and I'm glad I could be of some help to you. I will see you guys soon. Okay. Bye-bye.
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