The Taproot Podcast - Revisiting The Trap: How a Paranoid Mathematician Broke American Therapy

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Why is the most therapy-literate generation in history also the most depressed? This episode traces the hidden history connecting Cold War game theory, a 1964 pop psychology bestseller, and the mental health crisis devastating Gen Z. The thread starts with John Nash—the schizophrenic mathematician who built models assuming all humans are paranoid, self-interested calculators. It runs through Eric Berne's "Games People Play," which taught millions that relationships are just strategic transactions. It continues through Reagan, Thatcher, and the rise of CBT—a therapy model that treats your mind like buggy software. And it ends with a generation drowning in optimization, starving for meaning, and wondering why all their self-knowledge isn't helping. Featuring the tragic story of George Price, the scientist who slit his own throat trying to disprove his equation proving love is just calculation. Plus: why therapists can't legally unionize, how a secret committee of surgeons sets the price of your mental healthcare, and why the "just do it yourself" wellness movement is the final victory of the worldview that broke us. This isn't self-help. This is an autopsy of the assumptions we've been living inside. Topics covered: Game theory and psychology, Eric Berne transactional analysis, Adam Curtis The Trap, John Nash Beautiful Mind, CBT criticism, Gen Z mental health crisis, Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers, neoliberalism and therapy, Rosenhan experiment, C. Thi Nguyen gamification, purpose vs point, George Price equation, Wilhelm Reich, depth psychology, mental health policy  

If you would own... I could be a different version of your dad. I'm twice as funny and also twice as sad. I know just for not to say, but it's a game. Figures from our hand in hand and don't you frown. There's something like... Hey, guys, this is Joel with the Tapreet Therapy Collective Podcast, and we've been talking about the DSM and some of the things that are used to,

you know, guide psychotherapy, the history of how they got there and why those contradictions. assumptions at this point might not make any sense in mandatory structures that we have to participate in to continue to work and function. But I wanted to go back to something we talked about before, which is the Games People Play by John Nash. It's a book that's really interesting. I don't have anything against, I'm sorry, I said John Nash, the mathematician. I'm talking about Eric Byrne. The Games People Play is by Eric Byrne. I don't have anything John Nash will come up later. But like I don't have anything against burn. I don't think burn's a bad guy. Like the book, I use that. I'm not a transactional analyst, but I use that with patients sometimes to talk about

how to kind of manage and then anticipate the effects when we change systems. If you heal trauma in a marriage like in one person, the system of the marriage changes, you know, usually for the better, but sometimes there's just temporary instability where other things come to the surface that weren't there before because when you heal PTSD in one individual, you've now changed the game. And that is something that, you know, Byrne does well. So I'm not criticizing him. I'm just talking about I think he's an interesting and forgotten intersection point. I mean, and at one point he was one of the biggest authors in the world. I mean, the Eric Byrne, like, the things that we forget quickly sometimes are interesting to look at, like, why this book had the meteoric success that it did. Because it was

really like on every coffee table by the late 60s. And there's still some people who remember it, but it's generally not something that people still use. As a therapy modality, it didn't really evolve into anything else. I mean, probably the most similar thing to it would be like coherence therapy. But I don't think it's as interesting clinically. That's not my point.

My point is that transactional analysis, which is the modality that Byrne would create with his book games, people play, interesting intersection point in history. It gives you like all of these things where stuff was starting to go off the rails with therapy in the 70s and then overcorrected in the 80s. We talked about that in the weird history of psychotherapy series. So let's start.

You know, John Nash, who's the guy that you probably know from A Beautiful Mind, the movie with Russell Crow, plays the kind of genius mathematician who struggles with schizophrenia. But what the movie doesn't quite convey is that Nash was actually like working on this theory that they underplay the importance of in the movie. They just act like this was really useful. Nobody else had realized it. Now he gets the Nobel Prize. But that theory changed a lot of things that people don't,

and that movie does a poor job of explaining how Nash's theories were used. Nash was a Rand Corporation. He worked at Rand Corporation during the Cold War, and Rand is a think, or was and still is a think tank that's funded by U.S. military to develop strategies for nuclear confrontation with the Soviets. That's not as much of what they do now. But at the time, you know, it's this kind of libertarian-leading think-take. And they question that they were trying to answer with Nash's work is,

how do you predict what your enemy will do when you can't trust them? Because it's kind of like you get quantum physics when you take classical physics to its extremes. And you say like, what if all of gravity is so high that things condensed down into one atom? and what happens when, you know, all of a sudden, like, you surpass the speed of light and all these things that you kind of can't do and then the math takes you into this another thing. When you start talking about how to win chess, it's like the goal is to win chess, but when you're talking about a game that is like, what if we can kill everybody on Earth a hundred times over with the amount of nuclear weapons we have and how do we predict how someone will act with that information, then the game intersects with psychology in this way where all of a sudden you're getting into the predictive output. algorithms that run the human mind because it isn't a quote unquote logical or objective way that you can plan to conduct or prevent a nuclear war. You know, it's it's such a mind-boggling thought experiment. I think a lot of people don't even remember that we had that potential.

Developed in the 60s like in somebody's lifetime, the worst you could do is like, I don't know, blow up a building or start a war. and then all of a sudden it became that this imperative to figure out how to manage these things that could end on life on earth, and that's this huge psychological burden. So not to talk about the Cold War too much, but Nash develops game theory, which is the Cold War's why it's relevant. It was just this mathematical model for strategic decision-making in competitive situations. So there's, you know, the prisoner's dilemma that Adam Curtis talks about in his movie is kind of what Nash's thing was based on.

And in the movie, a beautiful mind, what he does is he says, hey, we all want to take home the girl at the bar in the red dress who's the prettiest, and that would be the most obvious course of action would be all of us to go ask for that girl. But if we do that, then all of us kind of will lose. But if we all go to all of her friends,

friends, she's confused and they're flattered and so we would win. And so there's this kind of, we don't actually want to even take home the person we're taking home, but there's this self-interest in us playing the game this way where we all get what we want, that the screenwriter's trying to get across. I don't think that there was a girl in a bar that led up to that realization for Nash. I think it was more of these kind of thought experiments. But when a filmmaker, Adam Curtis that I talk about a lot, a documentarian, when he introduces Nash and his kind of effect on the greater culture, one of the things that he uses to explain it is this thing called the Prisoners Delimmy gets used a lot. Adam Curtis has this story about a jewel thief and a gangster.

And he says, you know, you've stolen this rare diamond and there's a gangster that wants to buy it from you, but you're both criminals so you don't trust each other. So John Nash's theory is about when two parties have conflicting interests, they can't trust each other. And they're not. other. How do they win? You know, that was his contribution. So, um, the gangster could just shoot you and take the diamond if you meet in person. So you agree to a remote swap where you'll hide the diamond in a field and he will hide the cash in a different field and then you'll call each other, you'll reveal the location and you'll go get it. So if you tell him the true location, what if he lies to you? And then he goes off and gets the diamond and he keeps the money and he

leaves you with nothing. And then if you lie to him, he tells you the truth, you get the money and you get to keep the diamond. So because you're both right, rational, self-interested and suspicious, you know, which is Nash's view of humanity, you both lie, and you keep the diamond. And then he keeps the money. And then the deal, which would have benefited both of you, never happens. So Curtis is showing you that to show that Nash developed these theories that were basically, you know, paranoia. He was saying that, you know, before Nash, if you look at the history of game theory, it's von Neumann, who's like the big guy. And von Neumann's theories are all about one point.

party has to win, so what do they do? And John Nash's contribution that gets picked up by the DoD during the Cold War is what if they don't actually want to win? What if they just want to get the best outcome for themselves, and that is the win condition? So they don't not necessarily, they don't want the other party to lose. Maybe they do, but you don't know that. There are situations where people can get self-interest with neither party losing. And so that leads to, this assumption that mutually assured destruction is actually a good thing. Instead of trying to stop proliferation and conquer all these Soviet countries or Soviet influence countries and move missile silos around, we should just go ahead and let them

build them and then build our own. And both countries will sink billions of dollars into this stalemate. But the stalemate will actually keep us safe because the wind condition is survival. And if anybody shoots, everybody dies. You know, risky game, right, to ride on a theory. But that's essentially how it was used. Now, I want to add that later, you know, we have that that it wasn't really real. It wasn't what was happening.

People kept feeding to the DoD that all the Soviets were building all these missiles that historically we know they weren't really building. We had something insane like 20 something times the amount of nukes that the Soviet had at their height, you know, the USSR. are. But we assumed that because this was the way that you predict other people's behavior, that this was the thing that was going to keep us safe, and it was the assumption that everybody is acting on. And so, you know, what Curtis is pointing out is to make the math work, Nash had to make this assumption. He had to assume that human beings are isolated, suspicious, and purely self-interested agents. They were just machines basically programmed to do the ideological imperative of self-interest.

And in Nash's models, we're always strategizing to betray the other person before they betray us. But here's the thing. Curtis emphasizes Nash was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time. There's like a really funny clip in that movie where John Nash is being asked by Curtis about if he thinks that they did the right thing by listening to him. And Nash, who's known for his theories because he came up with them. And won the Nobel Prize is like, hell no, nobody should have listened to me. I thought that everybody who had a red tie on was a Soviet agent. and I believed in aliens were talking to me. Like, I had paranoid schizophrenia, and they gave me a Nobel Prize,

which was towards the ends of Nash's life. It was kind of an interesting scene. He doesn't get shown that way that much. But he was literally paranoid. He believed people were following him around. He saw patterns and conspiracies everywhere. He's hospitalized multiple times and just kind of allowed to live on Harvard's campus as like a dude.

And Curtis argues that Nash projected his own paranoid view of the world into his mathematical model. And the model assumes that everyone thinks the way Nash thought when he was in this grip of illness. They're suspicious. They're calculating. They're always looking to betray. And the military loves it, you know, and they're trying to model the Soviets paranoia on, they're trying to model the Soviets paranoia in their own defense, in their own game.

But the paranoia is completely projected, you know. And here's the thing that is discovered when they actually test Nash's model on real human. It breaks down every time. In the prisoner's dilemma, they did variations of this experiment where you can sell your cellmate out to get a lesser sentence, but if y'all both benefiting means that you don't sell him out, but it's always the best condition for you to go ahead and, you know, betray the other person. So in those different variations where they tested that experiment on real people, people trusted each other when they shouldn't have done it. And they gave wealth away and they cooperated and they acted from. not spite or, you know, but this intuition and loyalty.

And in other words, they acted human, right? And even under lab conditions, with real stakes, Nash's elegant predictions failed to predict actual human behavior ever. And the failure wasn't a fluke. It was this flashing red light that the human mind is not a machine built for logic. But our civilization continued to assume that from that point onward, which is why I think Byrne is interesting because it's when those ideas come into psychotherapy. You know, we're not spreadsheets or algorithms.

We're narrative-making grief-haunted, hope-driven, embodied animals. And the models didn't stay in the war rooms, and nobody paid attention to the fact that this stuff that we were basing billions of dollars in our whole culture on was not really right with psychology. We were forcing people to fit the model, not building a model to fit the person. And here's what happened with game theory worldwide. It starts leaking into the broader culture, and so economists pick it up. And if humans are rational, self-interested agents, then you can model markets as games.

You can predict behavior. You can design incentive structures. Psychologists picked it up. If humans are strategic actors seeking payoffs, then relationships are just transactions. You know, you can analyze social interaction the same way that you can analyze a chess game. And then in 1964, Eric Byrne publishes the games people play. Now, like, you have Freudian psychoanalysis in the water. And then you have game theory coming in in the culture.

And that's why the games people play is written. I mean, I don't know that he ever says, Eric Byrne ever says I made this book because of John Nash, but you have to understand, you know, the height of these things in the 60s that were just getting so big and written about it was the lens that everybody saw the world. Like, of course that's what happened. And they emerged from this zeitgeist

of the same Cold War paranoia and the same suspicion that underneath all our noble talks about love and duty were really just manipulating each other. You know, and Byrne gives this, this vocationationation. He gave it to the public. And Burns' book taught millions of readers that our social lives are not driven by love or duty or authenticity. They're driven by hidden strategies and payoffs. He calls them strokes.

We're all just playing games. We want to get emotional leverage. And what I think Burns' book is good and it works is it tells you how you can see things that people, you know, and they may not even be aware of it, you know, unconsciously or motivated by based in the way that they act, that you can sort of see. unconscious with an objective variable of a game. That's kind of why it works to help predict how somebody will do something and the way that you can best address that when it comes up. It's a great book for boundaries with families and different things like that. But there is this assumption that it is kind of taken to mean where psychiatry,

clinical psychology, the broader psychology sort of becomes cynical. It's not about really understanding yourself and healing something and going back in. it's about understanding how you can control other people by predicting their mind and see through them to really understand what they're doing so that you can get what you want. Byrne doesn't do that at all. I'm not criticizing Byrne. I'm talking about how a book like that is going to be picked up by a culture that is paranoid, and it was. You know, and here's what Byrne introduced that would have the later enormous implications. He argued that human beings have this fundamental need for what he calls strokes. A stroke is any form of recognition, so it can be positive or negative.

and a compliment or an insult when we need it, our nervous system, you know, it requires this simulation, or yeah, this stimulation from relational energy. And if you get only positive strokes, you'll manipulate situations, I'm sorry, if you don't get your positive strokes, like if you don't get the positive thing, you'll manipulate situations to get negative strokes. You'll have your inner narrative, you'll manipulate your environment to fulfill your inner narrative so that you get the relationship to the world that you want. If it doesn't, doesn't just give it to you directly. And you're not even aware a lot of the time how you're being passive, aggressive,

or being manipulative there. A lot of times we hide that from ourselves. So an abused child learns that provoking punishment is better than being ignored. This is the only way that I can have attention, so I'll settle for the negative attention. And then Byrne is saying basically that we're all abused children. And, you know, or all the people playing games at least that aren't in the adult ego state. They were even in the parentified or the child ego state. And thus a game is possible.

Anyone acting in the adult ego state who's aware of their behavior cannot be a part of a game. So when you get somebody to the adult ego state in therapy, then it breaks the games. And the other person has to change. And this is why people play games. Games are stroke-seeking behaviors. You know, even destructive games, games that make everyone miserable, they persist because they reliably produce the reward. Do you see what's happening here? You know, Byrne has taken human connection, love, recognition, the stuff that makes life meaningful.

And I don't think he did this as a person. I think he was an interesting guy. But he's given society this lens to see psychology as a tool that can reconceptualize, you know, its goal as getting currency, as not about treating the individual like a medicine, you know. It's about using psychology in order to get what you want out of others. You know, this is a pretty obvious connection that a world like this is going to draw. And this isn't quite the same as national. game theory where everyone is a cold rational calculator. Burns games are about unconscious driven needs that we don't understand.

But the frame and the metaphor uses the same assumption as Nash's that even if you're being nice, you're just doing it because you're self-interested, right? And, you know, Byrne would say, unless you're in the adult ego state and then you're well, but society doesn't grasp that point. You know, there's a philosopher that I like, Ty Nugian, and he's done the best contemporary work on what games actually are and why the game metaphor is so dangerous when it escapes its proper domain. Nugent draws a distinction between the purpose and the point of a game.

So the purpose of the game is the explicit goal. It's the wind condition. It's chess. It's a checkmate in a monopoly. It's banking. You're bankrupting your opponent. In a video game, it's beating the final boss or getting the most points, whatever. And the purpose is built into the structure of the game itself.

But the point of a game is different from the purpose. it's the deeper reason that you play. So why do you play chess? Not really to checkmate your opponent. You play for the sense of mastery, for the beauty of strategy, for the challenge, and for the connection with the person across the board,

for the flow state, and for the hidden insights that you never would have pulled out of yourself if it wasn't for the game putting you in the situation where you were challenged to come up with them. And the purpose is what the game tells you to want, but the point is what you actually want.

And good games align these. So the pursuit of the purpose delivers the point. You chase checkmate, and in chasing it, you experience mastery. And the goal serves the meaning. But here's what happens when the game loses its logic. It escapes into domains where it doesn't belong. So the purpose replaces the point. So in health care, the purpose becomes this metric.

The RVU, the patient satisfaction score, the depression questionnaire number, the purpose is measurable, auditable, optimizable. the point was healing at the beginning, and then later the point it becomes competition. So when you gamify healthcare, especially psychology, you optimize for the purpose and you destroy the point. So doctors learn to game the metrics. You're essentially teaching the test.

And they do what gets measured. But the unmeasured stuff that actually matters, it withers. And this is what Burns' framework did to, I think the broader culture. I think that a lot of people started to see psychology as this thing that they could sort of use to corrupt and manipulate and understand. I mean, the DOD is starting to use

where game theory is bumping up against psychology. So, you know, games people play tells the culture authenticity is basically a myth. If everyone's playing games, then the person who claims to be authentic is just playing a more sophisticated game than you. And the public servant who says they want to help people, they're playing a game to increase their status and their budget.

It puts you in competition with everybody, even the politician that represents you. You know, the spouse who says that they love you, they're really playing a game to get strokes. And the therapists who claims to care, they're playing a game to feel important to avoid their inner child that's really hurting and projected on you or to get paid or whatever. And nothing is what it seems. Everybody has this angle. Trust is for suckers. It becomes this paranoid world. I think that's why this book got so big at the time that it did, where American psychology and the broader culture is very paranoid. This is the,

because this is during the crisis of faith in the entire thing, right? Like this is before, you know, psychology is revision to be this scientific pursuit, and a lot of people already kind of think that it's bunk. And this is that same conclusion that Nash's math reach. It just is expressed in psychological language. And once this view became common sense, everyone knew that social life was just this strategic,

manipulation, something, you know, important, collapsed. You know, and when you take that in a vacuum, because I think what starts in the mid-60s gets magnified up until it kind of reaches its zenith in the middle of the 80s, I mean, what you get is something like American Psycho, right? That idea of that kind of person, that you showing your business card to somebody and them acting curious about it is actually this battle with swords where you want to kill them and burn their house and take their property that's taking place at the office. It kind of enters American culture there.

And so these old models of society, the ones that have been based on collectivism, collective trust, relationship, duty, tradition, public service, moral obligation, trying to be a better version of your dad. You know, like that, they started looking like hypocritical lies. And they were just the games that were played by people who were trying to control you. and so that sets you up for, you know, in the 1960s and the 70s, this group of economists developed something called public choice theory. And the idea is really simple. Let's apply game theory to politics.

Let's assume that politicians, bureaucrats, and public servants are the same self-interested rational agents that Nash's model describes. They're not serving the public good. They're maximizing their own utility, getting rich on the public dollar. You know, these public servants have never worked a day in their life except at their public service job that they work at. And the politician isn't trying to help constituents. They're just trying to get reelected. And the bureaucrat isn't trying to serve citizens. They're just trying to expand their budget and their power.

And the teacher isn't trying to educate children. They're trying to minimize effort, maximize job security, and then inject their own politics slash religion into your kids. And the doctor isn't trying to heal patients. They're trying to maximize their income. And the social workers are not trying to help you. to get information on you from the government. There's a paranoia that you start to see in psychosis that was never there before that really picks up around 1960s and then is magnified all the way through the 80s where psychotic episodes

have this paranoia about initially surveillance and government and control. And then as you start to get computers by the mid-70s and then the awareness of computers gets bigger, all of that, you know, people who are going psychotic, who are in the collective unconscious or talking about how computers are being used to control and manipulate them. There's a scene that never really made a lot of sense to me in the show Mad Men, where when they get a computer, one of the people who kind of has latent schizophrenia that's like going through the prodromal period, I think it's like implied that his dad also had a dopamine disorder. So good job, Matt Werner, you got one right. We have, you know, something on psychology that is

accurate on television. I was watching The Pit yesterday. And season two, is not really much better. Like, they are still, their knowledge of social work and psychology and hospitals is that they exist. So pretty much like what a lot of doctors, I guess,

who are the medical advisors, know about them. I don't want to digress too much in these, but man, in the first episode of season two of the pit, no spoilers for anything important, but there's a lady that comes in and she's smiling a lot and she's like,

I'm so happy today and I'm 75. And they're like, oh, we see you all the day. time for your heart. Why are you so happy? And she was like, I ate a bunch of weed cookies from my friend's short store. They bought them at a CBD store because they got to talk about contemporary issues and like weed being semi-legal or whatever in the show to be topical. And they're like, oh, well, you know, marijuana is a drug and you should be careful even if it is legal, ma'am. How many did you eat? And she's like, oh, I ate nine or ten. And I'm just, I'm smiling so much.

Holy hell of a 75-year-old woman that had never tried marijuana eight nine weed cookies. Like, I don't... Anyway, yeah, so Matt Werner gets it right in the show Madman. And he says that they... I can never really figure out why they show this scene of this guy who has prodromal schizophrenia, who gets obsessed with the computer in the office and thinks it's surveilling him. And then he finally, you know, has a psychotic breakdown and it's really ugly. And it was like that...

I like that character. I like that scene. I don't disagree with anything they did with it, but like, why is that there? Like, what's the theme that you're doing? And then after doing these series and like rewatching that show again, because this is one of my favorite shows, it was like, oh, like they're doing that because this is the time where psychosis started to change. And people were aware of like computers and data tracking and all of these things and that

started to come out in psychotic episodes as they got increasingly paranoid. Psychosis, you know, the reports of psychosis that we have from the 40s and the 50s, there are a whole lot more about like people talking to ancestors being given help being told to you know cling to their faith being told to help other people i mean they're still distressing and they're still psychotic and they have the dysfunction that comes with something like schizophrenia that are you know not the auditory hallucination part but the psychosis the psychosis itself was not about competition and paranoia and it was not about the technology that psychotic episodes would start to take on it in the 75.

So it's like, I think that this stuff, 1990, 75 and onward, is where we really saw that expand. And then it hits like this huge zenith in the 90s. But I think that there is a relationship between the way that we are able to feel the culture that we're sort of aware of more than we're aware of. And these things do color how we think about ourselves. They do think about how we see the world. They color our religious and our psychotic experiences.

I'm not saying religion and psychosis. I just mean that's kind of a transcendental, your ego is turned off thing. And there isn't a buffer that sorts all of this information. And so you can really see a lot of those unconscious assumptions when somebody is in a psychosis. And a lot of the things that come up with religion and psychedelics and trans states and people's personal spirituality also deal with those same places in the brain. And so it changes the way that they work. You know, religion changes when technology changes a lot of the time.

And so all of this mistrust that the social worker is now your enemy, you know, the therapist is just trying to help you figure out how you play your games and how people play them against you so that you can play games better, which again, not indicting burn. I don't think that's this point. There's none of that in the book. It's how the culture takes it and runs with it because of the time that he writes it. And, you know, markets are automatically doing this. The butcher doesn't give you meat because he loves you. He gives you meat because he wants your money. And if you love the meat of the butcher down the street more,

you're going to pay that guy and not him. And so it's all self-interest, and it's channeled by competition, which under capitalism produces good outcomes as the economics at the time. So everything is subject to market forces. You privatize, you deregulate, you replace trust. with targets, you replace judgment with metrics, you replace relationships with transactions. And that's what this theory, public choice theory, is used by people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, is they can come in and say, the government's just this big fat thing that wants

you to have this lovey-dovey relationship with you where it takes care of you, but really it's big and dumb and it gets in the way. And what we need is accountability. If it's working, that's great. We're just going to make everybody spend all this time taking assessments and tests to really prove that the teacher isn't, you know, just drinking margaritas at work and the whatever, which, of course, these institutions had HR departments and accountability and all these things before, but politicians started to weaponize them in the 60s and the 70s and make them popular and act like this wasn't being done, which of course it was always being done. I mean, you couldn't be drunk on the job as a high school teacher in 1950. Like, you couldn't do it because there were

accountability systems already built in. But the narrative becomes the government doesn't have any. of that. You have to ask for a job. Nobody, the government has to ask for a job, which I don't really understand the logic. I mean, you have to get elected or you have to get hired. If everybody could work for the government, I guess they all would. But, you know, I've talked about Theodore Porter before. I really like Theodore Porter's book, Trust in Numbers. We talked about that a lot through the DSM series. But in trust in numbers, Porter argues that there's something counterintuitive. That like quantitative rigor is not primarily about truth. It's about distrust. And you're seeing an example of this here because they start to tell everybody,

you, we can't take your word for it. We can't trust you. You have to be on guard all the time, proving that you're doing a good job because we're going through your numbers. Do your patients die more often than other patients? Do your patients get better, better than other patients? We can't trust the patient to, you know, assess you. We have to have these objective, just say what they're experience, was it good or bad and complain if they have a bad experience, we have to have these hard numbers that govern everything. And so a lot of, you know, what I'm critiquing here are some of the inevitabilities of bureaucracy, but we should still be aware of them because we can mitigate them. And if we don't, if we're not aware of them, and we don't mitigate them, they're going to be used

to exploit you. So, you know, thinking about, you know, if you trust your doctor, you accept their judgment, take this medication. Okay, doctor, I'll take the medication. If you don't trust them, then you demand metrics. Show me studies. What are the outcomes? what is the evidence basis for the medication, which in many cases you probably should be able to do. The accountability should be there, but the accountability should be a part of every system. But when you make it the point of the system, then you lose the real point. And so Porter's thesis is when society stops trusting experts, it replaces them with audits. You know, you pivot to numbers at times of insecurity.

And I think coming out of the oil embargo and Reagan wanting to be this big bravado cowboy boy who was going to be tough and get America back working by being, you know, tough or something. He definitely was acting from this place of insecurity. He's not Carter, you know, the crisis of confidence speech where Carter says, can we have like one point to America that isn't just like getting more stuff than someone else? Could we re-envision the myth and maybe make it about something other than just getting more stuff? And then people say, no, we want more stuff. That's the worst thing you can ever do to America, has asked them to have a different myth than the one we're on already. And the crisis of confidence bombs. Carter leaves. Reagan comes in and pivots to objectivity.

And, you know, the new world runs on this mechanical objectivity. You don't trust anyone. You can't. Everyone's a game player, remember. So you need rules. You need forms. You need metrics. You need targets. The idea of gaming the system, that there was some way, if you just filled out enough forms, the government would pay you money for the rest of your life. And the idea that you needed to means test everything, that there couldn't do. be a universal system again. You know, Medicaid, Medicaid is probably one of the last universal systems that we'll ever have. Everything else is like, well, you can have it like if you're a single mom that also recovered from drugs, and then you have more than three kids, and you live in the SIP code.

And means testing is, you know, the way that we do legislation now. It's about distrust, making sure that the wrong person doesn't get this government benefit. And so this is this bridge between John Nash's paranoid math, and that Reagan and Thatcher, revolution. If you believe in that Nash worldview that everyone is just playing games for selfish advantage, then you can't allow experts to use their judgment. You can't trust them. You have to strip the expert of power and you replace it with a manual.

And the manual is really the expert because it knows the code to the machine, which is one of the reasons why when I'm saying, yes, there's huge problems with the DSM 1 and 2 in the first part of this kind of mini season that we're doing, I don't love the checklist of the three because I don't, that they just hide the subjective bias from the practitioner, not make the subjective bias go away. In a soft science, I think the subjectivity is inevitable. And so Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher come to power on this philosophy. They didn't trust public servants. They didn't trust institutions.

They assumed everyone was this Nashian agent playing games for personal advantage. And it works because people's blood pressure gets up. And they want to, you know, it gets up, sorry. And they they want to hear more about this thing. And they start treating politics as the this extension of themselves, like football. Politics was kind of boring before. You know, people viewed it as the civic obligation, not this thing that they were obsessed with doing. And so only individuals exist.

And individuals are self-interested calculators, like in that system. And this is the beginning of that happening. So Thatcher introduced targets and performance metrics throughout the British public sector. You can't trust a doctor to do their job out of duty, so you have to measure their outputs and punish them if they fall short. You can't trust a teacher to educate, you know, just out of the, you know, just out of vocation or calling. They're really trying to scam somebody. So you must test the students and then rank the schools and the test captures how good of a job the teacher did. It's all able to be

turned into a number. And Reagan did a similar thing in America. You know, deregulation, privatization. The assumption that the government is this problem because the government is run by self-interested game players who can't be trusted. And so the welfare state was dismantled, not because it was too expensive because it was based on this false premise. It assumed public service wanted to help people. Game theory says that's naive. They don't. And it was just targets and metrics. And in America, we weaponize the law itself to enforce this isolation. So you know why therapists can't unionize like I talked about in the last episode. But let me connect this to that philosophical argument, that Sherman Antitrust Act, written in 1890 to break up standard oil. It prohibits every contract, combination, or conspiracy and restraint of trade. Trade is the highest goal of the country. And it was designed to prevent massive corporations from colluding to fix prices and destroy competition. But in the eyes of the federal government, a private practice therapist is not a worker. You're a business entity.

So even if you're a solo practitioner struggling to pay rent in a sub-leased office, the law views you as a CEO of a micro corporation. So if two workers at Starbucks talk about their wages and they agree to ask for a raise, that's collective bargaining. But if two private practice therapists talk about their reimbursement rates and agree to Blue Cross, for a race, that's price fixing. It's illegal. It's indistinguishable in the eyes of the law, but the law defines you as this standard oil tycoon because you have a company that is just you doing therapy. It requires you to view all of your colleagues as a competitor, and if you try to practice solidarity, you go to jail. So the law forces you to be isolated, suspicious, you know, agent in competition with other things. You can't collude. And it's not just a vibe. Like that's

federal statute. And it's when they enforce. And so meanwhile, if you have a market cap under $4 billion, there's a secret committee called the RUC, we talked about before, you know, that relative value scale update committee, where surgical specialists have to meet behind closed doors to set prices for the entire healthcare industry. But they're legally protected because they're technically advising the government. The same action that would be a federal crime for a therapist is protected actively for surgeons. And the system doesn't just assume that we're selfish game. players. It legally requires us to be selfish game players. Solidarity is criminalized and competition is mandated. But remember what's leaked out of the RUC that we talked about last time, the log rolling.

They're already playing games within that RUC system where they're saying, hey, we want to ice psychiatry out and only has one vote. I'm a foot doctor. You're a heart doctor. But I'll agree to make my specialty worth more. I'll make your special. worth more if you make mine worth more because we're both highly technocratic people that have to have all this technology to do a very specific skill which is probably not a very high and counterpoint for most of the American public like most of the American public would probably not benefit from these teeny tiny specialties that are needed and should exist sucking up all of those billions of dollars they probably would like their primary care doctor to be have a little bit more time and

be easier to see or a psychiatrist or a therapist but the money doesn't go that way and so So the whole idea of competition, that thing that we talked about in the Ken Therapist Start a Union episode, the RUC was designed to get rid of, collusion. You just moved that to a committee of 29 people doing it instead of getting rid of it. You just made it simpler. And so that is where the Adam Curtis argument gets really dark, right? By the way, like the argument there, what I'm saying, again, is here's another example. of you saying that you're going to take subjectivity out of a system, make it totally objective. But what you did is just hide the subjectivity for yourself.

Nobody knows why psych got disfunded. Nobody knows why psychiatry is undervalued and then the market forces people to go out of it. But it was because we said, hey, here's the RUC, here's this totally objective group of experts that's going to get it done so that doctors can't just kind of fight about it in private practice. And what did you do? You just moved a rule of 29 people playing the same game. and it probably ended worse. So we created this system based on assumptions that humans are selfish, isolated game players,

and then we told everybody, this book, The Games People Play, and a thousand similar cultural products, you know, that are like that. Their relationships were just strategic transactions. We built a political and economic system that rewards selfish behaviors and punishes altruism. And if you try and act out of duty or compassion,

then you're just a sucker who's playing a game. You're playing the victim. And the system isn't designed for that. The system is designed for rational self-interest. And we made it illegal to organize against the system. You know, the Sherman Act doesn't let us do that. We have to view ourselves this way. We can't work together, which again, the Sherman Act has passed for good reason, standard oil, selling oil, you know, below the cost of oil to put competitors out of business so they can charge everyone more.

You know, we don't want to be corporate slaves, so we got to regulate these things. I think the Sherman Act's fine. Let's look how it's being applied now, though. This is the trap. You know, we eventually become the creatures the model describes, even if we weren't when we started the model. We started behaving like isolated, suspicious, calculating individuals because the system left us no other choice. And if everyone around you is playing games, you have to play games too to survive. If the institutions assume that you're selfish, you might as well be selfish.

If trust is for suckers, only a sucker would trust. And if solidarity is illegal, then you can only look out for yourself. So the paranoid vision became this self-fulfilling prophet. And Nash's schizophrenic worldview, paranoid schizophrenic worldview, that of a man who saw conspiracies and betrayals everywhere becomes this operating system of Western Empire. And I want to tell you about one more person because the story is interesting. George Price, who Curtis also mentions, he's a scientist who in the 1960s developed something called the Price equation. And it's this mathematical formula that explains how altruism works in nature. And so the formula proved something devastating.

When an animal helps another animal, it isn't doing it out of kindness. It's just doing it because other animals share its genes. So altruism is just a strategy. It's just a game for getting your own genes onto the next generation. And mathematically, altruism is impossible. Every act of love and sacrifice and every moment of compassion, it's all just selfish gene to play a game. And this is Nash's paranoid vision, you know, applied to biolns.

and the math checks out. But here's the difference between Price and the economists who celebrate this worldview. Price is horrified. Like he went out to study altruism because he was an altruist and he wanted to kind of find the human in the math and he found something in the math that made the human not human. It just made it a game or a math problem that was trying to self-replicate its code on the biggest and biggest scale. And when Price sees that his math is telling him, which I don't think it is, but what he thought was the math is telling me that I'm just a self-interested creature that can't do anything nice. Even if I try, I can't stop playing a game.

And it kind of drives him mad. He didn't want to be a machine. He didn't want to be a calculation. He wanted there to be altruism, and he didn't want his own discovery to be true. And so there's some, so he tried to just prove it. He decided to perform an act of pure, uncalculated altruism, an act that gave him. an act that gave no genetic or social advantage. And he starts giving away all of his stuff.

He invited homeless people to live in his apartment. And he gave away all of his money. And he impoverished himself trying to be genuinely good. And it didn't work. He realized that he was still getting something out of it. It was there is a psychological payoff that the feeling of being righteous, the satisfaction of sacrifice was maybe just this reward that the code was giving him. And even in his extreme altruism, he saw this game and he was still trading, still calculating, and he was still trapped.

And so in 75, George Price commits suicide after going down this rabbit hole of grieving like something that he sees as a true discovery. And he does it because he can't escape this logic. He can't live in a world where love is just an equation, where kindness is just a strategy, where everything is a game. and Curtis uses this image to show in Adam Curtis's movie, which is called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, he uses that image to show this ultimate cost of the worldview that we've built. Price bleeds out because the trap has no exit. And if neoliberalism is true, you know,

if that neoliberal market based on that competition and paranoia is true, then we're really just selfish machines calculating payoffs and life is not worth living. But I would argue that none of us could live in the world, that Price thought that we were inhabiting. There's not anything that is fulfilling about looking at the world in the way that his discovery forced him to look at it. And that that is sort of becoming this unconscious assumption baked into our systems that is making, breaking therapy and making life very hard to live for a lot of the reasons

that people bring into therapy. And I'm hoping that if some of those unconscious assumptions can be things that we can observe, then we can feel separate and free from them, even if practically we're still dependent on them. You know, Byrne is not a villain. He wasn't trying to create this nightmare. He genuinely wanted to help people, and he thought that by exposing the games we play unconsciously, he could free us from them. I think of his book was applied in the way it was written. It probably would. I mean, I use it. It's good at doing that. But he believed in something that he called game-free intimacy, the possibility of authentic connection between people who aren't manipulating each other.

And that was the goal. I think that John Nash, reason that people point to it and say, yes, you know, we do need to live in this paranoid, neoliberal, hyper-capitalist, hyper-competitive world, because look at all of the things that happened when people were trusting. I would say, yes, correct. I know that those exist. I also try and avoid those things, but have we forgotten that those interactions happen when people are deeply sick? And the point of life is to find the people who aren't and make the people who are sick better so that we can have this authenticity. And I think that psychology itself, through the things that we talked about in the last four

episodes, you know, the clinical application of it is forgetting that. It is fallen prey to these same forces. You know, those games were obstacles to be overcome. They were not the human, you know, the truth of human nature. And when Price started to see himself as a game, it drives him into madness. It drives him into a paranoid schizophrenia where even his altruistic interactions with people, he can't feel joy or beauty in them, which is so sad. And what the culture received at this time were we are game players, our relationships or

transactions, authenticity is naive, everyone has an angle. And Byrne gave the public a vocabulary for the Nash worldview. He made it accessible. He made it common sense. He made it not a household name, but a household assumption. And it once was, you know, common sense the political implementation would follow. Reagan and Thatcher, you know, didn't have to convince anyone that humans are selfish calculators. Everyone already knew that.

And they'd read about it in this best-selling pop psychology book and from a million other places that are latching on to this idea that becomes this kind of new liberalism. The freedom of the market above all else means that you have less freedom if you hinder the market. And so Nash provides this mathematical model that humans are selfish agents. And Byrne provides the cultural language that life is a game, social norms or manipulation. And Porter explains the mechanism. When trust dies, numbers rule. And numbers are a low trust environment. There is no trust in numbers.

And so when neoliberalism provided the political implementation, we dismantle the institutions built on trust. And we unleash the market to manage these selfish agents. And so, you know, now think about what happens to therapy specifically, because that's where Nash's paranoid math arrives, you know, in the consulting room. You know, Aaron Beck is watching the chaos of 1970s psychotherapy, where people are going into psychosis and they're like New Age Faith healer licensed therapist is telling them it's a genuine spiritual awakening. I mean, transactional analysis died, by the way, around this time

because one lady who took this book about analyzing games that is pretty good, Reddit and then said this applies to attachment theory because the baby's playing a game or something. And if you have bad attachment with your mom because she was like bad to you, you shouldn't like work on that through relational counseling. What you should do is resimulate birth through rebirthing with an adult person in front of their mother. So you like wrap them up in towels like they're being born and like get them really tight so they can't breathe and then pull them out and they rego through the trauma.

None of this is. I'm making the point that this is. crazy because it is. And then when the towel weight comes off of them, then they feel like they were born and they see their mom and they have reattachment, you don't have to do like therapy at any point. You just strangle people with a towel. So not only did this not work, it killed one, maybe two people that like choked on the towel. So like this is psychotherapy in the 1970s. The CIA is paying like, you know, to have like dolphins be taught English by given LSD. And, you know, that's what the military.

Terry's doing is trying to see if identical twins can like see through each other's minds. If you have one look in a rose in any other room and then maybe we'll be able to defeat the Soviets with this. So like what do you think therapists are doing when that's what the four stars are doing? Like this was a wild time. What do you think the therapists that are like taking the LSD and smoking the marijuana in California were doing? I'm not defending therapy at this point.

You know, people have emailed me and said like Wilhelm Reich was bad. I saw somebody who was disciple that was an abusive whatever. if you can't just recognize Reich as a historical guy who came up with somatic psychotherapy and wrote a sort of good book on fascism who also was crazy, like if you can't see him, if you're continuing to try and do anything like that run, you know, from that person,

there are so many incompetent therapists at this point. There's so much wildness of the 70s and psychonautica. And there's bad therapists now. Like, I'm not defending any of these people because I recognize their place. in history. I have different thoughts about all of them, but they are important, you know. So Beck is watching this when he watches 900 people drink Kool-Aid and die in

Jonestown. And he's seen boundaries dissolve between therapists and client. You know, he's seen encounter groups become trauma reenactment and, you know, weird like celebration of how you have like a right because when you contact the trauma, it makes you want to do this to like abuse other people, all kinds of crazy stuff. stuff and he'd seen people with legitimate, you know, mental health issues be failed by the system. And so, and again, I don't blame Beck, even though I don't love CVT, because I think he's an inevitability. You know, Beck had a different idea.

He wanted to throw all that out, Reich's body, Jung, soul, Perlzes, experiments, Freud's unconscious, get rid of all that stuff. And then you can measure all of these things with numbers, and you can hold people accountable. And unlike Reagan and Thatcher, I think that Beck wasn't just trying to use numbers to get what he wanted anyway. He wasn't using them to manufacture a solution. I think he really believed it. And so cognitive behavioral therapy is born and it fits perfectly into this Nash Porter framework. You can't trust a therapist to use their judgment. So you manualize the treatment. We've already manualized the manual at the DSM3. So let's go ahead and turn therapy into a manualized treatment too. You can't trust subjective reports of improvement. You can't come up with your own hunches.

You can't say, hey, I've noticed that most of my ASD people do this. So I'm just going to act on that assumption even though I haven't read anything about that yet because nothing's been researched on it yet. You know, you can't trust the therapeutic relationship. So you just minimize it and you focus on technique. And so CBT is quantifiable. You fill out a pHQ 9 before and then after it was 80% sad. Now I'm 40% sad. You've proved improvement. My argument here is when you spend all of your time trying to prove something's happening, you don't spend all of your time making it happen. And that's what happens, you know, when this stuff. enters the health care market. We found now, you know, going back through it, health care outcomes

got way worse when we started doing the kind of Reagan-Datcher accountability revolutions in Britain and in America. It's just that we changed the goalpost so that the numbers looked like we were better so that we didn't lose our funding, you know, the hospital did. So, and that happens in both countries because people start spending all of their time trying to prove that they're doing their job instead of actually doing their job. And while you're, you're doing that, you know, HR department of a lifestyle, you also lose people who actually felt called to go do the thing because they're not doing it anymore. So you have teachers who are going to settle for $30,000 a year and nurses and all of these people that just start leaving the professions.

And this is exactly what Porter predicted. When trust dies, you get mechanical objectivity. You can't trust the expert, so you replace the judgment with protocol. And America threw away, you know, all of these different interesting somatic and parts-based experiments in psychotherapy to pivot almost entirely to CBT as this assumption that it would replace everything. And DSM-3 and CBT were just kind of the future. And so, you know, we talked about David Rosenhan going into the hospital and getting himself committed as a psych patient. And then, you know, supposedly 10 of his students, too.

And, you know, one of the things that that did was increase this insecurity in clinical psychology to where the DSM3 happens. You know, the Rosenhan experiment was one of the things that was the most public because he was one of theirs. He wasn't, you know, some guy writing a book saying, here's what you're doing to control society, man. Actual therapists started to speak up, especially in academic like Rosenhan. they were going to pay attention because they felt insecure and they didn't know how to answer. And so what we lost are the people like Jung and the post-Yungians from the mainstream of academia at that point who go on to make some of the most interesting modalities out there.

A lot of the best semantic and parts-based modalities are these sort of post-Yungian evolutions. And they didn't see archetypes as games. and so they leave the culture because they saw archetypes as patterns of meaning making that can connect an individual, you know, experience to human universal themes that make us feel part of a story, both the cultures and our own. And the hero's journey is a manipulation, you know, it's, or the hero's journey is not a manipulation. It's actually a map of what we're all trying to do.

The games are when we get stuck in doing that, and their use is limited to analyzing our stuckness, not our purpose, but our stuckness pointing us away from our purpose, our inability to be effective. This is what drives price insane. You know, and when you have this culture losing that idea, when clinical psychology is losing that as a guiding map, it goes into the culture. I mean, you get Star Wars in the late 70s for this reason, which is just Joseph Campbell's hero's journey written by George Lucas. And you get the blockbuster, right? The people pushing for real change,

a ton of them go into storytelling and mythology and D&D, you know, the people who were the would-be psychologists of this era. And there's a relevant quote here. I think, you know, like Walter Benjamin, who's one of the Frankfurt school guys, he says that the masses want change. But when controlled,

control happens, you know, he calls it fascism, but like when you, when you start to have this group who doesn't want there to be change, they're faced with this inevitability where what that group has to do, you know, the fascists or the people who don't want the masses to have more property, more power, more control, which is kind of what happens with psychology, because everyone demands that psychology include these things. And in their insecurity, they run further away from them, you know, with the DSM3 into the checklist model and the objective, stuff. And anyway, back to Benjamin. He says, you know, when, when, when they're not wanting to give you the thing that you want, which is material, which is, you know, more time off, more money, more stuff, a house, food, or something of better quality, what they will give you is the right to express yourself. And so when what you're going to do is see politics become aesthetic. it's not about this is what I'll do for you I'll give you paved roads I'll give you schools I'll give you health care I'll give you Medicaid for all when you can't do that when those aren't options we'll just give you expressions of

cultural change you know the person with the identity that you don't like won't be represented in commercials they won't be represented in Congress they won't be represented here. And then that way you feel like you're expressing yourself because, you know, the person that you don't like is being alienated or othered in the culture and the person that you do like who represents you, who usually looks like you, is having the power. And so it's this sort of false freedom where people hear heard without really being helped because they feel like they're changing something without something really changing.

And a lot of those Frankfurt school guys are pretty similar in what they're doing because they're fusing Freud with somebody like Marx, you know, who says this thing's a struggle. It's a game. And a lot of that comes from Wilhelm Reich. You know, the Frankfurt school guys disavow him, but the Freudian and semantic psychology, that's where they got it in order to have those analyses of, you know, post-World War II culture, basically, where they're trying to figure out what's going on in the system. And so the dark. The dark, side of repressing all of that messy humanity is that it doesn't go away, it just comes back up as this monster. You know, if you ignore the shadows, then they return as demons, is what Jung said. And when you exhal something from consciousness, like in this point, our real purpose, our humanity, our ability to be subjective, to bring subjectivity into our lives, you know, it doesn't disappear. It just goes underground. And in the age, you know, right as we're rolling out this cold, rational, Nashian worldview, um, society went insane.

We had the satanic panic. People started to believe that there were literal demons and daycare centers and hundreds of them, satanic cults, you know, ritually abusing children and all of this stuff. And I think that a lot of that had to do with people realizing that they were being hurt and that culture was getting worse, but not really being able to see who to blame. because in the mainstream culture, they're being represented. Like my group's in control

and we've reached the pinnacle of our aesthetic journey or agenda, but there's not any change in my life that is good. I feel bad. I feel worse. This is making me sick. And so why does any of this matter for mental health? Well, you know, millennials and Gen C

kind of inherited a lot of this trap. Like they're born into the world Nash's paranoia. and Burns vocabulary and Thatcher's policies and Beck's CBT, you know, those things have reached their zenith and are declining as millennials are coming up. And they live in this totally gamified environment where social media is a game and grades are a game and job applications are a game and dating apps are a game. And even their mental health vocabulary is gamified. Nervous system deregulation, attachment styles, trauma responses. Everything is a system to be optimized. And they're drowning because

they're thinking about it like doing it right, not doing themselves or not doing it better or worse, but, you know, they're competing with everybody. And they have more access to therapy than any generation in history, but they're the most psychologically literate, you know, population ever. They know more about psychology by the time they're 12 just from movies if their parents didn't put them in therapy, which is much more likely to happen for that generation. You know, 42% of them attend therapy, 87% of them feel. comfortable discussing mental help.

Giant change there from the boomers. And it's not helping. Rates of anxiety and depression and self-harm and suicidal ideation keep climbing. And this is the treatment prevalence paradox. More therapy has not produced less suffering. And a lot of that is, yes, probably because the world is getting worse around us, around the experiment that you're trying to run with time. But the words are the wrong words.

The frame is the wrong frame. They're being offered debugging for their souls. and they're being given worksheets when they need witnessing, and they're being measured when they need to be met, and increasingly they're rejecting that. As a culture, it's being reflected in attitudes about mental health as the most comfortable in generation to ever encounter it as it starts to encounter it.

They have distrust and negative experiences, and they need what the game framework can't provide. They need meaning, they need connection, they need presence, and they need purpose. And they need to know that they're not, machines and that their suffering isn't a bug to be debugged, that they're longing for something real is not naive, and they also need to know that it's okay to feel like the world is broken, because a lot of them feel like they're not allowed to say that. And they need to know that

George Price is wrong. Love is not just this equation, that there's an exit to that trap, which is big, heady stuff. You know, this is a lot less technical and almost more philosophical or spiritual than the talking about the way the DSM got where it was. But to me, they're related. You know, they're part of the same problem of how do we anticipate and fix like a better therapy. So what is the exit to the trap? You know, Curtis is pretty pessimistic.

He says, as documentary ends with the suggestion that we're just kind of stuck in the self-fulfilling prophecy and it's run so long, we can't remember anything else so we don't know that we're playing a game. And I'm slightly more hopeful, not because I think the systems will change easily. they won't, but because the trap only works if you believe it. And here's the trick that you can do at the end of this episode. You don't have to think about yourself this way. And when you notice a part of yourself is thinking about this way, you can realize that

it's just a part, that is sad and afraid. And it has a purpose. It's trying to protect you from being taken advantage of and being hurt again. And when you realize, and your job is not to get rid of it, it's to know that when you need it, it's there. And when you don't, you can put it down. and you can recognize this gamified thing of like one more one more one more and say do i need this part of me right now and if you don't need it you put it down in a way that doesn't threaten it doesn't upset it

it's just there when you need it again when you realize i may not trust this person i need to run some angles there but it isn't the point of your existence it's just a part of you that is there for good reason that you can love and have a good relationship with and you can love and have a good relationship with You know, once you start to see these assumptions and notice that they're there, you can question them. And yeah, people play games. People also love and people also sacrifice and people also create and people also connect, not as strategies and not as moves in a bigger game,

but as expressions of something that exists before strategy. And the mother gazing at an infant, when my wife looked at my daughter, she wasn't calculating a payoff. When I looked at my daughter for the first time, I was not calculating a payoff. I mean, the friend who sits with you in your grief isn't seeking strokes. They're present. And the therapist who holds space for your pain is not gamifying their relationship.

They're witnessing. You know, these things are real and they happen all the time. And the game frame can't see them because it has no categories for them. And to an increasing extent, our culture and our medical system and some of the rules that govern therapy can no longer see them, but that doesn't make them not real. and that doesn't make you not crazy for seeing or for longing for those things. But that's a limitation of the framework. It's not a limitation of reality.

And it doesn't change who you are because you were told to think that way. Even if you weren't told with words, even if you weren't told directly. If you were told to think that way, it doesn't mean that that's who you are. And this is where I need to say something that may sound kind of contradictory. But I'm really skeptical of the idea that therapy is just self-expression or that TikTok and support groups could replace professional treatment or that it's just all relational. You just sit with somebody in a room, Rogerian, and eventually you being nice to them makes them better.

And I'm skeptical of these critiques where they're like, the whole system is just a corrupted systemic control anyway. I mean, I'm kind of making an argument that it is, but I'm also making an argument that it wasn't a whole lot of people who knew what they were doing or were sitting in a room smoking cigarettes and are the alumni that run the world. this is multiple things across history that culminated in the moment that we are in, and there will be many more to undo this. It wasn't one person that had all the power.

It was a system of systems that started to give too much power to too few people. And, you know, the people that just say, well, yeah, your article's fine about the DSM, but it's really just the Sackler's running, you know, opiates or the Pfizer wants to sell pharmaceutical drugs, so they invent these diagnoses. Those systems aren't connected in this way. This is the way they're connected in, you know, in some ways it's a lot more nefarious and in some ways it's a lot more innocent. You know, and I understand the appeal of those kind of monadic narratives that put all of the oneness of control on one group of people because they're simple

and easy to understand and they let you direct your rage somewhere quickly. But after everything that I've just told you about this trap, you know, Nash is paranoid. Nash is not a bad guy. You know, the Sherman Act that's not a bad bill. You know, the RUC, the is set up to solve a problem that is real with Medicaid billing creeping up from, you know, doctors over billing so that their rates are based on what the old metric was. You know, Aaron Beck, who's not a bad guy that invents CBT, you know, those systems were not made by bad people, but they still all conspired to turn the soul into software, which is not an evidence-based or scientific belief. And it makes sense to want to burn the whole thing down

and start over. And so I hear the anger, you know, when I hear from people, you know, people, but here's the thing. The corruption goes deeper than capitalism. It goes deeper than big pharma. It goes deeper than the RUC and insurance companies. It's invaded yours assumptions, yours and mine. And the way that you think about health, the way that you think about self, the way that you imagine what healing even means, that's been colonized too. The trap isn't just in the institutions. It's in your imagination. And here's what the trap does. It strips you of creativity and the imagination to envision a better world. It makes you think that only, options, your only options are a corrupt system or do it yourself. And it forecloses this

possibility that care could be a right, that institutions could serve human flourishing, that expertise could be trustworthy, that systems of control aren't as easy as saying, well, capitalism corrupts everything, so let's opt out. It's not just psychopharmaceutical companies paying for studies or the Sackler's pushing opioids. It goes deeper than that. It's the way that this thing has invaded your own assumptions and it stripped you of creativity and imagination to envision a better world. When you just say, hey, I don't like the way these things work. When we look at how they work and why they got there, they don't really look like good things. And somebody just attacks you and says, that's crazy. This is a conspiracy theory. That's wrong. It's because just the idea of saying,

hey, we can have a slightly better world than the one that we're in right now has become so scary to that person, that you feel like a threat. And the people who say, yeah, just use herbs or go find your, you know, do a drum circle in a support group or clean your room or something. I mean, those are fine if they work, but you're kind of being glib about how seriously traumatized our culture is, how bad it needs therapy, and also the realities of trauma that can just be really awful. And don't go away if you clean up your room or you take like Hornet Venom from Joe Rogan or something. they're offering, you know, this empowerment that you have power over this because it's in you. You just got to find it within yourself.

But we can't survive like that. You know, it feels good. It feels liberating. It feels like you're escaping this trap. But it's this false empowerment because when things get really bad, the suicidal ideation doesn't respond to journaling. When the panic attacks don't go away when you do breathwork or getting an ice bath. And when psychosis starts happening and you need medication, you need a real doctor. And you're going to want someone who went to school who got super.

who is vetted by a board who understands the difference between a trauma response and a thyroid problem and who knows when medication is necessary and when it's not and who has seen a thousand cases and can recognize what you can't see for yourself and that doesn't mean that everybody who went to school and went got certified by a board is good it means that you're going to need somebody who's done that and is and yeah the system doesn't do a great job of screening there's bad therapists there's corrupt psychiatrists. There's pill mills, you know, pretending to be treatment centers and like, yes, there's sacklers and profit.

And yes, the boards have lots of problems. And the training is not adequate. You know, I make a case for on here. And the incentives are also broken. I make a loud case for. I have issues with all that stuff and I think they should be better. But the people who do understand trauma, who do good work, who I talk to every day, you know, across the world. I don't talk to somebody around the world every day,

but I talk to people very frequently because of this show and my blog from all over the world and all over America that are doing great work and went to school and got licensed and they submit to board oversight, not because the system's perfect, but because the alternative is a world where anyone can claim to be a healer with no accountability

and that's not going well. And so even though I have a problem with the way that some of the regulation is implemented, I still think that you need something real, not just aesthetics, not just this pseudo power of you can just do everything yourself and you don't really need experts for anything. And you also don't really need, you know, material things like medicine. Because you can just do it yourself. I think that that is people who have absorbed this game to their core and are wholly captured. And the answer to corrupt institutions is not no institutions

as better institutions. I mean, the answer to captured credentialing isn't no credentialing. It's credentialing that serves its purpose. If you get elected and then as somebody who runs the government, you say the government's bad, well, that's kind of your fault at this point, dog. Like, you're the one who has the power to change the way that all of these things work. They aren't inherently bad. Nothing is.

If you're in charge and you're saying it's bad, you're just saying that you're doing a bad job. You know, the answer to a health care system that treats people like machines is not abandoning health care. It's fighting health care that treats, it's fighting full. or health care that treats people like people. Care is a right. It's not a privilege. You know, it's not a product. It's not something that you earn by being productive or having good insurance.

It's a right. And rights require institutions to guarantee them. They require professionals trained to provide them. They require systems that can be held accountable when they fail. And the do-it-yourself critique leaves all of that out. The do-it-alone critique leaves all of that out. It takes the real insight or the abandon-the-system altogether critique. and go into the woods and use a crystal do that because it feels good please don't do that to cure your cancer

you know it takes the real insight that the system is broken and draws the wrong conclusion but we shouldn't abandon the system entirely that's not freedom either that's atomization and that's the final victory of nash's worldview where we're all isolated individuals who are in competition to see who gets the highest score you know before they die i guess maybe there should be a little bit more arc and a little bit more of a process to this thing that we call life where we accept some limitations on it that we do age that we do die that we have a limited amount of time to kind of go inward and understand how we think and to learn how to act effectively and to put down the games that we don't want and then learn how to play a new game you know i refuse to give up hope for

this thing i refuse it while i also refuse to pretend that the current system is working and that's hard a lot of people say it's got to be this binary choice between, well, if there's two different theories in the field and there's two different directions, which one's the good one? I'm saying neither. But I'm adult enough to realize that just because nobody is going in the right direction doesn't mean that I'm so scared I have to back the candidate in the least bad one. You know, I don't have to pick between what the DSM-5 did and, you know, the R-Doc that's stripping everything down to a biomarker,

that the NIMH is doing. I got things accusing me in the first one of picking a side between those. I think that they're both bad. I think something like Hightop that cluster symptoms is the way that you actually make the science fit the story. Not the, you actually make the story fit the science, not just kind of adjust the science to try and fit the story that you want to tell. But too much of this has changed human nature

as we've imbibed these passive assumptions about ourselves. But the system's, needs to be radically transformed and the system is still the best framework that we have for delivering care and the people doing good work are working within it not outside of it and the goal is to make the system worthy of people to serve within it this is not anti-science it's an argument for a better science you know nash gave us this paranoid math burn gave us the cultural vocabulary and porter explained why trust died but neoliberalism gave us this political implementation And we became the creatures the model described because the system left us no other language with which to view ourselves.

But the models are wrong from the beginning. They were projections of a paranoid mind onto the human condition and they were assumptions disguised as discoveries. Nash told everyone that himself. And the proof that they were wrong is that we are still here, still longing for connections, still aching for meaning, still capable of love that is not calculation. And George Price couldn't find that exit. You know, he bled out trying to disprove his own math because he needed therapy. He thought by imbibing this model to its root, he thought that life was not worth living

because he couldn't see another way to understand himself in the world. And that's the reason why I put something this dark in a podcast is because I feel like too many people have imbibed this system and have seen their, they are using it to understand their relationship to the world in a way that is driving them mad. You know, it's not about math or what the math meant. Love is not refuted by being explicable. Kindness is not negated by having origins. Connection is not fake because you can trace its biology. A trap is real, but it's not the whole story. The trap says you're a machine, but you're not. And the trap told us, us that meaning was naive and unsurious.

It's not. It's the purpose. And when we can remember the trap we're in, when we can see it, then we can figure out how to get out. But the first step is being able to see the world you're in. And to a large extent, I hope to cover this in the next one, I think Gen Z is already demanding that. I don't think it's optional.

You know, I'm telling therapists this because I want this profession to change. And I think that the next generation is telling us that it has to. I'm telling the profession this because like I point out to people when I do use Eric Byrne in the room to anticipate how things even wellness might impact their family might create a new game. You know, two people in the adult ego state cannot play a game. It's somebody in a child ego state and a parentified ego state. And the children are telling us at this point, that they want a new model of therapy, that this thing does not work for them.

They're telling us that on TikTok. They're telling us that in these Reddit groups. They're telling us that when we survey them, you know, with pupils. And so what we have to realize is that the game has already been broken by the next generation. It's up to us how to figure out to play the next game.