Chris Williamson and Joe Rogan explore how "luxury beliefs"—like California’s anti-flavored nicotine laws or UK bans—disproportionately burden lower classes while elite attitudes ignore real-world consequences, like youthful recklessness or systemic health risks. They contrast brutal martial arts training (e.g., Vanderlei Silva’s Vale Tudo era) with modern precision, like the "jihadi blender" missile or archery tuning, and debate biological performance disparities in sports, citing 93% MRI accuracy for innate male-female brain differences. Williamson warns of performative empathy masking manipulation, while Rogan critiques Biden’s cognitive decline amid political chaos, from Afghanistan documents to Hollywood’s lingering homophobia. The episode ends with a nod to their mutual success and the absurdity of modern polarization, where dating becomes a political litmus test. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I went back home for Christmas in the UK, and it's so strange to go back to a place that you know so well, you're super familiar with, But you're kind of different and everything's changed, but everything's the same.
And you fall back into old patterns.
You remember that tree that you used to walk past on your morning walk and all of...
Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic.
It's kind of getting common, it's when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least run one or two beers.
You're talking about a 16-year-old kid, a 15-year-old kid?
Like, fuck.
When they're doing things, they don't even know what's real.
I mean, and it's all completely dependent upon how they were raised.
Like you could get really lucky and have solid parents and really have like a good understanding of how to behave in the world.
Or you could get fucked and you got some dad who beats the shit out of you and he's always on meth and your mother's a fucking liar and she steals money and she sells people stuff.
You know, that could be your reality, too.
And to expect a person like that to behave exactly the way you do with your nice life is crazy.
It's crazy.
And it's one of the weirder things that we do.
Instead of looking at the origins of, what are the origins of horrible behavior?
It's all terrible childhoods.
It's almost all terrible childhoods.
Instead of looking at that, all we look at is a crime.
It's very strange.
It's a weird thing.
It's like to know logically that you just have to take a few extra steps and you say, well, what's the root of this problem and how do we address that?
How do we make it better?
We have so much money for other things.
We don't have any money for that.
That seems like one of the most fundamental problems any country would face is the amount of people that grow up that become violent criminals because they were fucked from the time they were young.
They had no shot at life.
Their whole childhood was just violence and chaos.
And that's not an insignificant number of people in this country and yet any foreign conflict has to be addressed with the utmost urgency when the things that are paramount to our daily existence right here What our tax dollars pay for right here are just completely ignored.
Completely ignored.
Never discussed.
They'll talk to you about climate change.
Climate change.
Let me tell you something.
If you live in the south side of Chicago and you get shot, climate change doesn't mean jack shit to you.
Okay?
We should address what the fuck is going on right now, not climate change.
I walked past a house in Austin, not far from where I live, that has a defund the police flag in the garden out front and a private security sticker in the front window.
He's one of the best writers in the UK. There's this really interesting example of...
My friend Mary Harrington talks about how the death of chivalry has caused an increase in domestic violence.
It's very interesting.
This is a good example of this luxury beliefs thing.
So...
Yes.
During the 1960s and 70s, if you were an upper-class lady and the guys that you were dating were from households that had two parents that had taught them how you're supposed to treat people and they weren't mistreated and all the rest of it.
They grew up like a well-balanced person.
To them, it might seem a little bit patronizing for the guy to hold the door for you, right?
Or to pull the chair out or to make sure that you get home okay.
Because you live an existence in which the danger of that not happening, not going appropriately, isn't that great.
Now, what wasn't understood by a lot of the upper class feminists that were talking about this derogation of chivalry that they wanted was that that doesn't necessarily work for the working class or the underclass woman who is dating a man whose father beat him or stepfather beat him or didn't have a father or was homeless or addicted what wasn't understood by a lot of the upper class feminists that were talking about this And she thinks it's a direct line, a single spectrum from you should hold the door open for women to you shouldn't beat your wife.
And I think that it's true.
Women should be seen as something that requires additional protection, that are precious and should be respected.
If you derogate the stuff up here, sure, maybe it means that you liberate some of the upper class women to be able to go and do whatever they want.
But what does this cause downstream when you don't have those guardrails in place for the men that the lower class women are dating?
This is how it's looked upon in the martial arts world.
If I know that I can fuck you up, and I fuck you up, I'm probably a bad person.
It's never good that a guy who is like some trained killer goes after some regular guy, picks a fight with him and fucks him up.
It's never thought of as good.
It's always negative, like almost entirely negative, like the entire fan base will recognize that terrible behavior.
So if you're a man and you have someone who is your wife and she's smaller than you and female, you have the craziest advantage physically.
It's the most awful tyranny physically if violence is involved.
If you decide that you're going to start swinging and teaching people lessons and And then lying to police about how someone got hurt and, oh, she fell down the stairs.
And if you grow up seeing that, that's even maybe more fucked up.
Because that's your model, and that's probably what their model was when they were growing up.
But it's, as men, we have to look at that as the weakest of most disgusting behaviors.
If a heavyweight beat up on a bantamweight, everyone would be furious.
But that's what a lot of men are and a lot of women are.
It's crazy.
If that happened in the male martial arts world, people would be furious.
It's just It's just fucking it's horrible and it's just it's it's weird that it's always been a part of like cinema There's always been scenes like James Cagney smacks a girl in the face and there was one God, I wish I could remember the movie.
It was so crazy But the the it was like a 1950s movie and the dad was spanking the the wife spanking her like had her over his knee and the young girl Was saying that that's how he shows mommy that he loves her.
God, you remember that movie, Jamie?
I know we played it.
It was insane.
It was like this insane scene from a movie where you're like, what?
I had this idea about we always hear the problems of child stars.
Macaulay Culkin, Britney Spears, too much fame, too young.
And I don't disagree that thinking about, oh my God, this person's basically never known the world without adoration and attention and focus and scrutiny and all that stuff.
But there's a really interesting question about what happens if you're a...
You know, let's say, for example, Canadian psychologist who's been working away in the dusty annals of some university for a while.
and out of nowhere, you get thrust into the limelight, and then this bald MMA commentator plucks you out of obscurity, and now you're one of the most talked about people on the planet.
The interesting thing here is, as the child, yes, you didn't know what the world was like before.
I understand that can be disquieting.
But what about when you had a sense of self?
What about when you thought you knew who you were, and your place in the world, and your place in the status hierarchy, as Will would say?
What about that?
And then you just get ripped from your moorings, and you're just out in space, and the ISS is going past you, and you're...
I think I texted him a stat about 77% of 18 to 24 year olds in the US are ineligible to join the military because of being overweight or mental or drug problems.
In Blackadder, Rowan Atkinson, this famous British comedy, he was saying...
You know your bits, don't you?
One of the actors says to him.
And he says, this is different.
It's spontaneous and it's called wit.
And I just always stuck in my mind that there's a difference between having prepared and well-constructed stuff in advance and then being able to, no matter what it is, whether it's insights, whether it's debate, whether it's argumentation, whether it's analysis, all of those things, the ability for someone to just turn it on like that.
And then there's some comics that aren't really good at that.
They're not good at dealing with audience members or anything like that.
They're not good at answering questions.
But they're good at long takes on things where they sit alone in contemplation and go over some ironic aspect of a topic and then they write out really good material about it.
It's still super valid.
It's like there's no one that's better than the other.
But there's different personalities that get attracted to the idea of constructing a stand-up comedy routine.
And for some personalities, they're not like a conflict personality or, yeah, well, you're a this.
They're not that guy or that girl.
They're someone who gets some subject, bothers them, whatever it is, climate change, whatever it is.
And they just sit on it.
And they're like, what?
And then they'll be alone.
They'll be in front of the computer.
They'll get a notebook out.
They'll just sit on it for fucking days sometimes.
Bounce it around back and forth.
Twist it around.
Start it from this way.
Start it from the back.
Back it up.
Go from the conclusion first and then explain your conclusion in a hilarious way.
See if it works better that way.
And you'll do that.
And then that type of comic, like that mindset, can create great bits.
They're great comics.
But they just don't like to do the audience thing.
But that's okay, too.
It's like, you can't ask someone to change their personality.
Whitney was telling me before, I did a little tour toward the back end of last year, which was pretty interesting.
And I was saying, what should I expect?
He says, expect to get a bit more boring as it goes on.
It's like, what do you mean?
He said, well, in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life.
And the problem is, if you're on the road, all you know are airports and hotels and dinners and shows.
And that's it.
And she was saying that she was in a Hollywood scriptwriters meeting.
And they were saying, it's a Saturday morning.
Where is she?
And someone shouted from the back, she's in a baby shower.
And Whitney was like, who goes to a baby shower?
All right.
She's doing a wine tasting.
She's like, no one goes to a wine tasting.
And the room turned and apparently said, no, Whitney, you don't.
Other normal people do that.
So you've got this vicious trap of success.
It must happen with musicians as well.
How are you supposed to...
If you're some heartfelt singer talking about your make-ups and break-ups of relationships, and now you're dealing with the fear of me too, that doesn't exactly give beautiful romance around what you're talking about.
The same thing goes for comedians, the same thing goes for anything.
The whole point of what you're trying to do is be representation, be representative for the normal person.
And the more that your life becomes strange and rarified and on the road, the less of that you get to experience, which is less inspiration for the art.
Yeah, so go to his Wikipedia, Adrian Carton de Watt.
I think he might have the best...
There it is.
Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Paul Gislaine Carton-du-Art was a British Army soldier, officer, born of Belgian and Irish parents.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration awarded for valour in the face of the enemy in various Commonwealth countries.
He served in the Boer War, First World War and Second World War.
He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, was blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, tunnelled out of a prisoner of war camp...
And tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them.
Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, frankly, I had enjoyed the war.
And you think he's going to go through the typical aristocratic route.
He goes to Balliol College in Oxford.
His father wants him to go and study law.
And you think, right, that's the end of the story there.
At 19, he decides that he wants to go and see war, sneaks away without telling his father, and literally offers himself to either the Boers or the British.
He wants to go to the front lines of the First World War now.
But they said, we can't send a guy with one eye out there because it's going to look like we've got really weak soldiers.
So they give him a glass eye and say, the only way that you can go back out is if you wear this glass eye.
And he says, okay.
In the taxi, leaving the hospital, takes it out, throws it out of a window and starts wearing an eye patch.
The first battle that he's in, when he rejoins the army in World War I... A piece of shrapnel explodes his hand and all that's left are two fingers hanging on by the skin of the palm of his hand and his watch actually embeds itself in his arm too.
So this is the first thing that he's encountered again.
Goes to the field hospital.
The doctor declines to amputate the fingers.
So he just rips them off in front of him because he's in so much pain.
The arm then has to be amputated.
So he says to the guys again, I want to be redeployed.
Like, you are now a one-eyed amputee.
I want to be deployed.
Battle of the Somme, his next battle that he goes into.
There's reports from other soldiers seeing Carton Duarte running into battle, pulling the pins out of grenades with his teeth, throwing them at the enemy and reloading a revolver with one hand.
So this guy is a single-armed killer.
During that, he gets shot through the back of the head.
Through the head.
Doesn't die.
In subsequent battles, oh, he got promoted for 24 hours before he threatened to punch his superior and then got demoted again.
So he's just like this totally wild dude.
Anyway, he goes through this series of different difficult military exposes.
He takes over three squadrons who don't have a commanding officer.
None of them have any communication.
So he, this one-armed, one-eyed guy, decides to run back and forth between the three different companies, communicating his own orders.
Rather than using a messenger, he just does it himself.
That was what he got the Victoria Cross for, which is our equivalent of the Medal of Honor.
During this time, he shot a bunch more.
You think, right, okay, this guy's just led the most insane campaign through the Boer War and the First World War, time for him to retire.
60 years old, in 1940, he gets conscripted and drawn back up to help run secret missions.
So his first mission, one of his first missions, he gets shot down in a fjord going toward Romania.
There's a German plane that shot his plane down, circling overhead.
Rather than get into the dinghy, because it would be an easy target, this one-armed, one-eyed guy and all the rest of the crew just bob under the water until this German fighter plane runs out of ammunition.
That goes away.
He finally gets picked up.
Second time he goes up in a plane.
This plane crash lands and he swims to shore carrying an injured comrade who survives.
One arm, but swims carrying this other dude.
Gets captured by the Italians.
He's then part of five escape attempts and digs a 60-meter tunnel with one arm and a bunch of other dudes.
Then he spends a full week hiding out in northern Italy, despite the fact that he's 62 years old, one-armed, one-eyed, can't speak Italian, and has covered in scars.
Then he finally, finally gets picked up and released.
They said the only thing that the Italians had left to do was to use him to enable an armistice.
They wanted to no longer be a part of the war.
They use Carton Duarte to be an envoy between the two nations.
And they said, well, you've been a prisoner of war for nine months.
You don't look or smell the way that you should do.
Why don't we give you a nice Italian tailor?
And he rejected their offer to give him an Italian suit and said he would only wear one if they got it from Savile Row because, quote, he didn't want to look like a gigolo.
There's another that doesn't even really have a particularly good book.
He wrote a memoir called Happy Odyssey, which is like, it's written by him as opposed to, you know, a bit more exciting.
Alistair Urquhart, this guy called The Forgotten Highlander.
This is probably one of my favorite books.
I taught Ryan Holiday about this and it fucking blew his mind.
So this dude was 18 years old and got conscripted in World War II. He was Scottish.
Scottish regiment gets sent to, I think, Singapore.
Then Japan joined the war.
The Japanese just invade fucking everywhere.
Take everything that they can, including him.
So this guy...
Is made to forced march for weeks with nothing, a loincloth, bloody feet being cut up by the surroundings.
He has every tropical disease under the sun for five years straight.
Dysentery and malaria and everything that you can get, probably yellow fever and full works.
He's part of the forced labour group that's made to build the bridge over the River Kwai, the famous movie.
One of the prison guards tries to sexually assault him.
So he kicks him in the nuts and runs away and hides.
But there's not much...
What are you going to do?
What are you going to run to?
You can't survive without the meager amounts of rice that they're giving you.
So they find him and lock him in an open tin box to bake in the sun for three days.
Doesn't die.
Like, right, okay, well, this guy's sufficiently resilient.
We can probably use him.
If he's this resilient to survive this, he'd probably be a good worker.
So let's keep him and we'll do the rest of it.
So they then pull him out.
They need to transport all of these prisoners.
So they put them on what they called a hell ship.
And these hell ships were just huge tin boxes with no Swiss cross on the side, which is what you should have to say that you're transporting prisoners of war so that it's not a military vehicle.
And they would just toss tiny morsels of food down to 100 men.
That were in the hold of this ship.
And it was baking hot in the midday sun as they're traveling over the water.
And these guys still doesn't die.
They're stood in their own feces.
People are dying left and right, starting to decompose.
So because they didn't put the Swiss cross on the side, a US military, I think it was a boat or a submarine, sent a torpedo at them.
So his boat that he's on explodes.
He then catches a piece of flotsam or jetsam or detritus, like a little bucket that he can sit in so that he can float around.
Basically has a fight with another Japanese guy who's also doing the same thing.
Finally washes up on shore.
He's free, briefly, but he's in Japanese territory.
I can't remember what country he washes up on.
Maybe Singapore again.
He then gets recaptured, put back to work again, and gets knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki.
He gets hit by the bomb blast and knocked off his feet by it.
50 years, this guy doesn't talk about it at all.
Doesn't say a peep for 50 years by orders of the British government.
And then finally writes this memoir as a call to arms to bring the Japanese to account for the atrocities.
You know, we had the Nuremberg trials and stuff for the Germans, but there wasn't that similar kind of reckoning for the Japanese.
And he thought this is unforgivable because of what he went through.
For the rest of his life, he could only eat tiny, tiny amounts of rice.
His stomach, his whole digestive system was ruined by starvation.
just extended starvation for this five-year period and very, very tiny morsels of food.
So his stomach had adapted to that.
And that was this guy.
And he died in the early 2000s and then wrote this book, The Forgotten Highlander.
Just the atrocities they did with people's children, their babies in front of them, the way they just tortured people.
What people can justify doing in times of war is absolutely terrifying.
And when you read about it, and you read about it from a time that's less than 100 years ago, it's so shocking.
It's so shocking.
Because when you think of Japanese, when I think of Japanese, I think polite culture, warrior society, a long history of martial arts, amazing engineering, incredible automobiles.
I think of all these positive things.
I don't think of what happened during World War II. It's really terrifying.
There was a documentary about it, too.
I remember I had to buy online from VHS tape.
It was very hard to get.
It was some sort of a educational documentary, like something that they would show at a university.
We've talked about him a few times because of the Gray Man, but they recently just said, Sly said that Ryan Gosling could be the only guy who would, like, vouch for Rambo.
So what they realized was that collateral damage is a big deal in war zones because if you kill people that aren't just the target, you galvanize that group against your...
Yeah, there it is.
America's secret ninja bomb packed with blades that shred militants alive.
So there's no explosive in the front of it.
It gets deployed using an existing platform.
But rather than having an explosive payload, these razor-sharp, six razor-sharp swords come out the side of it and just turn human flesh into smoothies.
Because if it was a long enough vehicle, front right seat and back left seat, back left seat will be scared, but it'll be fine.
So there was this dude, supposedly one of the masterminds behind 9-11, they'd done surveillance on this guy and every morning he'd come out and drink his coffee on his balcony.
Same balcony, he'd come out and he'd drink his coffee and...
Rage hypodermic is a wild mechanical broadhead that they invented for bow hunting.
So instead of a bow hunting broadhead being a fixed blade, like a solid piece of metal that's screwed into the end of your arrow, instead it's a mechanical broadhead.
That upon impacting tissue opens up into this huge opening.
They make giant holes.
They call them rage holes.
And they kill animals quick.
And it's kind of controversial in that if your blade hits a branch on the way in or like a stalk of hay or something like that, it could trigger it and then it would fuck up the trajectory of the arrow and it might lead to a bad shot.
So there's that, and then it could get deployed accidentally in your quiver, and you might not know it when you're drawing and shooting.
It could be open, and it could open up in flight.
But if it stays close and it does impact, it makes a giant hole.
But he made me do the trail, but he taught me to shoot, and I was looking at, with gruesome glee, looking at all of the different types of arrows in the bow rack, looking at all of these different heads and all of the different attachments.
They made me shoot through the paper to see where are you pulling accidentally, and then they adjust and tune.
Dude, I loved it.
I love seeing...
Anyone that loves anything that much.
That degree of passion to me is...
So me and my housemate Zach watch these videos of motocross, you know, the Colin McRae...
Oh, is that Rallycross?
Sorry.
And these dudes will go out to buttfucknowhere Scotland in November, and it's pissing down with rain, and they're in ponchos, and they do it to see...
And then they turn to each other and go...
And they just lose their shit.
And it's so...
Dude, it makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
Jamie, see if we can find some of these videos.
It's the most pure, loving...
Wayne Endicott at the Bow Rack, just the way that they play with the bow and they know that if they add a tiny little bit of flame from a lighter to the sight, that it'll sort of cinch it in a different way and it heats the sinew of the thread and it tightens that in.
Seeing anyone that loves anything that much is just...
There's something very gentle and honest and peaceful and beautiful about that.
I love watching people make things and put things together.
And I love watching people work on cars, do mechanical things.
I love that shit.
But the bow rack...
One of the things that's interesting about archery...
Is that even if you're just interested in target archery, any kind of archery that you're interested in, unless you are shooting a traditional bow where there's no sights on it and you're just kind of like doing it by feel, then you learn how to aim depending upon how much your arrow weighs.
You can get pretty accurate with those things, but not nearly as accurate as you can with a compound bow.
And with a compound bow, it has to be fitted to your frame.
You have to go to a place like the Borac.
And if you're lucky and you have a place like that, that's great because they're really good at it.
But you might not be lucky, so you might have to travel hours to go to some place.
It becomes, if you practice it enough, it never really becomes an extension of your body, but you do get so comfortable in that activity that it becomes a normal thing to you.
So then that activity is all just about the fine details of breathing and thinking and shot execution in your head.
And the goal is always, at least the way I do it, is always to make a surprise shot.
I never want to get it to go off.
I want to be in full draw, I want to have my pin on the target, and I want to just be concentrated on that arrow hitting the mark, and then I just go through this shot execution thing and it goes off.
And when it goes off, the ultimate goal is just watch that arrow go exactly where you wanted it to go.
And when I do that at like 74 yards, It is the most satisfying feeling in the world.
Just targets.
Just shooting at a foam target.
It's so satisfying and it requires so much concentration that in that act of doing that, the world goes away.
And that's the key to it.
That's the key to anything that I really enjoy doing that's very difficult.
I think you need little vacations from the world.
And if you have an hour and a half to shoot a bow, It can provide you with a vacation from the world.
It's so difficult to do and it's so involving and it's so rewarding when you get it right that you're completely locked into this one activity and the world goes away.
I love the solitude and the peace that you get doing something that you know well and that you can get better at.
And I often think about three types of Chris.
Dopamine Chris, serotonin Chris, and cortisol Chris.
And my goal is to spend as much time in serotonin Chris as possible.
But, you know, dopamine, Chris, plays on modern wisdom and growing the channel and money and new stuff and traveling to new places and novelty.
And cortisol, Chris, is dealing with the operations and its executive function.
It's answering emails and it's dealing with challenges.
And cortisol is kind of exciting, too.
But serotonin, Chris, is walking with your friends in nature and calling your mom and catching up and having dinner, going to a comedy show, watching live music.
When I'm not feeling balanced in myself is when I'm spending too much time.
In the UK, the left side of my body, left arm and left leg, just go chill out.
Go on holiday for the next hour while I do this journey.
I can use right arm only and right leg.
But yeah, I remember hearing...
I think it was Tim Kennedy talking about...
If you're a guy who is cared about preparedness and you don't know how to drive a manual car, that's not preparedness.
Imagine that you're halfway up a mountain and only one car works or you need to get somebody down or there's been a car wreck or something and it's a manual car.
Like if you have a Jeep or something like that, you get it all scuffed up, that's fine.
But yeah.
Yeah, it's a good thing to know how to do.
The real problem is, if there's some sort of an electronic blast, if something happens, like a solar flare that takes out the grid, and the only...
Because if electronics get fried, and this is a real possibility, I know you're like, what are you saying?
First of all, you have to understand, entire planets get fried by supernovas.
It's not just electronics.
You know, things happen in intergalactic space that would end everything for us.
And it 100% could happen.
That's a real thing.
But solar flares taking out power grids, that's a fucking real possibility.
Taking out satellites, that's a real possibility.
And one of the things about most modern cars is most modern cars are essentially run by a computer.
So if all the computers get fried, guess what?
Your car doesn't work.
I mean, if we're running into some sort of situation, some horrible event, where all the computers get fried, that means your fucking car doesn't work.
Now, if you have an old car that works on carburetors, you know, those are cars, like, if you have an actual real 1969 Camaro, not like the ones that...
I have ones that have new stuff in them.
So all the new stuff is computers.
They'll be useless.
All the ECU that powers all the ignition and the electronic fuel injection...
I was hearing that my neighbor has a Tesla, and I think he gets his insurance through Tesla, but they can see the diagnostics of how he drives the car.
So his insurance is way more expensive because it knows how late he brakes, how fast he accelerates, how close to other cars he is.
Algorithm that's used in China that when someone is applying for medical insurance, it uses the website to track the number of typos and the movement of the mouse.
And they've mapped that with an algorithm to predict pre-Parkinsonian, pre-Alzheimer, dementia, all of these things.
So basically, if you're filling in your medical insurance in China and you fuck up a little bit, your premium goes up.
I bet if they have that app, they have that ability and you have it open, I bet they use it no matter what you're doing.
I bet if you're flipping over and now all of a sudden you're on Instagram or now all of a sudden you're on Facebook or Twitter, I bet they still can see all your time.
But I think what also would help is have things you enjoy doing.
You can still enjoy your life without having a job.
And if you've got enough money where you can retire and you feel like you could pull that off, you should do stuff.
Yeah, but some people don't know what the fuck to do when they're not working, and work was their everything.
It was their entire existence.
It was their social status.
It was how they made a living.
It was their social community.
It was all their friends, really, because you're with your workmates more than you're with your partner, your wife, your husband.
What's the number when you're awake at home?
You get home at 6 o'clock.
You're only going to be awake till 10 if you have to work, if you're doing a 9 to 5. If you're a crazy person, you're up at 11, 11.30, and you don't mind being a little tired in the office.
But if you're, like, trying to be on the ball, you're going to go to bed as early as you can.
I've been thinking about this idea of hidden and observable metrics for life.
So an observable metric would be something like the amount of money that you earn per year.
It would be the value of the car that you drive, or the engine size of the car that you drive, or the value of your house.
A hidden metric would be something like the quality of your relationship with your partner, the amount of time that you get to spend without tasks to do, the I think?
We're going to need you in the office earlier.
And you're going to be in charge of this floor of 10 people.
Okay, how much more money have you got?
Well, I've got $15,000 added onto the observable metric.
But what's the hidden metric cost that you're paying for that?
Well, peace of mind.
And time with your partner.
Or you take another job somewhere else and your commute is now 45 minutes longer in both directions.
It's 90 minutes a day that you're not spending with your kids or with your wife or with whatever.
And because money is the ultimate game, it's the best game.
It's literally global.
It's universal.
It can be exchanged between different currencies.
I know your game can be compared to my game, can be compared to anybody else's.
But I don't get to see the dashboard that tracks the quality of your sleep or the peace of your mind or the relationship that you have with your kids or your wife or the amount of time that you just get to yourself.
And I think people should be very cautious of trading observable metrics for hidden metrics.
And one of the ways that you can try and fix this is to bring the hidden into the observable.
So using a tracker of some kind maybe to track your sleep.
That would be a good start.
Or if you were to note down in a journal how you feel each day.
Oh, well, maybe I feel a little bit better today because I did some...
Yeah, no, I think just overall general happiness gets thrown out the window in terms of the metrics of the numbers.
The numbers and the observable things that make you superior.
The car, the watch, the stuff, you know.
But yeah, I always tell people, one of the things about a house, I've said this many times unfortunately, but when I first got my first really nice apartment, when I first moved to California, I realized pretty early on, after a while, I was like, oh, this is just my house.
This is just where I live.
It feels just like the place that I had in New York that was a shithole.
He's kind of on an interesting arc because he's sort of stepped back a little bit from public life, from doing the stuff that he was doing before.
And I was asking him basically whether he thought he'd overshot Dopamine Dan.
And he said he was considering shaving his head, shaving his beard and going working in an Amazon warehouse for six months to try and do like a hedonic reset.
To see.
The problem is, it was kind of like when Tim Kennedy did the waterboarding thing.
There's a difference between electing to do something and being forced to do something.
And the fact that you know at any moment you've just got the eject a seat button or that it's going to be over in six months or that it's going to be whatever.
I wonder if that changes.
But yet he basically said, you know, this rapid use and abuse of all of the things that you can, the partying, the cars, the girls, the jets, the holidays, travel, the drugs...
And as you start to go up and up and up, the first time that you hit a thousand subscribers on your YouTube channel or the first time that you buy a Toyota Supra is the same or maybe even kind of less than when you get a Rolls-Royce Cullinan or you get a gold plaque from YouTube or you get whatever.
All of these wins feel the same.
So I got this other idea that I love about how people sacrifice the thing that they want for the thing which is supposed to get it.
So a lot of the time we will sacrifice happiness in order to be able to achieve success so that when we finally have enough success, we can allow ourselves to be happy.
So you sacrifice the thing that you want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is success.
And it's a super common pattern amongst high performers.
You know, they grow up and maybe their parents have high standards for them.
And they say that the subtext is that love is contingent on what I can bring to the world.
And growing up, this person internalizes the lesson.
It is very important for me to overperform and they're driven by this desire to do more and to prove people wrong and a chip on their shoulder and all of this.
The problem is, I think that on average, high performers are more miserable than the average person.
I think that more people are driven by fear and anxiety and a lack – a desire for validation and to prove themselves to the world and a desire for acceptance than some perfectly balanced – Optimal, loving, I just want to make life the best that I can.
That's not to say that there aren't people like that, but I think on balance, most people are driven by that fear of insufficiency and they're hoping that the next thing is going to be the answer.
But another friend, Alex, says, you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy.
You've already achieved goals you said would make you happy.
How can you presume that your happiness sits on the next side of the next set of goals, given that right now you are on the other side of your last set of goals?
It gets tossed into that word that just makes things sound stupid.
But gratitude is very important.
And if you can actually appreciate where you are and what you're doing, even if you're not doing what you want to be doing, you're going to look back on these days, if you're successful in life, and you're going to look back on the days when you're kind of struggling, like, wow, I was...
Finding my place in the world then.
Those are exciting times.
If you could be excited while also motivated, it'll help your life immeasurably.
And I don't think it's going to steal from your drive and ambition.
That idea of it's far easier to achieve your material desires than to get rid of them, than to renounce them.
It's way easier to drive a beat-up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari, because you've closed that little loop.
Mark Manson talks about, he has this great question, what pain do you want in life?
And he says that it's a much more accurate way of asking the question...
else but feels like play to you.
That's like a common thing.
What can you do that is play that to everyone else is work?
That's a competitive advantage.
That might be comedy for you, for Chappelle, etc.
I would happily do this for free.
There are other people out there who would need to be paid an awful lot of money to go through the drama of getting up on stage.
Mark's contention is that any pursuit, even the most existentially aligned, will regularly feel like work.
So what you need to look at is what are the pains that you can deal with better than everybody else?
Like if you, there is pain associated, I'm sure, it's not just pure joy as you stare at a Google Doc or a note in your phone and you're like, how am I going to get this bit out?
Like, how do I actually, I can't, I need to make this joke about cigarettes or something, and I just can't get it to work.
You're grappling with something.
There is a kind of pain.
It's not pure pleasure every single moment.
And I think assuming that your pursuits are always going to be perfect, just blissed out, man, and there should be no challenges.
Like, no, that's not the way that it's going to work, even if it's your calling in life.
So a better way is what pains can you deal with better than everyone else?
So he was a writer, and he paid his servant to come in every night during the middle of the night while he was asleep and pull the bedsheets off of him, off his bed, Leave six pieces of paper in his bedroom and a pen or a quill and lock him in.
And until Victor had slid all six pieces of paper written on underneath the door, his servant wouldn't let him out.
The level that people get to.
But think about when you're really struggling with the creative process, the ridiculousness of the things that will look attractive to you.
It's like, I haven't sorted these cigar cupboard things.
Alphabetically in quite a while.
I really think that the cigar cupboard could do with...
That's interesting, that brick that's been outside.
I really should find a place for that brick.
And the bird feeder needs refilling.
You just find these bizarre things because your body is just doing everything it can.
This is Huberman's thing, right?
What's it called?
The mid-singular cortex, MSC. It's that thing.
Apparently Goggins has got the biggest one in the world.
It's just the thing that allows you to overcome doing hard stuff.
I think, like, basically the way you can strengthen your muscles and you can strengthen your cardiovascular system, I think your mind works the exact same way.
I really 100% believe that.
And I think also the neglected conjunction of the two is significant.
It's very important.
So many intellectuals just don't think about their bodies and it's so unfortunate.
You're just racked with inflammation and, you know, just weak joints and weak muscles.
Muscles and just you can't open up a jar of mayonnaise.
It's like you don't want to live like that, man.
You don't have to.
It's like the idea that the two are mutually exclusive is stupid.
That's a stupid idea.
The idea that you shouldn't take care of your body and that you should really concentrate on your mind.
That's just dumb.
It's a dumb thing to do.
You're not going to be doing complex math 24 hours a day.
You can take the time to do some fucking push-ups.
Well, also because it's in today's day and age, there's doing it for the gram, right?
So there's like people that are really jacked that want everybody to see their muscles.
And so you're doing it...
All day long you're lifting weights you're you're involved in Recovery and all sorts if you've got the time to do that It's most as if you have a job too.
Well, what the fuck?
How do you have the time?
But if you don't have a job if that you're like a fitness influencer, you know, I mean that is your job You're fucking busy man.
You you want to be jacked online all the time?
unidentified
Like yeah, you're probably not reading a lot of books Probably not meditating all that much Maybe you are.
I tried to come up with a name for a trend I saw in myself, which was productivity purgatory, which is even the things that I was supposed to be doing for leisure I was justifying because they somehow contributed to my output for work or, you know, I wasn't taking a walk in nature because I wanted to enjoy it.
It's because I once watched an Andrew Huberman episode that said 15 minutes of sunlight in the eyes improves your productivity throughout the day by whatever, whatever.
I was like, if you're not careful, you're...
Everything that you do is infused with this desire, this need, this compulsion to be productive.
It's also who's prepared to learn the most, right?
Who's good at recognizing what actually happened?
Versus what you've been comforting yourself with what you mean if there's a bad result Whether it's a bad result of business or a bad result of your personal life like there's always this Desire that people have to find a reason why it wasn't their fault because it's uncomfortable, but if you can recognize oh this product tanked because of me and This is a stupid idea and I need to course correct and I need to realize what I did wrong.
Instead of blaming the suppliers or blaming the manufacturers or blaming the other people on the design team or blaming this but whatever the fuck you're making or whether it's an album you just put out that just everybody hates it.
What did I do wrong?
Don't bullshit.
What do I need to do different?
And for a lot of people that is an uncomfortable moment that they don't want to experience.
So if you're a high performer, the more you could recognize what you've actually done wrong and course correct and not just be...
If you're like a CEO of a company, you've got so many people kissing your ass.
It's like your ego's got to be inflated.
It's gonna be so hard to see the forest for the trees.
We spoke about this last time, Tiger Woods, the price that people pay to be the person that you admire.
Tiger Woods goes through this really difficult period with his father and all the rest of it.
And this is the best remedy for envy.
That I can think of.
Because people look at Elon as this dude, he's sending rockets to Mars, and he's making the coolest cars on the planet, and he's on stage in Japan or China or whatever doing weird robot dances and shit, and he's super rich.
And you go, you don't know the price that he's had to pay for that.
You don't know the internal texture of someone's mind.
Your heroes aren't gods.
They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else.
If you agree to do that with Israel Adesanya, Israel Adesanya will take care of you.
I swear to God.
He'll pop you a little bit and let you know that you're helpless.
But he won't fuck you up.
He'll smile and laugh and he'll hug you afterwards.
You could spar with him.
I guarantee you could spar with him.
And then just touch your face, just to let you know.
Like, you would have been knocked out, but I just touched your face.
Just gonna touch you a little bit.
Move around.
You can't touch me.
I touch you.
Here's a faint and that's coming at you.
And if he's not, if he's kicking, you're fucked.
But even if he's just using his hands, if you're like some streamer, he wouldn't hurt you.
But Sean Strickland's a different animal.
Sean Strickland has, you know, he's got this fucking man code and he believes in it.
Like, you got to get your ass kicked every now and then.
He spars all the time.
Spars constantly, and if you agree to get in there with him, you're essentially agreeing to let him beat the fuck out of you because you don't really have a chance.
Like, you have no chance.
But, in Sean's defense, When he lost to Alex Pajeda, one of the first things he did was go to Connecticut to Glover Teixeira's gym where Alex trains and train with him.
When we was training with Alex Pajeda, he was light sparring.
So this is fucking light.
Find the video of Sean Strickland training with Alex Pajeda.
Because he's smart.
Because you can't...
That guy's not Sneeko.
You can't just...
That guy already knocked you out.
Pajeda knocked him out in the first round.
He hit him with a left hook and then a right hand as he was going down.
Because point karate, they kind of dive in and just touch each other.
But...
They all know how to hit bags.
They all know how to hit mints.
They all know how to hit tie pads.
They all know how to do that.
They know how to hit things.
It's just the real skill level is in control.
The real skill level is in being able to counter quickly but know exactly where your hand is going.
And you can do that.
You can learn how to control force in a way that, like, when I used to do Taekwondo demonstrations, like when we'd open up a new school, one of the things you'd have to do is, like, Throw kicks at people's faces like stop it at their face just to show them like the kind of control that's possible and you would have your foot like literally fly up like right in front of someone's face and you would have someone stand there who's another student you would demonstrate on them and You just gotta stand there, not flinch?
Yup, and you just stand there.
And my instructor used to do it to me all the time.
He would do it to someone in every class.
Like, in the front row, he would demonstrate by stopping the kick in the air in front of your face.
The thing about it is, though, man, it's going to shorten your career substantially.
Substantially.
It'll shorten your durability towards the end of your career substantially.
You see it in every fighter that comes from that sort of environment, and the traumatic brain injuries that they get when they spar like that all the time, especially when they're not slick.
The thing about, like, Anderson Silva above all those guys is that Anderson was slick.
He was very difficult to hit clean.
So Anderson Silva, when he's sparring, he's flowing and moving.
That's basically all it does is prevent some breaks.
It connects your thumb to the hands too because the thumb breaks easy.
The thumb like on a missed punch might hit a forehead with the thumb and the thumb will snap.
So it'll protect it a little bit.
See, Luke cracked him there with a good left hand.
And Luke was a fucking hell of a fighter in his prime, man.
He was UFC middleweight champion and in his prime when he beat Chris Weidman, he was a motherfucker, man.
He was a motherfucker.
But Mike Perry is not a guy that you can think you have.
He's just so tough.
He's gonna keep coming.
And if Luke stuck and moved and maybe had a different strategy, maybe he would have had a better time, but you let Mike Perry start mauling you, he's so dangerous, man.
I wanted to teach you about something that I'd learned on the show.
So you've had a number of conversations about trans athletes in sport and about the dangers potentially of biological males moving over into women's leagues.
And it always kind of...
It comes back to the same, well, if we can get the hormones down to this particular kind of level, basically, can we reverse some of the structural changes?
And it kind of gets into this realm of hormonal fuckery, which is fine, but I think that's kind of been talked to death.
There's something that I learned about on the show that I thought was even more important.
So the male and female brain difference can be detected in utero I think?
93% accuracy of an MRI between a boy and a girl.
That's exactly or that's around about the same as your accuracy of detecting whether it's a man or a woman based on looking at their face.
That's the same degree of difference.
So one of the arguments that will be put forward is social roles theory.
So social roles theory is that boys behave like boys because they see boys behaving like boys and girls do the same.
They're socialized into doing this.
That doesn't seem to be true, because this is universal, it's across the board, it's present before anybody's even been born, and it's present before androgens.
But the reason that this is, I think, important towards sport is that one of the key differences is in what's called visuospatial abilities, and males have a huge advantage in visuospatial abilities.
This is preschoolers, Age three and four, their throwing accuracy and their throwing distance already begins to diverge from girls.
By the age of 19, there's essentially no crossover at all.
You could understand why this might be the case because, well, if you're an ancestral hunter, you need to, as a man, be able to see this is an animal running this way.
I have this particular spear in my hand.
I'm going to throw it to intersect this.
So you go, okay, well, one of the problems of using that is you can't bifurcate a male's performance, especially with something like throwing, visual-spatial, from the physical structure that they have, which is impacted by androgens.
So men have longer forearms.
Their shoulders articulate in a different way.
They might have more trunk rotation, perhaps.
So they did a study to try and work this out.
Instead of having them throw things, The lecturers at this university brought their undergrads in and used a tennis ball firing machine like you use for practicing returns in tennis as dodgeball.
And the guys in the class topped out the ceiling.
They were very, very difficult to hit.
The same wasn't true for the girls.
The reason is that the male proclivity to be able to see things in space, understand how they fit together, understand the proprioception of where my body is and how I can interact with this...
Is very, very different.
It's a sizable, statistically significant difference that you find between males and females.
Now, females have their own advantages.
Social cognition, which is otherwise known as emotional intelligence.
Reading faces.
Lying detection.
What's called, like, I think it's local memorization or spatial memorization.
So you know those games where you've got a load of cards down on the table and you've got to match them?
Girls would wipe the floor with guys at that.
So there are...
Predispositions mentally that men and women have.
And this is something, this is not, and this is the important thing, this is not impacted by testosterone level.
So you as a biological male can't take a ton of estrogen or hormone blockers and have your visual spatial ability be down-regulated to that of a woman.
So this to me explains an awful lot about why the WNBA is struggling because you are talking about a very different set of capacities.
And unfortunately, I guess, the way that sports are done is it needs to be visually compelling, right?
You want to see cool things happening.
You want to observe shit going on.
A lying detection test or someone turning over cards and matching them doesn't lend itself to being a spectator sport as much, which means that males have this predisposition which is more entertaining given the current rule sets of sport.
And this to me is a much more compelling unfairness When you're talking about male and female capabilities within sport, this doesn't have anything to do with what time would they put on hormone blockers.
This doesn't have anything to do with what is their testosterone level at.
Right, but you could see how people would have an issue with that, right?
Even though it's statistically significant, people would go like, who did the study?
You know, if you're trying to, like, say that trans women are women, there's a lot of things that you could say that they have an advantage with physically.
Proving it mentally just based on that, I agree.
It seems an issue.
Well, you know how big of it's an issue?
It's an issue in pool.
Pool's not a strength game at all.
It's a finesse game.
It's a game of, you know, executing shots under pressure.
It's a game of angles, and it's a game of geometry and feel.
But very few women Ever get to the level of, like, an elite professional male.
In the pool world, the reason why I was bringing this up, recently a woman made it to the finals of a tournament with a transgender woman and just quit.
It's really bizarre that they're letting this happen.
It really is.
It's so strange.
It's like women's rights have gone out the window in this sense over the name of virtue.
The virtue that you're a good person and you say trans women are women.
Okay, in real life maybe, yeah, but not on sports.
You're a biological male.
It's the same thing as if you tell someone, hey, I don't do steroids now, but I've done steroids straight every day for 20 years, and I'm so fucking strong, I've run through a wall, but I'm going to stop doing steroids and I want to compete with natural people.
Well, that's exactly what you would say for a woman.
If you had a woman athlete, and that woman athlete developed a male voice and giant muscles, but was still a woman, was beating up all these women, you'd be like, oh, that woman was on the sauce.
She cheated.
She cheated.
Well, if you're going through puberty, guess what, fuckface?
You're taking testosterone.
If you really say you're a woman and you're going through all that, and then you're after puberty, you're an adult, and then you're going into your 30s, you have your whole life of producing testosterone.
You have male tendon strength.
You have the male bone density of different shaped hips.
Everything's different.
Your competitive drive's different.
It's so dumb that we're having this conversation.
And the people that suffer are the biological women.
And that was the thing that we were always supposed to be protecting with Title IX. That's the whole idea of developing regulations so that women have sports that they can play that are just with women.
It's a fair playing field.
The same reason why you don't let third graders play with fucking high school seniors.
It's real simple.
You have someone play within the parameters of a fair playing environment and you're always going to get outliers.
You're always gonna get people that are like exceptionally strong and fast for their weight and their age, and then you're gonna be at people that are struggling physically, they just have no experience whatsoever in athletics, and you gotta find the comfortable medium, but it's within a fair parameter of the biological gender.
This fucking thing that's on your birth certificate.
What is it?
That's what you can compete in.
What's your chromosomes?
Do you have XY? Yeah, you gotta go with those guys.
That's it.
You don't want to fight anymore?
Okay, well then don't fight.
But you can't beat up women just because you decide you're a woman.
That's crazy.
That's just crazy.
It doesn't make any sense that we're allowing that.
It's not compassionate.
It's not open-minded.
It's not progressive.
It's just stupid.
You're just caught in some cult-like mindset.
And the people that are suffering are the women.
The women that would be competing in just sports.
You see that thing in Canada where the volleyball players, it's five biological males on a volleyball team and the biological women were sitting there on the bench waiting while the biological males were dominating this fucking woman's volleyball game?
It's insanity and it's this thing where you're supposed to pretend that they're not lunatics.
Like, there's a man in Canada that was a 50-year-old man that decided he identified as a 15-year-old girl, so he's competing in girl swimming events, and he was changing in the same locker room as the girls.
And then you have to think, like, what kind of an influence does that have on young people?
Like, one of the things about steroids being shunned and illegal, even if it was irrational in some sense, like that if you have an adult male and this guy is 35 years old and he just decides, you know what?
I want to take steroids.
Why is that not okay?
But you can prescribe him a ton of different fucking things that can kill him.
You can prescribe him anti-anxiety medication.
You can prescribe him painkillers.
You can prescribe him Ozempic, because he wants to lose weight.
You can prescribe him all kinds of things that might have adverse health risks, but you can't.
Nothing that makes you stronger.
We have a limitation on that.
It's very odd.
And I can see how you would make it banned for sports.
I feel like it wouldn't be surprising to me if the cascade was, this ruins fairness in sports, and then we retroactively change the gym rat Normal population rule set to ensure that the sporting rule set isn't wrecked.
I feel like it was probably the trickle down that way from sports and elite sports and tested sports into the public.
But Derek from More Plates, More Data has talked about this, how if it hadn't been for the fact that there were controlled substances, we would have way safer, better researched compounds.
So the reason for this, and it's really interesting, Seth used a ton of different AI programs to analyze all of this data, and he said he was able to do what would have taken him three years in 30 days.
The reason that it's Christopher is that Christopher is the sort of name that is given by middle-class parents to their child.
So it's really an indicator of social class.
And there is this belief that in basketball, it's a meritocracy where the underclass, hardworking athlete can clamber his way up.
You know, this is LeBron.
LeBron, single mother who was 16 years old, makes it to the top.
He's an outlier.
That's not that common.
The most common path is someone that comes from two-parent households that's relatively well off and, you know, like classic advantages that you get.
Christopher is the sort of name that's given.
I think Michael is another one that's up there and he does this big word map thing where you can see the size of the names and the bigger the name, the more likely it is.
One of the other things that no one really ever thinks about is handspan.
Handspan, one of the biggest determinants for success in the sport.
So Shaq has a 14-inch handspan from finger to hand because palming the ball, you know, if you're up there and you're able to palm the ball, that's a huge advantage.
So the hand now weighs a pound and a half more than usual.
You hit someone and that's like a fucking hammer.
So if that's the case, that rule is mass of hand equals damage.
So someone that has denser bones or more muscular hands or bigger hands, that's basically just more weight on the end of your arms that you're swinging at someone's face.
So, Moneyball was an assessment of the MLB done by a guy that was picked up by the Oakland A's, and he was using very advanced mathematics to look at...
I'm not going to play the whole thing, but just what's going on here is he's explaining to them the idea of what he was just talking about, the Moneyball, but there's a bunch of old scouts.
These guys have been around forever, and they're just like, what are you talking about?
So these Afghanistan documents, these top secret Afghanistan documents that were supposedly held in his garage, as you'd say, there's photos of how it was.
It was just an open box in the middle of the garage.
Mr. Hur suggested that Mr. Biden's memory was failing and questioned some of his actions, even though the special counsel had found no basis to prosecute the president.
The issue that he says, basically, in the report is, if you try to prosecute this guy...
Mr. Biden would likely present himself to the jury as he did during our interview with him, which is as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
That's literally what it says in the report.
Well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
So basically, you can't prosecute this guy because he's not compass mentis, but you can let him run for the President of the United States in November.
So that's the world that we've managed to get into.
If I had to guess, and it's just speculation, I'd say they're setting up Gavin Newsom for it.
That's what I say.
That's what I think.
That's what it looks like to me.
I think more and more comes out about this stuff and more and more comes out about the Burisma thing and the Penn State thing, you know, where the Chinese donated money to Penn State and then he got a million dollar a year gig where he didn't even have to show up.
That's old school.
That's like mafia stuff.
Was it a million dollars a year?
How much was it that he got from Penn State?
And he was telling people, he said, I'm a professor at Penn State.
Everyone went there.
Didn't teach one class.
Look, some of it is part of its fun.
Like, if he wasn't the president, it would be really fun.
And there was like, if you had made a union negotiation back in the day, like we're talking back in the day-day, they would throw in a bunch of no-work jobs.
So you think, you know, this guy who's holding on as best he can, like trying to get through the presidency and there's all of this scrutiny and people are making jokes about him and his team are like, oh, let's put a fucking meme out of him with red eyes after the Super Bowl and then he's got to deal with all the rest of that stuff.
And then it just makes me feel like, fuck, like that must be really rough.
To be that guy, to actually be the human that is Joe Biden, that must be really fucking like, I don't know, you're going to be aware, you're going to be self-aware of the fact that you're failing, that your mental faculties aren't there, and you're like being pushed and just this RPM is being pushed higher and higher, 8,000, 9,000, 10,000.
Meanwhile, the new president of El Salvador just won with an 85% vote.
85%.
So El Salvador went from having the highest murder rate in the world to now the highest incarceration rate in the world.
This guy is locking up everyone.
They have a brand new 40,000 person prison that's the size of seven football stadiums.
Jamie, have a look at this football stadium thing.
It is wild what they've done.
He's cleaned up the streets.
He's gone super aggressive.
There's some dangers of what he's done, which is they're being very indiscriminate.
with who gets convicted.
12-year-olds can be, I haven't heard if they are, but 12-year-olds can be treated like adults and thrown into the prison as well.
You know, if they break down the door and come in this room and you're a bad guy and me and Jamie are not bad guys, we're probably going to prison as well.
So there's probably a good bit of collateral damage that's come with this.
That was, you know, with Duncan Trusholm, when we were in L.A., when the George Floyd riots hit, one of the first things he says, dude, we're going to have a right-wing authoritarian president now.
That's going to be the next person.
Like, the next, like, when this all collapses, the only response to that is people go hard, right?
The insight around during a time of upheaval and uncertainty, looking for a more dominant leader and a more authoritarian leader, that has roots in evolution as well.
So this is something that Will Storr talks about, which is there's multiple roots to status.
There's fewer roots to leadership.
So there tends to be two, one being dominance and the other being prestige.
So dominance is the more authoritarian you will do this because there are negative outcomes if you don't do this and it's more overbearing.
Prestige is earning reputation through being positive some.
During times of war and strife, tribes would look for a more dominant leader because you have threat from the outside, so you're going to have someone that's going to be aggressive, they're going to lean in, they're going to try and fix this problem.
Of course that's going to be who you choose.
Problem is, if you have someone who is a dominant leader, For times of war, when it becomes a time of peace, that dominant leader isn't just going to step aside.
They're dominant.
They're going to hold on to this power.
They've usually managed to embed themselves.
They've got sycophants.
They've got a distribution network of people that can help to enforce their rule.
To have the guy who runs it be very vulnerable and only have a four-year term.
And then you can only do two of those four-year terms, and then people are constantly trying to figure out a way to manipulate the reality of the world to get their guy past you, including high-level gaslighting.
I mean, we've seen some wild gaslighting just the past couple of weeks talking about the economy.
Well, one of them was Gavin Newsom talking about how great Biden was and how the Democrats record that this has been one of the greatest presidencies ever, full stop.
It's like hot gas in your face.
It's burning your lungs.
It's just gas lighting.
It's gas lighting.
You can't have a great economy if you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars financing wars overseas.
It's not even possible.
You're gonna have inflation.
How'd you get all that money?
Where'd you get another 95 billion that you passed in the middle of the night?
Solo polyamorous means someone who has multiple intimate relationships with people but has an independent or single lifestyle.
They may not live with partners, share finances, or have a desire to reach traditional relationship milestones in which partners' lives become more intertwined.
Well, I think that seems to make sense with all the dating apps today and all the Instagram DMs and all the people just...
There's so many more options people have today.
It makes sense that more people would agree to polyamorous interactions.
They want to hedge their bets.
It's a weird time to be a young person.
Imagine you're just getting out of high school, just getting into college now, and you're entering into the romantic workforce.
I thought it was interesting that a lot of people whose common talking point was, don't judge someone just based on one misdeed that they do, based on one misspoken thing about some new social campaign or whatever it might be.
It didn't seem to extend the same kind of leeway to Bud Light.
There's someone that says it was a marketing intern.
There was another that says it went right to the top.
And this shows that Bud Light were the lib cucks that we've always known that they were.
I'm like, I don't know.
But if it wasn't infused into the company, what you're doing is taking a very isolated incident and using that as the canary in the coal mine to say, See?
So the one thing was the Dylan Mulvaney picture on the beer can that drove people nuts.
But then there was the video of the woman who was in charge who was explaining that they had to rework the image of the brand and that it was a fratty, sort of like bro-heavy, I forget the words she used, but it was a juvenile.
She was trying to literally- To be a brand.
But it's literally, you're talking about your entire customer base.
So she's deciding that the customer base should now be trans.
Or the customer base should...
I mean, literally.
I mean, she's literally deciding she's going to make the customer base gay.
It's going to be friendly to the LBGT community.
It's going to be sponsoring floats on Pride Parade.
And that's what they did.
Under her guidance, she was like, I'm going to fix this.
We're going to make it just like I believe the world is, coming from universities that are hyper-liberal into a community where you're in a corporation that's also...
Subject to all those DEI restrictions and you think this is like the way of the world today and then you do that one thing and then they catch you on video saying all those things about the customers and then the coup de gras.
I learned from Schultz this interesting thing that I called Schultz's Razor, which is it's not coordination, it's cowardice.
From the outside, things look like a coordinated attack.
From the inside, it looks like people not trying to lose their jobs.
So I think a lot of the presumption is that there is some grand plan.
Maybe it's a conspiracy or maybe it's just coordination.
What it is from the inside is this guy has just bought a new house that his wife wanted and his kids go to private school and he needs to keep this job, man.
And the thing that is currently being pushed at the moment is, okay, we need to go along with this new campaign.
Sure, let's just do this thing.
That to me is a much more...
I hope that it's true.
The reason I hope it's true is it's a much more reassuring way for the world to be, a lot of these incidents.
Because what it shows is that people are just responding to incentives.
you can change the social structure of this stuff, you can quite easily change behavior.
If it's coordination as opposed to cowardice, that's much more difficult.
If everyone's actually bought into this and they're part of some deep state conspiracy and it's all psyoppy and all of this stuff, that you go, oh, this is completely out of my control.
And that's much more scary.
But I think on balance based on the stuff that I see, I think that Andrew's right.
I think that it is more likely to be cowardice than coordination.
I think specifically with some issues, there's coordination online.
And one of the ways they do that is through bots.
They do that through social media campaigns that are like fake accounts or Hired accounts.
There's that too.
That does shift the narrative in a certain direction.
But there's a lot of people that are terrified that they're going to get fired and there's a lot of people that are terrified they're going to get labeled or ostracized or kicked out of the social community so much so they're willing to go along with really ridiculous stuff because they think like that's where the tide of progress is now.
This is where the world is.
And, you know, you're seeing both things happen.
You're seeing cowardice and you're also seeing...
Coordination.
It's kind of naive to think that if you were a world power that is doing everything you can to sort of like balance things in your favor, including...
Launching spy satellites, establishing a space force, ramping up your nuclear capabilities, developing these weapons that fucking shred people with precise impact.
For sure you're going to do whatever you can to change the way a society views things and to influence things in a particular direction.
He'd be a fool not to.
I mean, if that's what other countries are doing, you'd be a fool not to do that.
You'd be a fool not to do it internationally.
You'd be a fool not to do it locally.
It's kind of the job of the person that's the evil fuck that's running the world.
That's part of the gig.
Part of the gig is if you want to lie to people about the economy, you want to gaslight him about the record of the president and gaslight him about the immigration crisis and gaslight him about how much money we're spending on these overseas wars, you would gaslight him online too.
You wouldn't just have the fucking White House press secretary lie and make shit up.
You would have a bunch of people doing it all over the internet.
You'd have a bunch of articles written that are just ridiculous, and then people would retweet him.
Yeah, his age really is a superpower.
Yeah, man.
Seth MacFarlane retweeted that and said, this is a million brave, crazy, so brilliant that they did this.
The net result of all of this, I think, is people just feeling very uncertain about the future.
I don't think that anyone's really convinced of any one narrative at the moment, but everybody is just uncertain and anxious.
There's some really interesting surveys showing that the number of Americans that say, I do not fully feel in control of my life just continues There's very much an externalized sense of agency.
I don't happen to the world.
The world happens to me.
I'm skeptical about a lot of these things.
It's basically a soup for ambient anxiety.
You're just causing people to be uncertain about stuff.
And I don't know.
If you were trying to make people just feel more and more and more shitty, all that they're doing is spending time inside on their phones.
They're watching porn.
They don't have as many friends.
The number of men in 1990 that had one or more close friends was...
Sorry, that had zero close friends was 3%.
In 2020, it was 15%.
So it 5X'd from 1990 to 2020. So people are more isolated than ever before.
It doesn't surprise me that people feel despondent or nihilistic or fatalistic or uncertain.
You remember that we were talking about how you work out whether someone is telling the truth or not?
This interesting sort of set of questions that I think people can ask themselves, which is, when was the last time that this person I am friends with or whose content I consume on the internet, when was the last time that their opinion surprised me?
When was the last time that they gave a take?
And I was like, huh, I might not agree with it, but that's not what I would have predicted had I have known them.
Something occurs and their response is different.
When was the last time that they publicly admitted that they were wrong?
Also really good, difficult to fake signal of authenticity.
When was the last time that they brought someone on or had a conversation with something that they don't agree with or someone that they don't agree with for a reason other than just mocking them?
what it is that they're doing.
And then the fourth question is, do they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an out-group or the mutual love of an in-group?
Is it because of othering or is it because of us-ing?
And I think othering is always, that's the scapegoating.
It's not about them.
They're coming for us.
It's this sort of anxiety-fueled thing.
But if you know one of someone's opinions and from it you can accurately predict everything else that they believe, they're not a serious thinker.
That is a hallmark of bad, independent political journalism.
It's like ripe with othering.
It's ripe with casting the blame on the other side.
It's ripe with not looking internally.
There's very little introspection thought.
Maybe I'm wrong.
It's always coming from a position of confidence that these other people are pieces of shit and we're going to lay out some out of context examples with no context into why they think they think this and what could steel man that and how can we look at it from their perspective and what's wrong about Everything is always highlighting what's wrong, highlighting the cruelty, gaslighting.
And they're doing it because they're a part of an ideology.
They're a part of a political group.
They're a part of this little gang.
And they want the love of the gang.
And there's people that fancy themselves as like hitmen for the gang.
They're going to go out there.
And there's a lot of that during the...
The Black Lives Matter riots in, was it Portland or wherever it was?
It was like literally like crazy violent people.
They're just wild Antifa dudes that got lumped into these serious conversations about what's ethical and what's not ethical in terms of like what should be done about police brutality and just psychos got involved in it with guns.
You know, there's this one guy who wound up getting killed.
He killed some guy, but he just killed someone who was on the other side.
Just decided, I'm going to go kill somebody.
And you can have that.
And if you just have that thing that happened in Seattle where they had that whole section of the city that was closed down.
And then they had the mayor on television saying that maybe it was a summer of love.
Like, what are you talking about?
But all these things just highlight how uncertain people genuinely feel today because we know those things took place just in really recent time.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
It was just a minor thing in terms of...
I mean, it was a major thing in terms of the world, the impact of coronavirus.
But it wasn't like...
Airborne Ebola, you know, it wasn't like something's gonna kill everybody like what what would break down that we broke down for a disease that killed a very small fraction of people and Those people almost all of them had four plus comorbidities almost all of them.
It's like in the high 90% Wasn't it?
It was like 94% or something like that of people that died from COVID had four plus comorbidities.
So a perfect example of this would be body weight has no bearing on health or lifespan outcomes.
Because you don't want to make people who are overweight feel uncomfortable.
Even if your message of you're healthy as you are, you're living your true self, even if that message causes those very people to actually die sooner, the short-term emotional comfort prioritization sweeps everything to one side.
It sweeps rationality.
It sweeps long-term outcomes, all of that stuff.
Another one would be there is no advantage or benefit to children growing up in a two-parent household.
Even if that causes teachers and parents to misunderstand why their kids that may come from broken homes behave in the way that they do, you don't want to do something or say something that disparages hardworking single mothers.
So instead, you do the toxic compassion thing, which is the prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over long-term flourishing.
And you see this everywhere.
This performative empathy, toxic compassion thing, the reason I think it's so prevalent online is it's perfectly geared to be mimetically driven.
All that's happening.
If you have some harsh truth tweet, some people are going to push it, and it may catch fire if it's a real truth.
But a lot of the people that don't want to hear that, they're going to say that you're being judgmental, that you're being misogyny.
misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, whatever it is.
But if you say something which is comforting, like we need to push back against these white men, like everyone can get behind that because it seems empathetic.
It's one of the problems that anyone who isn't a like hardcore card carrying liberal has on the internet at the moment, which is if you're not prepared to If you're going to tell people things that they don't want to hear, you're going to come across like a bit of a dick for quite a lot of the things that you talk about.
And that's not particularly good.
But yeah, this uncertainty, this like...
Do people love you for who you are or for what you do?
I think is a really interesting question to ask ourselves because it's that success and happiness thing again.
Are you trying to achieve happiness through success?
Are you trying to make the world love you, to force it by promising your value, by promising your validation, by saying, look, I must do this.
But the interesting thing, and this was like the second half of his mushroom trip, was he asked himself, Do I love me for who I am or for what I do?
So I'm asking the world to love me for who I am.
Because if the world loves me contingent on what I do, then it feels more fragile.
It feels like it can be taken away from me.
If I stopped doing what I do, my love would also cease.
It's interesting because it's that—so I would imagine that if you're one of those people that—and I know a couple of guys that are in the closet, and I've encouraged one of them is a friend of mine to try to come out.
Not a good friend.
He lives back in L.A. But he wanted to, and then he would not, and then he'd want to, and then he would not.
I go, well, if you ever do, you know, people still love you, man.
I swear to God.
It's all in your head.
Just don't.
It'll be a huge weight relieved off you when you realize how much people just love you.
They don't care.
No one really cares.
Especially in the comedy world.
God.
The comedy world is so open-minded.
It's one thing.
Are you funny?
Everything else is just nonsense.
It doesn't matter where you come from, what part of the world.
Yeah, well, that's one of the interesting challenges, I think, that no one really ever gets to see about the gamesmanship that goes on behind the scenes.
Like, no one knows about how easy Alan Richson from the new Reacher movie or Guy Ritchie or someone else, like, no one knows about how easy they are to work with.
But, you know, there'll be guys that have been on your show or been on my show or whatever, and you're like, I actually quite enjoyed the episode, but I find them very difficult to deal with.
Like, they're really difficult to deal with outside of that, and...
They're at a disadvantage if they're not very personable.
If they're not really...
If they don't respond in a timely manner, whatever.
I think that that's because deep down, a lot of the people doing the performative empathy, toxic compassion thing know that they're projecting a lie.
They know that they aren't being truthful, that if someone did open the cupboard and have a look inside, that it's full of disgusting, scary lies and fakery and persona and all this stuff.
So they assume that theory of mind for everybody else as well.
They can't imagine a world in which this slight slip-up by somebody...
Couldn't be indicative of their entire personality because they themselves know that this super cutesy, sweetsy, toxic compassion, performative empathy front is just that.
That if you poked it hard enough, there would be a hole and you'd find out that it was hollow inside.
Yeah, and that that would be really a solution to all that ails us in terms of so it would it would be like snap map times a billion It would be crazy everyone would know everything about everybody's thoughts But then it would be that thing like hey, what do you got to hide?
You know there's gonna be a lot of dummies that are gonna go along with that But you're gonna find out how fucking insane a lot of people are too if you can actually look into their mind and see the wiring well, I bet I That the people who are out front the most empathetic, kind, loving, caring people, they are going to be...
They would be first on my list for...
Get inside that guy's mind.
Have a look at what he's doing.
Because I think that he's probably a piece of shit.
Have you been observing or have you been seeing this skew of young boys to the right and young girls to the left in terms of their political perspective?
Dude, I think that will be the story of 2024. I think that's the story of this year.
This huge breaking of young Gen Z males, teenage boys mostly, to the right and of girls really sharply to the left.