0:00 - Introduction and Community Invitation
0:13 - Morality of Gambling and Making Money
2:37 - Aesthetically Preferable Actions vs. UPB
4:57 - Creating an Actionable System of Morality
8:23 - Value Provided by the Casino to the Gambler
11:00 - Understanding Addiction through Templates
16:18 - Template: Managing Moody Parents' Moods
19:02 - Low Skill Gambling Addictions
19:49 - Template Analysis for Gambling Addicts
25:02 - Exploring Layers of Gambling Addiction
29:48 - Managing Parents' Emotions and Gambling
33:31 - Relationship with Moody Parents and Gambling
In this episode, I delve into the morality of gambling, exploring the dynamics at play beyond mere financial transactions. I begin by outlining the categories of morals—good, evil, nice, bad, and neutral—and how they relate to our actions and interactions. I emphasize the importance of aesthetically preferable actions and how they shape our daily moral decisions.
Moving on, I analyze the concept of addiction and its psychological underpinnings. I introduce the idea of templates, patterns ingrained in us that influence addictive behaviors. I discuss how growing up with moody or volatile parents can create a template where one feels compelled to manage uncertain outcomes and hope for positive results, mirroring the unpredictability of gambling.
Further, I explore the levels of skill in gambling, ranging from low to high skill games. I draw parallels between one’s ability to influence outcomes in gambling and the learned behaviors from childhood when dealing with unpredictable parental moods. This comparison sheds light on why individuals may be drawn to specific types of gambling based on their early experiences with managing uncertain situations.
Moreover, I touch upon the complexities of emotional manipulation within family dynamics and how they can manifest in adult behaviors such as gambling addiction. The episode delves into the intertwined relationships between addiction, control, normalization of exploitative dynamics, and the struggle for independence from these patterns.
In conclusion, I highlight the deep-rooted psychological aspects that drive individuals towards gambling and how these behaviors may stem from unresolved childhood experiences. By dissecting the intricate layers of addictive behaviors, I aim to provoke introspection and deeper reflection on the underlying motives behind seemingly harmless actions like gambling.
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molony from Free Domain. Come join the greatest philosophical community in the history of the known and unknown universe as non-verified by non-experts in a non-objective fashion.
[0:14] FreeDomain.locals.com. All right. Question. What are your thoughts on the morality of gambling and making money from gamblers? It doesn't seem to violate UPB or the non-aggression principle. But to me, it's always seemed scummy and manipulative. Instead of providing any value, these businesses make money off of dumb people's inability to discern probabilities. Well, to say that all gamblers are dumb, that gambling is a tax on mathematical illiteracy, I think is, I mean, obviously true to some degree, but it is missing the central point. Sorry to be annoying right at the beginning. You've missed the central point. Let me make the case and maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. So UPB, there are five categories, two of which are mirrors of the other. So think of them as good, nice, neutral, bad, and evil. Good, nice, neutral, bad, and evil, right? So the good mirrors the evil, the nice mirrors the bad, and neutral doesn't mirror because, you know, zero is not the opposite of any number, right? So, good is, say, respecting property rights. Evil is stealing, killing, raping, you know, violations of persons and property. So, that's good versus evil.
[1:32] Nice versus bad, it's nice to be on time. It's bad to be late as a whole, right? It's not evil. Like, you can't shoot someone for being late, right? So, it's nice. This is what I refer to as aesthetically preferable actions. So, you know, reasonably polite, you know, not yelling obscenities in front of children or whatever it is, right? I mean, you can't shoot people for doing that, but it's not nice or good. Being relatively diplomatic when you approach people and so on, right? A boss yelling abuse is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, but it sure ain't nice and it's pretty bad all around, right? right? So aesthetically preferable actions are those which can be universalized, like it's possible for people to be on time, right? It's possible for people all around the world to be on time, but it's not enforced on others. Nobody's holding you at gunpoint, making you wait for someone who's late. You can choose to leave at any time, so it doesn't violate the initiation of violence, but it's preferable to be on time.
[2:37] And that's because we like it when people are on time with us and therefore we should try to be on time with others. So just as a whole, right, there's good versus evil, nice versus bad. Bad is not the same as evil. It's bad behavior is not evil.
[2:54] And then there's neutral, morally neutral actions. Should I go to a cat cafe today? There's no moral question around that, right? It's just, you know, do I like red as opposed to blue in the color spectrum? Well, there's no moral evaluation of that. So good versus evil, better versus worse, or nice versus bad, polite versus rude, whatever you want to call it, right? Aesthetically preferable, but not UPB, right? Just as a quick reminder of how UPB works. Because the majority of morals that we deal with are not UPP, right? The big questions are how do I handle an amoral or negative moral situation in a way that is most productive, most conducive to the spread of virtue? virtue. If some woman says, I know that so-and-so's girlfriend is having an affair, those are the kind of moral things that we're more likely to deal with, or a very aggressive boss or an employee who's withholding information that's really, really needed from the organization that pays her, whatever it is. So these are the, we, like 99% of our moral decisions are in.
[4:10] Nice versus bad, in the realm of aesthetically preferable actions, not good versus evil. We don't wake up in the morning and say, should I rob a convenience store today? Should I assault someone? I mean, this is not where we make most of our actual moral decisions. And so, if I were only to have in a system of morality extremes of good and evil that 99.99% of the population, at least that would listen to my broadcast, would not ever have to make a decision about in their life, well, that would be sort of pointless, right? Again, diet books for thin people. If you only talk about good and evil, evildoers don't care about virtue, and good people aren't tempted by evil.
[4:58] So what's the point of a moral system that only talks about rape, theft, assault, and murder, other than universalizing them in the face of, obviously, institutional violations to the contrary, which we can't really achieve, right? We can't achieve that, right? We can't stop national debts, right, against whatever it is, which would be theft from the unborn, right?
[5:18] So I want to create a system of morality that's actionable, which means I have to include almost all the moral challenges that almost all decent people struggle with, right? Which is why people don't call in and say, I want to become a master thief. What should I do? Right? That's not what people call in about. They call in and say, well, I'm being kind of exploited or somebody is treating me disrespectfully or people won't let me tell the essential truth about my origin story or my family is still putting me down or my girlfriend is inconstant and volatile, because that's where.
[5:59] Our actual moral decisions are. It would be like training a family doctor only in battlefield medicine, right? Well, I mean, I suppose someone could stagger into the doctor's office once or twice over the course of his career with some battlefield-style wound. It just happened to get stabbed, you know, three paces from the doctor's office and just, but that's not what 99.9999% of his patients are not going to be dealing with battlefield injuries. Injuries so upb is like the battlefield injuries of morality but aesthetically preferable actions tell the truth you can't shoot someone for lying right i mean you you can't use violence against people who are simply lying but truth versus falsehood is very important in our lives, so aesthetically it's aesthetically preferable it's good it's polite it's nice it's better to tell the truth and not being allowed to tell the truth or being punished for telling the truth or people who invite you to tell the truth and then punish you for telling the truth, well that's that's where most of our moral decisions lie so it is in the realm of integrity, not virtue right if we have a value called telling the truth and then we have core relationships say with destructive parents that in which we are not allowed to tell the truth or in fact punished for telling you were gaslit and attacked and punished for telling the truth. Well, that's pretty important, right? That's pretty important.
[7:25] So I just wanted to point that out. Now, gambling, you say they don't provide any value. The gambler does not provide, sorry, the casino. The gambler is providing value to the casino. We understand that's giving him the money, usually. But the casino is also providing value to the gambler. Right so the question is what value does the casino provide to the gambler right what value now of course you know the the odds of winning and so on i get that i get that but the gambler is doing something very specific so let's let's say the gambler we say the gambler wants money He wants money for gambling, right? He wants to make bets and make money. Okay. Well, that's just one of the many ways that he could get money.
[8:23] I mean, moral, in terms of it's not theft, right? Assuming that the casino is not cheating and the gambler is not cheating, it's not theft, right? So if the gambler wants $10,000, he can go to the casino and put his money on red 29 or play the blackjack table or play a poker or spin the wheel or whatever he's going to be doing. He wants $10,000. So the casino is going to give him the $10,000 if he happens to win. Right.
[8:51] So, the casino is just one of the places he can get the $10,000. Of course, the other place he can get the $10,000, just for, you know, there's lots of places, but the most simple is he can get a job, or he can work overtime, or he can create a side hustle and sell his handcrafted earrings on Etsy or whatever, right? So, there's ways he can get the $10,000. He can go to his parents and say, here's what I need the money for. He can take out a loan. He can take out a second mortgage. That's another kind of loan, I guess. But he can get the $10,000 any number of ways, but he chooses to get the $10,000 in the, and it's not even the least effort, right? You say, well, if you've got to work, you know, if he makes $100 an hour, he's got to work 100 hours to make $10,000, right? Well, that's a lot. And so, but if he goes to his parents and say, you know, you guys have some assets, I really need $10,000 if you could see a way clear, whatever, blah, blah, blah, right? Okay, well, that's actually less effort than gambling, right? He could come up with a whole bunch of business ideas and then sell them to his entrepreneurial friends for $10,000. That might be, if he's very creative or knows something about this, then that might be a whole lot less effort.
[10:14] Than going to a casino which you know you have to put in quite a lot of hours to walk out with ten thousand dollars right because there's ups and downs and so on right so then the question is why does he want to go to the casino right what value is the casino providing to the gambler now we can't just say gambling because that's tautological right what what value does the gambler find in gambling? Well, gambling, well, that doesn't add anything. It's just tautological. It's not money because there's lots of ways you can get to 10 grand. So what value is the casino providing? So to understand addiction, and again, this is just my personal opinion. This is not science, not facts, just my opinion. Maybe it's true, maybe it's false.
[11:00] But let me introduce you to the idea of templates. Templates.
[11:06] So, in order for something to be addictive, there has to be a template. And I'm talking about not just a mere physical addiction, but a psychological addiction. There has to be a template. In other words, it has to feel both familiar and necessary prior to performing the activity that you end up addicted to. And again, I'm not talking about purely physical addictions. I'm talking about the psychological addictions and gambling is more of a psychological addiction because a physical addiction is when you know the the opiate joy juice flows into your veins removes all of your unhappiness and makes you feel like a normal human being for the first time in your existence so that's a physical addiction but a psychological addiction, would be something where the drug is not delivered from something external right so alcohol changes It changes your chemistry. Gambling does not. The gambler is not injected with a substance. A pornography addiction is not. Your computer monitor is not injecting something into your veins, right? So we're talking about a psychological addiction. And, of course, you're still getting the dopamine. I get all of that. But for psychological addictions, there has to be a template of some kind.
[12:21] So what is the template for gambling? Why does the gambling addict end up as a gambling addict? There has to be something that's primed. Because, of course, there are tons of people who really get into gambling who don't end up becoming addicts. They enjoy gambling. They may even gamble quite a bit, but they don't become addicts.
[12:45] So the template that i believe is the case for the gambling addicts if you look at gambling what is what is going on well and there's many different kinds of gambling some are pure chance some are more skill but almost always the casino the dealer and so on has more skill like if you're playing a blackjack table the blackjack dealer has gone through all of the mathematical mathematical probabilities and been deeply and thoroughly trained on how to take money from you and if you consistently win you will a lot of times be accused of stealing is cheating counting cards or whatever and you will be kicked out of the casino because the casino doesn't want you to consistently win they don't mind of course occasional winners because that's the bait that draws them in draws the gambler in so that the casino can make a lot of money from them from the the gambler so of course occasional winnings are there but if you consistently win i'm no expert and i've spent very little time in casinos but my understanding is that if you keep winning, they'll they'll pay you if they suspect you of gambling maybe you'll have a bad day but you'll be banned from the casino if you winning all the time or win too much.
[14:02] So let's talk about the game of medium skill, of medium skill. Blackjack, I would consider a game of medium skill. It's not totally random, but it's really just mathematical odds. But the mathematical odds in blackjack are far less complex than the mathematical odds in something like poker, which I would consider high skill, right? Low skill would be, you know, dice rolling. A low-to-no skill would be dice rolling or roulette wheels and so on. There's no skill involved in winning. You say, oh, well, no, I work the numbers, I work the odds and so on. But there's no particular skill in where the ball lands in the roulette wheel. There's no particular, if you spin the wheel, it's just where it lands, right? There's no particular skill. So we've got high skill, medium skill, and low skill. So let's talk about the medium skill first. So let me give you a template, see if this makes sense. So in the template, it goes something like this. If you grow up with a parent who is moody, then you need to work very hard to try and keep that parent in a good mood.
[15:13] Now, some parents respond better or worse to your attempts to keep them in a good mood or to get them in a good mood. So let's say you've got an abusive father. He comes home. He's had a really bad day, and he's stomping and stomping around. He's looking for problems and so on.
[15:31] Now, maybe you just hide so that you don't give him an excuse. But then you give him the excuse of, you know, why are you hiding from me? What's the matter with you? Come and talk to me, right? Whatever, right? And he'll get mad at you for not being there. Maybe you try to engage him in a way that's sort of positive. You know, I sort of think of, it's more of a depressive story, but people like Robert Williams with a depressed mother who becomes a sort of performing dopamine delivery dance monkey fun head boy in order to try and keep his mother from crashing into a life-destroying depression. depression.
[16:05] So, do you as a child, have you developed any skills or do you believe that you can do something to alter the negative or dangerous mind state of your parent?
[16:19] And this is a big debate my brother and I had when we were growing up. It was an endless debate. My brother would say, let's clean up the place so mom doesn't get mad. And I would say, it doesn't matter what we do. If she's in a bad mood, she'll just, doesn't matter, right? Well, let's not give her any any excuses. Well, she doesn't need excuses. Like this is back and forth, right? So if you had a dangerous, and dangerous doesn't just mean abusive, it can mean neglectful, depressed, it can mean any variety of things. Or even if the parent is not abusive to you directly, but if they're in a bad mood, they go to drink and you've got to try and get them to not drink. Because when they don't drink, they can get up and go to work and provide for the family and take care of you and all of that, right? So do you have, as a child, any ability to alter the destructive moods of moody parents?
[17:10] It's an important question. Now, if your parent is just going to be moody no matter what you do, then you are in a passive position of hoping for a good outcome that you can't do anything about. You are in the passive position of hoping for a good outcome that you can't do anything about. And that's the low skill games. I hope, I hope, I hope that there will be a good outcome, but there's nothing. I'm forced to play the game in a sense, because you're forced to be with the parent. But if the parent doesn't respond to any of your exhortations or preferences or protestations or jokes or, you know, encouragements or entertainment, if your parent doesn't respond to any of that, then you just got to cross your fingers and hope that your parent.
[17:54] In a good mood or finds their way to a good mood or fights off the bad mood or something like that, but you're kind of passive and trapped. Well, that's you staring at a wheel that's spinning that you can't do anything about. You're forced to play, right? So gamblers feel this compulsion to play, but there's nothing you can do. You're just trapped in a situation where you have to cross your fingers and desperately hope for a good outcome. Well, why would you have that template? Why would you be in a situation where being trapped in a sense by your addiction, being trapped trapped in a situation where you can only passively hope and pray like hell for a good outcome, why would that be a template? Well, it has to come from somewhere, and maybe it comes from a priest or a teacher or something like that, but most likely, almost certainly, it comes from being around a moody, dangerous parent, and there's nothing you can do to change that parent's mood for the better. You just have to hope that somehow there's a good outcome, that the parent and shakes it off or time passes or, you know, they drink so much that they pass out or something. So you're just, you're passive and you're desperate for a positive outcome, but there's nothing you can do about it, but you're trapped in the situation, right?
[19:02] So that's low skill gambling addictions, right? That's betting on the ponies, right? Betting on horses or greyhounds or what are cockfighting in the sort of immoral sense. I mean, you desperately want the horse to win, and you're right, but there's nothing you can do about it.
[19:22] Trapped in the game, right? So that's stuck in a house with a bad parent who does not respond in any way, shape, or form to your exhortations or responds negatively to everything you try to do, in which case doing nothing is the best strategy. So you're paralyzed, you're trapped, and you're desperately hoping for a good outcome, but you can't do anything to alter the outcome. So that's having an addiction to no skill gambling, right? If it makes sense.
[19:49] Now, Now, I can do the rest of them, of course, much more quickly. The more impact you can have on the outcome of a moody parent's negative moods, the more skill you're going to be drawn to, and there's a bit of an intelligence thing here for sure, the more skill you're going to be drawn to in gambling. Because you've developed all of these skills, I really, really, I'm trapped in the game, which is the addiction. I desperately want a positive outcome, and there's something I can do about it. So you're going to be drawn to higher and higher skilled gambling games, the more that you were able to affect the outcome of a negative parent's dangerous mood when you were little. You're still trapped in the game, that's the addiction, but there's something you can do to affect the outcome. And so managing a situation, applying your skill in order to produce a positive outcome, that's got to come from childhood. It's a template.
[20:47] It's a template. I desperately need a positive outcome. I'm helpless. Well, that's a zero skill game.
[20:54] Like the game of war, right? Which is the higher car. It's not even really a game. It's no strategy, right? right? So that's one, right? And then all the way up to the most sophisticated games, poker or whatever it is. I don't know what the most complex gambling games are, but I assume it's something like that, where the number of variables and the amount of skill has a significant impact on the outcome.
[21:16] So you are addicted, which means you're trapped in the game and you're desperately flexing your wits in order to produce a positive outcome. Well, that's a dangerous dangerous parent who can be managed. There's some skill that you can bring to bear. Now, you can't solve the problem, you can't fix the parent, but you can at least manage or ameliorate some aspects of the negative or dangerous moods. So for me, I did not believe that there was anything I could do to change my mother's bad moods. And I actually, this is a sort of a point of pride for me when I was a kid. It was a point of pride and a sort of deep and significant point of pride for me as a kid, which was this.
[22:01] Even if I could, I wouldn't. Even if I could, I wouldn't. I'm not going to pretend that my mother's moods are mine to manage, because that would be to take responsibility for her moods, and that would be to take responsibility away from her for her moods. And it was really just a point of pride. And I knew it was going to be tough. But frankly, I would be damned if I would try and fix my mother's moods. I'm not taking ownership for that crap. I'm not making myself responsible for that terrible behavior. It's her job. It's her responsibility. And this came from basically, I mean, basically kind of an FU to the moodiness. I find moody people quite exhausting. And also, it was dangerous to me to take on my mother's moods. And also, she held me responsible for my life. Right? When I was a kid, if I did something wrong, she would hold me responsible. So I'm like, okay, well, if you have the direct principle of self-ownership and personal responsibility for little kids who are, you know, five, six, seven years old, then I'll be damned, damned if I withhold from you responsibility for what you're doing when you're 35. Like, no way. I'm not taking that on.
[23:21] And so when I went to a, I did a bit of gambling, I mean, you know, dimes and quarters at parties when I was a teenager, but I was never drawn to the high skilled games. I was drawn to the low skilled games. I hope for a good outcome. There's nothing I can do to affect it. And look, please understand, I'm not saying this is proof. I'm just saying this is where this stuff has come from. The people I knew as kids who believed that they could do something about their parents' negative mood, if they got into gambling, they tended to be drawn towards the higher skilled games. And I felt that template click in when I was in low skilled games, that wanting a good outcome and not lifting a finger to change to be able to affect it, that felt terribly familiar. Familiar and i have to if it's not like some big demon i have to battle but i don't i don't gamble because i can very much see how that could become a thing right you could call it repetition compulsion i would call it the simon the boxer analogy from my book real-time relationships free domain.com books but there's a template something clicks into place that feels terribly familiar.
[24:34] Managing your emotional responses to an outcome you cannot affect has to be present in your heart, mind, and soul before it clicks into place as something both familiar and desirable, when you gamble. I want a positive outcome. I have no small, medium, or a large capacity to affect that outcome, which means I'm drawn to a low, small, medium, or large skilled or high-skilled games.
[25:03] But that is only two layers down. We have one more layer to go. One more layer of the chocolate pound cake. Chocolate pounding because my mother assaulted me. See? Get it? Hey! It's been a while. I can joke. So.
[25:17] The other level. When you can't really control the outcome of someone's moodiness, all you can do is manage your own responses to that moodiness. And you see, of course, we know this because people who grow up with moody parents will often end up with moody boyfriends or girlfriends or husbands or wives or whatever, because you can't manage someone's moodiness. You can give yourself the illusion that you can manage it, but you can't fundamentally manage it. Because if you could could manage it you could solve it right a successful diet ends right you lose the weight you stop dieting at least as much and if you're constantly dieting you know gaining and losing, 10 25 pounds or whatever if you're constantly dieting constantly gaining and losing the weight your diet is not successful and you can't do anything to manage the moods of your parents.
[26:10] Because if you don't try to manage them at all well then you're accepting that you can't do do anything to manage the moods of your parents. The more you try to manage the moods of your parents, the more they will blame you for being in bad moods and expect you to fix their moodiness, which means they never gain any self-control, which means you are then forever and ever, are men going to have to manage their moodiness. It's like a kid, you know, like when you're very little and you have chocolates around or whatever is your particular crack candy of choice. Before you develop self-restraint, before you understand calories and eating well and all of that, Before any of that, you will just eat as much candy as you can get your hands on, right? So it's up to the parents to manage the food intake of young children because they cannot manage their own food intake. They simply go for what tastes best, right?
[26:59] You don't have the chocolate in the house you put it in a place that's inaccessible and you manage and figure out what your children are eating and have them or guide them steer them pretty directly towards better food choices and of course you model self-restraint in your food choices so that, your children grow up being able to manage their own food right i mean i know this sort of direct direct experience. So the children cannot manage their own food choices, so it's up to the parents to manage those food choices for them and grow them to the point where the children will manage their own food choices so that the parents, when the parents are 60 and the children are 30, the parents aren't still telling the children what they should or shouldn't eat and the children aren't overweight. They've internalized, you know, reasonably healthy eating habits, if that makes sense.
[27:49] But parents are supposed to manage their own emotions, as adults are supposed to manage their own emotions. If they offload that job, right, I'm in a bad mood because my kids did something bad or negative, or I'm in a bad mood, it must be because of the kids. And it's up to my kids to make my mood better. Right? Big hugs. And now I understand bad moods can be ameliorated by other people, giving you, you know, comfort or whatever. Your dog dies and puts you in a bad mood or a sad mood, and then other people can give you comfort, and that helps. So I'm not saying that we don't have anything to do with each other's emotions or anything like that. But in particular, negative emotions are not to be managed by your children, right? That's a horrible, horrible job. That's like you going to daycare and they drive it to work for you, right? That's just crazy, especially when they're like five, right? So your kids are not supposed to be managing your or negative emotions, and they're not supposed to be managing your emotions at all.
[28:48] Kids are drawn to manage negative emotions because they want to stay alive and they don't want to get abandoned and they don't want their children to be paralyzed or to fall apart right i've got two particular examples of this children managing their parents emotions one is of course k with her mother lady barbara in just poor and the other is tom with his mother in my novel almost most that they take on the burden of their mother's emotions and try to prop them up and keep them going as a form of survival or self-protection or to put it another way of course the children who weren't successful at ameliorating the negative emotions of their parents had less of a chance of survival so those genes would have gotten weeded out those preferences would have gotten weeded out over the course of society so you can't manage your parents emotions, and it never fixes never never works in the long run you just do it as a sort of survival survival mechanism in the short run and of course if your parents make you responsible.
[29:48] For their emotions then you reject that responsibility at your peril so you know my mother would blame me for being in a bad mood and i would kind of nod and whatever right but i mean i never really believed it and i always held her in great contempt for such a pathetic cowardly move yes yes your life is a total mess but it's me at the age of eight who's the the problem yeah yeah i'm the kid is the problem not any of the choices you're making as a sovereign adult yeah i mean it's just it's it's so contemptible it's just pathetic right and you know of course you're not responsible for your parents moods or choices or whatever my daughter is not responsible for my moods or choices right so so you're not managing your parents because you can't do that you you can pretend and you can play this game but it never ends right And once you accept that it never ends, you will stop doing it, right? If you pretend that you can manage your parents' emotions, once you accept that you can't do that...
[30:50] Then it will end. At least you pretending you can support your parents' emotions. If you have a sort of emotional terrorist or an emotional bully as a parent, then, you know, you'll appease them when you're younger. And then when you get older, you probably get kind of tired of that and just tell them the truth, stop managing their emotions. And then you realize, of course, that they've not learned anything about managing their own emotions. In fact, it's gotten worse because they've offloaded the, forcefully offloaded the job onto you. And so that's a huge crisis for the quote relationship right managing other people is not a relationship it's uh appeasement and manipulation and survival because it's a predator prey relationship so what you're doing of course is you are managing your emotions of anxiety at having pathetically immature parents if you know if these are the parents right not all parents are blah blah blah right you're managing your feelings of anxiety and fear at having extremely immature parents.
[31:49] Moody, volatile, child-blaming, petty, self-righteous, whatever's going on, right? And, you know, the day that you wake up and look at your parent and say, well, they're just a toddler with a driver's license, that's a pretty alarming moment, right? And your life changes at that point when you can't look at your parents as authority figures, but as dangerous, volatile, immature people that you have to constantly manage, because as a five or 10 year old, you're far more mature than they are. I mean, that's a pretty chilling moment if those are the kind of parents you have, and a lot of parents like that. So most people pretend that they can manage their parents' moods because their parents demand that, and also because it gives them the illusion of control. It gives them the illusion of control that actually enslaves them. And a gambling addiction is giving you the illusion of control that you're going to get more money, but it actually enslaves you. So it comes from trying to get a benefit through manipulation, trying to get a benefit through amoral skill. Well, that's trying to get your parents in a better mood based upon your manipulations. And for kids to manipulate their parents into a better mood or avoid a negative mood, I don't mean that manipulation in a bad way. You know, that's manipulation like, you know, climbing a tree and getting some fruit is manipulating the fruit, right? You're manipulating it with your fingers, right?
[33:13] Bad thing it's a survival thing and no survival thing is a bad thing it's tragic sometimes what you need to do to survive but survival is in general a good thing evolutionarily speaking, can't say it's a bad thing that's why we're all here i mean you can but it's just kind of ridiculous wishing things that were wishing that things were otherwise in evolution is kind of wishing for non-existence.
[33:31] In a way so gambling addicts what are they there for they're there there to continue the relationship with moody and abusive parents so that they can continue to normalize that relationship and not question it let me say this again why are gambling addicts at the casino well it's to normalize various degrees of perceived control over outcomes desperately wanted good mood of appearance while having no real control and that no real control troll shows up in the addiction so in a sense in a very real sense the adult children are ordered to go to the casino by the parents so that the moodiness of the parents never becomes denormalized because now the children the adult children are stuck in a situation where they're desperate for.
[34:26] A good outcome that they can have little effect on the outcome and to have a good effect on the the outcome is to end the relationship right so in other words if you consistently win you'll be banned from the casino because they'll assume you're cheating again i don't know for sure it's a rumor i mean whether that's a fact or not but i assume that a casino would not be overly keen on somebody who keeps winning you know a hundred thousand dollars every night they probably wouldn't have that person stick around for too long so the relationship means that you can't win if you win you end the relationship and so if you win independence and you stop taking responsibility for your immature parents' emotions.
[35:03] The relationship would end in its current form, right? So you understand that the gambling relationship, the casino or the, and by casino, I mean, you know, whatever, whoever's hosting the gambling, that's a direct mirror of the immature, manage my emotion, parental relationship.
[35:21] So what is the gambler really after? He's after continuing the illusion of having a relationship with people who exploit him and demand that he manage their emotions. Or inflict their moods upon him, no matter what he does. So it's the normalization of the exploitive relationship with the parents that drives someone to the gambling, which is another way of saying that the gambling addict is so used to managing uncertain outcomes and trying to get a benefit, that there's a sick familiarity. That's the template. There's a sick familiarity with regards to the gambling. Managing your anxiety at your own helplessness, which was inflicted on you by your parents and then gets transferred to the dealer at the blackjack table or the roulette guy or the poker dealer or whatever, right? So I hope that helps and I would certainly be interested in your feedback. We could do this for a variety of addictions, but the psychological ones are generally better, right? All right. So I hope that helps and love you guys so much for giving me the opportunity to do this very important and very good work. And thank you again so much, freedomain.com. If you'd like to help out the show, I'd really appreciate that. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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