All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 27, 2018 - Davis Aurini
14:59
Soy, Nutrition, and Literature

A requested video, discussing the skinner boxes of modern culture.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So this is another requested video, but it's a very open-ended request.
I'm eventually going to post the question on my website because it was actually quite well written and said quite a bit on its own.
But for now, I think I'm going to do two videos responding to it.
And this is the first video.
And like I said, it's going to be very free form.
So yeah, soy, nutrition, and literature.
A funny thing happened to me the other day.
I'd been derelict in my shopping duties, and I was rummaging through the kitchen looking for something to eat that night.
You know, obviously nothing too amazing or too healthy, just something that, you know, met the bear requirements.
And I pull out a box of craft dinner.
You know, I kind of shrug my shoulders and says, you know, this is what you get for not, you know, being on top of things.
But as I'm boiling the water, I decided to read the ingredients on the box.
And wouldn't you know it?
First of all, it's fortified with iron.
It's you add butter to it, and you know, that fake cheese powder is mostly made out of milk and other actual things.
You know, the only real fake ingredient in craft dinner is the food coloring.
Say what you will, craft dinner is pretty damn close to real food, isn't it?
At least by today's standards.
See, when I was growing up, craft dinner is, that's what we ate because we were poor.
But you know, I go to the grocery store these days and everything, absolutely everything, is full of fake calories.
I mean, I checked Campbell's soup recently.
They've started putting soy in Campbell's soup.
So, you know, that's now off my list of things that I purchase.
Soy, canola oil, also known as rapeseed oil.
It's, yeah, it's terrible for you folks.
Sugar and absolute everything.
There's a great comic by Stone Toss recently where the kid's about to eat some ice cream and the dad says, hey, Timmy, no dessert for breakfast.
Meanwhile, he's having eggo waffles and a sugary bowl of cereal and he's eating a donut and you name it.
It's absolutely amazing what incredible garbage the modern diet is.
Soy, sugar, refined carbs, processed oils.
And I look at some of these people out there, especially the ones that are sickly or overweight, and I just wonder, have you ever had a real diet?
Have you ever had real nutrition go into you?
because you sure as hell don't look like you have, and I'll bet that, good lord, my, let's go back to the Kraft dinner.
You know what?
You want to make it even better?
Grate some cheddar.
Put that on top of it.
And there you go.
It's pretty damn close to real food and you made it for two bucks.
Not the best thing to live off of, but it's a hell of a lot better than soy and sugar and refined carbs every single day for every single meal.
The stuff I eat is so much more satisfying, it's so much healthier, it's so much tastier than the stuff everybody else eats.
And yet they continue to eat it.
And the question was about Skinner boxes.
And right here, we're into the exact same territory.
So the Skinner box, I'm sure most of you know what it is.
Basically, you put a rat in the box, and it has a choice.
It can hit the electrode to get a little stimulation of pleasure in its brain, or it can hit the thing to get a food pellet.
It usually changes, chooses the electrode.
It becomes obsessive.
The behavior that it's pursuing is disconnected from the supposed reward.
Okay?
It's like somebody that spends hours at the slot machine.
And it's like, you know, buddy, if you'd worked for all those hours, like you came away with 20 bucks.
If you'd worked those hours, you would have had 60 bucks.
So was that really the best use of your time?
Was it that enjoyable?
You know, it's like when you've got a can of Pringles.
Right?
How many of you have ever eaten half a can of Pringles?
How many of you have ever had three and then stopped?
You don't even want any more of the damn things.
They taste disgusting at this point, but you're just compelled to keep finishing the bottle.
Video games are turning into that.
You know, I've got Fallout 4 on my computer.
I still haven't completed it.
I kind of want to.
I want to know what the story is.
And yeah, here it's disappointing.
Don't ruin it for me.
But I go into that game and like every step of the way, it's a Skinner box.
It's just another go to this location, you know, hit X button here, and then come back for the second part.
And you get more XP and you get some caps and you get whatever.
It just increasingly disconnects me from the game.
I'm seeing the seams.
Okay?
I'm seeing the seams in the background decoration.
I'm realizing that, oh, it's not the Star Trek Enterprise.
It's just a set, and yet people play these video games, right?
I swear to God, the video games from 10, 20 years ago, Star Control 2, the original Fallouts, those were interesting games.
Baldur's Gate 2, Max Payne, these were fun, these were interesting.
And you enjoyed them, you played them, and then you finished them.
And then maybe 5, 10 years later, you come back and you play them again.
These new ones are just this endless distraction.
They are so full of material, but the material is nothing but cheap carbs.
It's so repetitive.
Go collect five rat pelts.
collect five dire rat pelts.
The same thing goes for narrative as well.
You know, increasingly the narratives of our civilization.
Guys, you want to do the number one thing you can for your mental hygiene?
Read old books.
You know, like, here, pick up Sallust right here by Quintus Curtius.
Great read.
Very well translated.
Very relevant to the modern day.
And you're learning something about your ancestors when you read that.
Go read old books.
Don't read this modern pablum.
Don't go to see the latest Marvel vs. DC movie.
Read old books.
Those are the cure to this.
Eat old food, play old video games, read old books.
You know, a game of chess with your friend doesn't have all the blinking lights of a video game, but it is so much more fun.
It is so much more fun to play chess or even poker than most of these endless, never-ending ciphers of nothing, which are your typical video games.
There's the occasional good one that comes out, but for the most part, you're just distracting yourself from the fact that your life sucks.
See, this thing, Sallustrite here, this is going to inspire you.
This is going to inspire you to be better.
You are going to walk away from that and have a bunch of pithy quotes in your head.
Geez, every so often I go back and reread the Narnia Chronicles.
I mean, most of these people are reading Harry Potter, which is the most simplistic garbage in the world.
The Narnia Chronicles, every single time I reread them, I pick up something new in there, some brilliant observation on the nature of the sexes or how exhaustion kind of leads us to act like cunts.
I love how the protagonists in those stories are not perfect human beings.
They're all flawed.
I love that.
And he managed to do it with children and writing for children at the same time.
The rest of these people, they're just living on empty calories.
They are physically malnourished.
They are psychically malnourished.
they are spiritually malnourished.
You know, SIPP-5 likes to toss this thing up where there's the three different modern systems.
There's communism, fascism, and there's freedom.
I'm not saying the other two systems were particularly good.
But freedom is all about commodifying and packaging and putting a label on it and selling a lunchbox.
You know, we put God in a lunchbox.
Go buy your God, walk around and carry that God and you're fine.
There's your spirituality.
It comes in a lunchbox.
Same with your culture.
You know, you can watch Ant-Man or you can watch Iron Man.
We've got something for everybody.
Psychically, oh, you know what?
Just go read one of those pop books recommended by the New York Times.
That's sure as hell going to teach you something.
We are so incredibly malnourished.
And now the interesting thing about fat people is that fat people, they're not fat because they eat a lot.
They eat a lot because they're fat.
Because what happens when you are overweight, when you eat too much sugar, when you get type 2 diabetes, used to be adult onset diabetes, but now kids are getting it, so it's type 2, what happens is that the insulin response in your fat cells no longer responds accordingly.
What this boils down to is that your fat cells are supposed to suck up the sugar when you eat and then slowly release it as the day goes on.
But when you damage your system by having too much sugar, by having too many refined carbs, that insulin mechanism no longer works.
And so these fat people, you know, if you're in shape, you have a big meal, you're okay for several hours.
The fat person could have the exact same meal within half an hour, they're starving because their fat cells won't put any of that energy back into their bloodstream.
And so these days, I strongly suspect, I have no evidence of this, but I strongly suspect that we spend way more time watching movies, reading books, playing video games than our ancestors did.
Okay, we, yeah, you could say, yeah, well, we're atomized, we're lonely.
Okay, maybe that's part of it.
But people will avoid hanging out with their friends to go play video games.
They will prioritize the video game.
And I think it's like that response in the obese person where you are so nutritionally deprived.
Like you really want a good story.
You want it so bad.
And the more bad stories you read, the more you want a good story.
But what happens is it drives you to reading more and more and more and more bad stories, more simplistic narratives, more garbage narratives, more narcissism-enhancing and justifying narratives.
The way you cure diabetes is you wean yourself off the sugar and you train your body to operate the way it's supposed to again.
The way you cure yourself from this narcissistic, toxic culture is you read old books.
So guys, read some old books.
Play a game of chess.
Have a conversation with a real human being.
Put down the Skinner boxes.
Behavior starts in the mind.
And if you fill your mind full of modern toxic garbage, you will behave like a modern toxic person.
So fill your mind with healthy calories.
Deus Volt.
▲
Export Selection