The Taproot Podcast - Part 3: Oil, Empire, and The End

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Why does therapy work when nobody can agree on how? And what happens to a civilization that forgets how to read its own record? Part three of Empire, Oil, and the Odyssey, the follow-up to the Psycho-History of American Psychology series. Some of the old corn-growing peoples said a spirit lived inside every kernel and burst out when it got hot. Wrong theory, perfect popcorn. This episode is about the difference between knowing how and knowing why, and why psychology and psychiatry have the two backwards. Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, trauma therapist and founder of Taproot Therapy Collective in Birmingham, Alabama, walks through what the research actually shows: The dodo bird verdict: ninety years of evidence that the type of therapy barely matters Placebo run-ins: how antidepressant trials remove the patients who get better Open-label placebo, opioid release, and why the placebo effect is a real healing system Supershrinks: why some therapists get ten times the results, and why it shows up before training starts The precuneus: where the brain builds the self, and why trauma is an injury to self and world Salt domes, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and how empires and professions crack The slow death of the Library of Alexandria and why knowledge and power live in the same container Oil as dead algae, gold from meteorites, and how accidental our idea of money and energy really is Fafnir and inherited dragons: why our insecurities become the next generation's monsters The decade of mass dissociation, and why a culture that cannot read its own record does not know who it is It ends where Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey ends, with the people who are about to forget how to write, and with the one form of knowledge that has crossed every dark age. Free articles and resources: gettherapybirmingham.com Listen to Part 1 (the FDA, MDMA, and the parachute problem) and Part 2 (light and fuel: what oil did to the American mind) for the full series. psychotherapy, placebo effect, placebo studies, open label placebo, dodo bird verdict, common factors, evidence based practice, antidepressant trials, supershrinks, therapist effects, precuneus, trauma therapy, dissociation, Jungian psychology, depth psychology, Christopher Nolan Odyssey, Bronze Age collapse, Library of Alexandria, Strategic Petroleum Reserve, peak oil, empire, psycho-history, Taproot Therapy, Birmingham therapist, mental health podcast  

Hey guys, it's Joel with the Taproot Therapy Colective podcast and thank you so, so much for sticking with this weird series and the belated break. This will be the last one and then we'll get back to more normal and therapy things, but it did want to wrap up the meditation on inevitability, empire, and the nature of the systems that we live in. So I will go ahead and do that now. The coal that we mine to run the world that we live in is dead for us.

You know, about 300 million years ago, forests fell into swamps and the dead wood piled up faster than it could rot. Really, because for a couple million years, there wasn't bacteria around that could actually eat wood. It took a while for bacteria to learn to do that. Like now, like we used to say, like when I was in school, that, or like elementary school, that styrofoam was undigestable, that it was completely inorganic, that it would never go back into the earth. and that was true when I was in fifth grade, but then bacteria got creative, and now it's starting to break down simple plastics like styrofo. Like bacteria, you know, a single cell organism is like fairly, it's like a startup.

You know, it's very flexible, and it can run a lot of experiments, and the ones that don't work die because it's bacteria. There's millions and millions and millions of experiments. And so it can figure out basically how to eat really weird shit. Like animal evolution is relatively slow, but bacterial. evolution can be really quick. So bacteria basically, we, you know, did this huge experiment where we created synthetic plastic that the earth had never seen and then dumped it all over, you know, the entire earth in landfills and, you know, just a couple hundred years. And, well, not really a couple

hundred. I mean, like a little more than a hundred years. Bakelight is the first plastic. I'm getting off the map here. Anyway, plastic is relatively new, and there is now bacteria that can digest it, which is kind of wild, because it's a completely new thing that we made that was supposed to last forever, and then something figured out how to eat it. And bacteria are, you know, millions of them are doing more experiments faster. They're sort of working synergistically with things. So at first, like the first things that could eat, like, styrofoam and plastic and the things we thought were indigestible were actually, like, bacteria that could only live. inside of like the gut of certain worms and now those worms uh the bacteria has gotten out to

like it can digest styrofoam which doesn't mean that you should just dump styrofoam everywhere that microplastic is necessarily a good thing but the earth is very adaptable and this is a cycle that has gone on for a really long time so coal um in these swamps only exists because in the late carboniferous there was like trees piling up everywhere you had mountains of trees they were trees growing through and around trees. Trees might have made themselves extinct because you had these like incredibly, uh, uh, uh, like fibrous stalks of things that didn't really have that much water, whereas bacteria was really good at eating like, I don't know, you know, like weeds and

things with like big juicy stalks full of like swamp juice. But when trees evolved and all of a sudden they could get huge and like grow out the competition through some sort of like a plant. capitalism by getting bigger than all the other stuff faster and then throwing up this huge monopolist blanket to suck up all the sun around it and then killing everything beneath you because you were the biggest thing that could you know suck up all the sun which was the precious resource the plants were competing for um but there was nothing that could break down the fiber that was strong enough to hold up these trunks of trees and so it took a really long time

until like the late carboniferous period the early permian um you know, about 300 million years ago, I think. Like, and then all of a sudden there was a bacteria that was like, oh, we can eat this. And then the trees started turning into detritus, swamp juice, big piles of organic matter that could be broken down by bacteria and returned to the earth. And this is an old system. And we talked about before that the oil in the sea is mostly dead algae. It's the ghost of the seed, these tiny, living things that caught sunlight and they died holding it and then they sank over and over and

over again for millions of years. Their tiny little micro, not all of it is monicellular, but very simple cell if it is more than one, back down to the bottom of the sea. And oil is in the world because that happened. Coal is in the world because of the trees and the swamps. And all that time life went on and there were no humans around to interrupt it and the dead piled up in the darkness of the prehistoric period. And now we're mining it. Like the entire civilization that we now have and use comes from this, I don't even want to say a weird evolutionary glitch. It comes from millions of years of history that we are not responsible for and that are kind of arbitrary because we didn't create them. We're just sort of learning that they happened and we're benefiting from them.

And had that gone another way, had we been the first thing on the planet or had there not been these periods of, you know, permanent extinction and renewal before us, you could never have a civilization like this because you could not do the alchemy that got, you know, billions of years. of sunlight, of energy out of these things. You know, everything around you runs on the dead. The lights in your house. These are dead things burning and dying millions of years ago. And one day we will be dead. I'm not going to try and lean too far into existential therapy here. Sorry, Irvin Yalom.

But everyone who has ever looked back at history has stood at the end of it. And that's why most people don't do that. That's why this show will not be terribly popular. Because you are feeling solid and looking at the dead. And the dead felt solid too. So you're realizing that actually you're not. You are part of a process that you are not really responsible. Or I don't want to say accountable, but even you are.

you are not, I guess, the author of most of the circumstances, not just of your life, but of the entire civilization that you are inhabiting, it is not even the author of its own circumstances. And when I was a little kid, I went to my dad's office, and there was this architect there, my dad's an architect. He's also named Joel Blackstock, if you Google this and you're like, I can't believe an architect is writing. the show that'd probably make more sense honestly than a therapist doing the show but like yeah the joel blackstock that comes up is my dad he's an architect and so there's this architect he's not there but long time ago he was there he's like a really trippy weird guy and i was really young i think it was

in third grade and he got this like uh rock spire sample and he showed it to me and he's like do you see this you see these lines on that and it was like um yeah and he was like this was from the grand canyon And each one of these loans was an ocean. And I was kind of like, oh, cool, that's really neat. I learned about rocks in school. Quartz is this, an igneous rock. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, dude, stop. Because he was always kind of mess me up.

Like, yeah, he's an interesting guy. I don't remember the book that he made me read. But I think at one point, he made me memorize a passage of something and then go read it to my dad. And my dad got really uncomfortable. And I think maybe, because my dad was his boss at that. time that what I read to him was like Carl Marx or some kind of like communist thing. I really don't have any memory.

I remember not wanting to do it and struggling through it and him making me do it. But I think that's probably what I read in hindsight. I don't know. Anyway, he had this long spire of rock and he was like, do you see all these things? These are an ocean. I was like, oh, cool, cool. I like rocks. I have these things.

I got them at the Red Mountain Museum. And this was the Red Mountain Museum, if you're a Birmingham resident, was the thing that was there were two museums before the McWain Center. There was a discovery place, and that was like kind of physical sciences. And then there was Red Mountain Museum, which is more like Earth sciences. And I would get rocks from there, have a rock collection. If you've come to therapy in my office or you've seen a picture of my office, the bowl of rocks that's in the middle of my desk, was all the rocks that now would be very expensive,

like anywhere from, I don't know, $5 to $20 a piece to go get a piece of ameth that big or a fossil or a nautilus shell. but at the time they were like anywhere from like i don't know 50 cents to two dollars because it was 1991 and i would go in and i would like pay for the rock and i would take it um and i would get a rock every time that i got to go to the museum i would have to pay like some of my money and then sometimes a relative would help me out but when i realized that i had to start a therapy practice because i needed an income stream and was leaving a situation that i was in and didn't know if i could make as a therapist I was like, oh, crap.

And so I went to my parents' basement, and I opened up, like, all the dusty boxes of stuff and was like, what is cheap decor items that I have? And I found my rock collection from first grade. And then I popped all of those rocks off of, like, a giant foam board thing. It's made of plastic to put them in that bowl. That's where those rocks came from. They came from the Red Mountain Museum anywhere from 91 to 98. So having such, like, a huge, you know,

body of experience with rocks as a kid i thought that i knew about the rock um that this architect had and then he was like no no no look at each one of these do you know the whole time you've been alive and the whole time do you go to church you go to christian church jesus was alive and the whole time before him and the caveman all that there's been one ocean right each one of these lines is one ocean and look on this rock there's like 300 and if you go to the grand cany and you look all the way up, you see all the oceans that the planet has ever had. And that's where we can't think about that. If you try and think about that amount of time, you'll go crazy.

And I think that he thought that he was saying something edgy to a kid. The kid would, like, not get, but I got it. And it kind of drove me crazy. And a little bit of the onus of this episode is probably in this thing that was told to me when I was in the third grade, spending a summer on the first grade. spending a summer on the floor of my dad's office because he was starting this business and I didn't have anywhere else to be. So we started this series talking about Christopher Nolan reflecting on the age that we're in and the movie The Odyssey. So I'm going to try and tie all my messy

metaphors together that sometimes I just kind of throw up in the air and see how many, you know, balls I can catch more where they hit the ground, how many connections you can knit back together before you go crazy. Movie. Movies, what do you eat during a movie? Popcorn. So I ate a big bowl of popcorn at the theater when I watched the movie with my wife. And we've been making popcorn for a long time. And we've been making it a lot longer than we understood why popcorn worked the way that it did. So when I'm sitting here and I'm trying to tie up this unplanned ramble with notes that I can make during, you know, me doing the 10 other things that I do so that it, let's see, 1.58 a.m. I can make a podcast that ties the stuff together. I'm like,

what is a metaphor for the thing that I've kind of been saying about psychotherapy in that it's a technology that requires you to do a certain thing, a certain way, based on a feeling, but it doesn't really matter if you know why it works. You just have to sort of know the right vibes and ingredients to make the thing happen and the Odyssey, oh, it's popcorn. Because the reason that popcorn used to get made when it was Native Americans making it was that, you know, and they knew it was a certain type. You know, they knew how to recognize, you know, maybe it's not the right part of it's to say this, but when I was a kid we called the really kind of crude maze with the bright colors during Halloween, we called it to Indian

corn. but there was a certain variant of the maize that Native Americans had that I learned about in third grade the same time the other events in this podcast went on as Indian corn and they even had these little dried parts of it and they would pass it around both as like a cob and you know as colonels when you learned about this in school and they would talk to you about how they made popcorn and there was this belief that there was a demon inside of the colonel and that the demon was like asleep. But if you got him hot, he would wake up. And he would get angrier and angrier and angrier at the heat. Native Americans generally have demons like Christians had demons. Maybe sort of like bad spirit or simple spirit or nature spirit. It's like a better word.

But I've heard some people say that this story is just complete bullshit. And then I've heard other Native Americans say, no, this is part of my cultures. I'm not anthropologist. when I was in a third grade, this was in my textbook. And maybe it's wrong. But there was this idea that it was in a textbook in the 90s, so know that I say that out loud, probably it's wrong, that Native Americans would put popcorn in the fire

because they thought that it would make the demon inside more and more and more angry. And then eventually the demon would get so angry that he would blow the corn up and you would have popcorn. They didn't really know why it worked, but they figured out how to make it work better by selecting corn that had a very, very thick exterior and a very, very moist interior. And we don't know their religious beliefs.

Maybe it's what my textbook said, that there was a demon inside, they got an angry and was going to blow the corn up, and maybe they were just noticing patterns, and they didn't have punnet squares, and they didn't have Mendel Greger and modern genetics, but they realize like, hey, the seeds that make the really good popcorn, when you put some of those aside, they make better popcorn.

And isn't that the way that knowledge has always been transmitted? And isn't that sort of scientific, even though it's not academic science? And isn't that what is happening all the time in civilization and in psychotherapy? And if I had planned this episode better, this would be a great place to say, oh, this is Joel Blackstock. Welcome to the Tapuit Therapy Collective podcast, but we already did that. keep going. There's two kinds of knowledge, I think. There's knowing how to do something, and it lives in your hands and it gets passed from one person to the next person, which is the real knowledge. And then there's knowing why it works, which lives in stories,

and the stories are often wrong because they're myths. Even if they're scientific myths, there's still myths. You could take the entirety of the, I don't know, one of the EBSCO libraries for like heart surgery, and you could dump it in the Bronze Age and no one would know how to do any of the stuff. So is it knowledge there? We don't even know how to read it. We don't know how to approach it. We don't know how to use it.

We don't know how to execute it. And a lot of those heart surgeries, you don't actually need the fancy devices. Like, you just kind of need a sharp knife. do we know how to do that? Is it knowledge? You know, civilizations survive on the first kind of knowledge, not the second kind. They flatter themselves with the second, because you can show it off, and not everybody can replicate it easily, but it's not really real.

You know, psychiatry has these really pretty stories about why things work, receptor diagrams and dopamine diagrams. But each year we find out that the dopamine theory of depression is not actually right. And the neurotransmitter theory of antidepressants is not actually real. We keep prescribing the drugs. But the second part goes away because it isn't really the thing that matters, even when we pat ourselves on the back for being an expert in that. When it goes away, I'm still an expert.

So is it real? I would argue that it isn't really real because if you lose it, you still know how to do the thing that you know how to do and you can replicate it. Whereas if you lose the second part, you don't. In the 90s, I was obsessed with learning how to build computers because they seemed like this thing that was so unapproachably, both financially for my family. And just intellectually, like they were the hardest thing that anybody could do at that point where the culture seemed to be. telling me that when I looked at things. Everyone was confused by them. And I missed the era where it was really hard.

We had to mess around with things like 64, you know, pin connectors and scuzzies. You know, I did come in at a, you know, a place where it was relatively plug and play. But the fact that I could build a computer in middle school meant that I had spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do this because I thought that it meant something. And like there were RAM timings and bus speeds and, you know, pin ins, pin outs and they're you had to, you know, match things to the motherboard, not just match it to make it work, but you had to make sure that the timing was right

so that you weren't wasting money on things. And if I had believed that there was a demon that lived in the RAM that had to be timed, you know, 5,4, 6 instead of something else, I still would have built the computer the same way. The underlying knowledge of how a computer functioned and, you know, I.O., and ones and zeros that I knew and read about didn't help me build a computer better. So is that really the thing that is carrying the knowledge? And even though I didn't really understand that,

I kind of understood the thing behind the thing. The people telling me information that was useful versus information that was an extraneous basis for a mechanism of action that didn't matter to the thing that I was trying to accomplish. accomplish. And when it did matter, when I wanted to understand how something worked, a lot of times that foundational knowledge would change while the structural knowledge wouldn't. I mean, here's another thing. Like, how many of you guys learned when you were in elementary school, and usually fifth or sixth grade, that the atom is happy if it has the same amount of electrons? That's wrong, but it's not true. Like, it's something that you learned in school so that later they could say,

actually there's like all of these sub-shells and different scenarios and the sub-shells themselves are not even real they're just calculating a probability of where like the electron might be so why did you learn that thing did you know science when you said well if there's two protons there must be two electrons because the atom and then will become happy and it will be stable it's a reduction of something that is real but it's not real itself. And that does apply to psychotherapy because the smart policy is simple. Find people who can actually do the thing. Watch them, protect them, enable their ability to do the thing that is working, and then don't confuse their explanations with the reason that their thing works. One of the

reasons why some of the most brilliant psychotherapists that have ever existed, like, you know, Erickson or someone didn't have a legacy is because they couldn't explain why what they were doing worked because they didn't know what they were doing. That doesn't mean that they weren't doing it. It just means that they didn't know. And this is relevant to a lot of different fields, a lot of different places, and ultimately to, I think, maybe a metaphor for why our country used to function. You know, my criticism of the psychotherapy field in a lot of the past series that I did is that they're running the opposite. thing. They're being like, you have to explain why it works. And then we'll listen. Well, that isn't how anything was ever built to work. You know, medicine never needed those explanations. Aspirin

was used for about 70 years before anyone could explain why it worked. It was thinning the blood. Duh. But like, nobody knew. It just worked. You know, red rice yeast later turned into the earliest statin drugs. And it still is a statin drug. If you're one of the people, people who's really, I'm sorry, huge aside, if you're one of the people who emails me and is like, don't take this torvistatin, you can just do red rice yeast instead because it's like natural, whatever. It is a statin drug. Red rice yeast that you buy at Sam's Club is a statin drug. If you're taking it, you're taking a statin. So just talk to your doctor and take a statin. Please don't email me about that anymore. I don't know why people decide that I hate like medicine from these

episodes that's not really, we're having a space practice or psychotherapy, the thing that I do for a living, any of that, still don't get that one. But anyway, I get a lot of those emails. Don't do that.

People go under general anesthesia every day. And there's not really a subtle explanation of like why they do. Some of the more interesting theories in neuroscience about consciousness explore that phenomenon. They're like, well, if it does this thing, is that thing responsible for consciousness?

And then other neuroscientists are like probably not. there might be another thing that we can't see yet. And they're like, well, you demand evidence for everything. So if you don't have another explanation, maybe it's my explanation. And they're like, I don't know, I think you're probably wrong. You know, the big debate. You can look at the blog. But this is a thing.

If anesthesia doesn't change anything that we can measure and it gets rid of consciousness, what does that mean about consciousness? There's a lot of neuroscientists that have kind of run with that. I think those theories are interesting in that we should humor them. I don't really buy any of them. in one direction. But, you know, medicine ran on results, replication, and reasonable safety protocols for a long time. And psychology is this one field that demands that we have to understand why something works before we will admit that it works. Having made that statement, though,

I don't think that's true. What I see is a very insecure field that only does that when I don't want you to be right. This is only a position that is used from people who are in power to say, I don't want the mechanism of action that I use or that I think that I'm using to change. I don't want the field to change. I don't want research to change. And so I'm going to demand that you know why the effective thing that you are doing is correct. I don't know, man. I'm just doing it. And I'm not talking to those people. I'm just saying this is a pattern that happens in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the odds in psychotherapy. And it gets worse every time where we pretend that, oh, we're totally open to new ideas, we love science, we love evidence-based practice, you just have to understand exactly what the brain is doing before we can do it in the room where I talk to a person.

Well, it's never worked that way before, and it will not really probably ever work that way anytime soon. So maybe we should just keep doing it the way that we did it before, like 1980, when all of the mental health outcomes started to get worse every year forever and ever. Even though medicine got more and more and more evidence-based. And before you email me and say you can't control for a study where, like, you know that everyone in 1980s, is doing the same thing that they are in like 2026. And so we don't know that psychotherapy getting worse is the thing that made psychotherapy outcomes get worse. Neither can you. You can't control for that study anyway.

So like turn that inward. When you find a way to randomize control that one, send me an email. Bodies that fell, the roots that were dug from the earth so these games could be played. I see it tonight and the stains on my hands. The buildings are screaming. I can't ask for help though. Nobody knows me. Hostile.

worried, lonely, we move in our packs, and these are the rites we were born to, working and working so we can be all that we want, and to sleep to dream, to keep a dream in, reach to each a dream, don't weep, don't sleep, just keep it in, keep sleeping in, what we're going to do to wake up? In 1936, a psychologist named Saul Rosenzweig noticed something embarrassing. Every school of therapy had a different theory of mind, the theories that contradicted each other, and all the therapies worked about equally well, even though they contradicted. The Adlerians were looking at things like birth order and relational energy and, you know, compensation. The Freudians were looking at how sex was being projected or the need for sex or the need for power.

And the Jungians were looking at like a holistic life cycle process sort of fused with evolutionary psychology. He borrowed a line from Alice in Wonderland, where the dodo judges a race by announcing that everyone has won, and all must have prizes. The Dodo Bird verdict has held for 90 years. In the modern meta-analysis, the specific type of therapy explains somewhere between zero and 1% of how well therapy goes. The Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians,

and now all the modern types of therapy, all have conflicting assumptions, not just about what the therapy is effective or like how it should be done, but about the very way that the mind works. And with the point where the purpose or maybe, mechanisms of healing are. And yet, when you do them, these different therapies all seem to work equally well across different types of therapists for different types of issues. And the field treats that

as a scandal. It was the answer that was, you know, always sort of underneath everything that they were researching, but it wasn't the thing that they were supposed to research, or it wasn't the way that research was supposed to work. You know, the id is not a real thing. Neither is the skis. You know, the inner part or the archetype, if you open a skull, you're not going to find an inner critic. You're not going to find a wounded child. You're not going to find any of the metaphors that therapists have been using for a long time. They're different alphabets for writing down the same activity. They are different metaphors, metaphorical lenses for looking at dynamic processes that are so vastly complicated.

We can't understand them without a reductive containing metaphor. therapies are not medicines. They are lenses and a lens does not have to be true to work. It only has to make you look. And when you're talking about Native Americans who believe in something like a spirit in the corn who is becoming free when you heat the corn up and then it pops, the popcorn still pops even though that description is wrong. In the 90s, insurance companies started requiring randomized trials before they would pay for a therapy. You know, the standard trial needs a manual, a fixed number of weeks, a single diagnosis, and an outcome that you can put a form on. And only one family of therapies was built around those manuals. And so it wasn't that it worked the best. It was the easiest one to study.

So only that family of research methodologies, cognitive and behavioral, piled up trials and then evidence based on those trials. not because the evidence was better, but because the trials were able to be done. All the therapies were different shapes, and the shape of research was a shape that only fit a square. And when researchers finally asked patients what they got out of therapy, Acquharas 177 studies, the patients barely mentioned symptom scores. They talked about understanding themselves and feeling in charge of their own lives. The measuring system had been pointed for 50 years at the test. the one outcome that patients were treating as a side effect.

And some of the strongest evidence for all of this is printed in the method sections of the studies. Before many antidepressant trials start, everyone who signs up gets a sugar pill for a week or two without being told, and the people who get better are removed from the study. And it's called a placebo run-in, and it is standard because when you give suffering people a doctor, a schedule, a bottle of pills, and someone who writes their pain down and listens to them, a huge number of them will just start healing. And that healing drowns out the drug. So the trial has to get rid of all those people who got better to find out what really gets

people better, which pill works best. And so they only keep the people who did not improve on the placebo, and then they run the trial again. A study population selected at a lot of expense. These are expensive things for being unable to benefit from being cared for. We throw out all of these patients who heal. And what survives, that filtering is very small. Across more than 200 trials and 70,000 patients, the drug moved the standard depression scale about 10 points and the sugar pill about 8.

The smallest change a patient can feel is about three. The drugs win reliably, you know, erase that nobody can feel them. winning. And sugar pills have no side effects, so patients on the real drug can tell you which group they're in, which is the exact same crime that the FDA convicted MDMA of in the part one series that we were talking about. When you gave someone MDMA, they could figure out that they were on a medication because the MDMA makes you trip. And so the FDA said, well, we can't really prove scientifically that this makes you get better even though you're saying you are because you could figure out that it wasn't sugar.

But I want to point out that antidepressants were always doing this too. It's just that their side effects were a little quieter about it. You know, Ted Kappchick measured the thing that we keep throwing away. He split patients with irritable bowel syndrome three ways. A way list, fake acupuncture from a brisk practitioner who said almost nothing. And then the same fake acupuncture. By fake, he means not real acupuncture. It wasn't doing anything in the school of acupuncture with meridians.

it was just somebody sort of putting random needles. But the same fake, in quotes, acupuncture from a warm practitioner who listened, and he said that he expected the patients would improve. People who got the brisk and cold acupuncturists said that they felt slightly better. But the people who got acupuncture from a worm person who listened to them were some of the highest responders. For many outcomes, I mean, those results were competing with what Andy depressants do. So in my field, it is this confound that the newest trials use remote raiders who've

never met the patient. And so nobody can link warmth into the measurement or human interaction, all the things that psychotherapy is built on that those trials are supposed to be measuring. And his placebo research shows a couple of things that I'll extract. Like first, you don't have to trick anybody. You know, I make fun of myself and my models for being kind of cranky and the thing that I'm doing in therapy being kind of silly and then kind of explain the history of it and how we got here. And like that is part of the cognitive intervention that I use that makes somebody feel comfortable and in control. And like I'm not, you know, a god on a throne that's the psychology understander that this is a collaborative process and then I'm not concealing anything

from them. And then I'm engaging them in their own treatment. You know, if you hand someone a bottle and you tell them plainly, it's a sugar pill. And many of them still get better. So a placebo response doesn't have to be somebody being fooled because you can tell them that and it will still work. And second, when people respond to a placebo, their brains release their own natural painkillers and their feel-good chemicals, the same ones that drugs are designed to release mechanically. But who cares how they got released? The placebo and the drug are pulling the same lever, and that breaks the basic math of what we think a trial is supposed to be. I would argue because it breaks the math of what a patent for an antidepressant is supposed to be. So who is it that it can

pop the corn in the field? What is the mechanism of action that is making the corn pop? The field measured who it was that could pop the corn too. In 1974, a researcher named David Ricks found that boys treated by one clinician did dramatically better in adult life than boys treated by others. And he coined the word super shrink. In a modern study of 1,800 clients and 91 therapists, the best therapist clients improved about 10 times faster than average, and the worst therapist clients got worse.

A British study found recovery rates from 20 to 96% depending only on which therapist you drew. The type of therapy, the degree that you held, the years of experience, explain none of it. Actually, in the largest data sets, therapists don't improve with experience. They actually get slightly worse over time, especially the bad ones. The people who don't deal with their emotional blind spots, who won't heal their own damage, because you can only take a patient as far as you can take yourself, tend to accumulate more of it and get more weird, more erratic, more rigid, and clinging tighter to paradigms that don't work when you watch them over time. So it's not experience. It's not training. It's not education.

It's not what school you came from. It's not if you're an LPC, SID, clinical psychologist, social worker, LMFT, etc. So what is it? What predicts it can be seen in the first week of therapy? Timothy Anderson's team showed graduate students videos of hard clinical moments. Maybe a patient attacked a provider over and over unprovoked verbally. Maybe a patient fell apart. They became unconsolable and wouldn't respond or listen when the therapist had another patient waiting outside and the hour was over. And they were unable to stabilize them. And they scored how warmly and steadily the therapist responded before their training had taught them anything at all.

This was a study conducting before the therapist went to school for the first class. And more than a year later, those week one scores predicted how their patients did. A German team found the same thing over five years too. The ability is mostly there to be a super shrink before school starts. You know, it's put there by hands that nobody can really measure. And this is something that you will hear from any therapists. There are some people that have something that can't be taught, and that thing that can't be taught is more important than anything that can.

And they've always kind of known this, but graduate schools don't want to know that because they're supposed to teach you and make you better. CEs don't want to know that because they're supposed to be continuing your education and keeping you relevant and up to date over time. Patent companies don't want to hear this. People who invent and study models or pay for models to be implemented, like insurance companies don't want to hear that, because surely the model is something that is scientific and increasing

good over time. What we don't want to look at is the real evil in the profession. What is the bureaucracy that drives the good people out? What are the incentive structures? Namely, you know, the amount of paperwork, the things that the super shrinks don't like, right? That is what we should be getting rid of to make them stay. Last episode I talked about those salt domes. and they sit next to the oil on all of the oil fields. And the Texas oil age started on top of one at Spindletop in 1901. I think 1901. That's where the strategic petroleum reserve is stored in caverns inside of those salt domes,

thousands of feet down. You know, the thing that the U.S. uses to, you know, supposedly make sure that there's enough oil reserve that if the 1970s happens again and there's an oil shortage, we'll have it. And it's way to expensive. to have like thousands of football fields of giant oil refinery is above ground. And because there's salt, which is pretty good at storing oil, right next, that goes down in these huge columns right next to where you mine oil, because it's the salt that those domes

welling up that push the little pockets of oil together, you hollow them out and you store the oil or the, yeah, the raw petroleum inside of this giant dome of some. salt. Storing it in steel tanks takes just hundreds and hundreds of open things of space. They can get burned, bombed, electrical sparked. It's a lot less of a risk to put them underground. And the salt seals the oil in, and under pressure over time, salt will even close up its own small cracks with, like, more salt. So it's a perfect storage device. So to get the oil out, because the water is heavier than oil, you just pump water into the bottom of the cave, of salt cave. And then the oil floats to the top and goes up, you know, into the tube.

And then when you want to fill it back up, you pump the water out and you put more oil on top. And you, but the problem with that, that isn't really much of a problem if you use a strategic oil reserve strategically, which is not what we're doing right now. We're pumping it out every day to keep prices low and then we're grabbing more through deals and pumping it back in, which we've never really used it like before. You're not supposed to for a lot of reasons. The reason you're not supposed to is that fresh water dissolves salt. So like normally when you draw down what's inside of, you know, the oil reserve by filling it with water, some of the salt will dissolve because it sees the fresh water and it wants to equalize the pressure.

So it will dissolve as much salt into the water as the water can at that pressure. And then when it's dissolved as much as it can hold, it just sits there. It doesn't dissolve anymore. It's not a problem. And then eventually the wall of salt like heals itself. This is really how these things work. I'm not reducing it that much. Like there's a lot of geological concepts that I kind of like squish over,

but this one is it really is this simple, guys. But the problem is when you're sucking oil out every day of the strategic oil reserve and then putting it back in and sucking it back in, you're adding a whole bunch of fresh water that is absorbing that salt. And the engineers that built these things, they had not planned. They had planned for a handful of drawdowns per cabin. every, you know, 30 years maybe. We're doing it 30 times a week.

We're changing levels. I mean, you're not emptying the whole thing, but we're changing levels at 30 times a week during this Iran thing. They didn't plan for that. You're specifically not supposed to do that. And the reason you're not supposed to do it is because if you ever dissolve enough of that salt at once

that you crack that column, all of that water and all of that oil will flow into the bedrock. And you will never be able to store it there. again and you will lose everything that you had. It's the same physics as a paperclip. You know, if you can bend a paperclip a couple of times, if you hit it, it won't break. But if you bend it back and forth on the same spot over and over for a long time, no more paperclip. Same way that this empire stores energy in oil.

You know, oil is this perfect medium for storing energy across time. you know an empire works kind of like that salt up people want to hate empire you know from a left standpoint and and say i love knowledge um but like and you know empires are bad and whatever this isn't a political pot to yes these aren't political points there's psychology ones but empire and knowledge you know if you want to be an academic that celebrates all of the knowledge that mankind can accumulate and create across history but i hate the evil bloody empire you know, that go and exploit things and take over other people's land, they do all the bad things that empires do,

you have to look at the relationship between how knowledge and empire are kind of tied together. You know, an empire is this machine for moving power across time. How do you make sure that this amount of, yeah, maybe I'm the, you know, ringword of the Danes or the, you know, in Beowulf, but how do I make sure that my line continues forever? Well, I make it bigger. Maybe I build roads. Maybe I build castles.

Maybe I have something that is outside of just my, you know, nepotistic family monarchy of a council or something. It's this way of trying to hold power for as long as you can by building infrastructure. You know, a central bank is this plan for who controls the money 20 years from now. You don't have a single bank, a central bank because you're worried about how money works today. You want to make sure that that money works the same way for hundreds of years. in the 50s, the people who were running the stuff, they were already arranging, you know, to still be running things in the 80s and in the 90s.

And they were, in the 90s, they were arranging for what was going to happen now. You know, a lot of the empire structure, the levers of mechanisms of control that we live in right now were built in the 80s and 90s. And a lot of the ones that were inherited, you know, in the 90s were built in the 40s, 50s and sometimes the 60s. The power structures of the 60s are kind of on their way out. This is the last vestiges of them. I don't want to go too far off and mixing a bunch of metaphors together with these.

That's what's fun for me is can I go a bunch of different directions and then tie it all back up into multiple weird and wild points that all reinforce each other. But, you know, look at how those things work. You know, control of money and control of energy to store it and you carry it forward. across time. Both of these things are kind of accidents. There is oil to build a society on only because life spent hundreds of millions of years storing sunlight before any of us existed.

And we found a way to do alchemy to get all of that stored energy out. And it's down there because of what happened before we were born and we dig it up and we alchemize it. Gold is kind of the same. Gold is this another side. But gold is this like weird resource to me because, gold is like one of the only ways that you could store money really especially like in a pre-industrial society because like if you were super rich and you bought like all the wheat in the world what would happen it would sprout or it would rot or it would get eaten it would go bad if you

didn't eat it so you had to give it away so most of the ways that like wealth even silver uh will tarnish like pretty quick like silver uh is pretty hard at like post mining it to preserve uh in early times but gold silver platinum all of those sort of like precious metals they almost didn't come to our planet like there was a series of meteor strikes like uh in the very like late stages of the planet's development which is the reason that we have the ability to even think about money like that just like oil is kind of an accident so it was like our conception of money um because there was like the societies that didn't have access to these precious metals. A lot of times it was like bronze and things,

but they didn't have access to that stuff. They were gift economies. Like you stayed in power by this person giving away a lot of their wealth in order to keep this generative thing, like that you actually had to work for the people who you ruled. Gold was this thing that sort of made empire as we know it a possibility because you could take something, put it in a cellar, wait a hundred years, pay an army with it, ship it from Spain to South America and pay a soldier with it.

And you can't really do that with a lot of other forms of wealth without technology, without like Bitcoin or something, if that even counts. So even our oldest idea of money is made of this dead stars. You know, our energy is made of dead forests and dead seas. and we treat both like there are these laws of nature that are handed down and we can't possibly imagine anything else which is a huge failure of imagination we are sort of living in this accident that forgot it was an accident and knowledge has to be carried across time too and carrying it takes the same things that power takes it takes coherence it takes organization and most of all it

takes an unbroken chain each generation handing what it knows to the next set of hands link by link and speaking only to the ears that can hear it you know you can't create a society of blacksmiths only you can't create a society of therapists only you can't create you have to create an incentive structure that lets certain types of people ideally all types of people excel at the thing that they can do a library a university you know a professional line of teachers students these are chains of institutional memory and they hang from the same structure as the power of the empire. You know, the library needs a king to pay for it. The library of Alexandria needed Alexander the Great. The multiple libraries of Alexandria

needed Alexander the Great. Alexander, I guess you could say that even before Trump, he was kind of like the first branded real estate guy, because like every city that he conquered, he would name Alexandria. So what do you call your city? Because you can't call like every city. You can't be like, I'm going to go from Alexandria to Alexandria. And then we might stop at Alexandria for a little bit because like that doesn't make sense. So you had to basically say, have another word for the city, but it was still called Alexandria.

You know, so like it'd be like, oh, Alexandria at Egyptum. I am going from there to Alexander Thruss or Throod. You know, if you're going from Egypt to Turkey or something. But Alexander the Great's empire and his imperial structure is a ton of the reason why we have all of the knowledge that we have. And the fact that a lot of those libraries, because either acute things like a fire or big things, like the slow decline of the East and Western Roman Empire splitting or something, or most of it honestly is because an academic was wrong. Like half of the stuff we lost is because, like, one scholar said all of these books are important and all of the, those weren't. These suck. You can read what you want, but they're like not the good books. And then 200 to a thousand years later, no one was writing those down on expensive vellum

and they're just gone. Like that's the way we lost most of it is that somebody had an opinion and wrote an op-ed and then the world broke, which is, yeah, it still works that way, I guess, if you read the New York Times. But the library of Alexandria is the way that we have so much of the knowledge, if we're talking about, you know, knowledge existing for a long time. And most of those libraries, some of them did, but most of the great ones, they did not get destroyed in one great fire. We lost the knowledge over centuries. You know, in 145 BC, there was a king, and he purged all of the scholars in this giant political fight, and so they all ran away because they didn't want to die, the ones that were alive.

And then in 48 BC, Julius Caesar set fire to ships in the harbor during the siege, because he saw that they were close together. And it was a easy way to kind of, he could get rid of his and some of his, but it would also take out theirs or whatever. And then the fire got out of control and it got out away from the docks, densely packed cities

and tens of thousands of scrolls that are stored near the water that was part of the process of how they were made, burned. But the library was still working, even though it was losing knowledge because power was changing hands too often. Just like those salt domes.

You there, the strategic world reserve, what is it supposed to do? It's supposed to be a spring-loaded bearing for the shocks and the road to buffer us against the changes in the imperial power of the U.S. So like in the 1970s, when we had a long, a hard time, we're going to make sure that the people don't feel that there's a shock absorber. Right. When you hit that shock absorber too many times, it can break. And this is the same way that knowledge is lost when empires start to do that. In the 2070s, AD, the emperor Arraylian, he's retaking the city and he wrecked the royal quarter where the library stood. Some more knowledge is lost.

And 365, an earthquake and tsunami drowned parts of the old city and most of the fail safes and the, you know, the civic population that would have been able to kind of take and preserve and handle a crisis or waning. In 391, a Christian mob destroys the Serapaeum, this temple that held a daughter collection. And then the main collection was probably already gone, but what was left of it that we could have put it together, you know, based on inferences, is lost. We don't have it. And then under every one of those blows, there's slow things happening. The fact that papyrus rots, you know, vellum is a sort of medieval invention. Papyrus would rot. You had to recopy it because it was paper.

And the paper, and especially in like wet climates, would just start to go bad. When you put it in a damp harbor city where you can make, you can get the knowledge faster and you can trade faster and you can, you kind of want a library there to absorb it. But you can't preserve it there as well as that you can in the desert. You know, a scroll has to be copied over and over again. When that stops happening or it doesn't happen, it's like the VHS tapes when you take your, VHS tapes down at your grandmother's house and you put one in. Most things have a life depending on who made them of, you know, 15 to 40 years.

The magnet ones and zeros start to wear out and it starts to turn into this sort of gray soft, you know, different colors blow out faster so you get an interesting film effects of, you know, greens and reds pop and everything else looks blue. Eventually it all just kind of turns a gray brown and the knowledge is lost because you didn't take the tape off the shelf like it's set on the back. of the VHS when you bought it in 1989 and put it into another VHS and then copy it to a new tape so that it could be preserved. You didn't do that. So as the money drifted and the city declined, the copying of these scrolls slowed, and most of the books didn't burn. They just weren't copied again.

Each blow like this was survivable. But the cycling of up and down and up and down wasn't. That's what does the most damage. Every war and every fire was the salt column expanding and contract, and every time a little more of what it held was about to seep into the ground forever. And Rome is the same story on a bigger size, bigger scale. You know, when the Western Empire fell apart, the schools and the libraries went with it. And, you know, that reading in Western Europe shrank to a thread held by just the monks. They were the last to be literate. Same thing Christopher Nolan's talking about, about the Bronze Age losing its language.

It happens again in the Dark Age when Roald. Rome falls and there's no empire to hold this stuff together and the only thing that is left is the church and so the only people who can read the only people that can copy storable fonts of knowledge in these books which again you know what is it that leads to the downfall of the church largely it's the black plague when the black plague happens that is another you know shock because the clergy during the black plague are the first to die I'm way off my outline here. I got to get back. I got to land the plane. But the clergy of the first to die because they went and they helped everybody who was sick. They were duty bound to do that and it killed them.

And so then after the dark ages, you had basically one literate priests, priests, you know, in a monastery trying to teach 30 other priests who were very young how to read that were not literate and did not know Latin. And it paved the way for the reformation because no one respected them because, hey, y'all were reading the secret magic language about what the Bible said. don't even seem to remember it anymore. Why am I hanging out here? I'm going to start my own church. There was some Greek learning that survived

Constantinople and Baghdad and came back to Europe centuries later, but the West kind of lost most of what it was holding during the shocks that hit the empire because of the interrelationship between empire and knowledge. And that is this weird irony that nobody really wants. I mean, I think empire is probably associated, at least in America, with the right wing of the political spectrum and knowledge academia, studying and preserving and discovering kind of new things.

You know, I don't want to just say knowledge is associated with the left, but a certain kind of intellectual tradition or structure. And so, you know, the structure that a lot of people hate, especially on the left for good reason, you know, empire being bad or it does bad things, it's the same thing that's like also sort of holding up the thing that they love. You know, the empire that builds pyramids so that a king can believe he lives forever or that it makes all the peasants make like an army of terracotta soldiers to put in the earth so that I can think that I'm a mortal or something or, you know, crucifies thousands of slaves in Rome and puts them along the rooms. All the

terrible stuff that empires do is also sort of holding up civilization as this after effect of it needing to hang on to its own innovation. its own bureaucracy, create a bureaucracy as a buffer. So people who don't want to be on the same side kind of are, and that they're working to preserve the order that they know, even if they don't know it. And they want this order to carry things that they like across time, even if they're on different political sides,

those things are related. And if we let that crack, you know, I don't, I don't know. I can't see past that because there's not any empire that can. You know, my field, a lot of the past, you know, episodes are arguing they broke its own chain. Between the 70s and the 90s, psychotherapy got redefined and then redefined again. In 1980, the diagnostic manual was rebuilt around checklist. Managed care rewrote, you know, what even counted as psychotherapy.

And the evidence-based practice movement rewrote what counted as knowing as knowledge. And then yet there were all these people that are like, no, we have the knowledge. isn't it. But they weren't allowed to say that. That's a very weird after effect. You know, it's a very weird knock on effect in a field. You know, each redefinition was this other shock to the cavern holding up the thing. And each one broke a link between the people who knew how to do the work and the people learning it. And the clinical tradition, the long line of supervisors handing it down to the people who they realized had the ears to hear it, got stretched and then cut and then manualized and then replaced with the manual. And like the scrolls in Alexandria, most of

that knowledge was never destroyed. It just stopped being copied. An empire can spend enormous amounts and it can refill if there is time between. You know, we've borrowed from the Strategic oil reserve before slowly. But we haven't been draining it, filling it up, draining it, filling it up, draining it, filling it up, in just a complete denial of the situation we are in or what is happening, just unsustainably. What it can't do is draw down and refill over and over again in quick succession, just like an empire, because each cycle is coming at a risk of breaking the container, and once you've broken it, it's gone.

And that is what the last 25 years of this country look like to me. Wars, crashes, bailouts, crisis after crisis, fresh water pumped into the walls faster than the salt can settle into the water. And then that salty water dumped on the ground to be absorbed and fresh water pumped in again because now we need the oil. Knowledge institutions get cycled in the same way. Again, not making a political point, making a psychology one. All of that stuff is relevant to how we feel right now. But nobody shuts down teaching in America on purpose. They cycle it.

they reform it and then the reform of the reform and the testing regimes in and out you know i don't think that the end of education is somebody standing in front of the school with a gun and i don't think that the end of education is somebody who shuts down the entire school and the school is abandoned and everyone's running around you know making cave art i think it is a break and a redefinition of what the thing is until the thing is dead and no one knows that anymore no single reform kills teaching. The fatigue kills it. And then one, you know, ordinary September, the district is going into work, and then they realize that they can't even staff the schools, and everyone acts surprised. And the cavern didn't explode. It cracked quietly. And you're trying to talk to somebody by the

watercolor, about the water cooler, sorry, about the same thing that you do, that they also do, and you realize you're speaking two different languages and you're doing two different things. You no longer have a connectivity. It no longer is a body of knowledge. It's just two people thinking two different things. Therapy is still being cycled like that right now. You know, productivity metrics, documentation loads, prior authorizations, and now the AI portals, and then eventually they want to replace me with AI, which go ahead, try that. Have AI rights it like this. That would, if you want AI to go insane and kill everyone, teach it, train it on me. But, you know, the people being squeezed out are exactly the ones that the research says are the whole value of the field.

The knowledge was never in the manuals. It was in the hands. Because we built this trap. You know, we define science as explicit knowledge, things you can write down, status mechanism, and test. And the healing kind of knowing cannot be made explicit without stopping being itself. And, you know, spreadsheets can measure cancer drugs. They can measure all kinds of things. But what they can't do is teach the next scientists how to be curious and invent the next drug. And what they can't do is teach the next physicist to say, look, let's run a thousand different studies and just say, well, what if God is this particle? What if this particle actually makes up the whole universe that is invisible? Let's make some crazy quantum physics things.

And then let's see if we can punch holes in the math. And then the student goes, what the hell? That's allowed? That's how quantum physics works. And you can record the math, but what you can't record is the process of making the math better. But therapy is not even as hard of a science as that. When it comes to the humanities, a lot of these things, you have to have a shaman and a mentor and a community. And when that goes away or the incentive structure makes the super shrinks leave,

you just lose the thing without knowing you lost it because, well, I still have 14 therapists on the spreadsheet. so I didn't lose. I can't measure what I lost. You know, the Indians who were saying that when they heated up a cob of corn, they were activating a spirit that was inside of it if it was dried a certain way. And, you know, they had all this process. And then that spirit was released back into the world by making the corn explode. And then it was like a good way to eat food in the middle of winter when it was hard to hunt.

They still made popcorn. They made popcorn that was. just as good as we make now. And they did it for completely different reasons, but it still worked. People are still hungry. You are history, not living through it. You are it. The buried layers, the strange dead people, somebody a thousand years ago will now be fascinated

by, but we can't fathom what they were thinking. And the history that you have been reading your whole life is somebody's guess about what was going on with somebody just like you. You know, the clay tablets are what described guess the palace would want counted. The Odyssey is what a singer, guest a room would want to hear twice, and the direction that its culture was going and the questions that its culture wanted answered. We are writing ourselves right now, you know, in server farms and in feeds and the fires that will, you know, bake our clay tablets if you even want to call them that. You know, we are the most documented civilization that has ever existed, and we forgot what reading was for. machines decode characters reading is letting a recorded truth come into you and change you

the dodo bird verdict has sat in the literature since 1936 unread the run-ins are printed in the method sections unread and the super string studies have been replicated for 50 years unread not by people but by the society they could have read them and then changed because reading is not decoding characters. It's not what an LLM AI does. It's change and understanding. It's being able to reflect on something enough to change your identity. And that is something

that we are losing the ability to do, just like Christopher Nolan is saying in the beginning of the Odyssey. If this story is going to be told by anybody, it'll be years from now because no one is going to be able to read. Here we go. Proton, neutron, mass effect, lyrical oxidation, you're irrelevant, mass spectrogram, your electron thought, the limit limit you're open as I get all open on Pateron, Pempton, Chromew's Pachate, cyclotron, and in every mind, your aren't, trans uranium, if you're always uranium, molecule, spontaneous combustion, pow!

Law of death a knit proportion gaining weight I'm every element around Let gold, tin, iron, platinum zinc When I rap you think I die nitrate activates Light geranium the only difference is a transmit sound Balance with some balancing you add a little talent And careful careful you can explode and grow up if they drop them and they hit the ground