TRANSCRIPT
*Transcripts are auto-generated and reviewed for accuracy, but there may be some errors in punctuation or words. Listen to the podcast at https://rabbidaniellapin.libsyn.com/ for clarification
The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Find Out If You Are Susceptible to Subtle Internet Suggestivitis
Date: 09/08/2025 Length: 00:38:06
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi reveal how the world really works. And I'm so happy you're with us, and so happy that so many of you have been spreading the word about the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show and the entire Happy Warrior community. So thank you very much indeed for your active and enthusiastic evangelism of the show. Much appreciated. And I teach the four steps of the creative process, the four Cs, connect, communicate, collaborate and create. Connect, communicate, collaborate, create. Now one of the ways to see the roadmap is to think of the most creative thing that a person can do. Ultimately, the most creative thing that a person can do is have a child and raise their child. And that is a road map. It is a hyper model of what creativity is so you know, for instance, that it takes two people for something creative to happen, and those two people mustn't be exactly the same. They have to be fundamentally different in important ways. Otherwise they don't each bring a valuable element to the connecting and the communicating and the collaborating so that they can create and so in in this, in many other ways, we can view the process of bringing a child into the world as a model for all forms of creativity. What another form of creativity is, is when two people, a man and a woman, or two men or two women decide to start a business, well that's going to bring creativity. It literally makes money. It doesn't move money from some people to other people. It actually creates value, and that translates into money. And so you need for two people to collaborate. You need them to first of all, connect and communicate. But for that to happen productively, and it has to be two people who actually do talk to each other. So again, you think about it, what distinguishes a rape from a seduction. And the answer, I think you will agree, is speech. Speech. That's what it is. And so whether you regard the end of the game the birth of a child, or whether you regard the end of the game the conception of the child, or even if you regard the end of the game as the seduction. The bottom line is that it only happens when a man and woman converse with one another. It doesn't happen if they have email communications. It happens when they face one another. And the magic of human connection occurs there and then, and sometimes it's superficial acceptance or superficial rejection, and sometimes it's a more mature conversation, and it moves from phase to phase. But it doesn't happen with email. And the lesson from this, obviously, is that for creation to occur, there is almost always a seller and a prospect. Now, what very often happens is that those roles switch. The seller is the person making the proposal, the person who has the idea he wants to get across, and the prospect is the person you want to have that air. But very often, the prospect turns around and says something that makes him or her the seller, and says, Well, I wouldn't be interested in a new Cadillac, but I might be interested in a new Hyundai and the all of a sudden, the dealer, who was the salesperson, now becomes the prospect, because he's being he is being influenced and persuaded to go in a different direction from what he had previously thought. So he there is still the potential for something creative happening at the end of it, namely, the transfer of a car from one person to the other, and the transfer of money from the second person to the first person. So creativity is almost always the result of a transaction between human two human beings and that transaction of. Almost always involves an idea that is transferred from one to the other. And it might be a man trying to get to know a woman with a prospect of becoming a friend of hers. And it might be a financial transaction. It could also be a parent trying to get across an idea to a child, and so, you know, the parent does not want to turn it into a confrontational row. The parent doesn't want it to turn into a fight or an argument. But at the same time, there's something the parent wants. And anybody who's had children who've hit the teenage years, knows exactly what this is all about, and you know whether it is that you want them to tidy or whatever it is. I mean, I could come up with 20 different examples as you could, and every parent knows that there have been more successful ways of selling an idea to your child, and you've probably also had less successful ways of selling an idea to your child. And one of the things you know again, is you do not try and persuade or influence your child in a certain direction that is important to you by email has to be in person and so right there and then. There's an important principle here, which is that you really as a person who wants to influence, a person who wants to sell, a person who wants to lead, and leadership means right influencing other people's thoughts and actions. And children do that to parents. Parents do to children. Sales professionals do it to prospects and so on and so forth. And there are many, many forms of it, but it's useful to know that email is not helpful in this phone, much better than email, personal contact, face to face, ultimately, the best a handwritten card sent in the regular mail, better than email. And again, one can discuss these things as to why and where for but the reason I mention them is because I'm interested chiefly in the practical aspect of these things, for people really understanding and knowing how to effectively convey an idea convincingly and persuasively. And for that to that end, this Wednesday night. I am actually going to be teaching a master class for a few people. That is going to occur at 5pm Eastern Time. No, I'm sorry, other way around eight, 8pm Eastern Time, 5pm Pacific Time, and it's going to be what we've called it is persuade with purpose, sell influence and prosper with conviction and confidence. And this is a set of principles that enable you to share your skills, your products, your convictions, your ideas, without being pushy or without feeling manipulative, doing it and in an authentic and ethical kind of a way, and that's what I'm going to be teaching so for instance, just to give you an idea of something that you may not have done, I'm sure you've had to sell in one form or another. You may well not be a professional salesperson, but you may have had to
Daniel Lapin 8:56
sell a relative on holding family Thanksgiving at a certain place, your home or somebody else's, and people aren't fully on board, and you got to sell them if there's 1000 different ways in which each and every one of us participates in a full and complete life as a sales professional. And part of a negotiation, part of a conversation, part of a discussion, is the ability to easily and comfortably switch between the launcher, the projector of the idea, and the recipient of the idea. Here I hear what you say. I'm now going to listen to it process. Let me come back to you with this. I Okay. Switch, switch, enroll, and if you know what you're doing and you are an effective leader, then you drive the conversation inexorably. I'm not a very knowledgeable fishing person at all, but I do have a little bit of experience, very little, and I do understand the basic idea. I. Which is that there's a fish on the other end of the line. Now, if I try and just reel it in, using my superior strength, because after all that fish, if I'm lucky, weighs eight pounds, and me, I weigh a whole lot more than eight pounds, so I'm obviously able to use my strength. But if I do that, there's a very strong possibility that the line will break. And so whenever I see an opportunity, when the line is a little slack, I reel it in, and I gain a few yards of line, and then the fish starts struggling from that new position. And I may even have to let out a little bit of line, but sooner or later, because of the way the fish swims and moves, I'll be able to reel in some more line, and maybe I'll put just a little bit of pressure on him. And then what happens is, when he responds to that, Oh, I get a chance to reel it in. So at the at any given stage during the man fish combat, it's not altogether clear who's winning, if you only look at it during a particular instant, but if you watch a video, not a snapshot, you'll see that inexorably, I'm bringing the fish closer and closer to my boat, closer and closer. Might take a while, but if you're watching a video rather than a snapshot, you know who's winning, and one always prefers to use a video rather than a snapshot, depiction a snapshot of any one instance of my fishing struggle, sees me struggling and sees the fish struggling, and there's absolutely no indication of who's getting the better of it. And so similarly, again, in understanding negotiation that is often actually the way the dynamic really works. And so if you are interested in looking into my master class this Wednesday night, at 8pm Eastern Time, New York time, and 5pm Los Angeles time. And you can plug in wherever you happen to be Wednesday night, September 10, just to make sure that the week we're talking about September the 10th. And it's called persuade with purpose, and it is how to sell and influence and prosper with conviction and confidence. It's how to make a compelling offer, whether you're selling products or services, solutions or especially ideas, and how to overcome the spiritual and emotional barriers that block many of us from communicating powerfully. I'll just give you one little idea that's one, one of many, many, many ideas. One little thing that I find, and I when I ask people who consult me on this, or they may be coaching clients, I find people don't do this. I say that what you need to do is rehearse the critical point so you know whether it's, you know, getting your teenager to clean her room, or whether it's getting your customer to buy your product, or whether it's getting your boss to give you a raise, you need to write down and rehearse the critical lines the ask. And the reason for that is because we are all born with an inbuilt discomfort about asking for anything and what you do if you haven't prepared it, if you haven't rehearsed it, then when you reach the critical words, and you know, here's what it's going to cost you, or here's what I need you to do, or here's what I'm asking for, what happens is your Words slow down. Subconsciously, you do this without any intent, and even worse than that, in your intonation, there comes invariably, a change in the tonal quality of your ask. That's that telegraphs a message that you're open to negotiation a telegraph message that well, you're not altogether sure that this is going to happen, and the surest way to overcome that is rehearsing and planning it carefully. So that is a little bit about the course that we'll be studying together on this Wednesday night, September 10, 8pm New York time, 5pm Los Angeles time and more information. Simply, all you have to do is go to we happywarriors.com and look out for the opportunity to. Join the master class on persuading with purpose, right? Just go to we happy warriors.com and if you are a member of the happy warriors community, you'll be very familiar with that, and you will be able to go ahead and register and reserve your seat. And I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday night, September the 10th, when we study together how to persuade with purpose. Looking forward to that very much indeed. And what I want to tell you about now is that I came across an article in one of the oldest online magazines. It used to be called the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington created. She used to be married to Michael Huffington, who was a, I don't remember if he was in the House of Representatives or if he was in the Senate, but he was a politician and a businessman, and they eventually, they, they did break up at Arianna Huffington, a brilliant woman whom I'd got to know reasonably. In fact, she was, she was in our home. She visited us at our home. I do believe, and I know I visited her at hers in Washington, DC, and she created this thing called the Huffington Post, which I think she's long since sold to financial interests. And at any rate, I it's been around for a long time. It's influential. You know, certain kinds of people read it. They've got a certain demographic. But I came across an article which essentially said, here's how to find out. I think it was six questions to answer. Will tell you if you were raised by narcissistic parents. Okay, fine. And I go through it, and I'm very intrigued, because it reminded me more than anything else, of something I hadn't I haven't seen for 20 years, maybe, maybe more. But the Scientology organization used to have a quiz that you could take, and this was widely advertised, and I'm sure it brought them many, many, many people. It was a quiz that would show you if you have need of Scientology and the lessons and programs that the organization offered. And I was always highly entertained by the quiz, because it had questions like, Have you ever walked into a party and felt that you were invisible. Hello, yes, has anybody not, I mean, who hasn't had the experience of, you know, feeling that nobody knows I'm there yet and things like, you know, have you ever felt uncertainty about starting a new job. And at any rate, any normal human being would, would really score 10 out of 10. I mean, all those questions, yeah, that's me, absolutely me. Oh, okay, I need Scientology. And so it goes. So that's what reminded me, as I looked at this thing, the sort of questions were have, did you ever feel that your parents were judging you on the basis of your achievements? Well, if your parents ever asked you, as mine frequently, did you know, why did I get a D in school instead of, never mind, an A, how about a B, right? Oh yeah, yes. Maybe they were judging me on my achievements. Okay, check that one. Another question was, have you ever had a situation of tension and resentment and competitiveness with a sibling?
Daniel Lapin 18:57
Yes, you know anyone other than a single child is going to say yes to that, because, of course, there are times you can think back to your childhood when Yeah, right. At any rate, what's going to happen is you go through this quiz and you quickly find that yeah, according to them, your parents were narcissists. And then towards the end, what it says is, and if that's the case, if your parents were narcissists, as this quiz demonstrably establishes, well, what you need to do is you've got to work on separating yourself from your parents you Know become estranged, because you must stop the toxic narcissism from going on another generation. And I know that any organization or book or article or person who recommends that people separate from their parents, I know that not only is that five. False and evil, but it is also an absolute racket. Why do I say that? Because the fact is that we human beings were created, or, if you prefer, evolve through a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution. Whatever you want is fine. I'm a very easy going guy, whatever you want, but we, who I say, created. We human beings, were created with a relationship with our parents. Now even animals have a relationship, at least with their mothers. I've had Susan, and I have had a pair of doves nesting outside one of our windows for the last few weeks, and it's sort of late in the year for this to be happening. I'm recording this going into the second week of September 2025 and so we watched the doves build the nest. And apparently doves mate. I think permanently. I'm not knowledgeable, but we found ourselves intrigued. And then they laid, she laid two eggs, and they took turns sitting on them, and one of the eggs hatched, and they sat with the baby bird and fed it. And they switched off, Mama dove and Papa dove kept on switching. One went off, getting food, coming back, and then the other one would sit with a bird. And the bird grew very quickly, and within less than two weeks, it took out. It was gone from the nest. It flew off. And then the other one was a bit of a slow learner. It took, you know, it took much longer. It just, it was like the, you know, the bird that didn't want to fly, just like hanging out in his parents basement. But we noticed that, nonetheless, even though the this dove was grown and it was now capable of flight, its parents still hung around. My point is that animals are linked to their parents. We once had a llama. Our family kept a llama for a while, and one day we took it back, and this was long after we brought it to our house. It hadn't been with its home herd for a long, long time, and we brought it back, and it unerringly ran to its mother. Now, the rancher who gave us the llama, knew who was, what and why, and we were astounded that after all this time, and it would be in a tiny baby llama when it left and came to us. Nonetheless, it ran to its mom. Fascinating. My point is that it is a principle which you can rely on ever more powerfully when it comes to people rather than animals. And I've worked over the years with many people who suffered horrible spiritual agony because of being at odds with their parents. And really, I think some of the most worthwhile things I've done is brought peace between parents and children. On several instances. I wish I'd done it more. There'd been a couple of instances where I tried and failed, but it's always helpful to have a restored relationship with a parent. Is very valuable, because we human beings are created needing that. That's one of the reasons for the fifth commandment, which is Honor your father and mother. In other words, build a relationship with those people. If you still have time to do it, if it's too late, one suffers. It is painful, and it does bring about what secularists might call mental disorders, and what another category of people would recognize as a spiritual pain. And if one leaves a reconciliation with parents too long, one ends up with profound spiritual pain, that's what it is. And so I knew that this article on narcissism was complete and utter nonsense, but I discovered that there's no shortage of stuff on the internet designed to persuade you that you were raised by narcissists your parents or that you have narcissistic siblings, or you have narcissistic co workers, but like narcissism is, is the big word I'm finding at the moment. And I mean, if you don't have narcissism, narcissists in your life, oh, and you're. Out of it, you just you don't, you don't have anything going for you. You got to have narcissism, and then you got to learn how to cope with the toxicity and the venom that they spew out. Oh, narcissists are such problematic people. Well, I defy you to try and find a definition of narcissism. Oh, yes, it does appear in the current fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely, it is there, but it is a definition that honest to goodness, if you read it, it sounds as if it's coming out of Alice in Wonderland, it just meaningless. And I should probably read you some of that, just so as you get the idea, listen to this and honor your feelings about your narcissist parent. Most of us love our parents no matter what, and we cling to our need for love and validation from that, your narcissistic parent cannot love you unconditionally the way we all deserve to be loved within our families. And for that matter, your narcissistic parent is capable of no more than fleeting empathy mixed with grief and anger you might even sympathize with your parents, narcissistic personality disorder. That's the name of the disease they've got. You see, it's also possible that you are numb to your parent, or too used up to feel love anymore. Whatever you feel. Don't judge yourself for it. Honor your feelings. Let them be your guide. Follow your feelings, really. That's me speaking now, not the article, follow your feelings. Really, is that the way for healthy adults to run their lives? Follow your feelings. Come on. You know, better than that. And then it goes, go. Listen to this. Back to the go. No contact with your parents, if that feels like the safest choice. Operate with firm boundaries. It's pretty amazing stuff, tremendously damaging, very damaging indeed. Here is some more. While some researchers think that there may be a biological basis that makes some people more vulnerable to narcissistic personality disorder. Oh, they you. What happens if you catch this disease? Oh, my goodness. Others agree that the personality disorder stems from a complex mix of factors that include harsh criticism and or praise in childhood, which causes the child to shield their low self esteem with a strong, perfect persona. It also makes the child especially needy. All right, fine people, this is evil stuff, and what's scary is how many people who are not happy warriors are going to be vulnerable to this. They're going to read this and they Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's why my life was ruined by my parents, because they're narcissists.
Daniel Lapin 28:17
I really do understand how incredibly seductive and persuasive. The stuff is, what I didn't know is how widespread it is, and how it is almost inevitable that somebody searching on the internet for some antidote to unhappiness, that they're feeling that teenager I alluded to earlier, who's being constantly told by his parents what to do, I don't think it would take more than 10 minutes on the internet before that young person is persuaded that He is being damaged by his proximity to narcissists, it is the creation of a mental disorder out of normal life. I mean, just listen to this. This is the Mayo Clinic advising patients. Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance, they needn't seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others, but behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism. Normal life, my friends, normal life, and it's a process of growing up and becoming an adult and maturing, and you get over that. That's how the world really works. But the way this is now structured, you must go to the witch doctor of your tribe or the high priest of your tribe. Tribe, and you That means your psychiatrist or your therapist, and they'll tell you whether this is really narcissistic personality disorder. A narcissistic personality disorder causes problems in many areas of life, relationships, work, school, financial matters. Do you know any people who are going through a stage of just having difficulty with relationships and with work and with financial matters. How often those things do go together? Well, guess what? They need to be diagnosed suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, signs that somebody is a narcissist, this is from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Analysis has an exaggerated sense of self importance. No numbers attached to that, because, as I've told you before, these nothing in narcissism is measurable, and so it's always the pronouncement of the expert. That's not how I relate to my plumber or even my regular doctor. They tell me what's wrong, they show me the test results, they explain what they mean. They play a role in deciding what to do next, but you can't do that with mental health, because it takes a high priest or a witch doctor to tell you what you're suffering from. People with narcissistic personality disorder, they want to be recognized, and they will overestimate their abilities, and they may act surprised when they don't receive the praise they deserve. That's that is one thing the DSM five says next second one is a Gnosis believes they're special or unique. Well, I don't know about you, but I think and have told my children, each one of them is special and unique. So the DSM says, well, it's okay to think you're a little special, but narcissistic people take you to an extreme. What's an extreme? Your extreme may not be my extreme. There is nothing objective here at all. A narcissist requires excessive admiration, excessive. How much is excessive? Each and every one of us depend and need the esteem of other people. Not self esteem, as is sold in the educational system, but the we all need the esteem of other people. And now it goes on like this, all of which is absolutely meaningless, going absolutely nowhere, and complete and utter nonsense, but even more dangerously destructive. And there it is, friends, I I don't know how. I don't know how to help because I understand that we've all been conditioned to believe the so called experts for how many years on the rabbi Daniel Lapin show, have I warned you against expertitis? How many years have I been warning you to run for your life when people say experts say studies reveal you want to run away from that stuff, because it's the witch doctors making the pronouncements. And you might ask me, come on, Rabbi Lapin, you know this is you're getting a bit carried away. Why should anybody have any interest in doing this sort of thing? And the answer is, the money. Follow the money. The primary purpose today, it's not how the DSM started, but the primary purpose today for the DSM is to arrange classifications and code numbers for medical insurance reimbursements, and we are watching a huge transfer of wealth going on at the moment, a huge transfer of wealth to the psychiatric profession, to the mental health profession, who have been very effective at lobbying over the years, and indeed the actual creation of the DSM and its growth and its increase in the catchment area of mental disorder from the first edition to the second, to the third, to the fourth, to the current DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual number five. And every single one of the diseases listed in there has a medical code next to it, which is the code you have to enter if you are a mental health provider to make sure that you get paid. And what's so wonderful about this is that, unlike in regular medicine, where I really can tell as Can you if the doctor is helping me or not. Helping me is what he's prescribing curing In fact, the doctor himself, on the next visit will say, let me check your numbers. Let me do a blood test, and I'm going to see whether we're tackling the problem, whether the numbers are moving back towards normal, and if they're not, we'll do something else in the mental health profession. You are an ignorant fool listening to and utterly dependent upon the expert pronouncements of your witch doctor. He'll tell you if you're sick, he'll tell you if you or she he'll tell you. She'll tell you if you're making progress or if you're getting worse. And as a matter of fact, there is no objection to keeping a patient for years because some of the mental health diseases take a long time to overcome, I should say, because there's nothing there to overcome. It's all in the mind of the practitioner. So there it is, good friends, let me tell you back to your five Fs, if you have a satisfying job, if your work is fulfilling and you have a good family and you have something of a social life, and on top of that, your physical health is under control, and you have a relationship with God, I assure you, you won't need the diagnostic and statistical manual of The mental health profession, friends, finance, fitness, family and faith. Yeah, if you've got those things going in your life, you've got those things going in your life, you really are going to be doing really well, just fine, nothing at all to worry about, and it is primarily an absence of one or more of the 5f that makes people vulnerable to the witch doctor magic of the mental health profession. There it is, dear happy warriors. See some of you who are interested in learning how to persuade with power. We'll do that this Wednesday night at 8pm Eastern time. It's a master class. It's 90 minutes. We'll work on this together for an hour and a half, and you'll take away very practical and useful tools for doing just that. So please join us. Go to we happy warriors.com and get more information on the program coming up on Wednesday night, September 10, looking forward to seeing you there. Until then, ladies and gentlemen, happy warriors, each and every one of you, wishing you progress as you climb onwards and upwards with your family and your finance, your friendships, your fitness and your faith. I'm Rabbi. Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
