Aug. 2, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:25:08
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Hi, Chris. | ||
| Hi, man. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| Very nice to meet you, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed your stuff online. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| You're a very good listener. | ||
| You are one of the best listeners. | ||
| You're really good at that. | ||
| Because you're really good at knowing when to talk and when not to talk. | ||
| That is a skill. | ||
| And that is a rare sign of social intelligence. | ||
| So I was looking forward to meeting you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that, man. | ||
| You've been a big inspiration, so it's nice to hear that. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate that, too. | ||
| We were talking about when someone's funny and when they're funny and not funny and why, and I don't know. | ||
| There's some people that I know that weren't funny for a long time, and then they became funny. | ||
| Like comics that were like they're starting out and they just maybe they were kind of okay I think maybe you have if you have a spark like a little haha just a spark you could turn that into a flame but if you don't have the spark if there's no there's nothing there you're never funny ever You're fucked. | ||
| Well that's different to training, like we were saying. | ||
| You can be the skinniest or fattest guy or girl, the right training program and some good macros, you're fixed. | ||
| You will definitely get stronger. | ||
| You will definitely get fitter. | ||
| Particularly like cardiovascular. | ||
| Cardiovascular fitness is 100% achievable. | ||
| As long as you don't have some sort of a problem physically, some sort of an ailment, you could definitely get better cardio. | ||
| Is it true about comics needing a messed up childhood, or that's a performance enhancer, that they say the pain that they've gone through in the past is something that helps them to be funny when they grow up? | ||
| There's something there. | ||
| There's something there. | ||
| I think it's being ignored. | ||
| I think when you're ignored as a child, kids figure out a way to get attention, and so they act out. | ||
| And then in acting out, if you act out in a particular way, you get laughs, and then you lean towards that. | ||
| I didn't have a funny family. | ||
| My family's not funny at all. | ||
| No one's funny. | ||
| My mom's not funny. | ||
| My stepdad's not funny. | ||
| No one's funny. | ||
| For me, I guess it was just having a weird childhood, moving around a lot, always having to make new friends. | ||
| And so just figured out what was funny about certain things. | ||
| And you ended up managing to get it right. | ||
| Yeah, but again, it's fucking lucky, man. | ||
| Either you're funny or not. | ||
| I got into comedy because my friend Steve, who I'm still good friends with to this day, Steve Graham, told me I should do comedy. | ||
| Because I would make him laugh. | ||
| And I was like, dude, you are laughing because you like me. | ||
| Other people are just going to think I'm an asshole. | ||
| This is not comedy. | ||
| I feel like it is a skill. | ||
| I feel like it's a skill that people can develop. | ||
| But yeah, if you've got the wrong spark, I mean, everyone's seen that comedian that's trying, really, really trying, and there's just something not there. | ||
| And then it's the same, I guess, if you look at absolute elite athletes, the best of the best of the best. | ||
| It's not just the hard work. | ||
| It's not just the training. | ||
| It's not just the skills that they've developed. | ||
| There's something else there as well. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but then you get someone who has all the things, and that's how you get a Michael Jordan. | ||
| You get someone who has physical talent, genetic gifts, the mind for it, discipline, consistent work ethic, and then you get greatness, but also mental illness. | ||
| You need to be, like Michael Jordan, with all due respect, Is considered, you know, absolutely one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player of all time, but is kind of mentally ill. | ||
| He's obsessed with winning to the point where he's an asshole. | ||
| But that asshole, like, he'll tell you, like, you just don't want to win enough. | ||
| And he's right. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| Like, he apparently, like, you beat him in a game of pool, he won't fucking talk to you for weeks. | ||
| Like, he's just a nut. | ||
| But I've met people like that before. | ||
| They have to win at everything. | ||
| They have to win at fucking playing fucking Parcheesi. | ||
| They have to win. | ||
| They're just winners. | ||
| They're obsessed with that goal of winning. | ||
| This is why jealousy is such a stupid emotion to have, I think. | ||
| Because you never know the price that that person pays for the skills that you really admire about them. | ||
| So a good example of this would be Tiger Woods. | ||
| You know much about his childhood? | ||
| I know a little bit about the coaching. | ||
| Jamie's a giant fan. | ||
| Jamie's a big golfer. | ||
| Yeah, so, Tiger, when he was growing up, you know, he was, I think, at one and a half, two years old. | ||
| He was already with a golf club. | ||
| And then, when did he go on that Saturday night program, Jamie? | ||
| And he ended up doing some put on... | ||
| He was three years old. | ||
| Three years old when he did that, right? | ||
| But his father was racially abusing him on golf courses, calling him the N-word, saying that, yeah, here it is. | ||
| Whoa, that's him at three years old? | ||
| Which show is this? | ||
| Jimmy Stewart and Bob Hope. | ||
| Mike Douglas. | ||
| Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| What a little cutie. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Earl, how old is it? | |
| How old are you, Tiger? | ||
| Daddy. | ||
| Two. | ||
| Two? | ||
| No fucking way. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Have you read Malcolm Gladwell's outliers? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well that is like an amazing example of that like having a Golf Club in your hand at two years old having a father who's maniacal and obsessed and forcing you to do this and then getting all that time in as your body is learning and developing and So the thing about Tiger that was interesting with his father is he would push him incredibly hard, say, these white people are never going to accept you on this course. | ||
| And he had a safe word, the same way that you would do during rough sex. | ||
| It was called the E-word. | ||
| And his dad would say to him, if it's getting too much, if it's ever too much, just tell me, just say the E-word and everything will stop. | ||
| And Tiger never once said it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And the E-word was enough. | ||
| Wow, so he would fuck with him so that Tiger would get better, and he told him, look, I love you, but I'm doing this to make you better. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And if it's too much... | ||
| Roll the clock forward now, so talking about the price that people pay to be the person that you admire, everyone would look at Tiger Woods narrowly bound, like... | ||
| I want to be as good of a golfer as Tiger Woods. | ||
| And you go, yeah, okay, but do you want the childhood? | ||
| Do you want to spend nearly half a decade out of the sport with injury because of how hard you've pushed yourself? | ||
| Do you want to struggle with self-worth to the point where you basically can't have a long-term marriage? | ||
| Do you want to be chased down the driveway with your wife in a golf club? | ||
| He fell asleep at the wheel. | ||
| He broke both of his legs not long ago. | ||
| He's been on antipsychotics. | ||
| Like, that is the price that you pay. | ||
| To have that degree of greatness. | ||
| It's a onesie, right? | ||
| It's not an outfit that you can pick little different bits about. | ||
| You don't get to choose one element of someone and say, I want that. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| All of these externalities, all of the things that you really don't want, they came along for the ride as well. | ||
| And that's why jealousy overall, like, do you want to take the whole outfit? | ||
| Because you can't just have the one thing. | ||
| Jealousy is kind of dumb. | ||
| Well, jealousy is dumb because it doesn't serve you any purpose. | ||
| What is that old expression that it poisons the vessel that's holding it? | ||
| How does that expression go? | ||
| There's some expression like that. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| Jealousy doesn't work. | ||
| Jealousy doesn't work for you and it doesn't harm the person you're jealous of. | ||
| It doesn't do anything. | ||
| It just creates this bad feeling. | ||
| It's a necessary feeling in human evolution because it forces people to compete for breeding, it forces people to compete for resources, and it makes people work harder in some ways, but it's not self-serving. | ||
| You can have that feeling of admiration and of respect for someone's ability and inspiration Looking at someone's accomplishments and avoid the jealousy part. | ||
| But you have to treat it like it's a personal weakness. | ||
| You have to treat it like that thing inside of you that looks at someone and wants to diminish their accomplishments and wants to look at their accomplishments in an inaccurate light. | ||
| Because it serves you. | ||
| It doesn't serve you. | ||
| In fact, it lies to you and it makes you feel like you're better than you are so you won't work as hard and you won't accomplish as much if you give in to jealousy. | ||
| But instead, if you look at someone, even if you don't particularly like that person's personality or what they stand for, If you can look at what they've done, even if it's someone that you really despise, you can find something in them and say, that is it. | ||
| You can find admirable things about Donald Trump. | ||
| One of the things you can find about it is the way he brushes off criticism. | ||
| It's like, bleh. | ||
| He just like keeps going like like they were In the beginning of the the presidential campaign coming at him with every fucking thing in the world And the guy would get out there in front of all his people is like I'm the best I've always been the best No one loves the Bible more than me and he was able to do that in a way that you know a lot of people Maybe he has a psychotic belief in himself. | ||
| Maybe he's literally on drugs. | ||
| But whatever it is, it's admirable that the guy got through four years in the White House and doesn't look like he fucking aged a day. | ||
| Biden looked like he's aged a hundred years in just the first year and a half. | ||
| I mean, he's so fucking old now. | ||
| He was old running for president, but he looks older because of the pressure and the stress of the White House. | ||
| It's kind of admirable that Donald Trump didn't do that. | ||
| So you can find things, even in people that you think are problematic human beings, you can find things in what they do. | ||
| And if there's someone that's in your line of work, and that person is achieving great success, there is a human tendency, a natural human tendency, to be jealous of that person. | ||
| But instead, be inspired. | ||
| But you have to make that choice and you have to recognize that jealousy is 100% a weakness on your part. | ||
| And it's a matter of self-auditing. | ||
| You have to be able to audit yourself and say, where is this feeling coming from? | ||
| Why am I feeling shitty? | ||
| Like, what is this weirdness? | ||
| Oh, this is jealousy. | ||
| Oh, that's a weakness. | ||
| I have to parse that out. | ||
| This is one of the big differences I've found between the US and the UK since moving here. | ||
| So I've been in Austin for four and a half months or something now. | ||
| One of the biggest differences is that in the US, as far as I can see, people really want to celebrate you when you're doing well. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think collectively they do. | ||
| There's got to be a lot of individuals that don't. | ||
| But collectively, overall, I think there's more of a tendency to celebrate people here. | ||
| I have some friends from the UK, and they have similar feelings. | ||
| Like when they came over to America, like, wow, it's crazy. | ||
| Like, you're doing well. | ||
| People congratulate here. | ||
| Whereas in the UK, they try to keep you down. | ||
| Yeah, very much a scarcity mentality. | ||
| Tall poppy syndrome is a huge deal in the UK. And Australia as well, right? | ||
| Yeah, very much so. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I wonder whether it's because population density is so much higher. | ||
| We're water locked, so everything kind of feels a bit more insular. | ||
| There's less stuff to do because the climate restricts us. | ||
| It's always cold and dark and wet, which means seasonal affective disorder. | ||
| There's a bunch of different ways. | ||
| But culturally, the end result is that people just aren't that supportive. | ||
| And if you start to deviate when you're young and do something a little bit different, it gets beaten out of you very quickly. | ||
| because the British ability for satire is born out of this fact that there's constant piss-taking happening. | ||
| And although satire is fantastic, it's not that great at encouraging people to go and do different things and be adventurous. | ||
| So when you roll the clock forward, what you have is British people have very much got their feet on the ground, probably too much. | ||
| They probably don't believe that they actually have a capacity that they can go and do things. | ||
| Now, the converse, I think, in America might be a little bit true. | ||
| For all that America is a cis, heteronormative, patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everyone down. | ||
| When kids grow up, the American dream still very much is a real deal, I think. | ||
| And And people are told that they can have blue sky vision and helicopter thinking and be whatever they want to be. | ||
| But the problem that you have is when those people grow up and become adults and the world doesn't deliver them the thing that they were promised, they feel a delta between where they are and where they could be. | ||
| They go, hang on a second. | ||
| I was told that I was going to get the blue sky and the white picket fence and the blah blah. | ||
| Especially in a generation now that is the first one ever that's doing worse than its parents. | ||
| That's going to cause a lot of people to look around and go, there's something wrong here. | ||
| Structurally, there's something wrong. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Do you think when they say that this generation is doing worse than its parents, obviously that is collectively, right? | ||
| So how are they looking at that and how are they making that distinction that this generation is doing worse? | ||
| Is it they're doing worse financially? | ||
| Is they're doing worse in terms of their ability to buy a home? | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I think that will be two of the major factors, right? | ||
| The fact that it's real living wages have stayed static since the middle of the 1970s, something like that, and getting onto the property market at the moment is pretty difficult. | ||
| But more than that as well, a lot of the things that we used to have, the traditions that we used to have for people, guys and girls, the roles that they used to take, have been outsourced to the state. | ||
| So if you think about the protector-provider role that men typically would have had, You don't need that so much when you've got a robust legal system and you've got a government that's going to look after people in case they fall through the cracks. | ||
| You've got social safety nets and things like that here and there. | ||
| I think that what happens is people end up feeling wistless and existentially lonely. | ||
| So not only are they materially less effective, they're unable to get as much money, they're unable to find a house as easily, but then existentially the role that they have, something that makes them feel innate and of themselves, that doesn't feel like it's helping either. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So you think the robust legal system and social safety nets somehow make people listless? | ||
| I don't think the robust legal system is that robust. | ||
| I don't think the safety systems, the safety nets that are in place, I don't think they're that effective. | ||
| I don't think that people have as much faith in them as maybe you think. | ||
| I know in the UK you have a better system in terms of like healthcare. | ||
| People don't have to worry nearly as much about getting ill, about getting injured. | ||
| I'm a big fan of having some kind of social healthcare system. | ||
| And I think people in this country, particularly conservative people, are very concerned with the idea of socialism in any form. | ||
| But I feel like socialism exists already in many forms that we accept, like the fire department. | ||
| That's clearly a socialist idea. | ||
| We all pay into it, and it serves everyone. | ||
| We need it, we all accept it, and we agree to it. | ||
| Public education. | ||
| Similar. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| It's pretty shitty and ineffective, depending, of course, upon the neighborhood that you live in. | ||
| Some neighborhoods have good public systems of education. | ||
| In terms of a social safety net, it's not that good in America. | ||
| I think in the worst case scenario, The worst worry is that a social safety net encourages people to not be ambitious. | ||
| That's what people were concerned with when it came to things like universal basic income. | ||
| They were concerned that it was going to alleviate people's ambition. | ||
| And on the best-case scenario side, I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses, I was like, maybe it'll encourage people to go out and do something they actually want to do for a living, and having their basic needs taken care of, like food and shelter, maybe that will give them whatever extra motivation they need to go out and do a thing that they really want to do. | ||
| Whether it's create music, or become a painter, or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| Do you think that's the way that people are going to lean? | ||
| I think you have to have that in you, unfortunately. | ||
| I know people that are just not fucking ambitious. | ||
| They're just lazy. | ||
| And if they didn't have any social safety net, maybe they would develop some discipline. | ||
| But if there is a social safety net, they don't. | ||
| And the thing that you were talking about earlier, like this... | ||
| There is a problem with generations that feel entitled, and there's this attitude, there's this sort of overwhelming idea that the government is responsible for you in a certain way, and if you're not doing well, the government has fucked you over. | ||
| The government, it's your fault. | ||
| And then people start looking to people that have a lot, like they start looking to billionaires, and they're like, we need to tax them! | ||
| We need to tax these billionaires, and there's people out there that are calling for a 90% tax of billionaires. | ||
| Which I always feel like is at the very least what they're trying to do. | ||
| Some of them, for sure, are just putting on a show. | ||
| They're just saying that because they want their constituents to go, yeah, they're fighting for us. | ||
| They're fighting for the working class. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are they? | |
| You know, I'm not sure they are. | ||
| I think they're bullshitting. | ||
| And I think that capitalism is a game. | ||
| And whenever you're going to have a game, you're going to have people that are like weekend players that go out there and put a little bit of effort into and they're kind of okay at basketball. | ||
| And then you're going to have Michael Jordan. | ||
| And you don't get a Michael Jordan without massive amounts of effort and time. | ||
| And that's the same thing with capitalism. | ||
| If it's a game, if we're all agreeing, even if you're a waiter, you're waiting on tables, you do a good job, they give you tips. | ||
| That's tips in America. | ||
| We get tips for waiters when they do a good job. | ||
| Because they don't get paid, that's why. | ||
| Yeah, it's sneaky. | ||
| I had to adapt very, very quickly to that. | ||
| Yeah, it's a sneaky thing. | ||
| Oh, you're right, because you're not used to giving tips. | ||
| Well, 10% maybe-ish. | ||
| And I did that in a strip club in Austin, and the waitress turned the thing around and said, let's try this again. | ||
| Slid it back across the table to me. | ||
| At a strip club. | ||
| Did you feel intimidated? | ||
| Being bossed around? | ||
| It was kind of hot. | ||
| It was kind of hot? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, she was hot. | |
| I understand. | ||
| Yeah, I don't agree with that. | ||
| But there is a thing in terms of, I don't agree with people getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips. | ||
| I think that's a fucked up way to run a business. | ||
| I think it's way better if you got paid a living wage and then people could tip you on top of that if they say, hey, she was a really good waitress. | ||
| She deserves more. | ||
| And then tip on top of that. | ||
| One of the big differences between the UK and America, I think, as well is the way that the homeless show up. | ||
| So in the UK, I've been a club promoter for 15 years, right? | ||
| At 2 a.m. | ||
| in the morning, the only people that are out are club promoters, the people that are going to our parties, and homeless people. | ||
| And the way that they act, their demeanor, the fact that they're The US has so much more sketchy, aggressive, talking to themselves, shuffling along the street. | ||
| They'll be much more forthcoming. | ||
| And I think a big part of that is the fact that you don't have a way to sweep up people that should be in mental health care. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| falls through the cracks in one way or another becomes homeless that means you're less likely to get a job that's like You get a job no medical insurance that means that if you do have any underlying problems They're not going to be looked after because you're not going to pay for it Maybe you turn to drugs that makes the mental health problems worse and it just becomes a spiral and Whereas in the UK step one or two of that you're gonna get picked up by the National Health Service and taken away Yeah, well that is ideal and If it's good mental health service, that's ideal. | ||
| And that's what they used to have in America. | ||
| They used to have mental health institutions that would take people off the streets. | ||
| But somewhere, was it in the Reagan administration, Jamie? | ||
| I know we've looked this up before, right? | ||
| We've gone into this. | ||
| There were some sweeping acts in the Reagan administration that just literally, like, released people from mental health institutions that couldn't take care of themselves. | ||
| And these people were pretty fucked up. | ||
| On the street. | ||
| Jocko told me the number of beds per capita that we have in the UK versus the US is wildly different. | ||
| It's like one per hundred thousand people or something over here, which is just way, way, way less apparently than you need. | ||
| What is the UK? Way more. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I mean, you know, pretty much anywhere we'll be able to take somebody in. | ||
| Someone that's in A&E, you know, if somebody's having a fit, if somebody's having a schizophrenic attack. | ||
| What is A&E? Accident and emergency. | ||
| And that's at every single different hospital. | ||
| There will be somewhere that someone could get rolled into. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, schizophrenia, I think it affects 1% of the population. | ||
| So look at the United States, that's 3 million people. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's a lot of people, you know, and you look at the number of homeless people that we have and the number of people that really need help. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not a good way to run a society. | ||
| And there's this idea that these people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like... | ||
| That is a fucking really dumb way of looking at it. | ||
| And it makes a problem for everybody else. | ||
| So when you look at what's happening in Los Angeles, this sort of attitude that, you know, we need to respect homeless people and let them just fucking camp out whenever they want. | ||
| It's destroyed real estate prices. | ||
| It's forced people to move out. | ||
| It's made people feel very unsafe. | ||
| And it's not helping the homeless people. | ||
| It's not helping them at all. | ||
| You just let them fucking put up their tents at the beach. | ||
| Now you have just people that don't want to go to the beach, so all the surrounding businesses lose revenue because people don't feel comfortable going there anymore. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you've seen what it looks like on the beach in Southern California. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| My friend Bridget drove through Venice and she sent me a video from her phone. | ||
| And I was like, this is insane. | ||
| It was like a mile of tents. | ||
| And I think they've cleaned up some places and not cleaned up others. | ||
| The dirty spot is downtown. | ||
| Skid Row? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it is madness. | ||
| If you've never been there before, when you... | ||
| I first went there, this was a problem in the early 2000s. | ||
| This had nothing to do with COVID. I was there in 2003 or 4 or something like that. | ||
| We're filming Fear Factor down there. | ||
| And I went through Skid Row and I was like, holy shit. | ||
| I couldn't even believe it. | ||
| I'm like, why is this not front page news? | ||
| This is literally like multiple city blocks Filled with people just laying around on the street, shuffling around, and going into these hospitals, not hospitals, shelters to get food, and then coming back on the street. | ||
| They moved people to these areas. | ||
| There was a documentary on that... | ||
| What was that hotel, Jamie, where that woman drowned in one of the water tanks? | ||
| Shit, I saw the documentary about that. | ||
| Yeah, it was kind of a sneaky documentary, right? | ||
| All about that elevator thing. | ||
| The Cecil Hotel? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the Cecil Hotel is like in the heart of this area. | ||
| And the documentary is sort of highlighting how all these people got duped when they're coming from other countries and they're coming into America. | ||
| Oh, we'll stay downtown. | ||
| You think, oh, downtown's lovely. | ||
| Downtown Los Angeles is a fucking shithole, like a horrible shithole. | ||
| It's so much worse than, say, downtown Austin. | ||
| Beautiful, lovely, nice buildings, great restaurants. | ||
| Downtown Chicago, great place to be. | ||
| Downtown LA is horrible. | ||
| Nobody wants to go there. | ||
| I saw a listing for a property in Portland that is being sold with squatters in it. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So it says in the description below it, be warned, this is being sold with current squatters tenanted in there. | ||
| The price reflects the current state of the insights. | ||
| What's the price? | ||
| Free? | ||
| Basically. | ||
| It didn't say on the advert, but it is wild. | ||
| He's selling property. | ||
| It's such a headache that you can't get rid of these people. | ||
| The police are not coming in to give you any assistance. | ||
| Anybody want some free tenants that aren't paying? | ||
| Yeah, well Portland's the worst. | ||
| They're the worst. | ||
| Because their own mayor bought into it. | ||
| Hook, line, and sinker. | ||
| And he was out there with Antifa and he was trying to talk to them. | ||
| They were like, you fucking need to resign! | ||
| And he's like, I am the most liberal mayor in all of the country. | ||
| And he is. | ||
| And then after a while, I mean, he was at the front of the line for defund the police. | ||
| He was talking about, like, we need social workers to handle problems, not police officers. | ||
| And he was buying into all that shit. | ||
| Until... | ||
| They beat him down. | ||
| They got to a point where they lit his apartment building on fire. | ||
| They broke the windows of the front lobby of his building and tossed Molotov cocktails through and shit. | ||
| And so then he started calling for them to be arrested. | ||
| And then he started calling for individuals to be arrested. | ||
| And he's tried to turn it around, his idea. | ||
| But he was like... | ||
| Faced with the reality of these progressive liberal choices where you look at things with, you know, through the lens of ideology rather than the lens of objective assessment of reality. | ||
| So the thing is, an absurd ideological belief is less about the actual facts and it's basically a show of fealty to your side. | ||
| It's like you're waving a flag, saying, I am a part of this. | ||
| And the more absurd the belief, the greater the show of fealty, right? | ||
| If you're saying, I will put to one side facts, reason, what my own brain is telling me, everything that reality is putting back to me, and what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to believe the ideology because that's why. | ||
| It's a threat display to your opponents. | ||
| It's a show of loyalty to the side that you're on. | ||
| But the problem with that is at the moment, all of these groups are bound together over the mutual distaste of an out group, not the mutual love of an in group, which makes them inherently fragile. | ||
| So what everybody's doing is they're constantly circling the outside, looking for someone that they can shave off. | ||
| Who's the next person that is just not quite right that we can get rid of? | ||
| I don't know whether you saw during Pride Month that there was white gay privilege is now a thing. | ||
| So white gay people have to like bow down to gay people of color? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you have to recognize that if you're gay, but you're also not another oppressed group, that you're kind of not that gay. | ||
| I actually mentioned this to Douglas and Douglas said that because he's white and conservative and gay, he's basically straight again. | ||
| He's an honorary straight. | ||
| His gay card had been rescinded. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| But yeah, that's what they're looking for. | ||
| They're constantly looking on the outside. | ||
| Who can we shave off? | ||
| It's called a purity spiral, right? | ||
| Constantly trying. | ||
| And everybody said that... | ||
| How long ago were people saying this sort of stuff about the fact that intersectionality inevitably leads to one person that is the most oppressed in the entire world and they're the only person that's allowed to speak? | ||
| And as soon as you see white gay privilege, you think, well... | ||
| That's what that is. | ||
| That is an intersecting hierarchy of grievance, and if you're only gay, you're basically not anything anymore. | ||
| That's amazing, isn't it? | ||
| It really is wild. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| I mean, that's what's happening to women in sports, right? | ||
| Women have always been protected, right? | ||
| We've thought of that women being oppressed, whether it's, you know, income inequality, or it's the glass ceiling in the workplace, or it's like, we've thought like, hey, we've recognized there's an inequality with women, but you know where there's a bigger inequality? | ||
| Trans women. | ||
| So trans women trump women. | ||
| So even if trans women have a physical advantage in sports, we still let them compete because they are women. | ||
| Ideologically disadvantaged. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| It's to open them up to violence. | ||
| Did you see that woman from Berkeley? | ||
| Was it Berkeley? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She was a law professor and she was testifying in front of Congress and they were asking her questions. | ||
| And it was this guy, Josh Howley, who's like a senator. | ||
| And he said that he thought, like she said, do you think that men can get pregnant? | ||
| And he said, no. | ||
| And she said, I just want to recognize that what you're saying is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence. | ||
| Which is one of the things that they love to do. | ||
| It's not whether or not you disagree with something. | ||
| If you disagree with the ideology, then you're opening people up to violence. | ||
| Like, which is wild to say. | ||
| Well, first off, there's something about the tenor that that lady spoke with. | ||
| I don't know how to... | ||
| It's kind of... | ||
| Condescending. | ||
| It's smug, it's condescending. | ||
| She's laughing partway through. | ||
| She's laughing during the things he was saying. | ||
| Yeah, which makes me feel like it's a little bit of a LARP for them. | ||
| It's almost like a little bit of a game. | ||
| Did you see a guy in the UK was arrested for sharing a swastika that was made up of the LGBT flag this weekend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| So, a guy called Lawrence Fox, who runs- Was he trying to repurpose a swastika? | ||
| No, so it's not a very good gym. | ||
| You might even be able to get this. | ||
| It doesn't look anything like a swastika. | ||
| It's like just four things that are all turned round. | ||
| So Lawrence Fox, the guy that created the Reclaim Party in the UK, ran for the mayor of London, I think, a little while ago. | ||
| Maybe he ran for office. | ||
| And he, at the start of Pride Month, decided to put together a Pride flag that's all the way around and put it as new profile pic. | ||
| This guy, Colin O'Brady, who was a decorated military veteran, I think, shared it at some point. | ||
| The police said to him that he had to accept an 80-pound fine and go to a re-education... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That's a swastika? | ||
| Well, that's as close as you can get, apparently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You can see that way. | ||
| It's in the middle. | ||
| It kind of looks like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Oh, I wasn't even... | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| I wasn't even seeing that. | ||
| Oh my God, how did I not see that? | ||
| Isn't that wild that I didn't see that? | ||
| That is so funny because that is really like a little optical illusion thing. | ||
| Because it is a swastika. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| So I didn't see that. | ||
| Well, why didn't they just do it where it's like that way, that way, that way, that way? | ||
| Like where both of them are turned. | ||
| These upper right corner and lower left corner are turned sideways. | ||
| You'd have to speak to the designer. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| That's what's so crazy. | ||
| I looked at that, and I'm just looking at the flags in their entirety, but now I clearly see it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that's a swastika. | ||
| He shares this, right? | ||
| You've also got news articles at the moment saying, Military veteran jailed or arrested for gay swastika, which is one of the best headlines. | ||
| So anyway, the police arrive and they say, or they contacted him and they said, 80 pound fine, and you have to go to a re-education course. | ||
| Oh, camp. | ||
| So he said, no, I don't want to do this. | ||
| And they said, okay, well, we're going to come and arrest you. | ||
| So he asked for a time when they were going to come around. | ||
| And he got Lawrence, the guy that made it, and also has a huge social media following online, got him to be there. | ||
| So Lawrence live-streamed it as it was happening. | ||
| And as the police are there, he's live-streaming this thing, and there's a clip that's 30 seconds from the middle of it, which has gone super, super viral online. | ||
| It's had like three million plays over the weekend. | ||
| And they ask the police officer why it is. | ||
| That's the guy there that made it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why am I being arrested? | ||
| And he said, well, obviously it's because your post has caused somebody social anxiety. | ||
| Social anxiety? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because we have these hate speech laws, non-crime hate incidents. | ||
| I think they're logged as in the UK. And yeah, somebody... | ||
| Non-crime? | ||
| Non-crime hate incidents. | ||
| So microaggression managed by bureaucracy. | ||
| Well, you remember that guy that got told, we have to check your thinking because he liked a post that was seen as problematic. | ||
| Is that in the UK as well? | ||
| Yeah, correct. | ||
| Who was that? | ||
| Somebody Miller. | ||
| So it was the guy that was actually there. | ||
| He was an ex-police officer, also a lawyer, understands the law very, very closely. | ||
| He got arrested along with the Colin O'Brady guy. | ||
| The only guy that didn't get arrested is the guy that made it, who also happened to be there. | ||
| The two people, one of them for obstructing arrest because he was saying, you're not following this rule. | ||
| Can you please show me your section 35 of the whatever whatever act? | ||
| None of this is, you haven't reached the threshold for arrest and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So he got arrested. | ||
| And then the dudes that shared the post got arrested. | ||
| So he got arrested for reading the correct law to the officers. | ||
| Saying that he was obstructing arrest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, England's not... | ||
| That's not good, man. | ||
| I mean, it's a trade, right? | ||
| It's either guns in the U.S., good for protection, not good for shootings, or freedom of speech in the U.S., but in the U.K., no guns, no mass shootings, but... | ||
| A lot of hate crime incidents, a lot of people being arrested for doing dumb stuff. | ||
| But can't you have freedom of speech in the UK and not have all the guns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It seems like they're not mutually exclusive. | ||
| Very correct, yeah. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, the UK is just, it's an interesting place at the moment. | ||
| We definitely have imported a lot of the culture war that you've got going on over here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't think that the UK has quite the same amount of capture that the US has. | ||
| People are still very spit and sawdust. | ||
| Everything in the UK, Constantine and Francis said this to you last week, it's very much a class-based system. | ||
| You don't get outside of your lane with regards to your class. | ||
| And I think a big part of that is we've just had longer to establish what different schools mean, what different areas that you live in mean. | ||
| I mean, dude, we've got trees in the UK that are older than your country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, we have trees here that are older in our country, too. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| In all fairness. | ||
| Very good point. | ||
| They've been passed on, though. | ||
| They're inherited. | ||
| My point being that people know where their station is, and they're told not to get outside of it. | ||
| And I think that because of that, that's the focus. | ||
| Now, it's more surreptitious. | ||
| It's maybe even a little bit more restrictive in some ways, but it means that we haven't been quite so captured by the new stuff. | ||
| That, I think, is interesting when you have a country that is established and has been around for, I mean, England's a thousand years old plus, right? | ||
| I mean, if you really go back to, and look at, and other countries as well, there's many other countries that have these class systems, like China's probably the best example. | ||
| China's 4,000 plus years old. | ||
| Which is wild when you really think about how young America is and the way China is completely locked down and the way the government has absolute control over their population in terms of like what they spend money on, how they spend money, what they get to see on social media, what they get to see on the Internet, what they get to say. | ||
| I mean even in terms of their Most respected population. | ||
| They're billionaires and super successful entrepreneurs. | ||
| If they speak out against the government, they either get eliminated, they vanish. | ||
| There's people that are like high-profile billionaires that have gone missing. | ||
| Jack Ma from Alibaba? | ||
| He came back. | ||
| Yeah, and then the tennis lady, she came back as well. | ||
| Did she come back? | ||
| She made a statement. | ||
| Posted a photo with a wall of fluffy toys behind her, which is just very bizarre. | ||
| But yeah, that happened. | ||
| But they could have the same photo of you with those walls of fluffy toys behind you, and it doesn't mean it's real. | ||
| Ah, interesting, maybe. | ||
| With CGI and... | ||
| Do you think they've deepfaked her? | ||
| They easily could have. | ||
| I don't know what the latest is, if she's been spotted out and about. | ||
| I want to see someone get deepfaked for tennis. | ||
| If you can deepfake a tennis player. | ||
| Cloned Rafael Nadal. | ||
| Yeah, you can't deepfake them actually playing, but you most certainly can deepfake them talking or standing there. | ||
| The Chinese government's Weibo account posted, prepare for war, yesterday. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| 600,000 likes when I checked last night. | ||
| This is yesterday afternoon or today. | ||
| Biden's got a call, and also Nancy Pelosi's going to Taiwan. | ||
| So they're Prepare for war was the official government account on Weibo, which is their, like, WhatsApp-y, social media-y app. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That is terrifying to me. | ||
| You know, that was the concern that a lot of people had about the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| That the Chinese government is going to be watching how the United States handled that and planning accordingly. | ||
| And one of the things the Chinese government saw was that we've instituted certain sanctions in place to penalize Russia. | ||
| And that the Chinese economy and the Chinese government was going to look at that and make provisions and make plans. | ||
| Because that's how we may be penalized in future. | ||
| So here's a question for you. | ||
| Do you think that the US government will have played four degree chess with the restrictions that they placed on Russia when they invaded the Ukraine, knowing that China would be watching to keep some other sorts of restrictions and plans in place that they might be able to use and pull out of their pocket knowing that China would be watching to keep some other sorts of restrictions and I would think that if the government was competent, that that's what they would do. | ||
| I do not have any evidence whatsoever that the government's incompetent, or that the government is competent, rather. | ||
| When I see Kamala Harris on TV saying, my pronouns are she, her, I'm a woman, I'm wearing a blue dress, like... | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| If that's not ideological capture, that way of talking and behaving, that's the wokest of the woke signaling because that's what people do because the idea is that you're stating your pronouns. | ||
| She's also wearing a mask, which is preposterous. | ||
| Aren't you tested? | ||
| Isn't everyone tested? | ||
| Okay, you're all negative. | ||
| So what the fuck are you wearing masks for? | ||
| They test them every day. | ||
| Signaling, signaling, signaling. | ||
| Total signaling. | ||
| And then also, you don't want to be ableist, so you want to signal to all of your people that are colorblind that I'm wearing a blue dress. | ||
| I think it's blind rather than colorblind. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Try explaining the color blue to a blind person. | ||
| The U.S. is in a recession at the moment, but it's not allowed to be called a recession. | ||
| Well, the government's trying to not call it a recession, but it's... | ||
| Wikipedia article got changed. | ||
| You see this? | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| No. | ||
| They redefined recession? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, recession used to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not anymore? | ||
| Not on Wikipedia. | ||
| When was this? | ||
| Jamie, get the Wikipedia-y thing up, because this is wild. | ||
| How long ago did they change it? | ||
| This weekend. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Well, I saw it got locked because people were fucking with it, is what I read. | ||
| But I don't know how much of that was... | ||
| But this is the definition when you type in Google, which is the same thing. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| So, a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters. | ||
| So, in Google, it's still the same. | ||
| In Wikipedia, let's look at what it says. | ||
| Recession is a business cycle. | ||
| Contraction, where there's a general decline in economic activity. | ||
| Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending or an adverse demand shock. | ||
| Be triggered by various events such as financial crisis, an external trade shock, an adverse supply shock, bursting. | ||
| Okay, here it is. | ||
| A recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market lasting more than a few months. | ||
| Normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale retail sales. | ||
| In the UK it's defined as that. | ||
| In the UK, it's defined as a negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters. | ||
| That got changed. | ||
| So that's what's changed, that the United States used to define it as two consecutive quarters, and now we don't anymore? | ||
| And people have pulled it up on the archive. | ||
| So a bunch of advisors, economic advisors, have got quotes of them saying what a recession is, especially when Donald Trump was in office, that there is a recession that's coming. | ||
| It's negative GDP growth for two consecutive quarters. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then this weekend, people are asking them, are we in a recession? | ||
| Economics just came out and it's 0.9 decline again. | ||
| Have you seen the White House press secretary define the economy as being strong and the best economy we've had in over a decade? | ||
| Have you seen her do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| It's like the wildest gaslighting because she's doing all of these political hand maneuvers that people do. | ||
| You know those moves that people do with their hands when they're talking and they're trying to display confidence and control? | ||
| It's literally like political pantomiming. | ||
| It's weird to watch. | ||
| Tai Chi and political Tai Chi. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird to watch because it's like sleight of hand. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| You think they've been trained in that, some neuro-linguistic programming, if you put your hands here when you're saying this sort of a thing, blah, blah, blah? | ||
| I don't know if they're... | ||
| There's clearly an indication that that's what you would do if you were trained, but I think it's more mimicking. | ||
| It's mimicking, like, the great presidents and the great politicians who have done these very specific things. | ||
| Like, Bill Clinton famously used to do this thing with his fingers, where he'd take his thumb and do this and do that. | ||
| So it's not aggressive and violent because you can't really hit someone with this. | ||
| But if you were doing this, it'd be a problem. | ||
| That's problematic. | ||
| That's angry, right, with the pointing the finger. | ||
| The fist is a sign of violence. | ||
| But this thing is this weird, like, mushy... | ||
| So the bizarre thing about the recession situation is the fact that it doesn't matter what you call it, right? | ||
| You can call it fucking paradise if you want, but it's still shit. | ||
| Like, all of the criteria of what's happening... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Indicates a recession. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the reason, obviously, is that you've got midterms coming up, and you need to make sure that is in a recession is not something that can be thrown at the Democrats. | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| It's a protectionist strategy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So don't use that word. | ||
| Well, it's not. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Because it's not defined in that way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not the accepted definition. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was until very, very, very recently. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Well, that's gaslighting. | ||
| And just that alone, you know, people would think that it's trivial because they are talking about this economic downturn, but it's not trivial because we've always used that term recession. | ||
| And we've always used that term to define whether or not the economic policies that are currently in place and whether or not the management and the government has done a good job of making sure that the economy stays in a good place. | ||
| They definitely haven't done that. | ||
| So in order to escape that sort of distinction. | ||
| They're literally changing the definition, which is terrible. | ||
| And it should be pushed back against in a big way. | ||
| It should be something that people get angry about. | ||
| Like, hey, you're fucking with definitions in order to pretend that you're doing a good job. | ||
| Well, the reason that you attach a sequence of letters to something, right, is to represent what that thing is. | ||
| You don't change reality by changing what those words actually mean. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you can't control the economy, you might as well just control the language and hope for the best. | ||
| God. | ||
| What a bunch of weasels. | ||
| Dude, it's wild. | ||
| But again, this is, I think, because everybody's opinions and their words now are what everyone's judged on, not their deeds. | ||
| We used to be judged on our deeds because they were the things that were the most obvious. | ||
| But now, because social media is one of the primary forms of communication, people are judged on their opinions and their words far more. | ||
| And what that means is that your opinion is actually, and the language specifically that you use, it's way more important than actually what's happening in the world. | ||
| And if that's the case, what it means is that language should be the focus. | ||
| Why wouldn't I lexically try and do some Brazilian jiu-jitsu to fuck around with this? | ||
| Little bit of semantic fuckery. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Well, because that's going to actually change the thing that most people are taking notice of. | ||
| And also, there's a concept called two-step flow theory. | ||
| And what it says is that there are precious few original thinkers in the world. | ||
| And because most people feel like they have to have an opinion on everything, because that's the world that we live in at the moment, but very few people can be bothered to do original thought and do the research, people just take on the opinion of whoever their favorite thought leader is. | ||
| So you could basically argue that the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers above them. | ||
| That's a great way to look at it. | ||
| And that is kind of what's going on with a great majority of people or a large number of people. | ||
| I don't know if it's a majority, but it's enough to make noise. | ||
| It's enough to show you that there's a real problem with ideologies and with tribalism. | ||
| Because that's what people gravitate towards. | ||
| They gravitate towards a group of people that they feel like they can fit into and then they can adopt those patterns of thinking and those thoughts. | ||
| And instead of coming up with their own opinions, they form this sort of conglomeration of other people's opinions and then they fiercely defend them. | ||
| And you see that a lot on Twitter, and you see a lot of ideological capture on Twitter, and you see a lot of people. | ||
| There's people that I'm friends with, that I follow, that I go to their thing, and all day long, they're just tweeting about politics, and they're tweeting about the Democrats, and defending the Democrats, and attacking the Republicans. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| Because it's some sort of a strange distraction because to a person, every one of those people that I'm talking about has a disappointing career. | ||
| Every one of them. | ||
| Every one of them is pretty fucking unsuccessful in their chosen craft. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Is that because they're spending too much time on Twitter or is it something that's deep-seated below that? | ||
| Are they focusing too much on status games? | ||
| Are they unable to prioritize what actually matters? | ||
| I think when their life is not going well and their chosen career is not going well, they concentrate on other things to distract them. | ||
| Instead of focusing on the very thing itself. | ||
| And they think that they're justified in doing that because those things are really important. | ||
| It's really important to stop the GOP. It's really important to do that. | ||
| It's not so important that, you know, I sell out at the fucking Chuckle Hut this weekend. | ||
| What's really important, it's not important that my jokes are good. | ||
| It's not important that the audience comes and laughs and has a great time. | ||
| No, what's really important is that I tweet bad things about Republicans and defend Kamala Harris. | ||
| There's kind of a compensatory control thing going on here, right? | ||
| The fact that they feel like they don't have as much control over perhaps their main pursuit in their life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they do have control over their Twitter. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I mean, that's why Karens are almost always fat. | ||
| They don't have control over their body, so they're yelling at other people. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| There's something to, like, the most complainy, bitchy people that are really shitty that don't have a good- They're never in shape. | ||
| No, they're not comfortable with their own skin, and generally speaking, they're not doing well. | ||
| They're not doing well at the other aspects of their life. | ||
| I bet their relationships are probably a mess. | ||
| Their friendships are probably all fucked up. | ||
| They're probably owed taxes. | ||
| They're a mess. | ||
| Why do you think it is that people are so concerned about politics at the moment? | ||
| Well, Donald Trump broke a lot of people. | ||
| He broke a lot of people's ability to objectively look at the other side as just having a different perspective on things. | ||
| Instead of that, it became, you're evil. | ||
| We're good, you're evil. | ||
| It got down to a really binary view of the way the world works. | ||
| You're either with us or you're against us. | ||
| He was so... | ||
| He was such a problem in that he's so confrontational and he causes so many arguments and he attacks his enemies. | ||
| Even while he was the president, he was doing this. | ||
| So it became this thing where it ramped up the resistance and ramped up aggression. | ||
| To the point where people are putting hashtag resistance, the resistance, in their Twitter posts about him. | ||
| It's like, I think people haven't... | ||
| They haven't recovered from that. | ||
| They haven't like, no one has put forth any like, and especially no one that's progressive has put forth any realistic argument for why that's bad for you. | ||
| Why that's bad for your thinking, why that's bad for even the group that you support. | ||
| You're encouraging the other side to attack you. | ||
| You're encouraging this sort of divide that I think America is stricken with at the moment. | ||
| It's not to say that there's not negative things about the Republicans, and there most certainly are, but there's negative things about the Democrats, too. | ||
| And I think that aligning yourself with a particular party is always going to be a problem because Some people feel like they can't talk about things that are not aligned with their party's values. | ||
| Like maybe they're a person who is very progressive but they're also a free speech absolutist. | ||
| And then they see people getting censored and they see like the Hunter Biden story getting censored by Twitter and they see certain stories not making their way into the news because the actual results The actual facts and statistics that points to this argument are problematic to their ideology. | ||
| And so they either ignore them or they push against them. | ||
| You run into these... | ||
| Ideologically captured people, and it's very hard for people to break free because then you run the risk of being attacked by your own community. | ||
| And when you have this like very binary perspective on politics and social issues, whenever you deviate in any way, shape or form, you run the risk of being attacked, particularly right now, because, again, people are so divided. | ||
| And I really think this started – I mean it's always been the case, but from 2016 on, it became much more aggressive. | ||
| In 2012, people stopped voting for the love of the side that they had and started voting for distaste of the other. | ||
| So up until then, people that were Democrats were voting because they liked the Democrats. | ||
| After that time, both Republicans and Democrats were basically doing a protest vote. | ||
| How much do you hate the opposition versus how much do you love yourself? | ||
| And it was more about I am not that than I am this. | ||
| And it goes back to that fragile hatred of an out-group, not mutual love of an in-group thing from before. | ||
| You're constantly looking for who can we shave off, who can we get rid of. | ||
| But I mean, why politics? | ||
| Because I can't remember a time, mostly because I had my head up my ass, but I can't remember a time when the news... | ||
| Wasn't talking about politics, but I know that there was one, you know, when it was other sorts of stories, but everything now seems to be so captured. | ||
| And any, do you remember, was it Nicki Minaj who became co-opted by the Republicans briefly when she was like vaccine skeptical a few years ago? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like anything, any opportunity to co-opt somebody in to become a political football that we can click about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Happened with you. | ||
| Same thing with you as well, you know? | ||
| I just wonder why everything is seen through the same frame of politics now. | ||
| Like, was it Trump? | ||
| Was that the thing? | ||
| It just... | ||
| Yeah, that's a big part of it. | ||
| But it's also, it's a very easy attack vector. | ||
| It's very effective. | ||
| If you can just point to someone having some sort of heterodox perspective that is problematic, you can attack them based on, you know, wrong think. | ||
| This is wrong think. | ||
| It's Orwell. | ||
| It's like, really, what it is. | ||
| You've decided this person, instead of saying, what is she saying? | ||
| Oh, she's saying her friend's balls swole up. | ||
| Which is kind of hilarious. | ||
| You know, she was talking about the vaccine and her friend had some bad reaction. | ||
| His balls swole up. | ||
| Which is apparently rare, but does happen to some people. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| The way they looked at it was like, you shouldn't be talking about this. | ||
| You shouldn't be saying this because you're contributing to vaccine hesitancy and this is vaccine misinformation and you're a bad person. | ||
| And she was like, fuck you. | ||
| She pushed back hard, which I thought was amazing. | ||
| Based menage for a couple of weeks. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| She went hard at it. | ||
| And so whenever that happens, then there becomes a problem, right? | ||
| Here's another problem. | ||
| Then people get captured by the Republican Party. | ||
| And then they start talking about that. | ||
| And then they start saying, you know what? | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| I'm a Republican now. | ||
| I'm red-pilled. | ||
| And then they just join another group. | ||
| They just join this other group that supports them. | ||
| And one of the things that's really interesting about the Republicans during this time is that whenever anybody does step out of favor with the Democrats, the Republicans endorse them and take them in. | ||
| They've done that with me. | ||
| And I'd like to thank you for that, Fox News. | ||
| I love you, too. | ||
| They've been super supportive of me. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| But look, the things that they're supportive of are things that we tend to agree with. | ||
| I don't believe in this sort of one-size-fits-all, government-mandated healthcare remedy for a pandemic when there's other ways to address it. | ||
| I think people should have autonomy about their body, the same way I think that a woman has a right to choose. | ||
| You know, it's like my body, my choice, except when it comes to this one thing, this vaccine that I want you to take no matter what, or I'm not going to let you work and you can't travel. | ||
| But that's problematic because you're now showing that you don't hold the wholesale opinion of the Republicans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| Also, it was problematic because I was right, because I didn't get vaccinated and I got over it very quickly. | ||
| It turns out I had it. | ||
| Yeah, it turns out you had it. | ||
| You didn't even know. | ||
| Yeah, we gave you an antibody test today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the new variant for a person like yourself who's fit and healthy is not that much of a problem. | ||
| Obviously, that's a blanket statement, and I'm generalizing because some people have a harder go of it than others, but that's based on... | ||
| How your immune system is reacting, and there's a lot of variables to that, right? | ||
| It could be it caught you when you were really run down and not doing well, or maybe you had another issue already, like flu-rona. | ||
| You know about flu-rona? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| It's people catch COVID and the flu at the same time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| Yeah, my wife got that. | ||
| And it was because she was doing a lot of stuff and traveling, and she got run down, and she caught the rona while she had the flu. | ||
| Nailed. | ||
| Yeah, she got it. | ||
| And it wasn't the worst thing. | ||
| It was, you know, like a flu. | ||
| But it was enough that I could see, like, my wife is very healthy and fit and for her to get it like that, it indicates that there's, you know, some people... | ||
| It depends on what is going on with your body at the time. | ||
| And there's times where your immune system is robust and strong, where you've been working out a lot, drinking a lot of water, and taking a lot of vitamins, and taking care of your mental health, and your immune system is powerful. | ||
| And then there's other times where maybe there's a death in the family, and maybe you lost your job, and maybe you haven't been sleeping, and maybe you have some mental health issues, and then you're worn out, and then you catch it, and it's really bad. | ||
| And they'll say, well, that's because the disease is really bad. | ||
| Well, it's really bad for you, given that set of circumstances. | ||
| And the idea that you just need to get boosted, no matter what. | ||
| Like, this is nonsense. | ||
| Like, this is not... | ||
| One-size-fits-all healthcare policies are stupid, because they don't address the fact that there's a wide range of different human beings in this country. | ||
| There's a wide range of reactions. | ||
| Like children, for example. | ||
| The idea that all children need to be vaccinated is crazy. | ||
| My children, and I'm not talking about other diseases, I think they should be vaccinated for other diseases. | ||
| But for COVID, it's not a problem for healthy children. | ||
| They get through it like that. | ||
| I've seen it firsthand with my children. | ||
| I've seen it firsthand with many of my friends' children. | ||
| They got COVID and it was almost nothing. | ||
| You know, my one kid had a fucking headache for a day, and that's it. | ||
| And she never had a cough. | ||
| She was laughing that she got to stay home from school. | ||
| You know, I mean, it was nothing. | ||
| But you're not supposed to hold that view. | ||
| You're not supposed to be pro-gun, vaccine skeptical. | ||
| I'm not vaccine skeptical. | ||
| I'm propaganda skeptical. | ||
| And I'm also skeptical of the fact that pharmaceutical companies have extraordinary amounts of money and influence, and we have always thought of them as being deceptive, and there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that they have misled people on the dangers, misled people on the results of their trials, they have hidden trials that showed negative results, and highlighted trials that were clearly biased. | ||
| That's always been the case. | ||
| We've always known that. | ||
| There's a shit ton of evidence, whether it's their release of Vioxx, there's many different drugs that they've been fined for in the terms of billions of dollars. | ||
| So it's not that I'm a vaccine skeptic. | ||
| I'm a skeptic of undue influence of massive corporations. | ||
| And they have done this forever. | ||
| We know this. | ||
| The fucking opioid epidemic is 100% caused by people who lied about whether or not these fucking things are addictive. | ||
| These are the same people that are pushing all these other pharmaceutical remedies because they make ungodly amounts of money. | ||
| Do you see Dope Sick? | ||
| I did not see Dope Sick. | ||
| I heard it's amazing. | ||
| So good. | ||
| And for someone that wasn't familiar with that, we have a very different way of... | ||
| In the UK, people are under-prescribed rather than over-prescribed, right? | ||
| Because it's subsidized. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But yeah, that was terrifying. | ||
| Another thing that I was looking at was psychedelic capitalism. | ||
| So companies at the moment, big pharma, are realizing that down the line... | ||
| The psychedelic world and drugs may be opened up. | ||
| They may be legalized therapeutically and perhaps even recreationally. | ||
| So a bunch of companies now are trying to synthesize patentable, ownable versions of drugs. | ||
| So they're going in and looking at MDMA and LSD and psilocybin and stuff like that. | ||
| Now typically what happens is a drug gets created and then over time it becomes generic, right? | ||
| It just gets opened up and anybody can pretty much make it. | ||
| What you have here is the opposite things happening. | ||
| The opposite. | ||
| So you have the existence of a generic off-brand label drug. | ||
| And now companies, big pharma companies are seeing down the line. | ||
| There's a company called Compass, I think, is one of the big ones. | ||
| They're looking down the line and they're thinking, we can own some of this. | ||
| We can somehow profit from this. | ||
| So they're future-proofing themselves by trying to create drugs, synthesize them. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| Because... | ||
| The result, it's going to be interesting to see if they do that, what the results are, because psychedelic drugs, one of the things that they do encourage is they encourage compassion and dissolving of the ego, and they encourage community, and they encourage love. | ||
| These are obviously mass generalizations, and there's people who have used psychedelics who have escaped all of those positive benefits. | ||
| We know those. | ||
| They become gurus and self-obsessed. | ||
| It's not foolproof. | ||
| But I think, in general, the result of psychedelics is a more loving, cohesive society. | ||
| And I think that's good. | ||
| So maybe we can have some sort of a brand of capitalism that encourages psychedelic uses because it's profitable. | ||
| And then because of that and through that, people can abandon a lot of their aggressive tendencies and a lot of their ideas that are not suitable to a loving community. | ||
| Because you're going to align something which is good for society with something that is good for the company. | ||
| Yeah, and maybe these companies in profiting off of these psychedelics would start to invest in community centers and start to invest in rebuilding neighborhoods and rebuilding fucked up cities. | ||
| Why would they do that? | ||
| They would do that because they're looking at their overall image. | ||
| If you're making... | ||
| Insane amounts of money profiting off of psychedelics and you're using these psychedelics as well. | ||
| You might feel, I would feel, that I had some sort of an obligation to enhance the community that was serving me. | ||
| Dude, if everybody in the company is on psychedelics, I don't know how much is going to get done. | ||
| I don't know if this is ever going to make it to market. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| There's a lot of people that are using psychedelics in big tech, and they're using them in microdosing, and it's changing their perspectives. | ||
| It's changing the way they interact with the market. | ||
| And their dog, and the mirrors, and everything else. | ||
| Depends upon dosage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, to get back to what you were talking about, about embracing views, like, you know, being pro-Second Amendment, but also being pro-choice. | ||
| You know, like, these things are supposed to... | ||
| You're supposed to not have that. | ||
| You're supposed to be able to... | ||
| Join a group, and that group is, you know, you've got, oh, I've got all my ducks in a line here. | ||
| What do I think about this? | ||
| Oh, that. | ||
| Let me consult the document. | ||
| Yeah, what do I think about open borders? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I'm for it, I think. | ||
| I'm liberal, yeah. | ||
| And then you look at this, and you realize that, like, there's some things on this side that I don't agree with, and there's some things on that side that I agree with. | ||
| And then you realize, like, oh, wait a minute, I'm just a person. | ||
| I'm a person with my own ideas on things. | ||
| And I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat. | ||
| I'm a human. | ||
| And I resist these notions that I have to be classified in this very fucking clear and specific box. | ||
| The problem is, if I know one of your views, and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe, you're not a serious thinker. | ||
| You've just adopted somebody else's ideology and you've plugged it in. | ||
| I think this is one of the reasons why Whenever I see people online that always talk about the same stuff, you know, it's like an old leather pair of shoes. | ||
| You can almost feel where it's going to go. | ||
| You know what the opinion's going to be. | ||
| Something new's happened. | ||
| The recession news about Wikipedia or whatever's happened. | ||
| And you can tell what the take's going to be. | ||
| You're never surprised. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That means that they're not a serious thinker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or it means, you know, they're ideologically captured, at least in that specific topic. | ||
| You know, like, the abortion topic is what I call, it's a very human issue. | ||
| And what I mean by that is it's very messy. | ||
| It's not like a math problem. | ||
| When you look at abortion, abortion in this country and abortion rights in this country, and that's what it is. | ||
| We call it reproductive rights, but it's really abortion. | ||
| You're talking about when... | ||
| Life has been conceived, right? | ||
| It is the potential to become a human being. | ||
| At what point in time are you comfortable with terminating that? | ||
| And who do you think should be allowed to say whether or not another individual, not you, not your partner, but another person, when they get pregnant, when should they be allowed to have an abortion? | ||
| Texas has this crazy law. | ||
| It's like six weeks, which is fucking insane. | ||
| Because six weeks in, a lot of women don't even know they're pregnant. | ||
| And then it's seven weeks and now it's against the law. | ||
| So now you have to travel to get an abortion. | ||
| It could be two weeks late for your period. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, fucking wild. | ||
| That's wild to me. | ||
| And it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And it's mostly based on religious beliefs. | ||
| I think. | ||
| We don't have a Christian right in the UK, which is one element that's very different. | ||
| It's very, very interesting. | ||
| It's amazing that no one's come along and built one. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perhaps. | |
| It seems like they could get a lot of people with that. | ||
| You've got them over here. | ||
| Yeah, we've got a lot of them over here. | ||
| It's interesting thinking about... | ||
| The way that the abortion debate comes about, I got asked on a Q&A recently, what opinion do you hold that most of your audience would disagree with? | ||
| And I said that both sides of the abortion debate feel to me like a kind of righteous side. | ||
| Like I really find it difficult to work out. | ||
| Like when I hear a Shapiro going like really, really good on the pro-life thing, I'm like, fucking hell, like that sounds kind of compelling. | ||
| And then when I hear someone that's completely talking about the pro-choice in a really, really good way, I find... | ||
| No, that's really compelling. | ||
| And maybe that's just that I haven't done the work to get myself to a sufficiently robust position to make one call or the other. | ||
| But I think it's what you said earlier on. | ||
| This isn't a maths problem. | ||
| It's a very, very messy issue. | ||
| And it comes down basically to sort of morality and a felt sense of what is right for a lot of people. | ||
| They can post hoc it as much as they want. | ||
| They can say, well, actually, we know that the cluster of cells and this level of survivorship and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You go, it's a moral issue. | ||
| It's mostly a moral issue. | ||
| It's how do you feel about this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And now you're trying to verbalize it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think, from my own personal perspective, my thought on it is, first and foremost, I am not a woman. | ||
| I am incapable of getting pregnant. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| And I don't think I'm a woman. | ||
| But even if I was a woman, I'm pretty sure I can't get pregnant. | ||
| So I might become a woman, but I can never get pregnant. | ||
| At least in terms of what science has figured out now. | ||
| If medical science comes up with some new innovation and I can become a woman and get pregnant... | ||
| I actually read something where they were talking about taking trans women and transplanting uterus in trans women. | ||
| And that this was at least theorized. | ||
| Where'd you get a uterus from? | ||
| Another woman. | ||
| Donation? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Someone doesn't want her uterus, she gives it to you. | ||
| He? | ||
| Yeah, you. | ||
| You can say you. | ||
| No, he gives it to you. | ||
| Presumably if you're getting rid of your uterus and it's still working, it's because you might be going through transition as well. | ||
| No, it could be a woman that doesn't want her uterus. | ||
| Just giving it away? | ||
| Yeah, she doesn't like it. | ||
| Like a yard sale? | ||
| Yeah, like I don't like my left hand. | ||
| You want it? | ||
| I mean, there are people that, do you know that? | ||
| There's people that, I forget what the term for it is, but they feel like they should be handicapped, and they're not. | ||
| I know that there's a trans-autistic movement at the moment, which are people who aren't autistic but identify as autistic. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| For the first time ever, I felt like someone was using my culture as a costume. | ||
| Are you autistic? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like, I feel like 5% autism is like a competitive advantage now. | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| That's what you want. | ||
| You just want, you know, the salt bay, you want that much. | ||
| Just a sprinkling of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You want to microdose Adderall. | ||
| Microdosing autism. | ||
| Good outcomes from first five years of uterus transplants. | ||
| What? | ||
| Is this into men? | ||
| Okay, hold on a second, but this is women. | ||
| But this is problematic, first of all, because they're saying women. | ||
| I was looking it up this way. | ||
| No, no, you just go back. | ||
| Uterine transplants and trans women. | ||
| Ethicists sound in. | ||
| Like, right there. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| I had something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was trying to find newer stuff. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But let's just like see what this is. | ||
| But this is May of 2022. Uterine transplants are not new. | ||
| The first successful uterine transplant was done in Sweden 2013. America boasted its first successful uterine transplant three years later at Baylor. | ||
| But these were cis women born without a functioning uterus. | ||
| Now an Indian doctor is proposing uterine transplantation for trans women. | ||
| This is what I was talking about. | ||
| The reaction in the bioethics community is mixed. | ||
| Oh, you think? | ||
| I was trying to see if there was a result to this. | ||
| I want to find the people that are in support of it. | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's not just a... | ||
| It's not like a garage or a garage, as you'd say. | ||
| It's not just like having a garage. | ||
| It's not just, oh, let's just park your car in here and it'll be fine. | ||
| You can have my garage. | ||
| I can have your garage. | ||
| It's like there's more than just the vehicle that you park it in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hormone cascades and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| Someone got really criticized online a little while ago for replying to Elon Musk's problem about underpopulation and population collapse that test you babies will fix everything. | ||
| He's like, well, it's the mother's heartbeat. | ||
| It's all of the ways that you interact, that the baby interacts in utero with the mother. | ||
| It's not just, it's not simply just like a vitamin pill that you could take or a particular solution that you could leave this fetus in and then you get a child nine months later. | ||
| Yeah, who knows what happens if we actually develop a full child outside of a human body, I mean a real test tube baby, where there's some sort of an artificial environment, and then they all turn out to be sociopaths. | ||
| They have no connection with other human beings, so they didn't develop a connection with their mother while they're in the womb. | ||
| It could be wild. | ||
| Or, excuse me, it could be a father in the womb, because men can get pregnant now. | ||
| I learned about the adaptive reason for psychopaths being in society. | ||
| So you'd think like it's about 1%, 0.1% to 1% of people are psychopathic, right? | ||
| And then you can filter that down to the ones that have got sufficient motivation to actually go and do something that's a bit wild. | ||
| But I was asking this guy, the researcher, and I was saying, look... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| How do psychopaths even exist? | ||
| Why do they exist? | ||
| I can't understand why they're adaptive. | ||
| I know that you can be effective over short periods as a psychopath, but over long periods of time, it doesn't end up being very good for society, and I thought it would have been bred out. | ||
| He said, yeah, you're right, except for the fact that over the entire size of a population, a few psychopaths actually make sense. | ||
| If you're a raiding party, a Viking raiding party that needs to go over and fuck everybody up in Lindisfarne, which is near to where I lived in the UK, you want some psychopaths. | ||
| You don't want them to come back with PTSD. | ||
| You want them to go over there, burn everything down, rape the women, pillage, come back with gold and supplies and grain and whatever else they take and not care about it. | ||
| You actually, on an individual level, psychopathy might not be fantastic for the people around them. | ||
| But in a tribe, it's actually quite adaptive and quite useful. | ||
| It's like a weapon, like a very specific sort of weapon that you can use. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Break glass in case of war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In case of raiding party. | ||
| It makes sense that it would be sort of a legacy thing that exists in the human population. | ||
| That we've had it because it was very beneficial thousands of years ago. | ||
| But the difference is now that you're not going to get pulled up as much for being a psychopath because you can move from town to town. | ||
| If it was a Dunbar number of 100 or 150 or something in your tribe previously, what are you going to do? | ||
| Go to the next tribe? | ||
| Maybe that would have happened. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Perhaps you could move from one tribe to another tribe. | ||
| It seems pretty unlikely. | ||
| You'd probably just get killed. | ||
| But if you fuck over people one too many times, this is the reason that socially we're so careful of status. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why we are concerned about public speaking, because one of the few times you would have done that is when your status would have been in high focus. | ||
| And people might have said, if this goes badly, they're going to drop down. | ||
| Or maybe you were defending yourself against the tribe of some kind. | ||
| If you're not able to move on, that would make psychopathy more difficult to manage and more likely to be punished, I think. | ||
| But now you can just go from town to town to town, within a city. | ||
| You can go from suburb to suburb, change your name, not use your social media profile anymore. | ||
| I think that psychopathy, people that are actively being psychopaths, are significantly easier now to hide in amongst society. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| It also makes sense that psychopathy would have been more common because it would have been more useful when you're constantly in tribal war. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it depends on how you deploy it. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| Psychopathy, to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath, you actually have to have committed criminal acts. | ||
| So you can't be, because of the way that the current psychopathic checklist is called, I think you have to be 28 out of 40 in the UK or 30 out of 40 in the US. The US has got a higher threshold for psychopaths, which is kind of funny. | ||
| And there was this guy, this researcher, who was researching psychopaths. | ||
| And what you see is a particular area of the brain is downregulated, right? | ||
| So you don't see as much activity when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy. | ||
| So he decides that he's going to study a bunch of psychopaths, many of whom I think are actually in prison, because you have to commit a criminal act. | ||
| And then he needs a control group. | ||
| So the control group is going to be, you're a professor, you've got students, use the students. | ||
| And he was running out of people to put in the control group. | ||
| I mean, he even used himself as one of the people. | ||
| So anyway, he's running through this control group and having a look at all of the people that are in it. | ||
| And he notices this person's got no activation when they're going through. | ||
| And he goes, holy shit, this is the brain of a psychopath in the control group. | ||
| I found a psychopath in here. | ||
| I need to go and contact them. | ||
| It turned out to be him. | ||
| Turned out to be the professor himself. | ||
| He discovered that he was a psychopath whilst doing a study on psychopaths. | ||
| And then he said, actually, you know what? | ||
| It all makes sense now. | ||
| Because when people come round to my house and they're eating my food... | ||
| I think, who the fuck are all of these people in my house eating my food? | ||
| Why are they here? | ||
| And they interviewed his kids. | ||
| They asked his kids. | ||
| And they said, what is it like? | ||
| You know, is there anything unique about Dad? | ||
| And he said, well, yeah, Dad. | ||
| He doesn't smile that much around us. | ||
| And he's not very warm. | ||
| He's not very loving and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But the point being that you can have the biological determinants of being a psychopath. | ||
| And it not... | ||
| This is a fully functioning guy. | ||
| Wife, kids, career... | ||
| Didn't smile much, wasn't happy when people ate his food, but like broadly, fine. | ||
| But he had essentially the same raw materials as the person that was murder in jail. | ||
| So what's the determination? | ||
| What are they looking for when they find out that he's a son? | ||
| A whole big long checklist. | ||
| It might even be available online, I'm not sure, but... | ||
| Big long checklist of things that you need to go through, a bunch of questions that you answer, and they go through this diagnosis. | ||
| But in order to breach the threshold of clinically being diagnosed as a psychopath, you have to have used it to commit crimes. | ||
| So this meant that although this particular professor had all of the raw ingredients, and it looked like he was psychopathic, by the, what is it, the DNS? What's that thing? | ||
| The Diagnostic Statistical Manual? | ||
| DSM. The DSM wouldn't have categorized him as a psychopath. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| That is very interesting. | ||
| So this guy, did they contact his spouse? | ||
| Well, I think it was him doing the study, right? | ||
| So I guess he contacted his spouse. | ||
| Did he ask his spouse, like, what's wrong with me? | ||
| Fuck knows. | ||
| Why do you like me? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| But then you also have to think the fact that psychopaths tend to be pretty effective in the world. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, someone that has very outgoing traits, they're super self-assured, you know, you have narcissism as well, as long as it's not vulnerable narcissism. | ||
| There's two types, grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| So, grandiose narcissists are the ones who genuinely believe that they are better than everybody else. | ||
| They are constantly proving this to everyone. | ||
| Vulnerable narcissists manifest their narcissism in a similar way, but it's to try and hide the fact that deep down they don't believe that they're anything. | ||
| So both types of narcissism will manifest in a similar sort of way. | ||
| Both of them will be out there, but one person is desperately seeking approval and needs people to tell them that they've done well, and the other one doesn't. | ||
| They're just going to continue believing no matter what reality brings to them. | ||
| Now, the vulnerable narcissists are actually really dangerous, and the reason for that is that if the world doesn't give to them that which they think, They're going to get very, very angry and aggressive because that taps into something that maybe they're fearful about that's deep down. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That makes sense where a lot of people who have a distorted perception of where they should be in the world are angry at others who are doing well. | ||
| And if someone takes them down, if somebody was to take the piss out of them, the grandiose narcissist, it would just be water off a duck's back. | ||
| Like Trump. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Definitely a grandiose narcissist, right? | ||
| He's not got vulnerable narcissism in him. | ||
| Someone that's a vulnerable narcissist, everybody knows that friend that just can't not bring up the most recent brilliant thing they've done, but they know that if they poke them a little bit too hard, that it would really, really hurt. | ||
| That's the vulnerable narcissist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So when this study is done on psychopaths and they're looking for these traits, are they able to do some sort of a scan of the mind? | ||
| Is there like an fMRI or something like that that they're... | ||
| Yeah, and they're looking for brain activation in particular areas that respond to imagery, I think, that people are being shown. | ||
| And the imagery is stuff like war images, dead bodies, stuff that should cause empathy to come through. | ||
| Because I think a lack of empathy is one of the main insights, one of the main causes or determinants, sorry, that... | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Is there a difference between desensitization, which is something that absolutely has happened with people being able to access horrific images and videos and stories online? | ||
| Because your access to horrific images is... | ||
| So much greater than at any time in human history. | ||
| However, for the most part, our physical interaction with horrific imagery is down way more than it ever was during times of war and during times of famine and in the past when things were way more brutal in history. | ||
| But our access to images There's a certain argument that video games and violent films and all these things have desensitized us to imagery. | ||
| So everyone's maybe become a little bit more psychopathic in that way. | ||
| Right, because if you're studying a person's reaction to things, it's not like you're taking them to a rape scene. | ||
| It's not like you're taking them like, hey, we're going to watch this guy get murdered, come with me. | ||
| It's not as visceral. | ||
| Right, you're not going to be right there. | ||
| How do you react when you're... | ||
| Are there levels to this? | ||
| If someone was stabbing someone right in front of you, would you not care at all? | ||
| Or would you just not care if you saw a video? | ||
| Yeah, the threshold is different. | ||
| But I mean, this is the problem with any lab study, right? | ||
| Any time that you want to try and talk about arousal response or all of that, it's in a lab. | ||
| So there's a conversation analysis is another type of science that's done. | ||
| And most stuff that's done to do with the way that people speak, they'll bring them into a lab and then they'll analyze the conversation or they'll watch them perhaps under multiple cameras. | ||
| Conversation analysis is actually done of this. | ||
| It wouldn't even be this. | ||
| It would be us out for a beer or something like that. | ||
| And then they record that session. | ||
| They go away and they transcribe it. | ||
| Difference being that you're able to get things out of a non-lab setting that you couldn't get in a lab setting. | ||
| There's always going to be an impact, right? | ||
| An unnatural impact. | ||
| And yeah, you might be right. | ||
| Perhaps there are people that are totally fine looking at the images and not being there in front of the situation itself. | ||
| Yeah, I would really worry about that analysis today because I do think that people are so much more comfortable with seeing horrific things today. | ||
| And particularly things that are not quite real, like violent video games. | ||
| Like if you play Grand Theft Auto, you could beat someone to death with a crowbar. | ||
| It's a part of a game that's been played by millions of people. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness to that. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness to getting accustomed to semi-realistic imagery that is not... | ||
| If you saw it in real life, it would be horrific. | ||
| But you're laughing, beating someone to death with a crowbar. | ||
| You steal their car and shoot them. | ||
| How much crossover is there between what we do in video games and how we see the real world? | ||
| I mean, this is like the billion dollar question, right? | ||
| Just how much impact is there of violent video games on the way that people show up in day to day life? | ||
| I think it might entirely depend on the resolve of your personality and how you've been raised. | ||
| I think if you're a person that doesn't get a lot of interaction with human beings, maybe have negative interactions with family members and parents, and you seek escape through these violent video games, and you play these violent video games, and the imagery is stimulating and exciting, and you get feelings of victory and of satisfaction by achieving these goals, which include shooting people. | ||
| That could be a problem. | ||
| Like say a person like yourself, like a fully formed adult human being, nice guy, I'm sure video games are not going to turn you into a psycho. | ||
| But if you're being raised on the internet and you're on fucking 4chan all day looking at people getting shot in the face, And then you go and play violent video games and then you don't have any interaction with loving people. | ||
| I mean there's people like that that the vast majority of the human interaction is through a screen to a faceless person somewhere else and you're just getting data in terms of like text from posts and articles and you're laughing at horrible memes and then you're playing violent video games. | ||
| You are, in some way, I don't know what the equation is for nature versus nurture, but I would imagine that there's some impact that all of that stuff has on your overall being. | ||
| The question is like, what's that number? | ||
| Have you had a look at behavioral genetics much? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| So it's how heritable a lot of the traits that we have, especially psychologically, are. | ||
| So there's this guy called Robert Plowman. | ||
| He did the biggest twin study ever in history. | ||
| It was every twin born between, I think, 1991 and 1994 in the UK. He invited them to be a part of this study. | ||
| It's something like 60,000 pairs of twins that he did. | ||
| And what he was trying to do was he was trying to tease apart the difference between nature and nurture. | ||
| How much of what we are is because of our genetics and how much of what we are is because of our environment. | ||
| And the only way that you can really do this is with identical twins. | ||
| And what you can do is identical twins that get put up for adoption, you get to use the same genetics, but you split test what happens in terms of the environment. | ||
| And dude, the number, the amount of impact that our genes have on us is absolutely terrifying. | ||
| Pretty much 50% of everything that you are psychologically is because of your genes. | ||
| 50? | ||
| 50%. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So if your father's a psychopath and your mother's a psychopath. | ||
| Oh, psychopathy may be even more heritable. | ||
| I mean, so everyone would accept the fact that height is pretty heritable, right? | ||
| I think it's about 0.9. | ||
| So 90% is the correlation between you and your parents. | ||
| Weight is... | ||
| I want to say 50%. | ||
| There'll be a chart that we could get on the internet of how heritable Robert Plowman's work says everything is. | ||
| But stuff like depression, alcoholism, all of this stuff is super, super highly heritable. | ||
| And people don't like this because in a world that's a meritocracy, you want to believe that you can be anything that you dream to be, right? | ||
| If the people that are successes are worthy of their successes, then what does that mean? | ||
| The people who fail are worthy of their failures. | ||
| But this genetic research would suggest that there's a lot of restrictions that get placed on people before they actually end up even stepping onto the field of play. | ||
| And that makes people feel very uncomfortable. | ||
| It's... | ||
| You know, just around the corner from talking about eugenics, it's just around the corner of talking about determinism, that there's racial differences in IQ, all of this sort of stuff. | ||
| It's in the same region as some pretty touchy subjects that nobody wants to go close to. | ||
| But when you're talking about psychopathy, a lot of that is coming through. | ||
| Yeah, maybe it's activated in the environment, but a lot of this needs to be triggered in the parents. | ||
| And you go, well, that's a difficult situation to work out who's morally responsible. | ||
| Is the psychopath morally responsible? | ||
| Well, how responsible? | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The argument of free will versus determinism is very compelling when you get down to the bottom of it and you really start thinking about how much free will do you really have? | ||
| And what does that mean? | ||
| Are you a combination of all of your life experiences plus your genetics? | ||
| Or are you an individual with choices that you can make in the moment right now? | ||
| Do the right thing. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| Are you a person or are you a conglomeration of ideas and thoughts and genetics? | ||
| And how much will and how much control do you have over the things you say and the things you do? | ||
| I spiraled one of my friends into a deep depression after I sent him the clip of Sam Harris talking about that on this podcast. | ||
| He didn't leave the house for two weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, well, if everything's determined, then it doesn't matter. | |
| It kind of does. | ||
| I think Sam makes a very compelling argument, but I do think there's something... | ||
| To external pressures that you get from the community that affect your choices because you say and do things that people think are either a problem or are negative or have some sort of negative effect on others and so you realize that people don't like that and then it shifts the way you think and behave in the future. | ||
| And then when faced with a similar situation, you then, instead of relying upon this accumulation of data and genetics, you also take into account, into consideration, the thoughts and feelings of others. | ||
| And that is a version of free will. | ||
| Because then you decide, you know what, I think I'm thinking about this wrong. | ||
| And I think my natural, I'm compelled to act in this way, but I think maybe I should lean more towards that, and maybe I should try to do the right thing, and that's free will. | ||
| It definitely makes people, I think, believing that you've got that impact, it definitely makes them feel more empathic, right? | ||
| If nothing matters, then you're only two steps away from fatalism or nihilism. | ||
| That doesn't seem like a very good way. | ||
| So, I mean, you could say that learning about determinism is an information hazard. | ||
| That if you learn about it, it may cause you to be less caring, to be less diligent, less conscientious with the things that you do. | ||
| It's interesting, thinking about the role model thing that we said earlier on, A lot of the time, or at least where I grew up in the northeast of the UK, there's not a massive amount. | ||
| There weren't many people that were like the people that I wanted to be. | ||
| And I realized that I didn't have any role models or many that were fantastic for me to be around. | ||
| But having a negative role model, so someone that you know that you definitely don't want to be like, I actually think is maybe just as useful. | ||
| If you don't have anybody around you that you want to be like, and you do have people around you that you like, I don't want to have his relationship with his father, his type of way that he shows up for his kids, the financial setup that this person's got in their life, that person's body image, that person's relationship with their diet, all of that stuff. | ||
| Those are all flags that you can plant in the ground that are going to say, okay, I'm not going to be this, I'm not going to be this, I'm not going to be this. | ||
| And avoiding ruin is probably more useful than actually trying to achieve success. | ||
| People can get themselves out of the game a lot more easily than they can get to the top. | ||
| And if you end up with a criminal record or dying in a car crash because you were drunk driving or getting a girl pregnant when you were both too young to support the baby, all of these things are huge problems. | ||
| And the downside of that is much worse than the upside of being more inspired. | ||
| So I just felt like looking at negative role models is potentially a useful way to go about things like that. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people who are very successful came from a horrible environment. | ||
| Like they realized that's not how I want to be. | ||
| That's a big factor with alcoholics' children. | ||
| The children of alcoholics either become alcoholics themselves or really have a great disdain for alcohol. | ||
| Yeah, but if you grew up on an island, the genetic predisposition for alcoholism is pretty high. | ||
| But if you grew up on an island that had no alcohol on it, you wouldn't be an alcoholic. | ||
| So everything isn't fully determined by your genes, right? | ||
| The environment plays a role. | ||
| I did a gig once on this place called Block Island. | ||
| And Block Island, I think... | ||
| See, find out where Block Island is. | ||
| I think it's off Rhode Island somewhere. | ||
| But, I mean, I don't know if the audience that I had was indicative of the rest of the population of this island, but there wasn't a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, okay, Rhode Island. | ||
| There's not a lot to do on this island. | ||
| And I think it's mostly like fishermen or people who, you know, I don't know. | ||
| But I've never encountered a more stupefyingly drunk audience in my life. | ||
| They weren't just drunk. | ||
| I mean, they were fucking obliterated. | ||
| And it was the whole crowd. | ||
| And it was me and this guy Scott that I was doing this gig with, and I remember we went back to the place we were staying afterwards, and we were like, never again. | ||
| We're never doing this gig again. | ||
| This is the worst gig ever. | ||
| We have to tell everybody. | ||
| Is there a right amount of drunk that the crowd needs to be? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, they could be completely sober and have a good time. | ||
| I mean, alcohol is obviously a social lubricant and it helps a little bit for people to, you know, loosen up and have some fun. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, I go to shows all the time where I'm sober and I'm laughing. | ||
| You don't have to be drunk. | ||
| You don't have to be intoxicated in any way. | ||
| But being stupefied, these people were just... | ||
| Larry. | ||
| It wasn't one of them. | ||
| It wasn't ten of them. | ||
| It was all of them. | ||
| I've never encountered an audience like that where everyone was shit-faced. | ||
| There's got to be a table that I could turn to with a rational group of people that are just out having a good time going, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| There was no people like that there. | ||
| Everyone was just... | ||
| And keep drinking. | ||
| They kept drinking. | ||
| And it was just so depressing. | ||
| And I was just thinking, imagine growing up and being stuck on this island. | ||
| Maybe it's better now, people. | ||
| I don't know, Block Island. | ||
| Maybe you got it going on now. | ||
| You pulled it off. | ||
| Got your shit together. | ||
| But when I was there in like 1989, it was horrific. | ||
| I mean, it was fucking horrific. | ||
| And we couldn't believe it. | ||
| I forget how we got there. | ||
| Probably like a ferry or something. | ||
| But I remember like coming back. | ||
| We were just going, I'm never fucking going back there again. | ||
| Because it's like, there was no humor. | ||
| There was nothing you could say. | ||
| It didn't matter what you said. | ||
| These people were obliterated. | ||
| I mean, the whole audience was obliterated. | ||
| I remember this lady yelling out at Scott when he was on stage. | ||
| She was just like, And I looked over, and the people that were with her were barely recognizing she was that drunk. | ||
| They were just plastered. | ||
| Talking about funny stuff, have you seen the new PETA adverts about how meat can get in the way of your love life? | ||
| No. | ||
| Jamie, please. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| It's going to get in the way of your love life. | ||
| My goodness, you definitely don't eat meat then. | ||
| These adverts are some of the funniest things that I've seen on the internet. | ||
| It's a new campaign. | ||
| This says it was from 2017. Is this... | ||
| Meat will get in the way of your love life? | ||
| Yeah, it says meat interrupts your sex life. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| It might be 2017. Oh, is it from... | ||
| Is this it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, let's see. | ||
| There's a cow in the middle? | ||
| First of all, that guy has problems anyway with his fucking man bun. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
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Easy. | |
| I got one. | ||
| It doesn't look like that though. | ||
| Shave it off. | ||
| That silly fella. | ||
| Yeah, scroll down Jamie. | ||
| What's it saying? | ||
| There should be some more. | ||
| So yeah, they put them on the side of the road. | ||
| How does it interrupt your sex life? | ||
| There's one with a pig there. | ||
| Meat and dairy clog your arteries and can lead to erectile dysfunction. | ||
| That's not really true. | ||
|
unidentified
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None of that's true. | |
| Go a little bit further down. | ||
| I think there's one that looks like two guys have had their mind blown by a chicken. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Meat interrupts your sex life. | ||
| Two guys that have had a threesome with a chicken and it looks like they've blown their mind. | ||
| I don't think that's what they're saying. | ||
| I think the chicken is keeping them from fucking each other. | ||
| That's what it's saying. | ||
| That somehow or another chicken is bad for your sex life. | ||
| Tell that to 95% of the world who eats meat. | ||
| It's probably more than that. | ||
| I think it's like 97%. | ||
| Women see men who are omnivores as more attractive than men that are vegetarian as well. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| There's a bunch of studies on it, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But what about vegetarian women? | ||
| There's a lot of vegetarian women and vegan women that are disgusted by people who eat meat. | ||
| Perhaps, but that means that you've reduced down your dating pool, right? | ||
| As a vegetarian man, you're at a disadvantage to all of the omnivore women. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But perhaps an advantage to the vegan and vegetarian women. | ||
| Potentially a high price to pay, though, just to get laid. | ||
| To not have meat again. | ||
| Well, unless it works for you. | ||
| I think for some people, that's what they want. | ||
| You know, I mean, I'm a strong believer in biological diversity. | ||
| And I think there's many people that thrive on a vegetarian diet. | ||
| They don't seem to have a problem with it at all. | ||
| They seem happy and healthy. | ||
| Have you ever tried it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When I was fighting, I did a vegetarian diet for six months because I was trying to maintain a ridiculously low weight. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| It didn't work well for me. | ||
| But also I should say that I was 19 or 18. And so I probably wasn't doing it right. | ||
| But I was just eating vegetables. | ||
| I'd buy Chinese food and I'd get Buddha's Delight and I'd get all vegetables and I wasn't eating any meat at all. | ||
| What was your performance like? | ||
| Changes? | ||
| I was just a little lack of energy, listless. | ||
| It just didn't feel good. | ||
| But again, I'm not saying that you can't thrive on a vegetarian diet. | ||
| I'm just giving my own personal experience with how I did it. | ||
| I don't think I did it well. | ||
| But when I started eating meat again, I won the Massachusetts State Championships in Taekwondo four years in a row. | ||
| And the first year I won it at 140 pounds. | ||
| And I wasn't 140 pounds. | ||
| I was probably like 150-something. | ||
| And I drained myself to get down to 140 in order to compete. | ||
| And you had to weigh in the day of the matches. | ||
| And I won, but I was very tired. | ||
| I was drained. | ||
| And I won by knockout in two of the fights. | ||
| And I was very lucky that I did because I probably didn't have enough energy to fight hard for all the rounds. | ||
| And then the next year, so between that year and there was a few competitions before the state and national championships. | ||
| And so I said, I'm having a really hard time maintaining this This weight and getting down to this weight was so brutal for the state championships, I'm going to try to do something different. | ||
| So I tried a vegetarian diet. | ||
| And then I did it for six months and it wasn't good. | ||
| I didn't make gains in terms of my technique and my ability. | ||
| I just felt like I was stuck. | ||
| And so my instructor said, why don't you think about going up in weight? | ||
| Just give it a try. | ||
| And so then I started eating meat like crazy. | ||
| And I gained 10 pounds, like almost immediately. | ||
| Like within two months, I was 10 pounds heavier and much better. | ||
| Same condition? | ||
| I was faster, I was stronger, and I was winning in much more spectacular fashion. | ||
| I was going into tournaments and just destroying people. | ||
| I really came into my own after I quit my vegetarian diet. | ||
| But again, I don't think I was doing it right. | ||
| I think I was weakening myself. | ||
| I mean, I think if I was like supplementing one of the hemp protein and making sure that I got my B12 in order, then I was, you know, taking supplements and doing it the correct way and getting my blood work done and making sure that my levels were all good. | ||
| I wasn't doing that. | ||
| Much less education about it back then. | ||
| Much worse supplementation in terms of helping people to do that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, much less. | ||
| I remember I went to a nutritionist to try to talk to her about it, and she's telling me I should eat cereal. | ||
| She's like, have a bowl of cereal. | ||
| I go, what about sugar? | ||
| She's like, well, you'll burn that off. | ||
| You're very athletic. | ||
| I was like, that is a terrible nutritionist. | ||
| How hard is it? | ||
| The Jake Paul fight's just been canceled. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, and that's been canceled because his opponent couldn't lose 16 pounds. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| Most likely it was cancelled for numerous reasons. | ||
| That may have been one of them. | ||
| But the allegations that I'm hearing are that they sold so few tickets that it would be a real problem in terms of financially to even break even. | ||
| Dana White said that he had heard they had only sold a million dollars worth of tickets. | ||
| If you want to turn the lights on in Madison Square Garden, it costs a half a million dollars. | ||
| You have to sell a lot of fucking tickets if you want to make some money in Madison Square Garden. | ||
| And if you want to make money on pay-per-view, there's a threshold. | ||
| Like, say, up until like 100,000 buys, depending on what the deal is, you might not make any money. | ||
| And then after 100,000 buys, then you start making money. | ||
| And who the fuck wanted to see that fight? | ||
| I didn't want to see it. | ||
| Nobody wants to see that fight, except Jake Paul's family and his friends and his fans. | ||
| I think, and Rachman's family and friends and fans. | ||
| But I think that if he had fought someone who was either a ranked opponent or someone with a big name, Jake Paul is obviously very popular, and he's very talented. | ||
| He knocked out Tyron Woodley, who's one of the greatest welterweight champions in the history of the UFC. I mean, obviously Tyron Woodley's not a boxer, his background was in wrestling, but you're still talking about an elite combat sports athlete, and Jake Paul flatlined him with one punch. | ||
| He's legit. | ||
| I believe, and I've watched him Hit mitts. | ||
| I've watched him work out. | ||
| I've watched him spar. | ||
| I think he's legit. | ||
| I think he could be a legit pro boxer. | ||
| And I also think that if he wasn't Jake Paul, and you watched his performance, like the way he knocked out Tyrone Woodley, if he was just an up-and-coming boxing contender, I would say, that guy's a fucking killer. | ||
| Keep an eye on him. | ||
| The way he knocked out Tyrone Woodley is serious. | ||
| I would tell everybody, have you seen this guy Jake Paul? | ||
| He's the shit. | ||
| He's real. | ||
| That Nate Robinson guy that he knocked out? | ||
| It's not just that he knocked out an NBA player. | ||
| That's no big deal. | ||
| It's the way he did it. | ||
| He knocked him out like a stone-cold killer. | ||
| He knew exactly what he was doing. | ||
| He slid away, cracked him with a right hand and dropped him. | ||
| He's real. | ||
| He's got real talent. | ||
| You know, the Ben Askren knockout? | ||
| It's not impressive to knock out Ben Askren because Ben Askren is just an elite wrestler. | ||
| He also had a hip replacement before that and kind of probably barely trained striking for that fight. | ||
| He doesn't have this deep background in striking where he was a really dangerous opponent. | ||
| But the way he did it, he's cracking him at one punch and flatlining him. | ||
| He's legit. | ||
| Jake Paul is legit talented. | ||
| But you gotta have a fucking dance partner. | ||
| And even though Rahman is Hasim Rahman's son, and there's legacy to that, and he's like 12-1 as a professional. | ||
| He lost his last fight, but he's still 12-1 as a professional as far as credentials go. | ||
| He's bigger than Jake Paul, and they wanted him to be at 200 pounds, so he's supposed to weigh in at no more than 205, and he was like 215, and that's why they're canceling the fight. | ||
| Maybe, maybe, or maybe the interest in this fight was a lot less than they had anticipated. | ||
| He was supposed to be fighting Tommy Fury. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tommy Fury, who's, you know... | ||
| Second time that Tommy's pulled out of the fight. | ||
| It can be because of originally an injury, I think, back in last year, and then this time it was something to do with immigration problems. | ||
| But in the last two fights that Jake's had, three people have pulled out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's because he's fucking good. | ||
| He's good, man. | ||
| You run a real risk of getting knocked the fuck out if you fight Jake Paul. | ||
| He's got nothing to lose as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You run a real risk of getting knocked the fuck out by Jake Paul. | ||
| And that's because of the way he acts and behaves. | ||
| Because it's so funny, the way he acts. | ||
| Like, what he's done is really kind of amazing, because he's, like, created this persona that's, like, easily mocked. | ||
| But you can't mock his fucking skills. | ||
| So, like, these guys can mock him and talk all kinds of crazy shit, but when you get in the ring with him, that fucking dude can fight. | ||
| He can fight. | ||
| Like, I'm a combat sports expert, right? | ||
| I literally do that for a living. | ||
| I'm a martial arts expert. | ||
| I will tell you without doubt that fucking dude can fight. | ||
| He can fight. | ||
| There's an interesting question coming up now, especially to do with boxing, that it's the sweet science and it was held in very unique prestige. | ||
| There's a question about how late can you start and still become absolutely great. | ||
| Who's the guy that fought Tyson Fury for the Deontay Wilder? | ||
| He started super late, right? | ||
| I want to say 17, 18? | ||
| Yeah, I think older than that. | ||
| I think he started when he was 21. Okay. | ||
| He won a bronze medal in the Olympics after a year and a half of training. | ||
| You need to understand what kind of special talent Deontay Wilder has. | ||
| He's got what Teddy Atlas calls an eraser for right hand. | ||
| Forget all the mistakes he makes, he can just erase it, boom, with one right hand. | ||
| And he almost knocked out Tyson Fury. | ||
| I mean, he fucked him up, and it's one of the reasons why Tyson Fury wants to retire. | ||
| Because that fight, he was concussed after that fight, and he was hurting for a long time. | ||
| Because Deontay Wilder cracked him on two moments in that fight and dropped him, and had him in really bad trouble. | ||
| And, you know, look, Tyson Fury's an animal and a warrior. | ||
| And he got up and he won that fight. | ||
| He won by spectacular knockout. | ||
| But a lot of people would have went night-night that day. | ||
| A lot of people. | ||
| Most people. | ||
| But there's a question to be asked here of how late can you start, you know? | ||
| Depends on the individual. | ||
| Because some people just have an inherent ability to learn athletic pursuits. | ||
| They have just a better understanding of their body. | ||
| They have a better relationship with movement for whatever reason. | ||
| And you can say that it's important to have traditional martial arts or boxing training early on. | ||
| And for the most part, that's correct. | ||
| But there's a lot of things that people do, whether it's just fucking around with their friends or whether it's other sorts of athletic pursuits that can enhance your ability to learn boxing and can enhance your ability to learn MMA. But to be the best of the best, I think there's a real good argument that you need to start early. | ||
| Because Tyson Fury obviously started early, Deontay Wilder didn't. | ||
| But also, Tyson Fury's 6'9". | ||
| I mean, the physical gifts that he has are undeniable. | ||
| And the guy's mind, I mean, he's a fucking animal. | ||
| Like, when he goes in there, when he was talking to Deontay Wilder and they were doing the pre-fight instructions, he's looking at him and goes, you're a fucking bitch! | ||
| You're a bitch! | ||
| You're a bitch! | ||
| And he was saying that to him, and you could see Deontay Wilder going, what have I got myself into? | ||
| Like, that was, I think, for the third fight. | ||
| What, he'd already knocked him out in the second fight. | ||
| Then he fucked him up in the third fight, too. | ||
| Built different, man. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And it's also the environment he grew up in. | ||
| You know, obviously, he's a gypsy. | ||
| He calls himself the Gypsy King. | ||
| You know, it's like, you're around people that are fighting all the time. | ||
| There's a long history of bare-knuckle boxing in the gypsy community. | ||
| I mean, they're tough fucking people. | ||
| Jake Paul called out Canelo Alvarez as well. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's a death sentence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also, Jake Paul's 200 pounds. | ||
| Canelo Alvarez really should have never fought at 175 pounds, which is when he fought Dimitri Bival. | ||
| He lost the title at 175 because Bival is an elite, legit world champion at 175. And a lot of people feel like that's why he avoided the rematch with Bival, and that he's going down to super middleweight to fight Triple G. Because if he fought... | ||
| Again, Bival would have his number because Bival had him in real trouble in moments of that fight where he had him up against the ropes and he was absorbing punches. | ||
| You know, there's another guy at 175, he's even more terrifying, and they were talking about setting up a fight with him and Canelo. | ||
| His name is Arthur Bitterbeev. | ||
| And Bitterbeev is the only boxer currently that's a world champion that has a 100% knockout ratio. | ||
| He's 18 or 19-0 with 19 knockouts. | ||
| And he fucks everybody up. | ||
| And they were talking about setting up a fight with him and Canelo Alvarez. | ||
| There's a reason why there's weight classes. | ||
| Canelo Alvarez fought Floyd Mayweather at 152 pounds. | ||
| Mayweather made him go down to 152 to weaken him, right? | ||
| He really was fighting at 154. And then he goes up to 60, wins titles there, wins titles at 68, wins, he beats Sergei Kovalev at 175, but Sergei would already, he was on the decline. | ||
| He was like going down in his career. | ||
| But Bival's not on the decline. | ||
| And Bival kicked his ass. | ||
| Just how good is Vasily Lomachenko? | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| But he's 130 pounds. | ||
| Watching him from the outside, it's such an impressive style of fighting. | ||
| It seems so flowy, beautiful technique, footwork, moving in and moving out. | ||
| It genuinely does seem like a ghost. | ||
| Is he that good? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, he's one of the best alive. | ||
| He's just pursuing big money fights at a weight class that it's not his natural weight class. | ||
| Like when he fought Teofimo Lopez, he fought Lopez at 135. Now Lopez is a big 135. He drops weight to get down to 35. Whereas Lomachenko really should be a champion at 130. And I think he started off his career at 26. So he's like going up in weight class to fight these bigger power punchers and it's having an effect on him. | ||
| And also I think he went into that fight with compromised shoulders. | ||
| There was something wrong with his shoulder and he wound up getting an operation on it after the fight. | ||
| But his footwork was because his father, who's his trainer, told him to take two years off of boxing and just concentrate on Ukrainian traditional dance. | ||
| No way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No way. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And through dance, he developed this ability to move his feet in a way that, you know, footwork is everything. | ||
| I mean, punching someone in the face is everything, but footwork is next to that. | ||
| It's so important because it puts you in positions. | ||
| If you watch, pull up Lomachenko Highlights. | ||
| Vasily Lomachenko. | ||
| When you look at his highlights, what he does is he'll stand in front of someone, he'll hit him, and then he does this step to the side, hits him here, and then spins him around and hits him at a different angle. | ||
| It's all his footwork. | ||
| His footwork is spectacular. | ||
| I mean, he's always in a position to catch people. | ||
| Like, his movement. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at how he's moved to the right and he's off to the side. | ||
| Look how they did that. | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| Who moves like that? | ||
| His footwork is the best in boxing. | ||
| But that's not being taught through boxing. | ||
| Well, it's being taught through Ukrainian dance and the movement that he developed, plus boxing. | ||
| Honed through. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, his ability to move his feet is paramount. | ||
| It's huge in terms of the impact that it's had on his success. | ||
| But also, he's an elite boxer on top of that. | ||
| There's so many things about him that make him special. | ||
| He's a microsecond ahead of every opponent, right? | ||
| He's not there to be hit, man. | ||
| It's like he knows where they're going before they know where they're going. | ||
| And he steps off. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look how he sets up. | ||
| I mean, he moves off to either side equally effectively, too. | ||
| So if a guy throws a right hand, he's moving off to the left. | ||
| If a guy throws a left hand, he's moving off to the right. | ||
| I mean, it's just special. | ||
| And there's no single punches here, either. | ||
| This is three, four, five, six, seven combinations. | ||
| Yeah, he's spectacular. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| But, like... | ||
| When you look at how he started off his career and the guys he was fighting and the size of them in comparison to Teofimo Lopez, the guy who he lost to last, it's a giant difference in size. | ||
| And that has a huge impact because there's a lot of things he can't do. | ||
| When he was standing in front of Lopez, every punch that Lopez threw at him had disastrous consequences. | ||
| Lopez is a ruthless power puncher. | ||
| Because of the size difference. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also Lopez, super fucking talented on his own. | ||
| And Lopez rose to the occasion and Lopez beat his ass. | ||
| But there was moments in that fight where he was putting it on Lopez, particularly the 11th round where he poured it on because he was realizing that he was behind in the scorecards. | ||
| Is that typical for fighters then in boxing? | ||
| They started a weight fight and then they go up and up and up and up? | ||
| It depends. | ||
| One of my favorite boxers of all time is Marvin Hagler and he was 160 his entire career. | ||
| Never went anywhere. | ||
| Stayed at 160, dominated everybody. | ||
| He's like, come to me. | ||
| You guys are welterweights you want to fight? | ||
| Come to me. | ||
| Light heavyweights you want to fight me? | ||
| Come to me. | ||
| Come down here. | ||
| I'm the king. | ||
| And he was. | ||
| He was the king for a long fucking time at 160. I'm going to guess that that's how people accumulate tons and tons and tons of titles, though, by moving up through weight categories. | ||
| And that's just as they grow as athletes, as they accumulate more muscle mass generally with training age. | ||
| And also steroids. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of those guys that are going up in weight class. | ||
| Like when you see a guy and he's a world champion in like eight weight classes, he probably had a little bit of help. | ||
| You think he's got some assistance? | ||
| 100%, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's always been a lot of shenanigans in terms of boxing and the use of supplementation. | ||
| Well, it depends on whether or not Hunter Biden's special powder is being thrown in there as well. | ||
| Well, that's not going to help you, unless you're Aaron Pryor. | ||
| Aaron Pryor was the only guy who his trainer gave him something in between rounds, and he went out to stop Alexis Arguello. | ||
| He stopped him after his trainer, who's banned from boxing now, for not just this. | ||
| His trainer was Panama Lewis, who's a famous sort of sketchy character in the world of boxing. | ||
| But he said, give me that bottle. | ||
| No, the other one. | ||
| I mixed. | ||
| And he says this in between. | ||
| See if he can find that. | ||
| And then he gives Aaron Pryor what's most likely cocaine. | ||
| And Aaron Pryor goes out and fucks Alexis Arguello up in the next round and stops him. | ||
| You're kidding me. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Let me see it, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me another bottle. | |
| The one I mixed. | ||
| Yeah, give me the other bottle, the one I mixed. | ||
| So he's having a really tough fight with Alexis Arguello, who is an absolute killer, and so he's giving him the other bottle. | ||
| So he gives him the other bottle, and Keith comes out, woo! | ||
| Having a great time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was a really good... | ||
| Look, to be clear, Aaron Pryor was a really, really talented boxer on top of this. | ||
| But that has always been a point of contention. | ||
| Like, what happened to him? | ||
| How did he rebound like that? | ||
| And what was in that bottle that he said he mixed? | ||
| Some of the devil's dandruff. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| And to add on to this, go back to right there. | ||
| You see what you were just showing? | ||
| That's the beginning of the end. | ||
| And to add on to that, Aaron Pryor went on to have a serious drug problem in his life and a real battle with cocaine afterwards. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure he died recently. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Yeah, but he had a real problem with cocaine afterwards. | ||
| And so it wasn't a secret. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| He's pouring it on him. | ||
| I mean, and this is after... | ||
| Hey! | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Ref, come on. | ||
| Well, they let him go because it's Alexis Arguello, but he stopped him. | ||
| Shit, son. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think about masculinity in the modern world? | ||
| This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. | ||
| I've got young guys that follow the show and sort of ask a lot of questions to do with that. | ||
| Obviously, we were talking earlier on about the fact that It's a strange time at the moment culturally for men and women, especially with how criticized it is of what a man and a woman means. | ||
| But in terms of masculinity at the moment, it feels like there isn't a very firm place very much for men to stand on. | ||
| You know, a lot of the traditional roles that they would have had have kind of gone away. | ||
| Patriarchal superstructure was something that was bad and then lumped in with that was masculine values as well. | ||
| And that's kind of been thrown out. | ||
| I mean, do you think that this is something that's going to swing back around? | ||
| It depends on the circles you hang out in. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, masculinity... | ||
| It's always going to be something that women are attracted to. | ||
| This is why it's bullshit. | ||
| Like, what women say they want in a mate versus what they actually want in a mate, what they want is Jason Momoa. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| They want a masculine man who's also a nice guy. | ||
| That's what they'd like. | ||
| They don't want some super femme guy who's only eating bean sprouts and he weighs 110 pounds. | ||
| That's not what women want. | ||
| They'll tell you they want that, but they don't. | ||
| What they don't want is all the shitty things that go along with it. | ||
| They don't want misogyny. | ||
| They don't want abuse. | ||
| They don't want all those awful things that come with it. | ||
| They don't want people that have a genuine disdain for women. | ||
| But traditionally, masculinity was always like having a respect for women, having respect for your mother, being a protector and a provider. | ||
| That has kind of gone away in the eyes of a lot of people, unfortunately. | ||
| That those positive aspects of what we consider to be masculine characteristics, those positive aspects are no longer considered when you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| That's exactly what I would have said. | ||
| The fact that there was a lot of things that were bad. | ||
| there were men that needed to be called to account for certain things but unfortunately lumped in with that was The firm place that men got to stand that was actually beneficial Right interesting you'll notice that masculinity became very in vogue in the Ukraine when Russia invaded. | ||
| Oh, yeah, and when men were considered as Conscripts that needed to go into the into the army There was no question about what constituted a man or a woman when they got to the border about who was going to leave and who was going to stay and Yeah, they actually didn't let trans women leave. | ||
| They were like, no, no, no. | ||
| You're a man and you have to fight. | ||
| Grab a gun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, the masculinity thing, I just find very, very interesting because it's strange for men at the moment to try and find a firm place to stand, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it that I'm supposed to genuinely be proud of that's a part of me, right? | ||
| Am I supposed to be a protector and a provider or is that part of the patriarchal superstructure which is keeping everybody down? | ||
| Well, the question remains, like, what are you protecting people from? | ||
| Well, the problem is you're protecting people from other men. | ||
| Like, I had an argument with a guy once who was trying to argue this really ridiculous point about rape. | ||
| And he said, do you know that most of the victims of rape are men? | ||
| And I said, yeah, but you know who's raping them? | ||
| Other men, you fucking idiot. | ||
| It's not like groups of cheerleaders are running around raping football players. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, it is, but it's prison. | ||
| Oh, they're skewing the statistics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's men raping men in prison. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, or men raping boys, you know, men raping people that are, you know, weaker than them that happen to be men. | ||
| Yeah, it is a fact, but it's also a lot of rape is underreported, right? | ||
| Like, it's hard to know. | ||
| It's hard to know from the masculine side, like how many men have been raped that are underreported, and how many women who've been raped that are underreported, and also women that are sexually assaulted by other women, which is also real. | ||
| The unfortunate thing is that people with power over other people have always exerted that power over people. | ||
| And so when you're saying that a man is a protector, okay, but who are you protecting them from? | ||
| You're protecting them from other men. | ||
| That highlights the problem, right? | ||
| The problem is the men, right? | ||
| It's very rare that you're protecting women from other women. | ||
| It's more common that you're protecting them from other men. | ||
| Yeah, I think when you're thinking about what it is that men are supposed to do in the modern world, and yeah, the protector-provider role is up against other people that are coming in, but the status element of this is why I think universal basic income is such a strange option, because people are inevitably going to start competing with each other. | ||
| You have to have an element of competition. | ||
| You want to keep up with the Joneses, but if everybody's flattened down that status hierarchy because earning has now been competed to the exact same level, what are you going to compete on now? | ||
| Right, but that's not real because universal basic income is not a lot of money. | ||
| It just covers your needs. | ||
| And then people are going to earn on top of that? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| What about if you roll it forward to the point where automation comes in and takes out everybody's jobs? | ||
| Think about into the medium to sort of far future. | ||
| If most people's jobs end up being automated and no one's got anything left, what about then? | ||
| Yeah, that's Andrew Yang's perspective, is that we're going to need a universal basic income because automation is going to take away all the Truck drivers and, you know, factory workers, and there's gonna be a lot of jobs that are just gone, and we're gonna have to figure out a way to not have society collapse, and one of the ways is to institute a universal basic income. | ||
| Well, people start competing on crazy things. | ||
| I had this guy on the show, Will Storr, who spoke about the status game, and he was looking at how status comes about in loads of different areas ancestrally and in the modern world, and he found that There's this tribe where the men, they compete... | ||
| Oh, is that coffee? | ||
| Yeah, you want some? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Where men compete based on who can grow the biggest yam. | ||
| So they have yams. | ||
| That's what is the most important element for determining the male hierarchy. | ||
| Who's got the biggest yam? | ||
| And these guys grow things to be so big that multiple people need to carry it. | ||
| It comes over in a huge wheelbarrow. | ||
| That's what they're focusing their status on. | ||
| So humans will find ways to compete with each other especially when it comes to getting a mate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That makes sense, kind of, if you're in an area where you're farming and the size of the vegetables is, that means, like, how many people are going to eat. | ||
| Perhaps, but I don't think that these are for eating. | ||
| This is kind of just a random display. | ||
| Right, but I think it's perhaps a legacy thing, you know, left over. | ||
| It says here that they would give their big yam to their worst enemy to make him obligated to grow an even larger one, to have his status fall when he was unable to do so. | ||
| LAUGHTER What country is this? | ||
| It's the Papua New Guinea. | ||
| Oh, well that place is a real problem. | ||
| You know, Papua New Guinea is the place where they have the semen warriors. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| Papua New Guinea, that is the most egregious version of toxic masculinity that we've ever established. | ||
| They take young boys when they're like six and seven years old and they take them away from their families and men essentially rape them. | ||
| And in their culture they believe that the children need sperm in their body from grown men in order for them to grow and mature. | ||
| And so they go with what they call an anal father. | ||
| And this older man repeatedly has sex, both oral and anal, with these young boys. | ||
| And then it becomes a part of the culture. | ||
| And then as they grow older, they do that. | ||
| Do the same thing. | ||
| They take them away from their mother when they're like six years old, seven years old. | ||
| Why is it sperm wars? | ||
| Sperm warriors. | ||
| Oh, sperm warriors. | ||
| Yeah, to become a man, and in essence a warrior, these young men are taught how to detach themselves from their mothers and the women around them as a means of showing that they can live without them and prove their masculinity. | ||
| The six-stage process of affirming one's manhood can take anywhere from 10 to 15 years. | ||
| Until these young men father a child much of the initiation and training is characterized by what some have deemed to be highly erotic and sexual and the first stage is a sharp stick of cane is inserted deeply in the young boy's nostrils until he bleeds profusely the young boys are also introduced to older warriors who are told that bachelors are going to copulate with them to make them grow Throughout much of the sixth stage, | ||
| the act of having the stick of Cain inserted into the nostrils and the performance of fellatio are integral to the process of becoming a man. | ||
| While the former practice is often derided by many as inhumane and the latter is often referred to as homosexual behavior, the Sambia's understanding and purpose behind these two processes differs from our conventional understanding. | ||
| Oh, how woke. | ||
| So scroll up here. | ||
| While much of it viewed the practice of inserting the cane stick in the nostrils being inhumane because of the obvious infliction of pain and injury to the body, for the Sambi, it's a symbol of strength and his ability to sustain pain, which is indeed a requirement of a warrior. | ||
| Additionally, the act of performing fellatio and the act of ingesting semen is seen as an integral part of manhood because boys are unable to mature into men unless they ingest semen and they adhere to the notion that all men have, in quotes, eaten the penis. | ||
| He's bitten the penis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| According to Sambia belief, the semen of a man possesses the masculine spirit which young boys would be able to attain through the ingestion of semen. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking crazy. | ||
| Well, you've had Michael Easter on the show, right? | ||
| The Comfort Crisis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I love his insight there, the fact that we don't have rites of passage anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that these are big deals. | ||
| It's something that marks a transition. | ||
| I think we can avoid that one. | ||
| You don't want that one? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I think we should avoid that one. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| That sounds like you're not being open to other cultures, Joe. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Like, perhaps you should be thinking about eating the penis a little bit more. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| But yeah, I think the lack of... | ||
| Rituals and routines that get people to go through something, a rite of passage. | ||
| Think about what it is when people go into the army, you know? | ||
| You're bonding together over brotherhood. | ||
| I learned this the other day on the show about how men bond by doing things. | ||
| And it makes sense that men would bond by doing things because that's what they would have gone out ancestrally. | ||
| We're going to take down that mammoth. | ||
| Me, you, Jamie. | ||
| Grab spear. | ||
| Go get my mammoth. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That would be what we would do. | ||
| But interestingly, it also creates a reason for why men's friendships are a little bit more shallow. | ||
| Because if you were to die while we were out on the hunt, and then I spend the next three months weeping at your death, that means I'm pretty useless. | ||
| Men need to be able to cycle through friends more. | ||
| So it seems like men have broader social circles, but much more shallow. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Women have tighter social circles that are more deep. | ||
| I don't think that's true because the brotherhood that men have that they form in combat and the brotherhood that men have when they're a part of combat sports teams and people that do very, very difficult things together, that's an intense bond. | ||
| That's a brothership. | ||
| That's a family thing. | ||
| That's a love bond. | ||
| It's very deep and some would say deeper than most female relationships, than most females have with each other. | ||
| Yeah, perhaps. | ||
| But they're bonding over doing a thing, which is, I think, the important element that they've got going on. | ||
| They're doing something. | ||
| It's almost a simulacrum of war, right? | ||
| When you're being a fighter. | ||
| Or the warriors who are actually doing war. | ||
| They're bonding over that. | ||
| And they have to rely on each other. | ||
| When you're talking about people in elite combat sports teams, like the SEAL teams, things along those lines. | ||
| Not combat sports, combat teams. | ||
| Those guys are fucking tight with each other. | ||
| In a way that is... | ||
| You don't see that much in female relationships. | ||
| Because they have to rely on each other. | ||
| They have to have their backs. | ||
| And they also know that that person has gone through buds. | ||
| They've gone through this insane, difficult, weeding out process of weak minds. | ||
| And people that will quit. | ||
| Those guys are different. | ||
| But that's a rite of passage, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's people that have gone through something where they've proven their worth and value, and also their self-esteem is based on that, that they have gone through this thing, and they know who they are. | ||
| They have accomplished this thing, and they've passed through this test. | ||
| It certifies that the people that are around you are worthy of being around you. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And you can trust them and count on them. | ||
| And you value them very, very highly. | ||
| And I don't think those are shallow relationships at all. | ||
| I would agree. | ||
| I would agree. | ||
| I think this is on average, again. | ||
| One of the issues that you have here is this chasm of comfortable complacency that a lot of people are caught in at the moment. | ||
| So I learned about this idea called the region beta paradox, right? | ||
| So the region beta paradox, imagine that if you were to go a mile or less, you would walk it. | ||
| And if you were to go more than a mile, you would drive it. | ||
| Paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile. | ||
| So that means that sometimes worse situations can be better than better situations. | ||
| And this is an issue when if you only decide to act after you cross a certain threshold of badness or whatever, you can end up being stuck in region beta. | ||
| So for instance, the friend that should leave his job really, really needs to leave his job, but it's just about passable. | ||
| His boss isn't that much of a dick. | ||
| Maybe the benefits are okay or whatever. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You understand what I mean? | ||
| You can get stuck in this chasm of comfortable complacency that sits somewhere in the middle. | ||
| If things are good, great, no problem. | ||
| If things are bad, great. | ||
| Activation energy to go and make them good. | ||
| If things are just about passable, you end up being comfortably numb. | ||
| Ooh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| So what does someone do? | ||
| Do they have to have high expectations and high standards? | ||
| So that even, like, for a guy like yourself, who now makes a living independently, if you had to have a job and you had to be working around some boss who's kind of a dick and took credit for your work and wasn't, you know, happy with your performance, was always, like, nitpicking and fucking with you and, you know, you know how it works in office environments and... | ||
| I've not had a boss for 15 years, but yes. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thank you, man. | ||
| So it's a perfect situation, because if you did have to go to that place where a large percentage of the population is in on a daily basis, bosses suck. | ||
| A lot of people have bosses. | ||
| A lot of people are in those really suppressive office environments. | ||
| We're dealing with office politics and egomaniac bosses. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| If you had to go back to that now, it would be horrendous. | ||
| But if you were conditioned to it, if it was a normal part of your life, it was just say, look, I like playing softball on the weekends with my friends and I love my family. | ||
| I'll deal with it. | ||
| I can handle it. | ||
| But you're suppressed all day long. | ||
| You're just feeling like shit. | ||
| And because things aren't that bad, the activation energy isn't there to kick yourself out of it. | ||
| Yeah, you're upper middle class, you got a nice house. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| This is the way that people are being sedated into a life that they really don't want to lead. | ||
| It's so dangerous, man. | ||
| It really, really is. | ||
| And I don't know what the answer is. | ||
| I mean, what do you want to say? | ||
| Do you want to say that you need to make your life actively worse so that you're going to be more excited? | ||
| So that you're going to have the activation energy to kick yourself out at the bottom? | ||
| I mean, think about the things that... | ||
| A lot of people do to make themselves feel better. | ||
| Actively going out of your way to sit in a hot circular wooden chasm, right? | ||
| Or going and putting yourself in 39 degree water. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Because the world has become so comfortable, we're having to go out of our way to actively seek discomfort. | ||
| We inject it into our lives. | ||
| We artificially inseminate it into our lives. | ||
| Without training and hot and cold and meditation and all of the other things that we do, reading, doing deep work, all of those stuff, without that, if you didn't actively go and seek it, you could easily just breeze through life, right? | ||
| I guess, but I think you'd be overwhelmed by anxiety. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| But that's where a lot of people are. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And unfortunately, people don't recognize that. | ||
| That's why that stuff exists. | ||
| And people that I care about, that I've tried to talk to, don't recognize that. | ||
| And I think sometimes when I give advice to people that I care about, My personality is so overwhelming, and I'm so crazy, like with what I do, that it's like people, they're like, I don't want to do that. | ||
| Doesn't map across onto other people? | ||
| Well, it just seems like it's too... | ||
| For some people, it's attractive, and they go, I want to do that too. | ||
| Like, you seem pretty fucking happy despite all the stress you're under. | ||
| Like, how are you doing that? | ||
| And I'll tell people that... | ||
| Because I create my own bullshit, and my own bullshit's way harder than whatever I'm facing in the world, and that's how I mitigate the stress of success and pressure and criticism and all that stuff. | ||
| I do to myself way worse than they're ever going to do to me, so that's how I mitigate it. | ||
| Also, I calm my body. | ||
| I calm my mind through calming my body, and I calm my body through work. | ||
| I make it work. | ||
| And I make myself do things that are very uncomfortable, that I don't want to do. | ||
| And by doing that, I develop this strength and perseverance. | ||
| And some people hear that and they're like, I don't even want to do that. | ||
| I don't want to take a fucking nap. | ||
| You're exhausting me. | ||
| They're like, I'm not you. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| And it takes them away from that. | ||
| And I'm like, you don't even have to do that. | ||
| Just go for a fucking walk every day. | ||
| It sounds like it's easy to do, but when that walk comes, look at your clock. | ||
| Oh, it's 8 o'clock. | ||
| Time to go for that walk. | ||
| You're like, I don't want to walk. | ||
| I'm just trying to play video games. | ||
| I don't want to walk. | ||
| I'd rather read emails. | ||
| I don't want to walk. | ||
| I'd rather scroll through TikTok. | ||
| But if you just force yourself to go for that fucking walk every day, you will develop mental perseverance. | ||
| You will develop some tenacity. | ||
| You'll develop the ability to force yourself into work. | ||
| It doesn't have to be grueling. | ||
| It just has to be a thing that you have to do. | ||
| This is the problem, I think, of how mimetic we are and where the culture is and what people are told about what life is supposed to be like. | ||
| And it's a massive advantage that podcasters have that there is a direct source from an individual who has managed to get themselves to somewhere that's worthy of having an audience to speak to these people and say, look, maybe the local community and the values and the norms that they've given you aren't all that's out there. | ||
| This is a different way that you could live life. | ||
| So this is, I guess, kind of what happened to me toward the end of my 20s. | ||
| So I went to uni and I became a club promoter, started running nightclubs and it was very successful and I guess had... | ||
| Achieved success in the way that modern culture might tell you that you're supposed to. | ||
| So being a club promoter, constantly being around lots of women and always having money and everybody knew who you were and there was status and acclaim and all this stuff. | ||
| But then it felt like I was thirsty for something and I didn't know what I was supposed to drink. | ||
| There was something... | ||
| I thought, like, is this really all that life's got to offer me? | ||
| Standing on the front door of a nightclub and getting people drunk on one-pound Jagerbombs. | ||
| Not that that's nothing. | ||
| I loved the business that I ran. | ||
| I had a great time doing it. | ||
| But it felt like there needed to be something more. | ||
| And I went on reality TV, a blue tick on Twitter, and free charcoal toothpaste, and all of that stuff, right? | ||
| Like, I did the full thing. | ||
| And then came off and thought, is this really all that I've got to offer the world? | ||
| And the problem was that I'd taken the rules of what life is supposed to be, of how you're supposed to enjoy yourself, of what is supposed to be valued, that it's supposed to be weekend warrior, it's all about the girls that you're sleeping with, or the money that you're earning, or how many people know you. | ||
| And it turned out like I'd reached the top of that tree. | ||
| I'd completed that game, right? | ||
| And it wasn't fulfilling to me. | ||
| It hadn't answered any of the questions that I had deep down. | ||
| It really, really hadn't. | ||
| So I started asking different questions. | ||
| I said, well, look, if I've done everything that I'm supposed to do in terms of social norms from a working class guy in the northeast of the UK, what are you supposed to do? | ||
| You're supposed to go out and do all this stuff. | ||
| And then I went and did the Champions League World Cup Final, which is going on Love Island, one of the biggest reality TV shows in the UK. And that still didn't satisfy. | ||
| Okay, like there's something wrong with that. | ||
| So I started consuming stuff like, this is a great time, 2016-17, this is the advent of Jordan Peterson, you with conversations with people like Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, massive influences. | ||
| Because for the first time I was being told as a young guy that there are different things that you can value. | ||
| Stuff like truth, right? | ||
| Virtue, integrity, honesty. | ||
| Doing something that's hard and worthwhile. | ||
| Not just doing something for its effect. | ||
| I think for a long time I'd... | ||
| I judged the value of my work based on how other people interpreted it. | ||
| So I'd outsourced my sense of self-worth to everybody else. | ||
| I was playing a role, right? | ||
| And it's kind of like I didn't feel love. | ||
| I only ever felt praise. | ||
| One of the reasons for that is because the thing that I was doing was just me playing a role. | ||
| Like I wasn't being Chris Hemsworth. | ||
| I was being Thor. | ||
| I wasn't being Gladiator, right? | ||
| I was being Russell Crowe. | ||
| And it took a long time for me to deprogram all of that. | ||
| It took me a very, very long time. | ||
| And from the outside, you go, well, it's a guy that's got the club stuff and is doing modeling and reality TV and things like that. | ||
| And from my side, it was so vapid and hollow and there was nothing there for me. | ||
| There was nothing there that I wanted at the end of that that really, really mattered. | ||
| And then I started the podcast, Modern Wisdom, like four and a half years ago because I wanted to speak to people That might have the answers. | ||
| If I'm getting this from listening to other people's conversations, maybe if I get to sit down with other people that I think are interesting or useful or have insights, perhaps that'll move me a little bit closer to where I'm supposed to be. | ||
| And over time, four and a half years and more than 500 conversations or whatever, every single time there's just like a little 1%. | ||
| That just moves you a little 1%. | ||
| Here's an insight. | ||
| Here's something that comes up during a conversation. | ||
| Here's some discomfort about... | ||
| You mentioned about listening earlier on. | ||
| I always wanted to interrupt. | ||
| If I didn't speak on a show, if there was silence ever, I would presume that it's because I wasn't interesting or the guest wasn't interested in me or maybe the audience would think that I was stupid or whatever. | ||
| I was always outsourcing my sense of self-worth to what other people were thinking about me. | ||
| And that was a byproduct of how I'd lived most of my 20s. | ||
| And it took a long time for me to deprogram that, to think, okay, find somewhere firmer for you to stand. | ||
| I think that's why I brought up the masculinity thing earlier on as well. | ||
| So I'm like, look, I can feel very comfortable in myself chasing something that I want to do. | ||
| My intellectual curiosity, right? | ||
| Finding people that I resonate with. | ||
| Having conversations that I really care about. | ||
| About how to engineer human DNA so that it can survive space flight because there's tons of radiation. | ||
| Never going to use it, right? | ||
| Probably not going to get to go to space. | ||
| Probably not going to re-engineer my DNA. Fucking fascinating. | ||
| I want to know about that. | ||
| And every single time that I leaned into something that I wanted to do a little bit more... | ||
| It reminded me of the direction that I was going in, and that was the drink that I was thirsty for. | ||
| You know, the first time that I got a message that says, hey man, just wanted to let you know I listen to the show, and I'm a rugby player from the northwest of the UK, and I don't really have anyone around me that understands me, but dude, when I listen to you and your friends talking, it feels like someone gets me. | ||
| It feels like I'm in the room with you. | ||
| And I was like, holy shit. | ||
| There was this guy came up to me at Body Power, which is like a fitness expo, it's like the Arnold Classic or whatever, fitness exposition. | ||
| And it's all of us with our tops off lifting weights and fucking about and doing stuff. | ||
| This is a while ago now. | ||
| And he came up and I'm trying to be the, you know, super masculine weightlifty guy still just doing his thing. | ||
| This guy came up and he said, Hey man, I just wanted to have a conversation with you. | ||
| This podcast that you did, it made me realize that I hadn't really dealt with the death of my father. | ||
| And this guy breaks down in front of me and said, you know, I was lost. | ||
| I was alone. | ||
| My wife and me didn't have a connection and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Basically, this one insight that he got from a conversation changed it. | ||
| And he's weeping. | ||
| And then I start weeping. | ||
| I'm like, fuck's sake. | ||
| I'm supposed to be like the super testosterone guy that's, you know, the Love Island-y thing and the blue tick and all of this stuff. | ||
| And then continual interactions like that made me realize that All of the bravado and all of the front that I'd put up and all of the who did you sleep with last week or what's the girl that knows your name or how many followers you've got on Instagram, they were hollow. | ||
| But there's so many people that are chasing that. | ||
| There's so many people who see that as their primary source of value. | ||
| And other people's heads are a wretched place for your self-worth to live. | ||
| Absolutely wretched. | ||
| You're constantly taking your sense of self-worth as an abstraction of what other people think about you. | ||
| And it took, you know, it's still an ongoing process, but it took four and a half years of constantly speaking to people three times a week, every single week, having a conversation, researching, looking at whatever it is that they might have that would help me a little bit. | ||
| And it's been such a huge change. | ||
| And dispensing with those previous values has been a big deal for me. | ||
| Well, it's a beautiful thing that comes with the conversations. | ||
| It comes with this inadvertent education that you get from podcasts. | ||
| Having these conversations with these people and absorbing... | ||
| I love that you said maybe it's like 1% with each conversation or 1% with each profound conversation. | ||
| I always use the analogy it's like you're making a mountain with layers of paint like every day paint another layer and it's like it's slowly but surely over time and for me it's somewhere around I mean it's like 1800 episodes but there's also a bunch of other ones that are like MMA episodes and there's doing other people's podcasts and through these conversations you do develop a better sense of what what's authentic and I think what you're really selling is What you in particular | ||
| are selling is authenticity, right? | ||
| These are genuinely things you're interested in and you've found some things that you thought you were supposed to be interested in, but they ultimately proved to be hollow and not satisfying. | ||
| And one of the things about pursuing status, like look at the car he's driving and look at the watch he's wearing and look at the girl he's with, That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable. | ||
| But then you attained it and then you realize, oh, this is not valuable. | ||
| This is just difficult to get. | ||
| And there's a difference. | ||
| There's a big difference. | ||
| What's valuable is something that fulfills you intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, lovingly, right? | ||
| Like having a great relationship with someone is very valuable. | ||
| And it's hard to achieve. | ||
| It's hard to be worthy of having a great relationship. | ||
| It's hard to be worthy of having a great friend. | ||
| And to be a great friend is very valuable. | ||
| And to be friends with people that are intellectually stimulating is so valuable. | ||
| The people that are around you, the people that you can have conversations with you that ignite a curiosity and change your perspective and a person whose point of view and ideas are enriching to you. | ||
| They literally are fuel for your own curiosity and fuel for your own perspective and you can admire that person's thoughts and Take some of what they've said and apply it to your own life. | ||
| And we're doing that. | ||
| You and I are both doing that. | ||
| And we're doing that through conversations that affect who knows how many people out there. | ||
| Who knows how many people have listened to your conversations with people and developed a newfound perspective, developed a different way of looking at their own life that is now serving them and helping them get out of whatever unsatisfying, shallow life developed a different way of looking at their own life that is now serving them and helping them get out of whatever unsatisfying, shallow life that they're living and move towards | ||
| And they realize it through you and through you saying these things that you had all those things, all the trappings of fame and success and, What people look at, because it's so hard to be wealthy. | ||
| It's so hard to drive a very nice car. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| So when people see a person who's done it, they say, oh, I want to be like him. | ||
| And you can either be that guy that flaunts that all the time and has that all over Instagram with a bunch of girls in bikinis hanging on you. | ||
| Or you can be the guy who says, you know what, I did that and it wasn't anything special. | ||
| And now I realize that this was all just a flaw in my own way of living and thinking and I'm much more in line with what seems to be natural and healthy and I'm growing and learning and I'm more successful in that way than I ever would be just like showing diamond jewelry and big houses and all that stupid shit. | ||
| Dude, I love the insight that it's not valuable, it's just difficult to attain. | ||
| And the difficulty in attaining it is a proxy. | ||
| It masquerades as value. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So Naval has a quote that says, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them. | ||
| And I do think that there is an element of that that we can say this, right? | ||
| And lots of people consume lots and lots of content online. | ||
| And you can tell someone, look, this is what the top of the mountain looks like. | ||
| Or this is what further up the mountain than you are looks like. | ||
| And yet, they still need to trudge all the way up there, get up there, have a look for themselves and go, shit. | ||
| it. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You remember that guy that I listened to five years ago? | ||
| He was right. | ||
| So there's an element of, not futility, but I feel like a lot of people still need to learn this firsthand. | ||
| Had you consumed the right amount of stuff online, I could have front-loaded a lot of the lessons and mistakes that I needed to make and not needed to do them myself. | ||
| Yeah, you need to figure it out yourself. | ||
| It can help your journey by learning from other people's mistakes, just like we were talking about learning from alcoholics and never being an alcoholic. | ||
| But there's a certain amount of mistakes that you have to make. | ||
| There's a certain amount of really stupid decisions that you have to feel the pain of those failures. | ||
| It's valuable. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It's good for you. | ||
| But it's also good to hear someone say it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that when someone else comes along and they start on the path maybe that you were on and then they run into you having conversations about the shallowness of these pursuits and then they realize in their own life maybe without having to go all the way to the top. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe they just make a couple of steps up and they go, I see where this is going. | ||
| This is fruitless. | ||
| It's not worthwhile. | ||
| And I understand the reason that culture and wisdom previously existed was that you would take on what other people said was valuable because for the most part, it was something that was valuable, right? | ||
| Cultural mimetic evolution meant that the stuff that stuck about, like, don't put your hand in that fire, don't go to that cave over the far side, like, that was useful information. | ||
| But now, because we've got so much luxury to lop our way through the world in comfort and convenience, people are being told to value things that genuinely aren't that valuable. | ||
| And yeah, there's a big part of it that young people need to learn. | ||
| You do not need to chase down the things that your local area is telling you that you need to. | ||
| This is what I think you create online. | ||
| You know, the people that you consume, the people that you read, the people that you listen to, they become your new community. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They become the new good influence that you always wanted. | ||
| And this is why people have such an affinity with the stuff that they consume. | ||
| And this is why the fans and the audience is so compelled and so bought in Because it very much is like a friendship between you and the person that you're consuming. | ||
| They are an advisor. | ||
| They are somebody that's helping to direct you in a particular way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you also can get stuck in the wrong way. | ||
| You know, the things that you consume online can lead you into these echo chambers. | ||
| And the path that you travel, you could run into a bunch of people that are also stuck, and you feed off of each other. | ||
| And if you have negative friends, and if you have negative interactions online... | ||
| And one of the problems with social media in general is that you're absorbing, like, what... | ||
| You would call like a very condensed version like Avi Levinovitz calls it. | ||
| It calls it processed information like your processed food is bad for you. | ||
| Processed information is bad for you as well. | ||
| And this sort of constant interaction with people in a shallow way online and also antagonistic interactions with people which is a large part of what the algorithms of both Twitter and Facebook and a lot of these places Unfortunately, because of our nature, they enforce. | ||
| Because it's not really the algorithms. | ||
| The algorithms just support what you're interested in. | ||
| And if you're interested in arguing about abortion, you can argue all day long because it'll direct those things towards you because those are the things you seek to interact with. | ||
| But if you're just interested in sports cars and watches and fucking, you know, watching rugby, that will be your algorithm. | ||
| It'll be all that. | ||
| It's really like what you choose to interact with. | ||
| with. | ||
| For the vast majority of people, the thing they choose to interact with more often than not is things that upset them. | ||
| And a lot of that is because they're unsatisfied with their own life. | ||
| Their actual life, the people that they interact with, the thing they choose to do for a living, the way they exist in the community of actual human beings that they are around on a daily basis is not good. | ||
| They don't like it. | ||
| It's unsatisfying, it's unhappy, and then they... | ||
| Get into these fucking these groups online and they they find conflict in that and they avoid the problems that they need to resolve in their real life and just try to resolve these sort of external situations in these weird Twitter gangs. | ||
| It gives you a simulacrum of a community, right? | ||
| But I mean, I guess so does every online community. | ||
| The difference is, is this one genuinely valuable to you? | ||
| Is this something that's actually making your life better? | ||
| And that's the problem, that the distinction between the two is very, very difficult to work out. | ||
| Because you have all of the trappings, right? | ||
| The one, this is belonging. | ||
| It's a shared sense of ideals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's All of this stuff on both sides. | |
| But if it's not directed towards something which is genuinely virtuous. | ||
| I mean, you see this. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Are you familiar with MGTOW? Have you heard of that? | ||
| Men going their own way? | ||
| So there's a bunch of groups within the manosphere, right? | ||
| The manosphere? | ||
| Manosphere, yeah. | ||
| So men trying to work out what to do online. | ||
| And I resonate with this because I was somebody that got to the end of his 20s and was fucking clueless. | ||
| I mean, I still might be a man-child now at 34, but my point being that I'm less of an idiot than I was back then. | ||
| So there's a whole bunch of different groups. | ||
| Red Pill, Black Pill, MGTOW, Incels, all of this stuff. | ||
| And what they're trying to do is they're all different flavors of people trying to work out how the world works. | ||
| And men going their own way are people that have been scorned by women usually or having difficulty with women and have now renounced them entirely. | ||
| We don't need them. | ||
| I'm not going to be involved with them anymore. | ||
| Men going their own way. | ||
| A lot of them are people who maybe were previously married. | ||
| They're tangential to men's rights, which you may be familiar with. | ||
| They're kind of like justice for guys who don't have access to their kids after divorce and stuff like that. | ||
| And what's happening here is they've got the simulacrum of a community. | ||
| In fact, they have a community. | ||
| But some of these areas, especially the black pill forums for guys, can be a pretty bad place to be in. | ||
| They discouraged something called ascending, which is going from where they are to now being something more, to actually getting into a relationship with a girl. | ||
| That would be seen as betraying, basically, the ideology of the group. | ||
| And I understand as a guy that was looking for conversations, it's fortunate that I fell upon... | ||
| School of Life and Jordan Peterson conversations with you as opposed to that community because both of them would have given me the same sort of influence, the same kind of satisfaction, but long-term would have given me incredibly different outcomes. | ||
| Yeah, whenever someone's discouraging people from loving relationships or engaging in happy, loving relationships or the idea that that's impossible or that you should stick with us and you shouldn't go off on your own and find a woman that you're compatible with and that you enjoy being with, that's a ridiculous community. | ||
| That's not good for you. | ||
| That's like no better than saying don't have good male friends. | ||
| That's no better than don't have a good relationship with your children. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| Good relationships are great. | ||
| It's a part of what we're doing. | ||
| We don't exist in a vacuum. | ||
| No one is happy on their own. | ||
| People like to think of themselves as individuals. | ||
| I'm a rugged individualist. | ||
| Okay, I'm a loner. | ||
| Are you really? | ||
| There's a reason why the worst punishment they can give you in prison is solitary confinement. | ||
| We need each other. | ||
| We are a super organism. | ||
| We're just trapped in this idea that we are uniquely individual on our own. | ||
| And if your group that you associate with is saying, don't associate with the opposite sex, give up on them. | ||
| Don't have a loving, happy relationship. | ||
| That's just because they don't think it's attainable to them. | ||
| That's the same thing as saying, you should never have a nice car because I can't get one. | ||
| You should never have a nice house because I can't afford one. | ||
| It's no different. | ||
| So there's this concept called the inner citadel by Isaiah Berlin. | ||
| And what he says is, when the world outside of us has denied that which we truly want, we retreat into ourselves, into a kind of walled off garden to protect ourselves from the fearful ills of the world. | ||
| My buddy gave a great example of this where he said, you can imagine that you've injured your leg, right? | ||
| And you can try to treat the leg, but if you can't, then you chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. | ||
| And you see this everywhere, right? | ||
| How many people do you know that have got into a polyamorous relationship and said that monogamy isn't ancestrally compatible... | ||
| Fundamentally because they struggle to hold down a relationship that works well. | ||
| Or you see this with the body positivity movement saying that weight has no genuine bearing on health and that we need to be much more accepting. | ||
| Basically being fat is just as healthy as being normal-sized, good BMI, and that the world needs to change to your views because they struggle to lose weight. | ||
| Or criminals that have turned to a life of crime and say that jobs are for suckers because they struggle to hold down a job. | ||
| These are all their inner citadels. | ||
| They're constantly retreating Basically, if you can't win at a game then you change the rules and announce that you never wanted to win in any case. | ||
| If you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| The body positivity is a great example, too, because they actually get angry at women that lose weight. | ||
| Adele. | ||
| Adele. | ||
| I was going to bring her up. | ||
| Yeah, it's a perfect example, because she's gorgeous now. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That beautiful, healthy woman was trapped inside an overeater, and she figured it out. | ||
| But you're no longer part of the tribe. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Not only that, but they're angry at her. | ||
| She's betrayed them. | ||
| I mean, they've said that about Lizzo, too. | ||
| They don't want her to lose weight, like angry at her for trying. | ||
| She's like a pretty big girl as well, right? | ||
| Probably be healthy for her to lose some weight. | ||
| But you're no longer able to make me feel more comfortable about the life choices that I've made. | ||
| Yes, and they don't identify with them anymore. | ||
| You know, they think that person is another now. | ||
| Well, you're just another beautiful, healthy, sexy, thin woman, and I don't like you anymore. | ||
| You're cast out of the kingdom. | ||
| Purity spiral. | ||
| Bonded together over the mutual hatred of an out-group, not the mutual love of an in-group. | ||
| They never loved Adele. | ||
| They loved the fact that Adele wasn't what they hate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, she was also an amazing example of an incredibly talented woman who was also obese. | ||
| Crushing it despite the fact. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Or in spite of the fact. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, that's... | ||
| But how is it that the person that's overweight and is an inspiration to people is an inspiration for as long as they stay that way, but losing the weight isn't even more inspirational? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because it throws into harsh reflect the fact that they haven't done that bit. | ||
| They're also not Adele the singer, but they knew that they never could be. | ||
| Adele did the weight loss thing that fundamentally everybody knows that they could achieve. | ||
| And this is the problem with the black pill. | ||
| As an example, I had to go... | ||
| What is black pill? | ||
| So black pill is men who consider themselves... | ||
| Evolutionarily, and with regards to women, basically lost causes. | ||
| They would say that they are never going to have a relationship with a woman, and they bond together over their mutual despondency at this fact. | ||
| And the problem that you have with the black pill community is that it's this ascending thing, which would be moving from that to a functioning man that may have interactions with women. | ||
| I had this lady, Nama Cates, on the show, and she did a ton of research into incel culture and stuff. | ||
| And within these forums, if any of the guys were to say, she told me if any of the guys were to hint at ascending that they would be pushed out of the group. | ||
| And I went, oh, so if they got a girl's phone number, for instance, or something like that. | ||
| She says, whoa, whoa, whoa, way less than that. | ||
| If they went into the Starbucks and the cashier was female and her eyes lingered on them for more than they thought that they should have done and they posted that in the group, they would be pushed out. | ||
| And it's for the same reason that Adele is a bad example. | ||
| Because it gives them hope. | ||
| For as long as there is no hope that anybody could do the thing, lose the weight, that means that you have an excuse. | ||
| Adele hasn't done it. | ||
| I don't need to do it. | ||
| No one else within the particular community has ascended and found that they're able to get in a relationship with a woman or be attractive to a woman or have a conversation with a woman. | ||
| Therefore, I don't have to. | ||
| But the delta is felt... | ||
| They say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Ooh, I like that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Yeah, that caffeine's kicking in. | ||
| Ha! | ||
| That's good, though. | ||
| That is really what it is. | ||
| It's like this understanding that you fucked up and that you've committed to this ideology, committed to this lifestyle, these choices that you make, this rigid pattern of behavior that is ultimately not serving you, and you realize the flaw in it, that you could have been something greater. | ||
| And then you see someone who has done it, who's gotten better and is healthier. | ||
| And you realize like, oh no, what have I done? | ||
| There's two types of responses to that, right? | ||
| One of the responses would be, I want that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| that's inspiring. | ||
| The other response to it would be, that is a betrayal. | ||
| That's a betrayal of the group. | ||
| And the tighter the ideological group or the tighter the identity around that particular group that that person's come from, the more it feels like a betrayal. | ||
| This is why tribalism is so dangerous, man. | ||
| As soon as you decide, you know, you were saying earlier on about right and left, Democrat and Republican, the kind of stupid ideas. | ||
| Because as soon as you do that, you agree to adopt wholesale all of the views of the group. | ||
| And then, you know, And as soon as you begin to deviate, that's seen as a lack of commitment by your side and a chink in your armor by the other side. | ||
| So it doesn't allow you to be a person. | ||
| It doesn't allow you to fit into the very unique shape that your life is supposed to take. | ||
| You're supposed to put on the onesie. | ||
| But you're also highlighting two options. | ||
| There's one option that makes you feel terrible for your own choices and you feel angry and you don't want to associate with that person who has changed and grown. | ||
| And then the other option is for you to be inspired and to do that and become like that person and look at that as a motivation. | ||
| But you also can realize that just because you fucked up and you've made this bad choice, you've run into the person that you could have been. | ||
| It doesn't mean you can't change paths. | ||
| It doesn't mean you can't course correct. | ||
| The problem is people don't like course correcting because it requires them to admit that they've been on a bad path. | ||
| And they've fucked up. | ||
| But course correcting is beautiful. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| It's a part of growth. | ||
| It's very valuable to be able to understand that, oh my god, even though I've lived 12 years as a Mormon and I've committed to polyamorous marriages and all this, that's not good. | ||
| It was written by a con man. | ||
| Joseph Smith was 14 when he wrote this shit. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| You can get past bad decisions. | ||
| But you just have to admit that they were bad decisions. | ||
| You have to admit that they're not self-serving, they're not beneficial, and that ultimately there is other ways to go about living your life that would probably be better. | ||
| So, change! | ||
| This loops in with the importance of how people attach themselves to their opinions that we were talking about earlier on. | ||
| So, the fact that A big bunch of people on the internet and in the real world feel terrified to admit that they're wrong. | ||
| If we are judged by our opinions, not our deeds, then admitting the fact that you have a wrong opinion is tantamount to destruction, right? | ||
| It's destruction of the ego. | ||
| People that can't admit that they're wrong are at the biggest competitive disadvantage in the modern world of anybody else, as far as I can see. | ||
| You need to be able to admit that you're wrong. | ||
| One of the problems of playing a persona, which I was doing for a very long time, this big name on campus guy, front of a club, like, hi mate, bye mate, how are you mate, blah blah blah. | ||
| the persona was contrived. | ||
| I was always thinking about who is it that I'm supposed to be? | ||
| What would Joe want me to say right now for me to get the response from Joe that I actually wanted? | ||
| And what that means is when someone asked me my opinion, I didn't actually have a truth. | ||
| I had a sequence of roles, like a bunch of different algorithms or scripts that I'd run, like a chatbot or something. | ||
| And I'll be like, okay, if this, then all of the people I've spoken to are kind of similar to Joe. | ||
| Therefore, I will come out with this answer and maybe that'll have the response that I want. | ||
| But I wouldn't admit, I struggled to admit that I was wrong because that would be admitting that all of the models that I'd created were ineffective somehow. | ||
| Whereas the version where you're much more humble and you realize, look, I'm a flawed, terrible creature that is constantly still trying to get things right and I am open to, in fact, I'm seeking being wrong as much as possible. | ||
| The more that I can be wrong, the more that I'm going to identify all of the different pitfalls that are going to go across. | ||
| That's what you need to be looking for. | ||
| And if you can't admit that you're wrong, If you can't get used to the discomfort of holding an opinion, feeling someone push up against it, you notice it arise inside of yourself, right? | ||
| You go, oh shit, that sounds compelling. | ||
| That sounds like I might have had a blind spot here. | ||
| And if you're not able to accept that to come through, you are at a huge disadvantage. | ||
| Yes, you certainly are. | ||
| And it's also this idea that your thoughts are you, right? | ||
| So when you keep saying, I was wrong, you're wrong, but really the ideas are wrong. | ||
| Like, adopting ideas as a part of you, like saying, these are my opinions and I will defend them to the death, is the most ridiculous thing. | ||
| Because ideas You can have a thought that is incorrect and you're still the exact same person. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You just got to be able to understand that that was an incorrect thought and then you have to back engineer it and figure like why Did I have that thought? | ||
| Was I misinformed? | ||
| Was I biased? | ||
| Did I look at it in a shallow way? | ||
| Did I not do a deep dive into the subject? | ||
| What was causing me to have these opinions that were incorrect? | ||
| But people defend opinions as if they're defending their liver, like they're defending a part of their body. | ||
| And that's silly. | ||
| Because you are not your thoughts. | ||
| You are not your opinions. | ||
| You are you. | ||
| And you have various opinions and various thoughts that bounce around your head all throughout the day. | ||
| But if you don't base them on absolute reality and truth and honesty, you're fucked. | ||
| Because then you're never going to be able to grow. | ||
| You're going to defend things that are untenable. | ||
| You're going to defend ridiculous ideas because you think you're supposed to do that, because other people do that, and they never admit they're wrong. | ||
| They're like politicians, right? | ||
| Politicians never admit they're wrong, and that's a part of the flaw of that system. | ||
| It's a part of the reason why people don't trust them. | ||
| It's scary to see online how few people are prepared to admit that they're wrong. | ||
| I think a big part of this is that if you are to admit that you're wrong, it's maybe a dangerous cascade downstream. | ||
| Well, if you said that you were wrong about that, then what else are you wrong about on the internet? | ||
| And admitting that you're wrong, as far as I can see, is one of the best signals that somebody could put across. | ||
| Because you go, oh, this person isn't preoccupied with the ideology or with committing to previous opinions that they've already had. | ||
| What they are concerned with is the truth. | ||
| Updating the operating system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what your business is, and my business as well, that's so valuable. | ||
| If you're one of those people that can't admit you're wrong, or can't address a problem that you have created in your mind, adhering to a very specific thought process, when it proves to be inaccurate, | ||
| ineffective, unproductive, You're gonna you're gonna project that to all these other people and then they're not gonna listen to you anymore They're not gonna want to hear you because they know that you're full of shit They know that you or you or you have a weak structure in terms of the way you address things Some people are very very good at playing that persona though Some people have buried the person so deep down that they've been subsumed by the persona itself Now there are people online that I think are playing roles People that have made entire careers out of playing | ||
| roles. | ||
| And everybody knows. | ||
| Everybody knows deep down that this person's still doing a grift or still doing a shill of some kind. | ||
| Yeah, there's definitely some people like that. | ||
| But I don't think they ever developed the sort of rabid following that you have or that I have. | ||
| I think that's where it comes from. | ||
| I think the authenticity that you're selling is very, very, very valuable because it's real. | ||
| And authenticity is not something you can fake. | ||
| You either have it or you don't. | ||
| And the only way that you can exhibit it is through clear conversation, like real thoughts expressed in an honest and articulate way, where you're saying these things and you're consistent with it. | ||
| So people go, oh, this is really how Chris thinks. | ||
| I see how he's thinking. | ||
| I see how he's working through this. | ||
| I identify with that. | ||
| This is beneficial to me because I also seek truth and I'm also seeking to try to figure out what's right and what's wrong and what serves me and what serves other people and how I can sort of like live life in a more compatible and cohesive and satisfying way. | ||
| This is one of the problems, I think, of a lot of people not having someone that they can have a genuine deep conversation with on a regular basis. | ||
| I try and prescribe to as many people as possible to do a fake podcast. | ||
| So to just put your phone down with a friend once a week. | ||
| It can be the same friend or a different friend. | ||
| And just press record simply because it means that there's an external record of what was said. | ||
| And just have a conversation. | ||
| Phones are away except for the one that's recording on the table. | ||
| Half an hour, once a week. | ||
| That's a great piece of advice. | ||
| And the reason for that is... | ||
| What I loved about having conversations where I was going to be held to a rigorous standard is that if there were any breaks in my thinking over time, that would be called out. | ||
| Hang on a second. | ||
| You said three months ago that this was an opinion, and now you've said the opposite thing, or this doesn't... | ||
| You're constantly being fact-checked. | ||
| It means that you have to be incredibly rigorous with your thinking. | ||
| You need to be precise with your speech. | ||
| All of this stuff. | ||
| And that, for me, has been one of the biggest growths that I've seen over the last four and a half years. | ||
| I've really zeroed in on what it is that I believe. | ||
| And you can't hold up a persona for three hours, four hours, however long the conversation goes on for. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| And even just a half hour conversation you have with your friends once per week. | ||
| Get it on record. | ||
| And then, okay, go back and have another... | ||
| Anything. | ||
| Whatever it is that you want to talk about. | ||
| Do that. | ||
| Because so few people are able to have deep conversations that are uninterrupted by their phones, by other people, by responsibilities. | ||
| And yet, for me, it feels like therapy. | ||
| It feels like a mental workout. | ||
| And even if you are doing it with your friends... | ||
| We've managed to make a career out of being the most stupid person in the room, for the most part. | ||
| You bring on somebody that is an expert in the industry, and you've read the book. | ||
| And you're now trying to hold ground with this person. | ||
| And you go, okay, like, here we go. | ||
| I'm going to have to amp up my evolutionary psychology understanding or my Jungian archetypes or whatever the fuck it is that I'm talking about today. | ||
| But even just on a small scale with somebody else, I think having that half hour conversation is really, really valuable. | ||
| I think that's great advice, and I think that I have inadvertently found that out through doing podcasts, because when I first started doing podcasts, it was just me fucking around with my friends and having conversations and just for fun. | ||
| And then along the way, I started interviewing people and having conversations with people like You know, Graham Hancock and talking about ancient civilizations and Randall Carlson talking about astroidal impacts and the effect on society and whether or not there's been a restart of civilization. | ||
| And then you talk to people that are experts in evolution and rocketry and genetic engineering. | ||
| Through that process, you develop this understanding of the world that I don't think you'd get any other way. | ||
| You're never going to have an environment in today's day and age where you sit for three hours with no phones and just look at each other and have a conversation. | ||
| And that's what we do on a daily basis. | ||
| And I think that's an incredible opportunity to grow and learn and also to address your own thoughts. | ||
| And you're not just addressing them. | ||
| You're exhibiting them to the whole world. | ||
| You're putting them on display. | ||
| This is how I feel about things. | ||
| And people will go, you're a fucking idiot. | ||
| Or, oh my god, I learned from you. | ||
| And through that, you grow and learn. | ||
| And It's not something that is traditionally valued or taught as a form of education, of a form of being able to understand how you think about things by recording them and then releasing them to the world so that the scrutiny of 100,000 people comes down on whatever shit idea you have. | ||
| Yes, and how stupid and how ignorant you were and how there was inconsistencies beforehand. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, you can create a community of people around you in that way by curating the content that you consume, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| This is one of the things, a lot of the time, audiences, especially at the stage that I'm at now, which is still getting feedback from the audience and it's not so unbelievably massive that I can't get any sort of kickback, The audience has a role, I think, with helping creators to create the sort of content that is good and to also encourage them to think better in a more rigorous way. | ||
| A lot of the time, the audience may have something genuinely valuable to contribute to what someone's thinking or saying, but the way that they put it across is just in this reactionary... | ||
| Lots of exclamation marks. | ||
| You got this wrong or whatever. | ||
| If I get an email or a DM from somebody or whatever that's really well thought out and they say, hey man, I listened to such and such an episode with this person on DNA and you said this. | ||
| Here's a couple of things I think you should really check out. | ||
| Here's an article or a news story and this is where I think that you're a little bit off the mark. | ||
| I'll read that. | ||
| What I won't read is someone just flying off the handle about a complete reactionary. | ||
| Now, audiences have the opportunity to craft the direction of the people that they listen to by contributing in a well-meaning way. | ||
| Like, if you genuinely care about the creators that you listen to, you can help them be better. | ||
| if you think this person is pretty close to the best thing that I can listen to online help you can contribute to their direction but what they won't listen they're going to switch off if you just have some outlandish sweary exclamation mark capital letters comment they're not going to listen to that right you have to think about what is causing what it what it selects for in the people that are in the YouTube comments right there is something that it selects for and we don't know what that is Maybe it's anger. | ||
| Maybe it's outrage. | ||
| There's certainly a particular type of personality that is always being selected for in that. | ||
| So if you want to separate yourself out from that, you actually need to do something that shows that you've taken more time, more care, more consideration. | ||
| You can think about it that way, but the way I think about it is that each individual person that's commenting is on a different stage of their own journey. | ||
| And if you're at the stage of your own journey where something you disagree with, you have to insult that person, ad hominems, and swears, and fuck you, and you fucking idiot, and you're at a very early stage of this idea of exchanging information. | ||
| And you don't have to communicate that way. | ||
| And some people, when they see someone's idea they disagree with, they just want to insult that person and diminish that person and demean that person. | ||
| And it's a very ineffective way of getting your ideas across. | ||
| You might think that you're damaging that person and then in so doing you're propping up your own ideas. | ||
| But what you're really doing is you're exposing this bitter, angry, unhappy version of yourself. | ||
| There are many people that I disagree with, but the way I try to engage with those people is by saying, I don't think that's correct, and I don't feel the same way because of this, and this is why. | ||
| And I try to never attack people. | ||
| I try to never insult people. | ||
| Unless they're so fucking preposterous I think that it's necessary to get a little bit out there like CNN anchors and shit like that because they're propagandists and I think that ultimately they're doing some danger in the way they communicate in some ways. | ||
| But most of the time when I talk about things I try to talk about things in a way where I look at their side. | ||
| I steel man them. | ||
| I look at their perspective and I try to see why do they have these opinions? | ||
| Why have they formed this? | ||
| Why have they been captured by this very particular ideology? | ||
| Why do they support this? | ||
| Why are they like, vote blue no matter who? | ||
| Why are they like, you know, Trumpers to the bitter end? | ||
| Like, what is causing that? | ||
| And I try to put myself in their thought process. | ||
| How much was that the case before you started the show? | ||
| Very little. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Very little. | ||
| Before the show, I was like, fuck him. | ||
| He's a moron. | ||
| Fuck this idiot. | ||
| You know, I learned how to do that from doing the podcast. | ||
| I learned how to do that initially from gauging the reaction other people had to my conversations. | ||
| But after a while, the volume of comments was just too much. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That's what I'm feeling a little bit now as well. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to get there. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| And you're probably going to, after this show, it's going to be rough. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| And also there's a reality of being a human being that the negative comments stand out more than the positive ones. | ||
| And if you read the negative ones and you internalize them, it's damaging. | ||
| It's not good for you. | ||
| And it's not necessary. | ||
| I got a story about the negativity bias that Malice taught me about a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| I mean, Malice was supposed to go to Russia. | ||
| Do you remember he mentioned it a couple of times? | ||
| He was going to go to Russia and we were going to vlog it and stuff and then COVID and then war. | ||
| So we are still planning on doing that. | ||
| He told me about... | ||
| The Brighton Hotel attack, I think it was 1983 or 1987. So Margaret Thatcher, right, is going to a hotel for a Conservative Party conference. | ||
| And this is when the IRA, Ireland's terrorist group, they had a big problem with what was going on in the UK. So they set a long time-delayed bomb to go off in this hotel. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And there's tons of Conservative Party members that are there. | ||
| Mrs. Thatcher's there. | ||
| She actually ends up being in the bathroom when it goes off. | ||
| Had she been in her main room, there would have been shards of glass everywhere, but she probably wouldn't have been killed, but would have definitely at least been damaged, right? | ||
| And afterward, she puts a statement out saying, we will not be deterred, we are not to be pushed around, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| The IRA puts a statement out and they say, Mrs. Thatcher, today you were lucky. | ||
| The thing is, you have to be lucky every day. | ||
| We only have to get lucky once. | ||
| So that is the fact that life has to win every day and death only has to win once. | ||
| That's the reason why the negativity bias exists. | ||
| That story, you have to be lucky every day. | ||
| We only have to be lucky once. | ||
| That's a Deontay Wilder one-punch philosophy. | ||
| Because he only has to catch you once. | ||
| The eraser. | ||
| Yeah, the eraser. | ||
| The eraser, man. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| And I think that realizing just how easy it is to change. | ||
| How easy it is to change the things that you think, the way that you behave, the norms that you follow. | ||
| This quote from Aristotle, he says, if a man knows not where he goes, no wind is favorable. | ||
| If you haven't considered what it is that you want to want in life, Basically, you're just the cleverest rat in the room, right? | ||
| Your desires are determined by the confused chemical signals of your body and the way you've dealt with past trauma and social norms and paths of least resistance, all of these things. | ||
| that's what's determining your behavior right now if you haven't lived a consciously designed life and the main thing that i've learned is that look life doesn't have to be lived by default you can design it you can go out of your way to assess okay what's underneath this stone oh fucking hell that's really ugly i would rather not look at that and then you give it a bit of a clean right you sort of clean it away and you go okay right let's have a go again for every 20 stones that 19 of them are disgusting and have something terrifying that sits underneath. | ||
| Maybe one of them's good. | ||
| Actually, do you know what it is? | ||
| My curiosity. | ||
| I really like that. | ||
| Or my empathy. | ||
| I really like that. | ||
| Most of them are desires that other people have given to you. | ||
| They're things that you don't actually want to do for yourself. | ||
| And that's why it's scary work. | ||
| It's scary work to admit that you're wrong. | ||
| It's scary work to look at assessing why I do the things that I do. | ||
| There's also the burden of having to make a living, right? | ||
| And that requires so much of your day. | ||
| Think about the amount of time that if we were talking about before that most people who are living, there's a large percentage of people that are listening to this right now that are living their life doing something for a living that they don't want to do and it's not enjoyable and it's burdensome. | ||
| Well, that's eight hours a day plus commuting. | ||
| That is most of your day. | ||
| So most of your day is spent in an undesirable way. | ||
| So because of that, it leaves very little time to course correct. | ||
| The more you develop responsibilities, whether it's a family that you have to support, or whether it's a mortgage you have to pay off, or a car loan, or whatever it is, the more of those things you accumulate, the more difficult it is to course correct. | ||
| And that's very, very important for people to understand, is that the further you go down this path, like you might have this job and it might suck, but then the boss pulls you into the office and goes, hey, Mike, we're going to give you a new responsibility, a new raise, but we're going to require more hours. | ||
| You know, it's a 10% bump in pay, but I want you to understand that, you know, this is, you're going to have to do a lot of overtime, you have to do a lot, and you start thinking, well, I'm moving up, but you're not. | ||
| Deeper into the trench you go. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's so important to understand, is that the amount of time, like the amount of focus, the amount of hours your mind is spent doing something you don't want to do, that's not going to fucking change unless you make it change. | ||
| You're going to have to do something about that. | ||
| And the more you commit to that and the more time spent doing that, the harder it's going to be to make those changes. | ||
| And you're going to start to cope. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Outside of that. | ||
| That's where these kind of conversations are so valuable, because you have done some things you don't want to do anymore, and you used to do them, and I have been the same way, and most people are that way. | ||
| We're not born into this job. | ||
| This is not something that was bestowed upon us by someone else. | ||
| We crafted it, we figured it out, and through step by step, you go back and listen to my early podcasts, they're fucking terrible. | ||
| If you went back and watched my early podcasts and said, one day, this is going to be the biggest podcast in the known world. | ||
| What the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| This is horseshit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's why it's out there still. | ||
| I like the fact that they're out there. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me too. | |
| I love the fact that it's still there. | ||
| But another thing to consider is the fact that if people are succeeding, even slightly, in a job that they hate... | ||
| Think about how good you could be if it was something that you really, really cared about. | ||
| Think about how amazing you could be if you pursued something that you genuinely had existential simpatico with as opposed to something that you detest or just not that fussed about. | ||
| If you're in the chasm of comfortable complacency. | ||
| Just how good could you be if this was something that you loved? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Holy fuck. | ||
| It's just so hard for people to course correct. | ||
| And it's so hard for people to have like sort of a top-down objective view of where they're going and what they're doing and how they're thinking and whether or not they like it. | ||
| Most of the time people need some sort of a catastrophic event, some sort of a near-death experience or a life-changing event or a breakup or being fired or a psychedelic experience, like something that just blows the paradigm completely into a million pieces and you're forced to look at it again. | ||
| That's falling out of the bottom of the region beta paradox, right? | ||
| You go through the bottom and you bounce out of there, right? | ||
| That's what you're looking to do. | ||
| But I think that when you think about how locked in to people's lives they are and concerns about making changes. | ||
| I'm 34 now. | ||
| I moved to America when I was 33, right? | ||
| 33 years old. | ||
| That would have been, you know, past the time when you're supposed to have responsibilities. | ||
| Now, yeah, I didn't have any restrictions or whatever to be able to come out here in terms of family and kids and stuff like that. | ||
| But still, moving to a new country on your own at 33 is something that most people would have been – that's a little bit of an odd decision to make perhaps. | ||
| There are opportunities and there are people that reach out that have made huge changes in their lives. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen them as well. | ||
| Way, way, way into late life. | ||
| There is no trench that's been dug so deep that you can't get yourself out of it. | ||
| But it is easier the earlier that you do it. | ||
| That's way easier. | ||
| That's just a sad fact that if you're able to nip something in the bud Before it becomes too entrenched, before you have too many responsibilities that make it harder because you've got to keep on grinding at the shitty job that you don't like, while you've got to side hustle, while you've got to raise the kids, while you've got to pay the mortgage, while you've got to do all of the rest of the things and the adulting. | ||
| It would be easier. | ||
| But it's never going to be too late. | ||
| It's never too late. | ||
| If you're alive, you can get better. | ||
| If you're alive right now, you can improve your condition. | ||
| You can improve your situation. | ||
| And it starts with improving the way you think. | ||
| That's the most important thing. | ||
| The way you think of things, the way you address things, you've got to change that. | ||
| And you've got to look at things objectively and you've got to be brutally honest with yourself. | ||
| And the more you bullshit yourself, the more it's going to be difficult. | ||
| You're literally throwing weights on your back and making it harder to move forward. | ||
| Yeah, it's because people's opinions are so highly, highly held as the most important thing that they do. | ||
| That's the concern, though. | ||
| The fact that in order to say that I've been wrong, it feels like destruction. | ||
| But it's not true. | ||
| Your opinions are just a thing that you're bouncing around in your head. | ||
| And you can't think of them as your lungs or your bones or your eyeballs. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| This is another Sam Harris thing, right? | ||
| Where he says, what are you going to think next? | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| You don't know what you're going to think next. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, okay, so does that mean that you're in control of your thoughts? | ||
| Well, you kind of are, but you're also kind of not. | ||
| And if there was somebody that was walking down the street saying things, and you couldn't predict what they were going to say next, would you trust what that person says? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| And you can't predict what's coming up next. | ||
| Your thoughts are no more of a part of you than the weather is to the sky, right? | ||
| The weather flows through the sky, and you know that the sky is there above it. | ||
| But the weather is just a current state. | ||
| It's not the sky. | ||
| It's just a part of it. | ||
| But you do develop momentum from thinking in a specific way, whether it's good momentum or bad momentum. | ||
| You can get good momentum by choosing... | ||
| Good paths in life by course correcting, by adding beneficial and healthy activities to your life, and you grow and change because of that. | ||
| You know, I've talked to so many people that have started doing yoga, and they're like, oh my god, it's changed my life. | ||
| It changed the way I think about things, changed the way I interact with people. | ||
| But by forcing yourself to do a thing, you now develop momentum, and that can be applied to all sorts of different aspects of your life. | ||
| And also by finding something that you deeply enjoy and that becomes satisfying to you, you enrich your overall experience on Earth. | ||
| And that, in turn, enriches the way you communicate with others. | ||
| It can enhance your relationships. | ||
| It can enhance your job performance. | ||
| It just changes your choices because you have less frustration. | ||
| We're rolling the clock forward as well, thinking about how you could impact other people. | ||
| What would the world be like if you showed up 1% better? | ||
| Who would that impact? | ||
| How far would the ripples go? | ||
| Listening to your show was a big part of the reason why I started mine. | ||
| Then 500 episodes later, Modern Wisdom's got me out to America and it's done all that, and how many people has that impacted? | ||
| And then how many people have they impacted? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's kind of almost a compulsion or a necessity for people to do what only they can do. | ||
| So I learned about Salvador Dali and just how weird that guy was. | ||
| So Salvador Dali, his parents, about 10 months or 11 months before he was born, had a kid called Salvador and it died. | ||
| Died very shortly after being born and they very quickly got pregnant again. | ||
| And called the new son, Salvador. | ||
| And they were adamant that he was a reincarnation of the baby that had died. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| That's where you've started, okay? | ||
| That's where you began. | ||
| And then he used to throw himself down the stairs as a child because he was a masochist. | ||
| He used to enjoy the pain of being thrown down stairs. | ||
| He once got locked in a deep-sea diving suit while he was giving a talk, and he had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk because he was suffocating. | ||
| Do you know about what he did with his wife? | ||
| No, I don't know anything about Salvador Dali. | ||
| He's fucking amazing, man. | ||
| Other than his mustache. | ||
| Yes, serious facial hair. | ||
| So he fell in love. | ||
| He was married and he fell in love with another woman who was also married. | ||
| And he was adamant that she was his muse, that she was almost divine, heavenly. | ||
| And she left her husband. | ||
| He left his wife. | ||
| He immediately bought her... | ||
| I finished that coffee. | ||
| Sorry, mate. | ||
| Oh, no worries. | ||
| Let's get more coffee. | ||
| Nah, we're good, man. | ||
| He was adamant that she was his muse. | ||
| He bought her a castle and immediately started treating her like royalty. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So he used to send a formal request to go and see her. | ||
| His wife, in the castle that he bought her, he used to treat her like royalty and she would have to accept it like by royal decree or something. | ||
| My point being that Salvador Dali was an incredibly odd human. | ||
| And as brilliant as he was, Michelangelo didn't do Dali. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Da Vinci didn't do Dali. | ||
| If Salvador Dali had been anything short of his truest self, the world would have been fundamentally less. | ||
| That work would not have come out. | ||
| Had he have tried to be his version of Leonardo da Vinci or his version of Michelangelo, the world would have been robbed of Dali's work. | ||
| So you are this very unique combination of genetics and experience and past traumas and social norms and your funny lisp and the fact that one foot's slightly bigger than the other, all of that combined together. | ||
| Gives you the opportunity to have a very unique offering to the world. | ||
| And it is incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's being themselves. | ||
| How am I going to be a better Joe Rogan than Joe Rogan is? | ||
| The best that I can hope for is being the second best Joe Rogan in the world if I decide to do that. | ||
| So if you decide to lean into the thing that only you can do, that is where your competitive advantage lies. | ||
| And that doesn't mean that you can't progress forward. | ||
| That doesn't mean that you can't enhance yourself and develop new skills. | ||
| But I do think that there's something to do with embracing the uniqueness that you have. | ||
| That will allow you to direct yourself towards something that is more fulfilling, that's more in line with you, that is competitively more effective. | ||
| Socially, people are going to resonate with you. | ||
| We don't love people for how much they like other people, right? | ||
| No one's ever fallen in love with someone and said, you know what it is? | ||
| I just love the fact that I can accurately predict all of their opinions without having heard their thought on something beforehand. | ||
| I just adore how predictable she is. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's because of how unique they are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The same thing goes for competitiveness in a job market. | ||
| We want people who have unique skills that cannot be matched by anybody else. | ||
| And then if you think, well, I want 7.8 billion people on the planet all being the very best version of themselves. | ||
| What is it that only you can do and you can break? | ||
| Because I've got people that can already do what they're doing. | ||
| If you try and do what they're doing, then they've already got that. | ||
| Do the thing that only you can do. | ||
| The thing is what you're saying by leaning into yourself and saying, what is it about you that is unique that only you can offer the world? | ||
| Some people don't feel like there's anything that is unique about them that they can offer the world because they haven't done anything that shows them that. | ||
| And one of the things about difficult pursuits, whether it's with Salvador Dali, it's art, whether with me, it's probably martial arts and some other things and stand up comedy and podcasting and through doing difficult things, difficult things, they establish your human potential. | ||
| And by going through these things, things you'd gain more confidence and more of a more of an understanding of your thought process and where you error and where you do well and what lessons that you can take from that and be a little bit better next time and the accumulation of all this data is it makes you understand what is unique about you and who you are | ||
| But That's why I think difficult pursuits are so important for humans. | ||
| I think we live in this shell of a body that has this ancient primate DNA that is all about problem solving and survival. | ||
| It's about figuring out where the threats are. | ||
| It's about recognizing your enemies. | ||
| It's about accumulating resources and food and about your DNA carrying on. | ||
| Well, most of those problems have kind of been solved by civilized society. | ||
| So in order to examine your own unique human potential, you have to have a pursuit, whatever that pursuit is. | ||
| Whether it's golf like Tiger Woods, whatever, it's basketball like Michael Jordan, whatever it is, you've got to find a thing. | ||
| And through that thing, you learn about yourself. | ||
| Whether it's yoga, whether it's writing, there's a way that you can interface with Difficult, complex problems that you will gain insight into how you operate and how your mind plays tricks on you and how accomplishing things is deeply rewarding and how learning how to be a more empathetic and kind friend is also rewarding and about when you recognize that in other people, it's inspiring. | ||
| All those things, you've got to get through something in life to acquire them. | ||
| And it bleeds into those other areas, right? | ||
| The single pursuit becomes the vector that everything else comes from, right? | ||
| It's a gateway drug or the pebble at the top of an avalanche. | ||
| The first step is the hardest one, though, and I think that that was what I was stuck at for a very long time. | ||
| You know, I knew that there was something wrong. | ||
| I didn't know what, and I didn't really know how to fix it either. | ||
| And that's the first step being the most difficult in terms of starting that momentum. | ||
| You know, you look at it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. | ||
| All of the people that you admire are just the end result of hundreds of thousands of tiny little interactions and iterations on doing a lot of different things. | ||
| The way that they show up for their friends, the fact that they turn up on time. | ||
| All of that stuff, the tiny, tiny, tiny little things. | ||
| And then that is how you look at somebody that's incredibly impressive. | ||
| But trying to reverse engineer the impressiveness without thinking that, okay, what is the thing that I can do today, the tiny little action that I can take that will move me slightly closer toward my goal, even if I don't know what the goal is. | ||
| So a lot of the time, I think people have a problem that Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control, right? | ||
| So they decide, I'm not going to do a thing until I know exactly the direction I'm going to go in. | ||
| And that means that no step is useful until I know the end goal that I'm going to get to. | ||
| But what they don't understand is that any commitment that you make is a step in the right direction. | ||
| Anything that you decide that you're going to commit yourself to... | ||
| Peterson's got one of these rules where he says, commit yourself to one thing as hard as you can and see what happens. | ||
| Just... | ||
| Write a blog post once a day for two months. | ||
| See what happens. | ||
| Even if blogging turns out you suck at it and you hate it and it doesn't end up getting any traction and it gives you no sense of joy or whatever, what you've learned there is that you can do a thing every single day for two months. | ||
| That is a really fucking valuable lesson. | ||
| It's a vehicle for developing your human potential. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| And the more that you can lean into just committing to doing stuff, right? | ||
| Far more people than realize it just need to commit to doing a thing. | ||
| Just do a thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Especially if you don't know what to do, because anything is better than no thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But one of the problems you've got is that people can be anything that they want, but they can't be everything that they want. | ||
| You have to pick a small, narrow window of stuff that you're going to compete on, right? | ||
| You can't be the leanest person in the gym whilst starting a new business, whilst going out every single night and socializing, trying to find your partner, whilst starting a podcast and a blog and a bunch of other things. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You can be anything you want. | ||
| It can't be everything that you want. | ||
| You have to pick what is the highest point of contribution that I can go to. | ||
| And then over time, you gradually, gradually refine those down. | ||
| Now sometimes you can find things that are kind of mutually beneficial. | ||
| So let's say that you end up being good at podcasting, which is conversation. | ||
| You also end up, like, commentary's kind of conversation, and comedy's kind of conversation. | ||
| Okay, so these things kind of intermingle, and the audience, and selling shows, and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So sometimes stuff overlaps, but more often than not, it diverges. | ||
| If you want to be a great businessman and make as much money as possible, you're going to have to sacrifice time with your kids. | ||
| If you want to be the best dad that you can, you're probably not going to be able to earn as much money quite as much as you could do usually. | ||
| So these things are mutually exclusive. | ||
| It's an idea Oliver Berkman has where he says, decide in advance what you want to suck at. | ||
| Because a lot of the time, we believe that we can do anything that we want to do, be anything that we want to be, and as soon as we start to commit to one thing, we feel the pain of the stuff that we've started to let fall away. | ||
| I used to be in condition, now that I'm focused on my family, I've noticed that I'm getting a little bit out of shape. | ||
| Even though I train, I know that I'm still doing stuff as much as I can, but I can't go to the gym as much as I could when I was 25 and had no girlfriend and no family. | ||
| But if you've committed in advance to wanting to be the best father that you can be, you know downstream from that, okay, what are the things that I'm going to have to suck at in advance? | ||
| My body condition is probably going to take a little bit of a hit. | ||
| Maybe I'm not going to be able to see the boys on a weekend quite so much. | ||
| But I'm prepared to suck at that. | ||
| Because these are the things that I genuinely value. | ||
| I want to be the best father that I can be. | ||
| I want to be whatever it might be. | ||
| But we feel the pain of that as it falls away. | ||
| We feel the pain. | ||
| And that's what stops us from making progress. | ||
| Because you can be anything you want. | ||
| You can't be everything. | ||
| And as soon as you start trying to spread yourself out... | ||
| And remember as well, this is something else. | ||
| I wonder whether you had this. | ||
| A lot of the things that I do, I've always presumed they're going to last forever. | ||
| So if I'm going to be into training in the gym now, I forget that it's just periodization. | ||
| I can focus on training for the next six months, and then after that, once I've locked in a good routine or I've built up this particular thing, after that it's going to be something else, and after that it's going to be something else. | ||
| I always presume that what I did, that what's happening now is just going to continue to stretch out into the future forever. | ||
| And this means that good things feel like they're going to last forever and then inevitably they end up disappointing you because they're not going to. | ||
| And bad things feel like they're going to last forever, which makes you despondent. | ||
| But realizing that whatever it is that you're doing now is only going to last for a little while, right? | ||
| You're going to have this particular training style. | ||
| You're going to have this little project. | ||
| And then what else are you going to add in after that? | ||
| Well, you don't know. | ||
| But not just feeling like the now is everything that there is and that things are going to change over time and that you're going to iterate, I think that's quite an important realization. | ||
| I try to just enjoy what I'm doing while I'm doing it. | ||
| And I don't think too much about whether or not I'm going to be able to do something forever. | ||
| I just think, am I doing it now? | ||
| Am I enjoying it now? | ||
| Great. | ||
| Let's do it again tomorrow. | ||
| And if there comes a reason why I can't do things anymore, like I had to give up on video games because I'm too obsessive. | ||
| There's a few things in my life where I've had to go, okay, this is not a good thing. | ||
| Let me stop that. | ||
| But generally, I just try to find things that I enjoy doing and do them as much as I can. | ||
| But that's why I don't understand when people say I'm bored. | ||
| Oh, I'm bored. | ||
| Like, I could live a hundred lives simultaneously. | ||
| If there was a hundred versions of me, I'd have a hundred different occupations. | ||
| I would try to be a professional pool player. | ||
| I'd try to be a professional chess player. | ||
| I'd be a professional fighter. | ||
| I would try to be a fucking singer. | ||
| I would find things. | ||
| I am endlessly fascinated by things. | ||
| Things to do, things to learn from, things, pursuits. | ||
| And I think that if you could find things that resonate with your particular personality, just enjoy them and treat them as what they are. | ||
| What they are is they're sort of a replacement For all the things that gave you human rewards, the human reward systems that are built into our primate DNA. You need those. | ||
| You can't just go through life just showing up, eating, sleeping, and going to sleep. | ||
| You're going to get depressed. | ||
| Like, your organism, the human organism, needs... | ||
| Problem solving. | ||
| It needs complex problems. | ||
| It needs stress. | ||
| It needs some sort of difficult thing that you have to overcome. | ||
| And through that, you relax. | ||
| You can't just have happiness all day. | ||
| Like, oh, I just want to be happy. | ||
| Like, that's not real. | ||
| Like, you have to face discomfort for you to appreciate happiness. | ||
| If you live in Southern California, one of the things you realize is, like, the sun doesn't feel good anymore. | ||
| You know, it's there every fucking day. | ||
| I went on a hunting trip once with my friend Brian and my friend Steve who went to Alaska and we were in Prince Edward Island and it's like the rainiest place in all of North America. | ||
| It rained every fucking day we were there. | ||
| It was pouring rain. | ||
| Sounds like England. | ||
| But it was way worse. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It's like constant rain, and we're sleeping in tents, right? | ||
| So you think, oh, well, I'll get in the tent, it'll be dry. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| There's moisture inside the tent. | ||
| You see moisture droplets in the air when you turn your headlamp on at night. | ||
| You see mist, moisture mist, because everything is moist. | ||
| Your sleeping bag's wet. | ||
| Your clothes are wet. | ||
| You never dry off. | ||
| When I got back home, I called my friend Steve because I was in the car. | ||
| I was like, dude, I've never been happier. | ||
| The sun is shining on my face. | ||
| I feel so happy. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Because my happiness was greatly enhanced by the fact that I was miserable for seven days. | ||
| Like, you don't get one without the other. | ||
| You don't get true happiness. | ||
| Some of the most depressed people I've ever met live in L.A. And they're in the sun every fucking day. | ||
| And the people that live in places where it rains all the time, when the sun comes out, they're in ecstasy, they're having fun, they're laughing, they're at the park. | ||
| You don't just be happy all the time. | ||
| And people seek these pharmaceutical interventions that are going to step in and change your brain chemistry and make you happy. | ||
| And like, yeah, maybe. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what's going on in your head. | ||
| Or it might be that you need more physical struggle. | ||
| You need more exercise. | ||
| And they've proven that physical exercise, in particular cardiovascular exercise, is just as effective as SSRIs, if not more effective on most people. | ||
| Dude, it's so strange thinking back to my 20s because I always thought that I was a depressive person. | ||
| I was really bad. | ||
| I would get burned out at work. | ||
| I would spend days in bed. | ||
| I'd feel ashamed about the fact that ostensibly there was nothing wrong with me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ashamed. | ||
| Ashamed, yeah. | ||
| Laid on top of the fact that I was sad and didn't want people that I was... | ||
| We had 500 people that worked for us at this events company and we were supposed to be the party guys and we were supposed to be the ones on the front door that was G-ing everyone up and we've got this DJ and we've got these cool people and this is the night. | ||
| Aspirational, inspirational, like outgoing, gregarious, extroverted people. | ||
| And I couldn't get myself out of bed. | ||
| I was like, holy fuck, how embarrassing is it that I, the person that's supposed to be in charge of this, can't bring himself to go to the kitchen to get himself a glass of water? | ||
| And I looked at what was happening. | ||
| I was going to bed at 4am two to three nights a week. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Dude, the first stable sleep and wake pattern I ever had was COVID as an adult. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The first time I ever went to bed and woke up at the same time consistently since the age of 18 when I lived at home with my parents was COVID. How much better did you feel? | ||
| It's indescribable. | ||
| It's indescribable, the difference, because of my sleep and wake pattern. | ||
| And then that allowed me to really sink into building up a great morning routine. | ||
| I already had a good morning routine. | ||
| I was meditating a lot and doing stuff. | ||
| But it was at changeable times, and my mood was always all over the place. | ||
| And obviously, if you're sleeping late, that means that diet is kind of hard to really dial in. | ||
| And then over time, you start to see, holy fuck, the momentum that you can build up when things are... | ||
| It's consistent, sustainable, replicable. | ||
| The difference is so profound that I can't put words on it. | ||
| And that's what you see, that's that 1%. | ||
| Each conversation, each day, each little time that you do something, each interaction, the fact that you turn up early, the fact that you tell the truth as opposed to telling a lie. | ||
| Every single one of those are mountain built and layers of paint. | ||
| Every single time, man. | ||
| And that's how it felt to me making a pivot. | ||
| Committing myself to doing something that I really cared about. | ||
| Committing myself to saying that I was wrong when I'm wrong. | ||
| Committing myself to telling the truth even though it's inconvenient. | ||
| All of those little interactions. | ||
| And it's that first step, I think, that a lot of people get stuck on. | ||
| I just want that momentum to begin. | ||
| I want to push myself down that hill. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Chris, let's end with that. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I really enjoy this conversation and I think we could have a hundred more. | ||
| And I really appreciate what you're doing. | ||
| I really appreciate how you communicate and the way you express yourself. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Your podcast is great. | ||
| So please tell people how to get that. | ||
| Tell people where it is. | ||
| Modern Wisdom, you can search on Spotify, obviously, and Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever else you need to search. | ||
| Just Modern Wisdom is there. | ||
| And dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. | ||
| Big inspiration, big reason why I started the show. | ||
| I'd love to have you on whenever you're free. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'd love to do that, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And tell people your social media, too, so they can get all of you there. | ||
| At ChrisWillX on Twitter and Instagram and everywhere else that you go. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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