Based Camp - Trauma is Always Self Inflicted

00:00:00.000 all these people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never

00:00:08.780 allowed to feel bad. And I was never allowed to confide in people. And they're like, and that was

00:00:13.780 all bad. That was all bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes

00:00:19.260 your life better. When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame

00:00:25.420 your life in the moment, it doesn't feel awesome in the moment when you want to be vulnerable,

00:00:32.720 it doesn't feel awesome. But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically

00:00:41.540 better. And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points.

00:00:50.080 Would you like to know more? It is so great to be here with you today. You had just sent me this

00:00:54.440 study where you're like, this is so fascinating and better than that. It confirms our preexisting

00:01:02.880 beliefs. And isn't that just the studies, right? That's what, that's why people read studies too

00:01:09.740 for confirmation bias. So this study is by Andrea Denise and Kathy Spatz-Widham. I'm going to get

00:01:17.680 their names wrong. Of course it's called objective and subjective experiences of child maltreatment and

00:01:22.340 their relationships with psychopathology published in nature, human behavior, which is a very respectable

00:01:27.900 journal. And basically they found, I'm just going to quote them. We found that even for severe cases

00:01:34.540 of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective

00:01:39.660 measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports. In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked

00:01:45.760 to subject reports, subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports

00:01:51.240 were consistent with objective measures. So dumbed down Simone words.

00:01:56.420 I'm going to say this in simpler language. Basically what it means is that if you had a really traumatic,

00:02:04.360 in the way that modern society would frame trauma, childhood, like you were systemically abused

00:02:11.580 in ways that were verified by the court system, but you don't believe that you had a difficult

00:02:17.780 childhood, you will not have any negative effects from your childhood. However, if you had a perfect

00:02:24.440 childhood, but you believe you had a terrible childhood, you will have all of the effects that

00:02:30.160 we associate with childhood trauma. Now, this is something that confirms with other studies that we've

00:02:37.040 talked about on this show. You know, we've talked about the study of sleepers that showed that people

00:02:43.400 who believed that they had had bad sleep, but hadn't actually had bad sleep, had all the effects that we

00:02:49.520 as a society associate with bad sleep. People who verifiably had bad sleep, they didn't have any of

00:02:58.280 those effects. Yeah. It's how you see it. If you think that you slept poorly, you're going to show signs

00:03:03.260 of fatigue that day are going to struggle. And even if you slept like shit, but you believed you slept 1.00

00:03:08.460 really well, you'd be like, Oh, I'm perky. I feel good on average. This is so critical within our, 0.99

00:03:15.940 because what this actually means, you know, you can, you can say, Oh, this is like interesting or

00:03:20.320 quirky or whatever. It actually means that as a society, when we say something like childhood trauma

00:03:26.680 causes adult issues, what that, that, that is just verifiably untrue. It's the belief that you

00:03:36.500 were traumatized in childhood that causes adult issues. Yet often these two things are pretty

00:03:42.640 correlated, right? Often somebody who is, is traumatized in childhood will have the belief

00:03:47.780 that they were traumatized in childhood. Right. But what's critical to remember is when, uh,

00:03:54.320 the left, it's usually the left who does this, invents new types of traumas that somebody can go

00:04:01.440 through, or they frame something as particularly traumatic that previously people wouldn't have

00:04:07.980 thought of as traumatic. They create the symptoms of trauma in that individual where that individual

00:04:15.480 previously wouldn't have had those symptoms. And this is, you know, we have seen this have such

00:04:23.240 negative effects on individuals' lives. Recently, we were interacting with someone

00:04:26.680 and they were just absolutely riddled with like all sorts of diseases, you know, neurological issues,

00:04:33.400 pain, all these sorts of very Spoonie like issues. If you go to our Spoonie episode and, and we had a

00:04:38.820 friend who was like that as well, you know, but what was really interesting is she was only like that

00:04:44.300 when she was a progressive. So when we first met her, she was like deep into the progressive sphere.

00:04:49.200 And so do you want to talk about what happened? Cause she's a better friend to you than me.

00:04:53.860 Yeah. I mean, she, she had some severe health problems and they included, you know, seizures,

00:05:00.780 severe allergies. I mean, this was a fairly limited life that she had to live. She couldn't,

00:05:06.100 you know, she couldn't look at computer screens. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine your life,

00:05:10.720 not being able to look at computer screens. It was, it was really rough. And then,

00:05:14.280 yeah, she, she shifted some things. She got in a really good relationship. She sort of

00:05:20.260 changed her standards and values and sort of the way that she was going to prioritize things in her

00:05:24.420 life. And then like one day she called me and she was like, yeah, so I don't have seizures anymore.

00:05:31.400 I don't know. Well, so it wasn't just that. So, I mean, the guy who she married is a Texan guy.

00:05:36.980 You actually have seen this couple in some of our, um, after video credits playing with the kids at

00:05:43.900 one point. Yeah. We really, really liked them. They're awesome people. Yeah. Yeah. And the,

00:05:47.860 and the, the 4th of July party, they, they hosted this, but yeah. So, so Texas guy, very religious,

00:05:53.200 you know, and actually not at first. So he and she had known each other for years. He was also in this

00:06:00.160 far progressive movement. And then they started hanging out more with us than their other friends.

00:06:04.800 And then they became like really, like, like they, they went along with sort of the way that we were

00:06:10.900 going, but they went further than us. And, and now, you know, they're really into Jesus and all that

00:06:16.900 and very much structure their lives as a very religious conservative couple. And they focus

00:06:22.580 on this real trad aesthetic. Yeah. I would, I would say that you go, we almost like implied that like

00:06:28.260 we had some influence on them. No, like they, they very, very introspectively thought through

00:06:33.380 their lives and their values. And they came to a very religious and more traditional conclusion.

00:06:40.040 Do you really think that would have happened had they not known us? Hold on. Do you really,

00:06:44.420 we were their only like non ultra progressive friends.

00:06:47.740 We, we may have nudged them slightly, but I think many, many factors nudged them slightly.

00:06:51.580 Okay. I'll agree with that. I'll agree with that. Yeah.

00:06:53.640 And, and, and, but anyway, I thought like that is really interesting. And I think, you know,

00:06:57.600 we, we see this effect of recontextualization on real world health outcomes, but what also makes

00:07:03.440 this, this nature study really interesting to me is, is Ayla also recently released some interesting

00:07:09.900 research on basically how women remember their childhoods differently than men. And, and basically

00:07:18.260 she looked through her massive amounts of data at how people viewed their childhoods and whether they

00:07:24.340 thought they were neglected, never, rarely, sometimes, often, or very regularly, and whether

00:07:29.680 they were verbally abused, whether they were physically abused and how often they were spanked.

00:07:34.960 And then she also asked them like, you know, what was the social class of your upbringing?

00:07:39.560 And, and, uh, you're taking too long to get to the point.

00:07:42.260 The point was basically girls reported more physical abuse, more verbal abuse, more, basically

00:07:48.860 more hardship and trauma in childhood. And it almost implied also that their social class was low.

00:07:54.340 Poor, I think actually they reported that their social class was lower. So basically like girls 1.00

00:07:58.280 saw their childhood as much worse than boys did, even though typically when you look at punishment,

00:08:03.620 boys are getting more punishment.

00:08:04.780 Take a step back. It was very obvious from the data sets that this was an equal data set in terms

00:08:09.480 of boys and girls. Women were not being punished more than men. They were objectively remembering

00:08:16.440 every aspect of their childhood as being worse than the men. Now, what we don't know is,

00:08:24.340 it could turn out that men are just misremembering their childhood and, and, and the women actually

00:08:31.620 are remembering everything. Or it could turn out that the women are inventing a trauma that

00:08:35.940 didn't exist in their childhood. And there's many things that could lead to this, but I probably

00:08:42.180 think the biggest factor in this is that our society does not reward men for experiencing and contextualizing

00:08:51.340 things is traumatic. Whereas our society does reward women for doing that. And this is really important 1.00

00:08:59.840 in the context of this other study as well, because it means that through doing that, you know, all these

00:09:05.900 people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never allowed to feel bad.

00:09:15.560 And I was never allowed to confide in people. And they're like, and that was all bad. That was all

00:09:21.320 bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes your life better.

00:09:26.140 When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame your life in the moment,

00:09:33.840 it doesn't feel awesome. In the moment when you want to be vulnerable, it doesn't feel awesome.

00:09:40.120 But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically better.

00:09:48.840 And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points. And so that

00:09:56.020 when you have these people who try to shut down these sorts of conversations about, well, you really

00:10:02.000 shouldn't as a man indulge in these sorts of emotions, that these people are helping you being

00:10:07.660 more mentally healthy. And when people engage with us, they often are like, wow, you guys really

00:10:14.180 don't allow yourself to like feel those emotions. And, you know, that's really going to cause damage

00:10:19.660 over time. And I'm like, well, I I've been around you. I'm obviously a happier person than you. So

00:10:24.620 like, that's not true, but anyway, continues to them.

00:10:29.580 Well, I just, it's also really interesting, the cultural role that that plays, you know,

00:10:33.120 that I think we do live in a culture now where women are more allowed to have trauma and encouraged

00:10:39.140 to have trauma. But it also is scary to me how, especially in progressive circles, people gain

00:10:44.760 status by typically showing some form of victimhood, which seems to encourage people to lean into their

00:10:52.160 past, find something that was wrong with it, and then turn it into drama, which will in turn

00:10:56.780 yield all these mental disorders and problems. And so it's no wonder that we're seeing mental health

00:11:02.720 epidemics. And it's, it's really sobering also to know that there's research that shows that how

00:11:07.580 you contextualize things really matters.

00:11:10.140 Well, I want to go over how forced people are to contextualize their childhoods this way.

00:11:16.500 Go on then.

00:11:17.200 No one has seen this as me. So just as an example, I don't know where how many hundred episodes in at

00:11:21.960 this point, and people are just now learning this about me, but I grew up in the prison system.

00:11:27.120 So at the age of 13, I was sent to court appointed prison alternatives. If you have read the book

00:11:34.100 holes or seen the movie holes is a very good example of one of these camps. It was a private

00:11:39.260 prison system for children that was related to the troubled teen industry, but it was like the

00:11:44.520 court appointed iteration of this. And from that age until college, I never lived with my parents

00:11:50.380 again, full time. And there's a lot, there's a lot more to this journey than that. But when I'm

00:11:56.000 talking to reporters, you know, they're always like, where did you come from? What's your origin

00:11:59.920 story or whatever. And when I say this, they're always like, Oh, that explains why that explains so

00:12:07.780 much.

00:12:08.540 Right. So it's just his trauma. He, all of this is to deal with his trauma.

00:12:12.360 His trauma. And I'm like, well, no, you know, like, like, I don't,

00:12:17.380 that's not really that relevant to my current world perspective. And they will not accept that

00:12:26.320 answer. You've seen this. They just refuse. You can see that they're like, Oh yes, little traumatized

00:12:31.760 child. I see you, you know, acting tough, but that's only because of the trauma. And I'm like,

00:12:39.440 no, culturally, I was taught that this isn't the way you relate to what's hard in your life.

00:12:45.200 Because, you know, worst case scenario, you create this rags to riches narrative,

00:12:49.980 which is really plausible. Like it's one I could really indulge in. But if I'm being honest,

00:12:57.280 my parents were both really smart people. And for generations, my family has had a very easy time

00:13:02.440 making money. And I inherited that. And yes, I may not have inherited wealth directly or inherited

00:13:09.000 their social circles or connections directly, but I did inherit the capability of life not being that

00:13:17.140 hard for me, just from a mental perspective, like whether it's the way I like, like sociological

00:13:23.980 profile aspects or, or, or IQ or whatever you want to call it. And so I don't really personally

00:13:33.920 contextualize my childhood as being that hard at all. Now, it's funny now that I think about it,

00:13:40.040 most of the people I knew committed suicide before they hit their twenties. So that's an

00:13:45.860 interesting fact, not most, but like a large chunk. Um, not great. Yeah. Maybe that wasn't that good,

00:13:55.260 but this shows how much you can twist your reality to just be like, nah, it was awesome. It all turned

00:14:02.080 out great. You know, I do want to talk with you about on this front, right. It's like,

00:14:06.480 you know, cause we need to think about how we're going to handle this with our kids and how, how to,

00:14:09.680 you know, encourage them to deal with things that are genuinely traumatic. Right. I mean,

00:14:14.440 you went through some stuff and other people went through some stuff. And, and so there's,

00:14:18.440 you know, we know that the way you contextualize things can significantly impact how damaging or not

00:14:23.680 something is. But then we also know that there are things like PTSD, which are real and which are

00:14:28.760 almost not almost, which are fairly mechanical and sort of the way they work and need to be fixed.

00:14:33.320 And where's the difference, you know, because you need to admit that you have PTSD to be able to deal

00:14:38.160 with it. And I feel like, you know, part of this view is it's really misunderstood. Trauma does not

00:14:46.580 cause PTSD. PTSD is caused by a very specific psychological phenomenon happening repeatedly.

00:14:54.240 And it comes down to, I call it the Houdini phenomenon, right? Houdini famously died because

00:14:59.960 he had this trick where he would tense his muscles and then somebody would punch him in the gut. And

00:15:03.540 one day after an event, somebody sucker punched him in the gut. He didn't have time to tense his

00:15:08.940 muscles first. Cause he didn't know what was happening. The guy was just like, well, are you

00:15:11.740 really invulnerable to this stuff? And he died from, you know, internal injury. And this is

00:15:18.480 obviously a really sad death, but it shows what actually causes what we call PTSD. If you are in

00:15:26.320 a family in which somebody is reliably abusive, i.e. if every day your dad comes home and beats you,

00:15:34.860 you will not develop PTSD. You only develop it. If your dad is good a lot of the time,

00:15:41.520 but occasionally he beats you and you don't expect it. It comes out of nowhere. There's no way of

00:15:46.860 predicting when this is going to happen. A wife who is always mean to you won't cause PTSD.

00:15:54.600 A wife who is mean to you randomly and without the ability to predict it won't cause PTSD.

00:16:01.340 So you're saying it's like the sort of evil twin of operant conditioning?

00:16:06.000 Exactly. PTSD is the evil twin of operant conditioning.

00:16:10.140 Where if something very unexpectedly bad happens to you, it's like the opposite of the addiction that

00:16:15.780 you get with positive operant conditioning, which is like this first, explain what you mean by

00:16:20.380 operant conditioning. So people, right. So, so operant conditioning, um, is a, a, a form of sort

00:16:24.920 of like feedback training where when you do not predictably offer rewards, but very unpredictably

00:16:31.900 offer awards, examples might be slot machines, gambling, various types of mobile games, et cetera.

00:16:37.320 Like it's built into everything these days. You actually have a very, you can have a very,

00:16:41.580 a very addictive response. Like the dopamine reward for when you do get that unexpected reward

00:16:46.500 is incredibly high. And so it seems that PTSD, as you describe it is the opposite of that, that,

00:16:52.660 that when very unexpectedly, a really bad thing happens, the reaction that you have also is like

00:16:58.140 on overdrive, but in the negative, like panic sense. So.

00:17:03.240 Yeah, that's exactly it. And it can cause like visible changes in parts of the world.

00:17:07.460 Okay. So why, why then do people come back classically from war with PTSD if they like expect

00:17:14.360 to be, you know, war is not every day people are shooting at you. War is sitting around doing

00:17:21.880 nothing for months and a half. And then in one day, half of your friends die.

00:17:26.740 Why did you not get PTSD from getting like thrown into the desert and having like kind of boring days

00:17:32.380 and then really, really, really bad things happening to you. Like some kid trying to kill you with a

00:17:35.760 shovel in the middle of the night. Oh, like me? Because I didn't contextualize those things as 0.98

00:17:40.500 bad, I guess. Do you still think contextualization? No, because I think you've argued in the past.

00:17:44.200 No, even in these moments, if somebody went into war and they contextualized it as this honorable

00:17:49.480 thing and everyone who died was in it as this honorable event, as I think a lot of people did

00:17:54.380 historically, even though wars were similar, I doubt you had as much PTSD back then.

00:17:57.880 Do you still think that contextualization is something to do with PTSD?

00:18:00.740 PTSD. Yeah. But it's about in the moment contextualization. Because PTSD is not something

00:18:08.840 that's caused by the way we remember the events. It's caused by... The unexpected, but also the

00:18:14.420 emotional. The unexpected and negative nature of the events. In these moments growing up, these bad

00:18:20.080 things happen. Simone was talking about a few times people tried to kill me. I starved at times. I

00:18:24.060 had to eat ants to not die. I had to learn what insects I could eat in the area, what plants I could

00:18:29.400 eat. It was hard because I was allergic to something they were using in the foods that they were giving

00:18:34.400 to the kids and they didn't believe me. And so, yeah. So a lot of stuff happened, but I just saw

00:18:39.620 it all as an interesting challenge. Like that was genuinely the way I engaged with it. I was like,

00:18:45.220 oh, this is a really interesting challenge. I suppose this isn't the way a lot of people engage with

00:18:51.320 things like this that happened to them in life. But that's how I contextualize it. You know,

00:18:55.660 I just saw it as an interesting challenge and I engaged with it like that. And I think that all

00:19:00.620 events, everything that comes into your brain in the same way that everything that comes into my

00:19:06.740 eyes is filtered through the lenses I wear, is filtered through the lens that you create, which

00:19:11.380 is the narrative for the events around you. And maybe it's an as a guy situation. You know,

00:19:18.100 you're talking about as a guy, as a girl, a society that frames women as victims, you know,

00:19:22.500 the princess in the tower or whatever, and guys as the heroes. Well, this was just all part of my

00:19:27.920 heroic journey. Yeah. And I guess, you know, if you were a girl, you know, as a guy, you were maybe

00:19:32.060 thinking like, oh, like I'm, I'm being rugged. This is like an adventure survival thing. This is

00:19:37.260 making me stronger. Whereas maybe a girl would be like, oh my God, I'm abandoned. I'm unloved.

00:19:41.560 Like they might see it as very different because there aren't very many like heroes journeys for

00:19:45.640 women that involve this level of survivalism. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I just, 1.00

00:19:52.360 I guess I don't have anything to say other than, yeah, you're probably right about this.

00:19:55.240 Well, I have one additional question for you because I don't think it was just you

00:19:57.840 contextualizing masculine heroes journeys while going through this as a kid that helped you not

00:20:02.180 contextualize it in a way that did give you PTSD or other forms of trauma based on your

00:20:06.280 contextualization. I'm wondering if your parents modeled this, like, where did you get, where do

00:20:12.720 you think? Because obviously everything's going to be a just so story. This is all speculation. We can't

00:20:16.620 know why we thought what we thought or why we did what we did, but your best guess, where did you

00:20:21.780 get this attitude of like, oh, this is an interesting puzzle. How can I work this out?

00:20:26.480 Like, was this from books you read? Was this how your parents behaved? Like, how was this

00:20:30.340 given to you as like the evoked reaction instead of some other reaction?

00:20:34.380 Well, I think that this is a very important thing about raising kids. And we had done another video

00:20:38.860 on this, on the Jordan Peterson raising kids thing. And we're like, we really disagree with his

00:20:43.880 parenting strategies because they are focused on breaking the child's will and getting them to obey

00:20:49.540 authority. Whereas ours are focused on stoking a child's will and getting them to resist authority

00:20:55.740 and even gain like emotional fire and happiness from the moments where they successfully resist an

00:21:02.960 unjust authority. And I think that there's a final form of childbearing, which is narrative

00:21:08.440 focused childbearing where, and this is the most common, where you teach a kid to engage with mostly

00:21:14.780 just narratives about themselves and about society and about their role in that society.

00:21:19.500 Narrative focused childbearing always leads to really negative outcomes. Right. And I think it's

00:21:24.660 really important that we don't allow our kids to engage in that because that's what progressive 0.91

00:21:28.840 society uses right now to really fuck kids up because every cult historically, this is just the way 0.77

00:21:35.280 cults work. It's a very effective strategy. If you can convince people that their close support networks, 0.97

00:21:40.860 their family and their culture were abusive to them as kids, you know, then you can separate them from

00:21:47.600 their support networks and then they become much easier prey and they become much less likely to

00:21:52.620 deconvert. So yeah, there's a reason that these institutions target individuals in this way. It's

00:22:00.040 because it's a really good source of prey, but you should know, I think, so there's two things here.

00:22:04.760 One, as a parent, you know, and we'll do a video on like how to be a good parent because I think

00:22:08.500 that's a good one, like all the things we're trying to focus on, but you really need to focus

00:22:13.280 on or one of our core things that we focus on as a cultural tradition. And I would encourage

00:22:17.140 other people to consider is stoking their will in internal locus of control and, and sort of desire

00:22:26.180 to know what's right for themselves and fight for that. Did your parents do that? Yeah.

00:22:33.180 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my mom told me, oh, they don't care what the teachers say. They're

00:22:38.960 idiots. They're losers. You know, well, that's not something a lot of parents would say, you know? 1.00

00:22:44.400 Yeah. Yeah.

00:22:46.460 But it really, it really worked for me. You know, my parents never being like, I will sit and punish

00:22:53.340 you until you accept X thing that I'm telling you.

00:22:56.240 I couldn't imagine them doing that. Yeah.

00:22:58.000 Yeah. No, they just locked me in my room and be like, look, if you're having a moment right now,

00:23:01.880 you're having a moment, we'll handle you later. So, so I think that's really important in terms

00:23:07.680 of dealing with situations like this, because then when you deal with hardship, you're not looking at

00:23:12.940 who's to blame or anything like that. It's just a challenge for you to overcome because so much of

00:23:19.720 the world depends on you overcoming it. And I also suppose that's another thing with kids,

00:23:25.620 you know, I was really taught to view protecting the world as my responsibility and as something

00:23:33.260 that I needed to do. And everything else was just sort of a challenge on my way to achieving that

00:23:39.360 end state. It was just like, well, this is just what you have to do as a member of this family.

00:23:43.300 Your goal is to fix things and no one else is going to do it. And the entire world's going to

00:23:48.840 work against you. And I think that those sorts of framings are really useful. And I think that these

00:23:53.860 are ones that Christians often do, you know, they see people attacking them as a sign that they're

00:24:00.160 more likely to be right. And this is actually part of what creates susceptibility was in more

00:24:04.440 religious communities, I think to MLM scams, because when they see people being like, look, 1.00

00:24:09.700 can't you see this as a scam? Can't you see these statistics? They're like, oh, well, the fact that

00:24:14.860 people are attacking, it means they must be on the right path. So there are negatives to this as well.

00:24:20.220 Interesting. Okay. So gosh, I mean, like, how are we going to impart this to our kids in a way that

00:24:30.740 doesn't, I don't know? Well, I think the easy part is stoking their will. I think the hard part is

00:24:36.960 providing external challenging situations that they have to overcome. I mean, my theory on this

00:24:43.020 remains the same in that I really think it's clear that when you have siblings, like a lot of siblings

00:24:51.720 in a family, you have already artificially created that hardship, because there's not always going to

00:24:56.160 be a parent who's ready to do what you need right away, because they may be helping someone else. And

00:25:00.240 there's just more limited resources. And there's also more people around who are going to make your

00:25:04.740 life complicated, who may want your help or need your help, or make it possible for you to get help

00:25:09.160 right away when you want it. So I actually think just having siblings is enough, like enough hardship

00:25:13.400 in life to solve the problem. You don't think so?

00:25:22.160 If we have enough.

00:25:24.420 Well, that's the plan.

00:25:25.560 I mean, if we get to like 12, sure.

00:25:27.840 12. I don't think you even need that much.

00:25:30.580 I don't think seven counts. That's a normal number of kids. You need a reasonable number of kids.

00:25:35.440 Malcolm, that is not a normal number of children.

00:25:39.000 Simone.

00:25:39.620 That is not a normal number of children.

00:25:41.180 Get out of here with this.

00:25:42.060 We're not in this day and age.

00:25:42.380 We're not in this day and age.

00:25:42.400 We're not in this day and age.

00:25:42.960 We need-

00:25:43.560 No, even, come on. Like, even people in the past, you know, they may have birthed 10 kids,

00:25:49.480 but they had like four or five. Like, this is, you know, I'm just saying.

00:25:55.160 Like, let's be reasonable with what is a hardship level of having kids. But yeah, I mean, I think

00:26:03.240 between us giving them siblings and us also not being, well, us being inherently very frugal people

00:26:09.480 is enough to create limitations that force some creativity and resilience. If that makes sense.

00:26:17.960 Yes.

00:26:19.560 But I do, I do think this is really interesting. And actually we've received some,

00:26:24.840 some emails actually from people who follow this podcast. And thank you, by the way,

00:26:28.440 for contacting us guys. But many of them actually are surprisingly riddled with this culture,

00:26:35.160 with this, like, well, you know, yeah, I, I have this thing that's running against me. Like,

00:26:41.160 I just, you know, I just can't do it.

00:26:42.760 Yeah. They start by telling us their narratives.

00:26:44.760 Yeah. Like we're seeing a lot of like learned helplessness or like, um,

00:26:49.240 determined what's the word fatalism. And like, well, I'm just not going to try because there's

00:26:55.960 no point.

00:26:56.600 And I get that narratives are difficult to break.

00:26:58.680 Yes.

00:26:59.080 But if you're starting with one of these narratives and you realize yourself is having one,

00:27:02.760 the most important thing is to change your friend group and change where you're living and change what

00:27:07.720 you're doing every day. If you change your environment, it is, and you go into this new

00:27:13.400 environment, like dead set. Okay. Well now I'm going to live this like trad conservative lifestyle

00:27:19.000 and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be industrious. The amount to which you can change

00:27:24.040 as a person is really difficult to oversell.

00:27:27.320 Mm-hmm. I totally agree.

00:27:29.720 Like it is the, the, the, the core study on this that I always cite is people coming back from Vietnam

00:27:35.640 who are addicted to heroin, something like 86% of them, the addiction basically immediately

00:27:43.160 disappeared when they came back. And the question is why, because their contexts were so different

00:27:48.360 that even really deep seated neurological phenomenon could be reset because your brain definitely

00:27:55.000 basically is running different modes for different environments.

00:27:58.680 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

00:28:01.160 Well, this, this has been spectacular, Simone, and I hope it helps some people. And, and really

00:28:07.480 the biggest takeaway from this, I would say is when somebody comes to you and they try to tell you

00:28:12.200 that your childhood was traumatic or your parents did something traumatic or, oh, here's this problem

00:28:17.320 you have that you didn't know you had. Now, if you're like, no, I guess I always sort of knew

00:28:22.280 that this was something that was troubling me. I just didn't have words. No, you didn't. That's not

00:28:26.680 a thing. That is, that is people writing things into your history. That is the way, if this wasn't

00:28:32.120 every morning you woke up and you're like, this is my big problem today, then it was created

00:28:38.600 for you. And I hate to say it, but this is one of the big issues we have with the trans movement 0.55

00:28:45.560 in that I do think that there are some people who are genuinely born trans, but I think for a lot of

00:28:50.680 people who joined the movement, it's more like this is something they were convinced was a problem

00:28:55.480 for them. And if they hadn't had people selling this to them, they never would have known that

00:29:00.040 this was a problem in their life. And so this level of pain that they're experiencing every day

00:29:04.760 is created by people pointing out the problem and contextualizing the problem and then framing the

00:29:10.920 problem as really bad. You know, one of my favorite things that I mentioned as a study, and I've never

00:29:16.680 been able to find this study, but it was mentioned when I was doing my degree in college at St. Andrews,

00:29:21.560 by the way, right now ranked the top university in the UK and by above both Oxford and Cambridge by

00:29:28.920 both the times and the guardian for the last two years. I, Hey, I got to take pride in my own honor.

00:29:34.280 Anyway, it was a study that showed that women who grew up in environments where unwanted non-consensual

00:29:42.280 surprise sex was common. It didn't have any negative effects from it, but people who grew up

00:29:47.160 in environments where unwanted, non-consensual surprise sex was uncommon. Like, you know, the

00:29:53.560 West really faced negative reactions to it. You create your society, the people who your friends

00:30:00.440 with, they create what's traumatic for you by what they contextualize is traumatic. And I guess you could

00:30:06.600 say everybody gets their sort of wisdom saving score. Yeah. I'm sorry. I've been playing a lot

00:30:11.160 of fall over skate three recently. And so it's a, it uses the D and D engine and it's, you know,

00:30:16.200 you roll the dice every time to see if you get a saving throw against this. But if you have a

00:30:20.840 community that's constantly trying to tell you people, not recognizing this people, not seeing you

00:30:25.880 this way, this is traumatic. It becomes traumatic in the way that trauma is meaningful. And by that,

00:30:32.040 what I mean is all trauma is really just due to these sorts of contextualizations. And no matter

00:30:37.560 what happens to you, the things that happen to you aren't what create the trauma. It's the way your

00:30:43.720 community and yourself choose to relate to those things. Yeah. So yeah, if you, I think a lot of

00:30:51.960 people who, because it will tell them it's such a cheat code. I think a lot of people who follow this

00:30:56.680 podcast think that they have this view, but don't. So next time you find yourself believing that,

00:31:04.200 you know, you, you can't solve a problem. That's probably a sign that you might be subject to these

00:31:10.040 views. So there's that. Sometimes one of the fun cultural differences between Simone and I is

00:31:17.160 every time something bad happens, she's always like, I didn't even realize that looking for a solution to

00:31:22.440 this was possible. She grew up her entire childhood, like not knowing about mucinex because like her

00:31:28.200 family, like they'd be sick and they wouldn't, I'm like, you're sick. Yeah. I'd be like, well,

00:31:31.560 you're sick. Google solutions. What do we do about this? She'd be like, I've been feeling really bad 0.73

00:31:36.920 today about X. And I was like, okay, go to Claude, type that in. That's an AI. That's the anthropic AI.

00:31:43.240 And let's find a solution. He goes, oh, there probably isn't one. I'm pregnant. And I'm like,

00:31:47.560 I'm sorry, just try. This was gas recently. And it was like, actually, there's this really easy

00:31:53.400 solution that doesn't hurt pregnancies. And she's like, like, why did you have so much resistance to

00:31:58.920 even trying? Yeah. I think part of like, a lot of it's how I grew up that like, there, there was no

00:32:05.400 attitude about like, oh, like take cold medicine when you have a cold. It was just like, drink

00:32:10.280 solutions. And that's a cultural attitude that you can. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm not,

00:32:15.640 I'm not exempt from this. That's why I really recognize it as a problem. So go home and think

00:32:21.240 about it, people. But Malcolm, thank you for helping me think through it all the time,

00:32:24.440 because I really appreciate it. I love you. I love you to death, Simone.

Based Camp - October 09, 2023

Trauma is Always Self Inflicted

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