The Taproot Podcast - Science, Bureaucracy, Oil and Odyssey at the end of Empire: Part 1

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

The FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD after the best trial results ever recorded for the disorder, because the patients could tell they were on the drug. That decision is the cleanest proof of the psycho-history series thesis: we have turned science into a ritual, and the ritual now outranks the truth. This episode covers the 2024 FDA decision, why the placebo effect is actually the ritual of care working, why noticing may be the mechanism of action psychology cannot admit, the fake Nobel Prize in economics, Porter's Trust in Numbers, the invalid DSM, Wampold's missing active ingredient, and how institutions develop defenses exactly like people do. Then Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the IMAX projectors nobody can build anymore, and what it means that we can no longer build the things we know we need. Part one of two. Part two: oil. MDMA FDA decision, MDMA therapy PTSD, FDA rejects MDMA, psychedelic therapy, randomized controlled trial problems, placebo effect explained, placebo studies, open label placebo, evidence based practice criticism, DSM not valid, STAR-D study, Nobel Prize economics fake, Hayek Pretence of Knowledge, Theodore Porter Trust in Numbers, Bruce Wampold common factors, psychotherapy research, Christopher Nolan Odyssey, Odyssey IMAX 70mm, IMAX film projector, Bronze Age collapse, psycho-history, Jungian psychology, depth psychology, Taproot Therapy   Free resources: gettherapybirmingham.com. Support the show with code TAPROOT at Hardy Nutritionals.

Hey guys, this Joel. And I wanted to do another kind of follow up to the Psychohistory of American Psychology series for a while. Just because something really funny happened that sort of proved the thesis of the whole thing right, right after I did it. And a lot of people noticed and they actually sent me the article, the FDA study. So I thought that was really funny that you guys were on. that and saw immediately how, because I, every time I do one of these, I get a million emails from people that are like, you're good evidence-based practice. Why do you not like science? This is the reason that those things are there. You said placebo effect, but this is the reason that that's there. And you said impact factor, but these are the reason that we do it. And I'm like,

no, no, no, I've done it. I've done it for a long time. Like, I know why we do it. What I'm saying is that doing it does not point you back to knowledge of something. It's just a thing that you are doing. I know how it works. What I'm saying is that understanding how it works does not mean that you're getting any information out of it that is useful. And they will just keep telling you, but this is the way the system works. If you're criticizing, you must not understand. And there's like no ability that they have to be like, oh, you know how it, you know how it works. You don't need more information about that.

You just don't like it. Like, that's not an option. And so anyway, I get a million emails from like that from people that stumble on the podcast and listen to one episode and then don't listen. anymore or the blog or whatever. And so because the FDA did this 24 MDMA study, right after the psycho history series came out and it had been out for a while, but it got into the press and it got like people were kind of looking at it. A lot of people were like, oh my God, this is exactly what you just said in Senate. And I thought that was really funny. So the people did make that connection in a positive way, was funny. And then I also wanted to do something about kind of the

economy and oil because I wanted to be like I'm not just picking on on psychology what I'm was saying with the psycho history series is the micro is the macro the same way that you can psychoanalyze a nation or an empire you can also psychoanalyze the people that make it up like it's the same functions they deflect in the same way like every bureaucracy behaves just like the bureaucracy in an individual's head and and then I saw Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey and it was sitting with some themes in that and I was like oh man which one should I do next and then they all kind of came together in my head and I was like, well, I don't know. If I do this quickly, maybe they, because they are all kind of the same thing or touching

on the same thing, this will be a coherent essay. It's not coherent. I won't release it. So if you're listening to it, I think it was at least good enough to hit post. But I'll start with the FDA study. So the FDA study, in June of 2024, the FDA started doing this process that they made this decision that's now getting a little bit of publicity because PTA. S-D steps back in the news for a couple of reasons.

And then also, I think some people that didn't like the result of how it was done, started talking about it and got in the news. But basically, they were MDMA or ecstasy by its street name. I've never taken it. I've never even had a patient that's actually taken it. I've had patients that have taken mushrooms and psilocybin in kind of psilocybin, or psilocybin, or ketamine in kind of a healing environment. Some of them got better and liked it.

It made a lot of them worse. because dissociatives and psychedelics, ketamine tends to make people that are dissociative, dissociate more. And psilocybin sometimes will unlock things that people can't contain. You know, you go back into the trauma, but you don't have a good experience. You don't have a better experience that resolves it.

You actually have a worse one. So it turns out in the studies, you know, ketamine was kind of positioned as this thing that was this miracle drug. Then we found out, it's just another tool. It works for these things, but not for those things. psilocybin is something that is a non-specific amplifier you know if you're not in control of the experience or you're expecting the drug to do it for you um which sometimes uh trauma with a personality cluster B type you know a subset does they want to put pill that makes me better but they don't view

it as a process it sometimes can make you a lot worse and it can give you a worse trauma um the results from the 2024 FDA study mdMA turns out not doing that i don't have any experience with it I'm just I'm just walking you through the study. The results are actually the best that anyone has ever produced for any drug that treats PTSD. Then not put a band-aid on the symptoms, like giving somebody a sedative or something, or a stimulant or, you know, or an antidepressant to try and take the edge off and then a pill for sleep and then a pill for that. Not band-aid stuff. Treating it. Not treating the symptoms.

Treating the thing. Two-thirds of the people who went through treatment no longer met criteria. It cured them. And then 85 to 90% of people had a huge improvement, even if they still had, you know, met criteria for PTSD. No drug has ever come close. No drug has ever done anything like that. And the committee said, yeah, it's self-evident. Look, this is the results.

Here they are. But we don't know if it's evidence-based or not. We don't know if it works. We can't know. Science hasn't said that it's evidence-based or not. And the reason that we can't know is because in a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard of doing research for things that are objective, I'll give it to them, like, you know, cancer drugs.

Like if you want to see if does vitamin C make glaucoma, you know, get better or worse. Well, you can just measure the glaucoma pretty objectively after, you know, somebody does vitamin C. Psychology, again, like I said over and over, it's a process of multiple processes that you have to be aware of. You know, the glaucoma cell doesn't know whether you took vitamin C or not. the little eye cell. Brains tend to know when they are changing. So the reason that the FDA had to just throw out the results and say we still can't know if this is evidence-based or not

is because to do a randomized controlled trial, you have to have a placebo. And a placebo in Sykes things, a lot of times it's cited as 35, but technically, depending on what you're studying, the placebo effects, which is somebody may just get better because they think that they had an intervention, even if the intervention didn't work.

They may trick themselves into getting better. It's normally 30 to 40% depending on what you're studying. So if you're going to say, does this antidepressant work, you have to give half the people a sugar pill and half the people a real pill. Because 35%, 30 to 40% of that improvement in the group that you gave the real pill to, it may just be fake. You've got to compare it to the other group to make sure the placebo is controlled for. And it is very silly in this study because when you give somebody MDMA, if you know anything about ecstasy, it's a rave drug, it's a club drug. It's a drug that gives you a drug trip. And to cure PTSD turns out you have to give people a pretty high dose of drug enough to make them go on a trip.

So when you give people a sugar pill, they can figure out whether or not they had a trip. And because they can figure it out, they can't be. be placebo can't be controlled for because the placebo has to be blinded and if they say I know it's placebo or if they say oh wow that was a great drug trip my PTSD went away then your randomized controlled trial was not done right so you can't know that it worked or not we're doing science guys and that is my critique of this system because if you as you know a thinking rational person say, okay, we want to study whether or not this makes somebody better. But in order to study whether or not it makes them better, what we have to do is we're going to have somebody

care about them. We're going to have somebody talk to them. We're going to have them think about their issue. We're going to have them reflect on it while they do this screener and we see, you know, how it's affected their life. And they're going to go through this process of us diagnosing them to see if they check these boxes. And then we're going to have them tell them what the treatment is going to involve. And then they're going to think about it. And they're going to going to be working with somebody who's bigger than the issue who's not overwhelmed or scared, you know, these mental health things, they're going to be talking about it in order to do all this. Well, if some of them get better, that's the placebo effect, because that's not real depression

if doing all that made the depression go away. Because none of that stuff can matter. None of that stuff can be part of the mechanism of action, the intervention that's getting them better. None of that stuff can be part of psychology. What if that is the mechanism of action? What if that reason that 30 to 40% of people in these studies get better is because that is something that you should be adding back into the profession and understanding is an intervention, is loving and caring and being present and reflecting on these things?

You can measure a cancer drug, whether or not it works. Does it make the tumor get smaller? Yes or no? with a randomized controlled trial. You can't do it with psychology because these are processes that we will always be aware of. And when you touch the thing, you've made it different. Even if you give it a placebo, you've made it different. And if the science can't see that, it's a science of something other than psychology.

Because psych science will always, always have that as part of the process. And that is what the academic model has resisted for 25 years. more CBT, more biomedical model. That's the gold standard because those things can pass a randomized controlled trial while this other stuff is either too hard to research or too messy. And oh, well, shit, you know, every time we've done this, though, for the past 25, 30 years, and we've set it's the gold standard and we put it more into practice and we put it more into schools. Mental health outcomes get worse. Results of people going to therapy get worse. It's failing to be validated by reality.

Why? Well, it can't be that the system that we're doing this stuff based on is wrong. For 45 years, research has been telling us the same thing, and it's not a flaw in the research. It is the finding. The mind can tell when it's being measured, and it changes in response to being measured. That is a property of the thing itself. Tennessee Williams point about, I set a jar in Tennessee, and then all of a sudden, the hill I set the jar unchanged, and the jar reflected the hill.

you know, it is exactly what a science of the mind would have to have an understanding of to actually be a science of the mind. If you go through a process where you know that you are changing, then knowing is part of the change. And there is no version of you that change without knowing. And a science of change that cannot allow the person to know that they are changing or that they are being affected or that they are being connected is a science of something else. It is not a science of psychology. So don't send me an email and ask me if I like science. I just know how it works. And I'm aware of when that science is very big.

And the committees fall back, you know, to defend them a little bit, there were problems with the study. There were some misconduct by researchers at some of the trial sites. But there always is that. That's why you do a pure review to point out the problem. Those were not big enough to throw out the result that they found. you know, the thing being treated and the thing being measured and the ruler are all the same object.

They're all you. And that is not something that happens when you're studying effects outside of the mind. Even when you're self-reporting it and turning it into a number by hitting one through 10 on the little number line, the thing being treated, the thing being measured, and the ruler are the same thing. That's not a phenomenon that happens in physics. you know, they are all you. And there is an instrument that separates the thinking

from the thinking that you were thinking. It was never multiple things, though. It is all three, but it's also one. I'm sorry, I'll get back on track. I'm going into my, like, rabbit hole in my head too much. But we've turned science into a ritual. The randomized controlled trial is the ceremony, and you feed the question in,

and you turn the little crank on the machine, and the truth comes out at the bottom. And even if you know the truth is true, if it doesn't come out of the machine, you can't know that it's true. That's what the FDA's saying. And so if something is true, but it didn't come out of the crank, it's not allowed to be true yet. The cure can be sitting in front of you and it can be self-evident. We could help all these people, two-thirds of the people, but we're not permitted to know that yet. And keep in mind, these people are largely, they would tell you, these researchers would largely tell you that they are not religious.

But this thing is a sacrament that we are doing. We don't run trials, randomized control, trials on something like do parachutes work if you if you jump out of a plane do you survive more if you have a parachute you couldn't run that run to mouse controlled trial half the jumpers get a shoot and the other one gets a backpack but it's full of pots and pans like a looney tunes cartoon and the control group you know gets this empty one that's got the pots and pans in it and nobody is told which one we skip that one and not because we're unscientific the effect for do you survive a plane crash with a parachute even though maybe sometimes the parachute doesn't work. Most of the time, vast majority of the time,

100% of people would like to have one. That effect is so obvious that demanding research on it, demanding a trial, not being able to know what we know there, that would be unscientific. To ask to run a trial on that would be so stupid. It would be unscientific. But if we did run it, nobody would throw out the data set because the subjects figured out which group they were in on the way down.

But that's what the FDA did with MDMA. And again, I don't have experience with the MDMA. I've never even had a patient that's done it that has told me about it. I've never done it. I'm not, I'm only going through this data and the thought process. So, you know, there were, there were other objections. But those are the same objections that I see, a small misconduct in the studies. Like in every trial for an antidepressant.

or antipsychotic, even though there's not as many of those that we do anymore, it flies through these things. You know, the proposal was real, you know, give the controlled group this low dose of something. This is the fix that they proposed, as they said, you know, we'll just give the control group a lower dose of something so that they're a little confused. They can tell that there's something psychoactive in their system, like maybe an antidepressant. but that still isn't going to work. It's never going to be good enough because MDMA,

at the doses you have to give it to care of PTSD, has such a strong effect that if 40% of the group is going through ego death and thinking that they're connected to the universe and that time is not real, they're going to figure out that they were on this drug. So even the proposed fix will not go anywhere. There's no knock-off effect of facing your own mortality. And that's what the people are reporting.

When you read the data in these trials, like as much of the raw data as they put out there, you know, people come out of this treatment and they're talking about a reconciliation with death. They're talking about a dissolving of the self. They're talking about a reordering of what their life was for, you know, meaning, a change in meaning in that way. And all things that are probably more important than the checklist of symptoms we call PTSD.

And then we hand them a form asking them to rate from zero to four, they're trouble concentrating after they've had those experiences and they want to talk about that and then we have to use that to figure out if the drug did something that was helping them you can't weigh a resurrection on a scale that counts symptoms you can't weigh this huge resurrection of like I really thought I was better off dead and now I'm not are you concentrating better though zero to four we have to be scientific like a science earns the name through agreement on three things. This is what makes it a science. What is the object? What is the method and what is it for? What's the purpose? If you said, okay, there's seven schools of marine biologists in academic marine

biology and they can't really agree on what marine biology is doing. I mean, marine biology is marine biology because 100% of marine biologists know that they're studying life in the ocean. If only 13% of them thought that, if there were seven competing schools in academic marine biology like there are an academic psych that we're doing and saying things like this, you might be within your rights to conclude that marine biology was fake. We run tests on astrology being fake all the time without blinking. We run it on homeopathy, homeopathic medicine being fake all the time without blinking. But we don't run studies on like, is economics fake? I mean, you guys are supposed to understand how money works and markets and all these things. And it seems like if a single one of you

figured out how to write a book and say, hey, recession's going to come in 2005, a recession's going to come in 2008, a recession is going to come in 2014. And this is what it's going to look like. Because this was a hard science, you'd be like the most valuable guy in the world. You'd be able see into the future with your math, which is what it's for us to see this stuff coming. None of them can. But I mean, economics is a respected science, right? I talk about Porter all the time, theater reporter. Trust in numbers is still a great book. Everybody should read it. Again, just a review, if you didn't listen to the, you know, psycho history series, his argument or any of the other things I've done, like his argument is always that soft sciences are pretty insecure. And so because they are

insecure and they're afraid of just sort of knowing what they can know and not knowing what they can't, they have to pretend that they can know everything by reaching for numbers. And then they use the insecure fields. They reach for numbers because the numbers looks like it fell out of the sky, like it came from heaven. And then if you have a number, nobody can argue with you. And he calls that metaphors from distance.

But we forget that numbers really are just metaphors, because the number is not the thing. The number is just a measurement of one aspect of a thing and the way that we can measure it. In the same way that a metaphor is a very broad description of a phenomenon. So we're numbers. they're not the truth. It's there to protect you from having to defend that your judgment is not the truth. And I mean, again, in the psychohistory series, my field already admitted all this about itself and then ignored the admission. Like in 2013, the National Institute of Mental Health said the DSM-5 is fake. The DSM has been fake for a long time.

None of these categories are valid. They're not replicable. They're not real. And you've had 30 years to correct that and you've gone in the wrong direction, so we're throwing it out. But therapists still have a copy that is in 5TR, the newest version of that book that came out, you know, two years ago on their desk. Why? Why is there a new version of that book? What is it for? Who is this for anymore? We have to have the numbers. We talked about the Stardee study, which is, you know, the biggest study in the world that was the most rigorous, past the most peer review.

And in the end of it, it found turned out the researchers couldn't tell the difference between 3% and 98. They accidentally thought 98% of people got better. Turns out it was 3. Because they were all looking at their little numbers and it was so complicated. and no one was looking at the whole thing. I mean, economics is the same thing, right? Like, I wanted to talk about this because I wanted to say that all of the things that I said about psychology are equally true for a whole lot of other things that run our world. Did you know that there's not actually a Nobel Prize in economics?

You know, the thing that gets announced every October actually was like made up in the 60s, this group of bankers. It was a Swiss bank that was really, or Swedish bank, that was really, um, famous and they wanted economic policy to be treated as science, not politics. Because people were treating money like politics. Why do you say that the interest rate should be that? Why should you decide that these people all of a sudden have a million dollars more? That seems like the wrong answer. I'd like to have a say in that. They didn't really want people to have a say in that. They wanted it to be a science. It was just numbers told us that the money had to do this. And so they said, if we give all this money to the Nobel Prize Association, then can we have, um,

If we do that, can we have somebody, somebody's calling me and I turn on my phone? Then if we do that, can we just make up a Nobel Prize in Economics and give it to the people that we think should have it? And the people running the Nobel committee at that point wanted the money and took it. The Nobel family, the surviving people who are actually pretty angry at that because that's not what Alfred Nobel wanted. He wanted it to be about science. And you're changing the definition of what science is by pretending that if you can measure something in numbers, it becomes a science. Well, I mean, I can measure the dragon in my dreams in numbers.

I don't think that's science. So Friedrich Hayek, who's a darling of like the rugged capitalists, he's a capitalist, you know, free market guy. In 1974, he gets it. And he, in his acceptance speech, he says, no economist should ever have this kind of authority. Like, this award that you just gave me is a joke. This is stupid. Like, this isn't what we're doing.

We're not really doing science. And then he called his lecture, I think, the pretense of knowledge. And he said that the medal was a costume. And then Gunnar Mirdal, who's a socialist, Hyac's opposite in every A. He was the co-winner. He also won. And so the socialist and the free market guy don't really agree on much.

If you read their papers, they are not going to have anything economic to say where they agree. But they both said, this medal is a fraud. When Miradol took it, he said, you should abolish this award. And Noble's family didn't like it either. But, you know, one descendant who was a member of the family, called the prize this PR coup, by economists to make themselves look legitimate. And another one said, this is a cuckoo's egg in the Nobel nest. Paul Romero, and he also won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he coined a word for the equations the economists to use. And he said, economists don't use math.

They use mathiness to put ideas on this performative, rigorous process, while there's really a political reality that is hiding underneath that nobody can see. And the philosopher Tony Lawson explained, you know, that you can't work with these things in those ways. He said deductive math runs inside closed systems and sealed box. where the parts don't change. And the same causes will always produce the same effect. That's why algebra is algebra, because x minus two equals three, X, well, hold on, let me think about that in my head. X minus two equals three.

This is how bad I am at math. X minus two equals, I'm leaving this in. X minus two equals three is always going to be five. But anyway, sorry, what Lawson was saying is that people are in open, system. We are historical and we react to being studied. So we do the opposite of last time just so that we feel free. And that's part of the math equation that makes us human that cannot be measured like x minus 2 equals 3 can be solved consistently in 1910 and then again in 2026 and you get the same answer. We have to realize that psychology is doing the same thing. We are historical and we react to being studied.

We do the opposite of what we've done. before. So economics just shaves the people down until they fit the method and it assumes identical, rational robots with perfect information. And then it acts surprised every time the real economy refuses to behave like the equation. Because psychology makes the same move for the same reason. That's why it started to do something as stupid as the experiment that I just explained. You know, the models don't just describe the world badly, though. It's not like something's happening and we don't know what it is. That's not my point.

My point is that people are reacting based on the model. The models don't just do a bad job of reflecting reality. They reshape reality. Like there's a sociologist, Donald McKenzie, and he calls a financial model an engine, not a camera, because it doesn't photograph the market. It actually drives it. when everyone adopted this the options pricing formula in the 80s, then traders priced the way the formula said they should price it. And all of a sudden, the history of options trading was different

forever because people were saying, well, I'm not following the model. I'm not doing it right. If the model didn't exist, they would have been trading differently and you would have been studying something else. So future models of studying options trading were just studying what those guys were doing in that model when a fund full of geniuses, you know, running that formula put a crater in the financial system, nobody was like, oh, oops, we shouldn't have done that. They were just like, well, we couldn't see it coming. But it was because people were using a model that they thought was supposed to study the thing and it changed what they were doing as the thing, as traders, as people being part of the economy. I don't want to say economists because they weren't studying it. They were doing it.

as markets. The map didn't just conquer the territory. It killed all the people, you know, in the territory. Psychiatry, you know, caught that same insecurity. And the, you know, that it was this runt sitting next to medicine, but used to be called alienist. And then it was called neurologist and then it was called, you know, but all the, all these things. And, but we're real doctors. And so the word for what it did is reification, you know, treating something fluid and alive as all of a sudden something static.

This manual draws this hard line where there is only one gradient. Well, it turns out there's a rainbow. Well, you know there's two categories. Could you put all the colors in the rainbow into one of these two boxes, please? Oh, warm colors and blue colors. That's a great idea. A rainbow has two parts now.

The rating scales that we use in research or even worse. You know, we ask you to feel from zero to three and you're doing arithmetic to a feeling like it's good and bad and not just an experience that you are having that could be described. Feelings aren't always moral or amoral, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. Sometimes they are an experience that is just alive and changing, but that's hard to study. You know, the form says 15, so you're carrying 15 units of depression. And everything that makes the suffering yours, the grief, the marriage, the lost job, gets swept off the table as noise because it doesn't fit in the box. No, you feel 15 depression.

And so you've disconnected them from the environment that psychology is afraid of. And it is the connection to the environment that makes psychology an inherently political science. Because if you follow the evidence, if you follow the science, what it's saying is that there's a lot of things in our world that we probably should change because the way they're done is deeply unhealthy. And it's fucking up the way we think. So when you say that, when you write that book, people will say, oh, you're an academic, you're a psychologist, you shouldn't be so political. But what they won't say is that when they write the book,

the biomedical model works and psychology should be cut off for the environment and these things just exist. They don't want to see that as politics. And it is, you know, in the same way that people, and I'm not picking aside, you know, but when people said like, oh, this guy is kneeling down for the national anthem to protest something in the Super Bowl, football shouldn't be political.

And I was like, dude, I'm not a football fan. I've been to three games in my life, but they were like fighter jets that flew over the stadium in American flag fireworks. And Toby Keith sung a song about God bless the troops or something. You just don't like the kind of politics that they're doing. It wasn't apolitical before. You just agreed with it.

Whether or not you see it doesn't mean that it isn't. And psychology in that way will always be political. And so when you write the book saying it shouldn't be political, you're saying that you don't agree with the politics that the science is indicating. We decided that therapy has to work the way that a drug works. And one active ingredient, you know, everything else is noise that you subtract. There's only one ingredient that's active.

Therapy never worked that way because psychology doesn't work that way. It worked by the opposite move, putting you in contact with a crowd of realities at once, your past, your body, the person across from you, and the things that you've referred. used to look at for years. Half of that contact makes you feel worse before it makes you feel better. And the upset is the medicine working. So we built a science that can only study single ingredients, and then we stood around confused about why it keeps failing to find the thing that heals. And in my field, the ritual has spent 50 years failing to find therapy's active ingredient because there's not one. Bruce Wampold, he spent his career talking about this.

You know, he compare real therapies head to head and the specific techniques don't matter. Remove the supposedly critical ingredient from a therapy and outcomes don't change. What heals is the relationship, one nervous system witnessed by another person. And the trial is a machine for removing context to isolate a variable. And in therapy, the context is the medicine. So the trial removes the medicine and then it measures what it's left. and then it says, oh, there was a weak effect. Well, maybe all the stuff that you threw out with the placebo effect

that you said might be just making somebody think they were getting better when they weren't really getting better was actually healing them and you were refusing to study it. And the proof of what I'm saying has been sitting, if you want me to be more scientific, in these trials the whole time filed under the wrong name. The placebo response in psychiatric drug trials is enormous. like 40% is a huge chunk.

Most drugs don't do 40% effective that we approve. And by some analysis, it accounts for the most of what the drugs appear to do. The trial's whole job is to subtract that as contamination. Well, look at what that is made out of. The ritual of care is biologically active and alive. And our attempt to remove the ritual of care. and the connection to the human through AI portals and all this like horseshit that we've been peppering through the profession. Our attempt to remove that has made outcomes worse.

But we can't indict the science because the science has this political motivation to make sure that left or right. You think that that is the only way that we can ever study these things. And if you don't study them that way, you're not a serious person, even though it's made everything worse for 40 years. look what that made you. Meeting with a doctor, being asked about your suffering, having somebody write it down, taking a pill every morning, handed you by a person who expects you to get better. These trigger real dopamine and opioid pathways. You know, they release serotonin. Expectation is not imaginary.

Ritual is not imaginary of going once a week to do something, even if it isn't perfect. It is chemistry. Add regression to the mean because people enter the trials at their absolute worst, and then the trial takes a long time to get on the calendar, and then the worst naturally passes, and then the natural passing gets booked as a placebo effect. Maybe the depression was just alive, and it was going up and down and doing this. It just wasn't a person with 15 depressions. It was depression as a living process. You know, add the psychiatric outcomes that are subjective reports and expectation shapes the report.

put it together and the placebo arm of the psychiatric trial is not an empty control. It's a package of active treatments, care, attention, ritual, hope, witnessing, a sort of shamanic person who's able to hear all this stuff and be bigger than it and hear it and understand it, but not be overwhelmed. It's a package of active treatment. And the architecture of the trial defines the whole package as zero. The field is, you know, quietly starting to admit this. But there is now a discipline called placebo studies.

There's a program at Harvard, and they study nothing else. The strangest result in it is that there's something called open label placebo. You give people a pill, you tell them plainly that it is a placebo, and it still works measurably, and the ritual of care works with the curtain open. And at that point, the word placebo is just the name that we give the medicine that we refuse to take credit for. And so maybe noticing the mechanism of action that we can't admit, you know, the being seen, the naming, the knowing somebody is paying attention to your suffering on a schedule, that would explain why every real therapy works about equally well. It would explain why the placebo arm, you know, keeps performing at the same efficacy. It would explain why the drug arm barely beats the placebo effect for most drugs.

And it is one hypothesis that the ritual can never test. because the ritual is built on subtracting exactly that. It found something that it couldn't see, and so it decided it didn't exist. The problem was never that the placebo effect contaminated psychiatric trials. The problem statement itself was wrong. The placebo effect is not in the way of medicine. It is most of the medicine, and we built 100 years of method around throwing it away, which reframes the whole hearing one last time.

The FDA's objection was that the patients knew if they got better, not just the researchers. Only the researchers were supposed to know that they didn't have PTSD. In a mind, the knowing is the active ingredient and the connection is part of the cure. And this is why the series is called what it's called. Therapy was the study of the worm ghost, the living, moving, moving, relational thing, that cold machines worm ghost songs that was the theme of the psycho history series. It's a person, but a person is not something that is entirely tangible. It is its connections to other things. You know, the instruments were imported. They were built to measure that, this cold machine,

but it could never really hold the ghost. And like, I don't know. physics is like the hardest science that there is. It met this problem at the bottom of matter and it gave up on the detached deserer. Like serious physicists will tell you that there is no view from nowhere because the looking is part of what you get. Once you observe something, it changes. And you can't go back and observe it twice from the same perspective at the same time. That you only get to touch it once. And so this whole idea of objectivity in physics,

is not real, which is, that's the heart of science to get humble. But it's one of the easiest sciences to get weird because they're not insecure about working with numbers. It's all they do. You know, psychology, which studies the most observer entangled thing in the universe, a person, you know, three feet away, bleeding their whole life into the air, went the other direction. It got stricter. It built the double bind. It climbed onto the throne that physics had just climbed down from. Michael Polani said, you know, we know more than we can tell. Everything explicit and measurable floats on this ocean of tacit knowledge.

Common sense. What is self-evident? The felt sense. The thing that an experienced clinician knows the second you walk into the room, but they can't really explain why they know it, these sort of hunches about like, I think that you're talking about all these things, but really what we're talking about is you're afraid to be alone. What happens if you're alone? Let's go there.

What would you feel if I told you couldn't leave this office? And I'm going to walk out that door and you're going to have to sit on the couch. What do you feel? All of a sudden, the person feels uncomfortable. I can't tell you how I get there with a client. I just know that it works and I know that I know it. When the ritual throws out the clinical judgment and the common sense and the self-evident, it's not being stricter and it's not being more logical.

It's being more stupid and it will become more insane. And it will build systems around it that reflect that insanity. You know, it kept the lit, tip and it sawed off the iceberg. Because it could measure the tip of the iceberg, but it couldn't see the thing holding that up. That doesn't make it not real. Now the tip's going to sink.

Knowledge didn't grow. It shrank to what a trial can hold, which is a thimble because you can't, like Pawani's saying, you can't really tell somebody everything you know. You're a professional and you do this for a living and you're good at it, and they just kind of have to know that you know what you're doing. There's not a bureaucracy that can justify, you know, like all of this stuff.

So, like, these systems are dumber than any one person inside of them. They're dumber than you, they're dumber than me, and I'm not a smart guy, again. Like, this stuff's just not that hard. It's just that nobody looks at it. Nobody reads it. I don't have an intellectual gift. I have an emotional gift of, like, not caring about looking at things that are horrifying, like the way that our world is run.

And, you know, because almost nobody understands how the gears actually turn, the few people who do can run the rest of us through them to make money, to launder and lie into, to launder this lie, like into a fact. And that only works while most people cannot see the gears. It stops the moment that enough people can. And that's the reason why I make these. You know, three things can happen to a real discovery inside the system. One, it gets co-opted and packaged and sold back to you.

Two, it gets ignored, left in a drawer because it does not fit the forms. Or the discoverer gets pushed out. He's not part of the system anymore. Those are your choices if you don't want to play by these rules. And a therapist has names for those. Swallowing a threat hole so it can't attack you from the outside is interjection. You know, it's the thing that exists, the cabinet that exists that never gets open. That's denial.

You're splitting off a part of you. that knows and then treating it as an enemy inside of you because it knows that the thing that I need to believe is true is not actually true. That's dissociation. And we are moving in to an epic of dissociation as a nation. Those are all defenses. Nobody in the institution decided on them. Nobody wrote them down. They formed automatically in response to a threat that the system could not afford to feel exactly the way that they form in an individual. They have formed in the soft sciences of American political sciences. And I don't just mean political science. Economics is political science. Psychology is a political science. Sociology is a political science. Marine biology is

not. So it's allowed to agree on what its purpose is because they know that they study whales. Psychologists are kind of confused about what knowledge is or humanity or the purpose of the study that they're doing. An institution has an unconscious. It has material that it cannot lay. let into awareness. It has protector parts. You know, that fire before anyone in the building finishes the thought. And the defining feature of every defended psyche that I've ever sat with as a therapist is that it experiences the cure as the attack. You have to push people into the shadow. You have to push people into the thing that they think is bad that is inside of them because the things inside of them are not all bad. You know, a patient gets one sentence away

from the true thing. And the whole personality reorganizes it's in a half second. So that the sentence never lands. And the patient's not lying. The patient's not even present for the operation. A committee gets handed, you know, the best PTSD result ever recorded. And the result threatens the ritual that the committee is tasked with doing. And so the committee reorganizes. There's not a villain and there's not stupid people in that room.

They're smarter than me. Every person in the chain can privately see that it's absurd. But it happens anyway because the system is not the sum of the people. It is the rules. It's not people anymore. It's bureaucracy. And that is why I made the psycho history series. Psychology is the eye that America uses to look at itself.

And the eye has blind spots. And the blind spots have a history. And the cycles run through the country's metabolism and surpluses come in and national ego inflates. And the psychology of the era turns grandiose and human potential and the conquest of inner space. And then the surplus goes out and the ego deflates. and psychology turns into coping and risk and deficiency and medication. But it is packaging all of those things as science that doesn't know what it is anymore. Because the mind of the empire tracks the material life of the empire.

And as a Jungian leaning therapist, I'm not a certified analyst, but I like Jung a lot, Carl Jung. I'm, you know, a lot of people think because I like mythology or I study mythology or history or some of these things, that I like, you come in and you say, I'm, I'm just a wounded healer who's a therapist and I'm like, oh, I need to tell you the myth of the wounded healer. I need to tell you the myth of Perseus or your ego's inflating. Let me tell you the myth of the guy that flies too close to the sun. No, that's not what it's about. It's about demythologizing the self. It's about understanding mythology, not to mythologize the self more to make yourself a part of it or to see yourself in the cycles of it.

Some analysts only do that. I disagree. It's about realizing how these myths function and how timeless they are so that we can take them off and be free of them as an individual and as a nation. I don't know. I was watching The Odyssey with my family and it was really interesting. I really liked it. I don't love everything about Christopher Nolan, but I do think his movies are incredible. I just think he can't write dialogue and he can't shoot action.

And then a lot of times, even though he can't write dialogue great, he writes tone and theme perfectly. and that's kind of why people like him. You know, he decides what a movie is about and what its theme is, and then it's tonally and thematically consistent, even when the dialogue can't really contain the themes he's trying to do. And the Odyssey is about the end of empire.

It's about the fall of these people at the end of the Bronze Age. And I don't just mean the book. I mean, like Christopher Nolan's movie. But it's the end of this world. And Nolan's, you know, always talking in that movie, spoiler for a 2,000-year-old play, sorry,

about the, he kind of, there's a, there's a guest host relationship in Greece that is really important. And he calls it the law of Zeus in the movie, but that's kind of an oversimplification. If you ask what the law of Zeus was to an ancient Greek, they'd be like,

well, there's a lot of them. And also none of them, because he's kind of not, anyway, but the, the idea is that, there's this like, you know, trick that they do to make the Trojan War happen to have the Trojan horse.

Everybody knows the story. I'm not going to summarize the Odyssey for you. I'm sorry, I started to do that. And then my eyes are glazing over. But there's this idea that there are these laws that hold the world together that can't really be enforced externally. We have to enforce them internally. And when you get rid of those, your culture doesn't really work anymore. And he's making a lot of this movie about, and the honesty was about the end of the Bronze Age.

I mean, it was about there, you know, there was a city that was like close to Turkey that it wasn't one city probably, but it was a bunch of walled cities and they controlled trade. And then the Greeks got angry and then there's droughts for a long time. And you have all these people, you know, coming in to the Hittite empire and all these empires and they're like pulling them apart. And those IMAX projectors that Nolan uses, those things are like insane. Like the reason that nobody shoots on IMAX anymore is because it was this thing that like one was invented to solve a problem that they had at the Colombian exposition for the World's Fair in 1907 where you had like a whole bunch of 35 millimeter projectors. And they tried to make them overlap, but it doesn't really work because there's like too much light bleed. and so they're like, what if you had a huge piece of film? And somebody tried to make this giant, you know, 70 millimeter film played,

but you can't move film that fast because when you move it that fast, it starts to ripple like it goes like this. Eventually it'll tear itself apart. But the image that it's projecting is not flat anymore. So it defeats the purpose of film. And so the way they solved that problem with this like huge ass piece of film is that they built tiny vacuum, like, you know, apertures all around it that sucked the film flat so that it

couldn't ripple, which means you have to build a vacuum, not only into your projector, but also into your camera, but then in order to get light through that thing, to get the dynamic range that you need and get at the distance that you have to have, you have to have a xenon bulb that is so bright. There are some modern alternatives now, but up until the 80s, they still had these. And some of the new ones still do because they didn't make them anymore. It would burn the celluloid film on fire. So you had to have a plate of water that was constantly circulating, like a water-cooled

PC pumping water across the plate to cool off this enormously hot bulb and then four vacuums sucking the film flat and then the plates of film are huge what you got to ship this thing like the little science documentaries they did were like you know 20 30 minutes long so they were shorter no one has a three hour film so to print these things it's a plate of film that's larger than a car and costs just to make the print then you got to ship it which is two to five thousand and careful it then bring it back and store it just to print the movie for one movie theater to have for one month it's 35 000 film they're insane and when iMac's trying to make these movies the CEO and all the people were like we don't have these anymore and nolan is kind of trying to go to the industry he's

another director like tarantino that's angry that they don't shoot on film anymore and he's like you know this movie's huge it's selling out and you're making all the this money and you've been saying like, oh, digital and AI and all this stuff and people don't go to theaters anymore. They just want to watch on iPads. How do we get people to go back to theaters? I'm giving it to you and you won't do it. And the CEO says we can't. We don't have the technology to make these. We don't have the supply chains to make these. This thing that when I was a kid, I took for granted. I went in and I watched the fish movie at the Denver IMAX, you know, for $12 in 1987. And then, you know, when I watched a ton of them, like 1995, when they opened the, um, Birmingham one, like I saw a ton there.

These giant machines that we take for granted, even though we've come so far and we have this progress and we have all this new science understanding, we can't do it anymore. We just won't. And I, all of that is baked into this weird meta metaphor around, um, or English majors don't come at me. I mean extended metaphor. Sorry. I like metametereter before, though. Um, about how. Christopher Nolan is thinking about this movie and what he's doing because he really is saying this is the end of the Bronze Age at a time where I think that I'm living at the end of the world and we know the things that can save us we know the rules that we should remember and everyone can see it and everybody knows but it's it's going away everyone who in the Odysseus even says it's very on the nose at the end of the film everybody who is going to write is about to die

And so if my story gets preserved at all, it will be through people singing it because they're not going to forget how to sing. You know, the industry knows what it needs to build and it won't do it. It won't start the supply lines. It has to keep going along the rules that it's made. And I don't want to stretch the metaphor too much about projectors, even though if I talk about things that are interesting to me long enough, eventually I've noticed that they all kind of come together and my brain will just do that and I have to have faith that it will land the plane. but the next episode is going to be about oil. And it will be part two of this one. You know, this series is about how everyone who looks at this industry,

many industries, at Empire, at the micro, at the macro right now, they know what they need. And we know the building the world that could save us. We know what it would require and we know it's possible. But culturally, we can't do those things. anymore. And that's a pathology. That's a problem. You know, admitting that you need to rebuild your means of admitting and you're letting the capability to admit things to yourself that you know are true so that you can solve them as problems is something that you no longer can do and so you

have to dissociate. I think that's why people much, much, much smarter than me did everything that I just said in the beginning of this thing. You know, admitting that kept hack. the capability died means that you are admitting that you're not the country that can build things anymore. And so all of a sudden, this belief that it can't be done wins. And that's bad. I think your only choice there, you're probably your best choice is to dissociate a little bit, which is what people are doing now. And that's why Christopher Nolan is making a movie, I think, about the late Bronze Age collapse, you know, how linear B was going to vanish.

And I will follow up with this in part two sometime, hopefully, this week. Thanks for listening. This is Taproot. If you want to check out our website, get Therapy Birmingham.com, that'd be great. There's a lot of things on our blog, a lot of free resources. And if you would like to use the code Taproot at hardy.com, at gethardy.com. There are a micronutrition company that we work with, and I do get a kickback from if you use our code, which is hugely helpful to give me the motivation to continue to make

this show because there's a lot of expenses associated with it, mainly time. I do enjoy doing it, but it's always the last thing that I'm going to get to since it is kind of a money sync right now. But Hardy was a company that I started working with because I heard from a lot of patients that it was super helpful. I heard from a couple other therapists and I looked up their site and, you know, because randomized controlled trials can study micronutrients, there was all this research. And they'd paid for randomized controlled trials on their product. And their research was really good. They even took Canada, which has extremely strict evidence-based practice laws to court. They took the Supreme Court of Canada to court and they said, we have really strong research. We get to say that we can

treat ADHD and symptoms of autism and children. And Canada has to let them do that. It's printed on the bottle. And I was just interviewing them because I like having podcasts on and it was cool. And then they sent me some of the stuff. And I wasn't treating anything. I mean, I took G&C vitamins before, which are not, you know, bad vitamins. I don't think.

Or at least they are expensive. And I took Hardy and I immediately felt a lot better just because I got it for free in the mail. And my wife made fun of me and was like, you're going to be Alex Jones selling these on the radio. And then she started taking them and she really liked them. So that's the randomized controlled trial. I ran in my own house, which I did not control for the placebo effect for. And I think they're good. So if you want to support the show, that'd be a huge help.

We also have a store that has some cool swag and merch. We sell that at cost. But if you're just looking for, you know, one of the cool saying about Carl Jung, like one of the eat your shadow shirts or the white on white, you know, taproot embroidery that we're getting out for fall, the sweatshirt. Check it out. I think they're neat. And I will see you sometime later this week. Thanks for listening. Now tonight's the night when the waters rise, you'll grope in in the dark. And ticket takers count the men can afford the arc. The ticket takers will not board. The ticket takers are tied. For five and change an hour.

to count the passers by. Now they say the sky's the limit, though the sky's about to fall. Down come all them record books, cradle and all. They say before he bid it that the boxer filled no pain, but somewhere there's a gambling man

with a ticket in the rain.