Nov. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:07
3908 40 Principles to Live By | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
Upon turning forty years-old Mike Cernovich published an article titled “40 Principles to Live By on my 40th Birthday” detailing what he learned along the way to help other individuals dream and live big. Mike Cernovich joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss loving as if you have free will, becoming comfortable with paradoxes, being the product of your habits, reading old books, seeking community, moving on from negativity, seeking small victories and much much more!Mike Cernovich is a lawyer, filmmaker and the bestselling author of “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms” and “MAGA Mindset: How to Make You and America Great Again.” Cernovich is also the producer of the film documentary “Silenced. Our War On Free Speech” and the upcoming film “Hoaxed: The Media's War on Truth.” Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CernovichRead Danger and Play: http://www.dangerandplay.comRead Mike on Medium: https://medium.com/@CernovichFollow Mike on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/CernovichFollow Mike on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DangerAndPlayOrder Gorilla Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/gorilla-mindsetOrder MAGA Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/MAGAHoaxed Movie: http://www.hoaxedmovie.com40 Principles to Live By on my 40th Birthdayhttps://medium.com/@Cernovich/40-tips-4oth-birthday-mike-cernovich-db4491192b64Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux with Mike Cernovich, the lawyer, filmmaker, and the best-selling author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, How to Make You and America Great Again.
He is also the producer of the film documentary Silenced...
War on Free Speech and the upcoming most excellent film, I imagine, Hoaxed, The Media's War on Truth.
You can follow Mike on twitter.com slash Cernovich, C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. Read Mike on media, medium.com forward slash at Cernovich.
And we're going to be talking about Happy Birthday, your 40 principles to live by on your 40th birthday.
It's a great place to start.
And thanks so much for taking the time today.
Yeah, my pleasure. And, you know, Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans.
I think, Canada, you already had your Thanksgiving about a month ago.
Yeah, no, I'm just working off the belly, so we have that advantage.
So, the first one, the first two, you know, this getting comfortable with paradox thing, a challenge for me.
But let's start off with surrender feelings of self-importance.
Surrender feelings of self-importance.
And, of course, you've received a lot of praise for handing over.
The Conyers story to BuzzFeed, the idea that it's not about you.
And I've said this in my show, like, I don't want people to be interested in me.
I want people to be interested in reason, evidence, philosophy, self-knowledge.
The more they focus on me, the more they miss the big picture, because it's not about an individual.
But help people sort of understand surrender feelings of self-importance.
Yeah, this is a tough one actually and I picked up this principle from reading these woo-woo books called The Adventures of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda or something about how he went through and did peyote in the desert and met the spiritual mentor and he tried to pass it off as non-fiction but nobody believed it but they were fun stories and the idea is that part of the mentorship is he would have to scrub toilets.
He would be verbally abused by people They would say, you're nothing, you're garbage, you're trash, you're whatever.
And of course, this is psychologically unhealthy, so I'm not telling people to go do this.
But the concept is that to really get what you want out of life is you do have to serve other people.
You have to become a servant to other people.
But if you view yourself as always being the most important in the room, as mattering more than everyone else, then you're going to miss that aspect of servant leadership.
You're going to be the person who says, me, me, me, make it all about me all the time.
Those people generally don't succeed, and even if they appear to be succeeding ostensibly, like a lot of the diva-type behaviors behind the scenes, actually, they're very miserable.
Very often they're on drugs, opiates, and other things, because you're not creating human connection with people.
So I definitely had a huge story on John Conyers, and it was just locked and loaded, ready to go.
It was, quite frankly, sick to my stomach.
Living by these principles doesn't always mean it's easy, right?
I'm like, I have this huge story.
Why don't I just fly out to Washington, D.C.?
I'm going to let them call me fake news.
I'm going to let them attack me.
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
And then I thought, What about the women who were harassed by conjures, right?
You're losing sight of You're losing sight of the women who are harassed.
You're losing sight of the greater societal good, of getting these 264 confidential settlements paid for.
You're losing sight of everything, man.
Because in Guerrilla Mindset, we talk about self-talk.
That was literally what I was saying to myself.
It's like, what is wrong with you?
What are you doing making it all about you and your ego?
You're losing sight of everybody.
This is not social behavior.
You have to give it away.
And then moreover, I said to myself, by doing this, you're going to set an example for other people, and then they're going to realize that we all need to help serve each other.
And then moreover, and this is how it kind of loops into the paradoxical thinking, by surrendering my feelings of self-importance and doing what was hard by giving away to BuzzFeed, I just got a tremendous amount of accolades and glory.
So it ended up being, in the end, the best thing for me personally.
It's funny because... When you have, like if you're a painter and you create a beautiful painting, you don't want to stand in front of it and have people look at you.
You want to step out of the way so that people can see the painting.
If you have a beautiful view and you want to create a window, you want the window to be, like the glass needs to be invisible so people can enjoy the view.
Because if they're looking at the view and they notice the glass, it's because the glass is poorly made, it's rippled, it's dirty, it's cracked.
So the idea that if you have something beautiful or important or powerful to share with the world, if you make it about you, you're just blocking people's view of whatever beauty you want to bring to the world.
And it's really distracting and it undermines all of the great stuff you have to offer.
It does. What makes it more complicated, though, is because America has become a very celebrity-obsessed culture.
That you do, in a way, have to create this brand, this Stefan Molyneux.
Nobody likes to think of yourself as a brand because then you feel like a commodity that can be bought and sold and respect my inherent dignity as a human being.
Everybody struggles with that, myself included.
In fact, I remember the first time I ever started making a pitch to sell anything, I felt just kind of dirty, like I was You know, selling myself.
It felt really awkward.
And now I do it easy. They're like, oh, you're a shill.
I said, yeah, it took me a lot.
I'm proud of that because it took me a long time to learn how to just make a pitch for me because if there is no you and you're not oxygenating yourself and you're not paying your bills and you're not able to take care of your family and you're not able to sustain yourself, then you're not able to create this art or break news or do Philosophy podcasts or everything.
So that's why we talk about the paradoxes and why you can't make it all about you.
You have to surrender feelings of self-importance, but you also have to elevate yourself to becoming the most important person in the world.
So these principles do feel like they're in opposition.
And of course, there is a relationship you have personally with the people in your life, your wife, your friends, your family, your children.
And that is where you're not a commodity.
But the idea that you go out and seek love and acceptance and approval and reinforcement from the anonymous masses, it seems to me an extraordinarily dangerous path to take.
Because the people in your life, you can trust.
They're there because you've developed love and honor and good relationships based on shared and elevated values.
But the anonymous masses, man, it's just like throwing yourself into lava to place your self-reliance and your self-esteem.
So you do have to think that you're important and you can't view yourself as a commodity personally.
But when it comes to the sort of masses out there that you have no particular relationship with, that's why you have to have a different mindset.
And keeping these two in balance, as you point out, it's a big problem.
Yeah, and you have to feel important to speak because if you didn't feel that you matter, if you didn't feel like you have something to say, then you would not say anything.
So, again, that's why it seems like this tension is you have to feel – you have to give up feelings of self-importance, but you have to feel that you matter and that what you say and do matters, and you have to feel important enough to take action.
Yeah. Yeah, so the surgeon wants to be loved at home for who he is as a human being.
But the surgeon wants to be needed by his patients for being an excellent surgeon.
And so the fact that he needs to have the self-esteem to say, I can be the greatest surgeon in the world, or I can be the greatest surgeon in the hospital, that encourages him to overstep his comfort zone, to reach for something better.
But at the same time, you have to have the discipline to submit yourself to the hard and rigorous work.
To actually become a great surgeon.
You've got to practice. You've got to watch videos.
You've got to go to endless training seminars.
And this idea that I think I can be great and the only way I can become great is to surrender my ego and surrender to the necessary disciplines of greatness, not for a goal that is to feed my ego, but for a goal that is to better the world.
That's a kind of a juggling act.
I don't know if it's innately a juggling act, but given kind of how we're raised, it seems that way these days.
Yeah, because we have so many different social personas now.
We're not in that Dunbar number of a hunter-gatherer tribe of 100 and 150 people, right?
We have the, who am I at home?
And you appreciate this more if you're kind of like internet celebrities like we are celebrities or whatever people call it these days.
You can go on the internet and there are like however many people talking about you.
And usually they're trying to embroil you in some kind of nonsense drama.
And then you turn it off and you're just hanging out with your family and they don't even know what's going on out there, right?
So you plug into this sort of like VR, I call it VR augmented reality, is you fire up Twitter and there's all these nasty things being said about you all, this drama, and then you just put the phone down and then I hang out with my daughter and neither Sheen or Shauna nor really anybody in my family even knows, let alone cares about what's being said.
It's like these parallel kind of tracks.
That's just the nature of a modern society.
There is no I am who I am all the time.
There is no there's me at a party.
There's me at work. There's me on a podcast.
There's me doing this.
There's me doing that. There's me as a father.
And it can be a challenge for a lot of people for sure to know when to turn it off.
So comfortable with paradoxes.
I read this bit here because there's stuff I agree with, stuff I don't.
20-year-old men are chomping at the bit to correct the obvious contradictions between, you know, surrender your ego and think of yourself as the most important person in the world.
He says, get used to holding simultaneously contradictory thoughts.
For example, you write free will is a myth, and if you live as if you have free will, your life will improve.
If you live as if free will is a myth, you'll be miserable.
This has been scientifically proven.
But wait, if free will is a myth, how can you live as if you have free will?
Exactly. Now, I'm a big fan of free will.
I do think that a lot of people who functionally don't have free will because they lack self-knowledge and they're run by automatic thoughts that they don't even know the source of.
So they basically are robots usually programmed by history to reenact trauma.
But this idea that there are paradoxes.
You have to love the world in order to want to improve it.
But the more you want to improve it, the worse estate it actually is in at the moment.
And therefore, the harder it is to love it.
And those kinds of paradoxes, I mean, I don't agree with you on the free will one, but I certainly do agree with you that they're a real paradox that you have to embrace in order to achieve things.
Yeah, the free will one kind of jammed me up because I wasn't saying that I literally believed we do or don't have it.
My own personal view is we have limited free will.
Daniel Danette kind of talked about elbow room.
So I would say that on a good day, we have maybe, you know, 5% free will.
On a great day, maybe 10% most days, we're just kind of autonomous beings.
But I just wanted to use that as an illustration, which is, I should have said, just assume you don't have free will.
Because the thing that happens is people want to get into the weeds when I'm just trying to be very sort of big picture.
And it's been proven that if you believe we don't have free will...
But you live as if we do have it.
You're happier. This has just been tested, repeated over and over in every which way.
So then people would say, well, wait a minute.
How can I believe something and then live in contradiction to what I believe and then end up having a better life outcome?
And I was like, I don't know.
That's the whole point. There might be a way to explain it, nuance it, and rationalize it.
But there is almost that sense of the Zen master paradox, which is Child, you don't have free will, accept this, and then live as if you do have it.
That's how you find contentment.
And once you have that aha moment, then it really does make sense, and you kind of learn how to hold on to these conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
It is too. I mean, one of the funny things is that we meet people virtually and then people like you and I meet them in the real world.
Like every time I go out, virtually without exception, someone's like, hey, you're that guy from the internet and so on, right?
You're a little less pixelated in real life.
And the funny thing is, is that the remote...
Relationships such as they are are much more unstable or prone to negative feedback than when you actually meet someone face-to-face.
I mean, even people who've disagreed with me, they come over, they shake my hand and say, well, I disagree with you, but it's great to see you out there.
Keep on doing what you're doing and so on.
And so there is this paradox as well that it's easy to end up with more problems with the planet as a whole if you look at the virtual attacks as something that is anything other than an acting out of trauma on the part of the other person, for the most part.
Because then when you're face-to-face with people, They're pretty reasonable.
Well, I'll give you another paradox.
Don't sweat the small stuff.
The devil is in the details.
Well, wait a minute. I need to pay attention to the details, but I need to not sweat the small stuff.
I don't understand both of these.
And that's why I use that kind of prototypical male thing.
I'm being a little bit snarky, but having written for a young male audience, they are always waiting to just pounce on whatever I'm not hating on it,
but what you would find out is, you know, I would write these long articles, and then there's one thing that they would key in on, and I go, okay, why don't you focus on the 40 other things, or the 39 other things, or the 25 other things.
The one thing you agree with that you like Why is it that you're always trying to just nitpick these other little things?
And that's like the very male thing to do.
So if you tell a young man, don't sweat the small stuff, but the devil is in the details.
They're going to say, well, these both can't be true.
Like, well, it is true. And then you can explain it in the sense that the devil is in the details.
Details do matter. But remember, zoom out every now and then and realize that you're improving a good thing.
So don't sweat the small stuff means don't focus on whatever little thing is wrong universally or let that monopolize your time.
Be sure to just zoom out and say, look, we have a good thing going on here.
I like what we have here.
And now we're just going to zero in and focus in on these details that we can improve to rise above it.
And that's hard to put in really clear Western terms for people.
Which is, again, why people, once they accept paradoxical thinking, they do tend to lighten up a little bit more, and they tend to be more productive.
Oh, man. This is going to be a slight detour, but it's something I was thinking about before we chatted.
If I could get, like, one phrase, just today, maybe it'd be different tomorrow, one phrase skywritten above the planet, it would be something like, your rage is your cage.
Because when people, oh, Steph, you're a shill.
You're doing this bad.
You're doing that bad. You contradicted yourself here.
I mean, it's funny because they think that they're putting me in a cage or you in a cage with these kinds of criticisms.
Now, I may accept and listen to these criticisms.
I may adapt and adjust my behavior if I think it's warranted and so on.
But I remain flexible and forward-moving and continuing to, you know, break through the ice.
But I so often see, and I've seen this in my life play out now, got a good half-century under my belt so I can be an annoying old whittling-on-the-porch lecturing guy.
But I've seen so often that when people say...
That, you know, you're a shill, you're a bad guy, you're doing this, you're doing that wrong.
What happens is, I continue to keep moving forward, but they paralyze themselves.
Because when you attack someone to that degree, you bar off that behavior for yourself.
Because especially if you attack someone for being hypocritical, it means that then you become paralyzed.
Because we all change our minds.
We all get new information.
You can always compare something I said 10 years ago with something I said today.
The sort of, ooh, two sides of the meme, and now it looks completely contradictory.
No sense of progress on new information or better arguments or anything like that.
And the rage that people put out at others, it breaks my heart, literally.
Like, I feel sad when I read it.
Not because it has any effect on me, but because I know that these are the cages that bar by bar by bar, these people are building around their own possibilities.
If you dump rage on someone who's out there confidently asking for what he wants, what does that mean?
It means you can never be out there confidently asking for what you want, because then that rage is going to get turned on you.
And, you know, this idea that when you lambaste and castigate people that you're doing anything other than setting up your own ever-shrinking prison is one of the great heartbreaks.
And I think so often by the time people understand that, it can be too late.
And it's one of the greatest heartbreaks I experience as a public figure.
Yeah, and that used to be me, actually.
I used to be... That's why I'm so good at this life advice kind of stuff, because I was a messed up dude, and I had to figure out what's wrong.
And I would be that way. I would say, oh, I'd read articles and I'd be mad.
And then it occurred to me one day, I go, why would you read something that makes you angry?
What's the point of that, right?
How is this going to elevate your own life?
Guess what? There are a bunch of idiots on the internet every day saying things that you might not like.
It isn't my job to go through.
There was even that, like, See DA or whatever comic where there's a guy on the internet, his girlfriend or wife is saying, hey, are you coming to bed?
I said, no, can't right now.
Why not? Well, there's someone wrong on the internet.
That's such a male behavior, by the way, too.
That is why I love when people call me a misogynist because I offer a rational critique of a lot of female behavior.
I say, well, you ought to read what I say about men, too, because you have a little bit better perspective.
And that is a male behavior.
Like, dude, what are you doing arguing with some moron?
When you have a life and a family and other people are neglecting or perhaps a business.
So yeah, that used to be me where I was the guy who just wanted to yell.
I had a weird moment.
I was giving a talk at Columbia University and they had a Q&A afterwards.
And the first person was a young woman and she, I could tell, didn't like me, didn't like me before it.
She said, I watched your talk with an open mind.
And I just think you're a bad person.
You're just as bad as the media people.
What would you say to that? And I said, well, thank you.
That's cool. You can think how you want to think.
She froze. And I go, I know you're expecting me to say something else, right?
But I'm okay with you feeling that way.
Because that's her issue.
And people don't know how to respond to that.
People can rage at me. And actually, the whole Q&A, people can rage at me.
They can say, I hate you.
And I'm just going to say, okay, I accept that.
I accept your... Your hatred, and then either they pause and have a moment of reflection, or they get angrier because they want you to feel what they want to feel.
It's called state matching, I would later learn in persuasion and NLP kind of thing.
People want you to feel however they feel.
That's why I tell people, if you're mad at me, hey, you have a right to be mad at me.
You have your own independent existence.
You have your own truth. Go be mad at me all you want.
But really what's going on is you're just mad.
And you want me to feel the way you feel.
Well, rather than try to make me feel the way you feel, why don't you try to feel great about the world, great about yourself, great about your family, and then try to make other people feel inspired and great about themselves.
Right, right. You are the product of your habits and your friends and family.
Now, this, to me, is a very, very powerful statement, and I've been kind of hoeing this back 40 for the past decade or so, because people will look internally and think that the only thing they ever need to change to become happy is their own thinking.
It's kind of a grandiosity thing, like, I can be in the mafia, but if I change my way of thinking, I'll be happy.
It's like, well, I think the mafia membership might be somewhat important in that whole thing.
Because you say, if you don't like who you are, look inside for your habits, A-OK, and outside at your family and friends, you may need to cut out some negative forces in your life.
And I think that's very true.
I don't think you can functionally be bigger in the world than the smallest idea someone has around you, about you.
Because if you don't have that support, if you're trying to do a high-wire act and you've got people throwing stuff at you, it's not going to work.
Yeah, I would run into this where people would say, oh, you know, you're the gorilla mindset guy.
You ought to just let me abuse you.
No. I don't think gorillas let you do that.
Read a book. There's a whole chapter in lifestyle design where I even say that you ought to rate people that you spend time with and eliminate all the people that you don't leave feeling inspired with.
No, I don't want to play...
Defense. The defensive game is, you know what?
Life is going to throw a lot of things at you.
People you love are going to die.
Things are going to happen. And when that happens, yeah, you do need to have mindset training and techniques to deal with it.
But that's still playing defense.
You're trying to overcome the bad stuff from life.
But we want to play offense, too.
We want to be on a winning team.
We want to connect with like-minded, winning people.
And if you look around and everybody's petty or they're gossiping, you're thinking, well, I'm spending all this time gossiping.
What could I be doing with that time instead?
I could be around people who have bold, visionary ideas, put those people together, and then your life is going to improve, and then your mindset is going to improve, and then the happier you are sort of at a fixed state, then the easier it is to use mindset techniques to get to an even higher level.
So an example is I used to watch comedians, and I would say, how can anybody get on stage in front of all those people?
It was To me, incomprehensible.
And it wasn't that I even wanted to be public.
I never wanted to be an actor.
I never wanted to be doing what I'm doing.
But I just would think intellectually, like, wow, that must be really hard.
And now when I see people on stage, I'm like, oh, yeah, I mean, you could kind of drop me in anywhere, and I'd feel comfortable giving a talk.
I wouldn't care if they liked me or hated me.
And I think I've demonstrated that multiple times at events.
Well, yeah, but I didn't get there.
I didn't get there because I was gossiping with people all day, being around negative people, being around dramatic people, being around losers.
I got to where I am now because I would be like, here's the kind of thing, like if you and I were in a room and you said, hey, you know, how do people speak before such big crowds?
I would say, well, hey, let's get you signed up for a public speaking course.
Because that's just what would occur to me.
But if you're in a room with just a bunch of other people, they'd be like, well, yeah, I mean, impossible.
Who could do that or whatever? So you have to get into a better room.
You have to get around people who think bigger.
And then when you do that, your own optimism is going to improve because people are going to reinforce what you're doing and that creates a positive feedback loop.
Yeah, if you want people in your life to improve, and I think that's a laudable goal and people should want you to improve.
We should all encourage each other to be better.
But if you want people, Mike, in your life to improve, you have basically two choices.
You can either nag them Or you can inspire them.
Now, nagging just plain doesn't work.
And it gets you trapped down in there.
Like if you're in a fat family and you're fat, you can either nag them to lose weight and basically say, well, I'm not going to lose weight until you do, until we all do.
And that just dissolves any choice or control or power you have in the matter.
Or you can just start losing weight, start exercising and, you know, go on hikes and go play tennis.
And at some point they may look at you and say, well, I really want some of that.
But that means that you have to leave them behind and pursue something better and then see if your inspiration causes them to want to follow in your path.
But that does mean rejecting where you are and moving ahead and then being certainly willing to circle back and help anyone who wants to follow.
But just sitting there in the mud and criticizing people is not the way to do it.
Inspiration, I think, is the only chance you have to affect that kind of change.
And people need to come up to your level.
What I always say is that...
Hey, I'm trying to get up here.
If you want to come up here with me, that's great.
I'll tell you how to do it. I'll throw you a ladder.
But I'm not going to go down to where you are, to the gossip, to the negativity, to the drama, to the bickering, to the small-time thinking, to being cheap, to being stingy, to manipulating people and using people.
I always say, yeah, I'm happy to hang out with you, but we need to come to a higher level together.
You have to be willing to To move on and just realize, because in your example, that's the very optimistic example, which is, oh, I want everybody around me to lose weight, so I'm going to diet and I exercise.
Well, you left out the part where people go, what kind of weirdo orders broccoli at dinner?
Why don't you just eat like everybody else?
Why are you going hiking?
We want to go do this.
You're so selfish.
Why are you so selfish?
Why are you always- Why won't you eat your mother's cooking?
Exactly. Yeah. And then they'll say, you know, Stefan, you're very selfish.
You only care about yourself.
You're only doing what you want to do.
You look like a weirdo at dinner because you're ordering these special foods and you can't just kind of get along.
And, you know, I heard a funny example of that was by some powerlifter, actually, Dave Tate, who's written a lot of great stuff.
And he said, if you go out to dinner with 10 people and you just order the menu, people just say, oh, what'd you get?
It's like not a thing.
But if you just...
On your own, say to the waiter, hey, give me a couple of chicken breasts and a double order of broccoli, no butter.
It's like the room stops.
Just let me eat, dude.
Just leave me alone. I'm not asking you about the noodles and the butter sauce.
Why can't you just leave me alone?
But that's the social conforming mechanism that comes in when you are trying to rise above it.
And that's why I've written before that people do have to disown their family many times.
They certainly have to disown friends.
I have cut people out of my life who have been there for a long time and I just realized it wasn't going to work.
And now that I'm older and wiser, hopefully, I kind of like a zero tolerance.
I'll tell somebody, hey, I think you're making a bad choice here.
And if they want to do the whole, they're going to give me 100 reasons why it's not a bad choice.
I just say, look, I don't care.
Do it. I'm just telling you this is the way it looks to other people.
You go ahead and do whatever you want to do.
I'm not judging you.
I'm not telling you bad. I'm just telling you this is how it looks.
And then I just go, don't talk to me again.
That really freaks people out.
But what you find is that you get sucked into their drama vortex.
It's like, no, I don't want to get sucked into drama.
I'm just telling you this is the way it looks to other people.
You look like a really bad person right now.
And they either take action immediately and correct themselves.
So I'll give you a concrete example of this.
A friend of mine, Jack, posted an image on Twitter that technically was publicly available, so he didn't do anything, like, wrong, per se.
But the way it looked, it looked like he was doxing a woman who had made an accusation that she had been sexually exploited when she was young.
So I just said, hey, dude, delete the picture.
He goes, well, it's publicly available.
I said, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't look good.
He goes, okay, deleted it. Just like that, right?
So those are the kind of friends you want to have, right?
You can just say, like, I know, I get it.
He didn't do anything objectively wrong.
But a lot of times it can be framed to look bad.
And you want your friends to be able to say, oh, this is the way it's going to look to nine out of ten people.
And you just did it and everything was cool.
And those are the kind of people that you want to have in your lives where they can just feel comfortable to say, hey, you know, this isn't a good look.
And you either take action or you don't, but you don't argue.
Well, yeah, because either you understand where someone's coming from and it's not that big a deal.
Like, I just put out a video on the childhood of Charles Manson.
And, you know, I mean, my producer and I had tons of debates about, you know...
What sort of voice should I use for Charles Manson?
If I put on the full imitation voice, it's going to be kind of grating.
But if I don't put on any voice, then people are going to take little snippets out of me reading Charles Manson's stuff and say, oh, did you know that?
And then by the time anybody, like one in a hundred people, care to find out the truth, so I decided to go somewhere down the middle so it wasn't too grating, but nobody could mistake it for me and so on.
These are just, you know, this is the world that we live in.
There are people who want to oppose truth and virtue and clarity, and they'll try and take things out of context.
You have to do a little bit of a defensive game, and you can't blame everyone else.
You know, this is another big thing, too.
I mean, the world is pretty irrational in a lot of ways, and that's the sea that we have to swim in.
And you can complain and say, well, you know, I shouldn't eat any scuba gear because it would be much more efficient if I had gills.
It's like, well, you don't have gills, so if you want to go down there, you better get some scuba gear.
That is the world that we live in.
And people, this is true, I think, of people who are non-leftists, sometimes even more, is that they continually walk forward as if the world is rational, complain when they're taken out of context, and don't do the necessary defensive steps that would be easy to avoid that.
Yeah, I wish five years ago I'd have some guy like me who's been like, you know...
I know that you're trying to do satire here, but I'm telling you, in five years, nobody's going to ask you if it's satire.
Don't do it. I wish.
That would have been great because everything people have dug up about me was stuff where I was either quoting other people or it was clearly satirical.
And I thought, man, you never realize that's what they're going to hang you with.
And that's what they would have hung you with, too, is if you say, oh, you want to talk about fantasies, but you're quoting other people, they'll completely remove the context of that.
And it's good to have somebody just say, hey, be careful.
Now, the kind of the paradox and the nuance of that, too, is you would say, well, how can I be authentic if I'm worried about what other people are thinking?
And that, again, too, is like another paradox, is where you do want to be authentic.
You do want to share your voice.
You do want to share your art and be true to who you are.
But you do have to realize there are people who are going to misrepresent who you are, and you have to take that into consideration, too.
That great Mark Twain quote or whatever, life isn't a dance, it's more like a wrestling match.
The idea that you're just going to say and do whatever you want and be authentically you and the world isn't going to have any kind of pushback is an idea you need to get out of your head real fast because the world is going to have an opinion and On you and what you're doing, and they're going to push back against you and recognize the struggle and the wrestling component to that.
Yeah, if your enemy has a bow and arrow, you take a shield.
Now, if you have the choice to be as fit and healthy as possible, not everyone has this choice, which we fully accept.
You say, I've gone through life fit, fat, and jacked.
Your life will fundamentally improve if you lose weight.
Go to the gym and lift weights and follow a basic skincare routine.
This isn't even debatable.
Now, the funny thing is, too, you know, like, I mean, a lot of people view you as a pretty macho guy.
And it's like, well, I need to have the right aloe for my cheekbones and so on.
I mean, I put on layers of stuff every day because I hate that dry face feeling.
And also, for me, I'm a pretty animated presenter.
And for me, like, Botox would be the worst thing in the world because I couldn't do my, like, Dr.
Seuss grimacing. And so I need flexible skin.
I need softness.
I mean, I need lips to be not dry so that I can be animated without feeling like I'm moving some sort of papier-mâché mask around.
And this, you know, go to the gym and lift weights, this is something that...
I mean, when I was... I went through, like, in my early teens, I got a little heavy.
And then I was like, I can't stand it.
Like, I just... I hate it.
And so, you know, I joined the swim team and the water polo team.
I was on a tennis team.
I did, well, cross-country running as well and just a wide variety of things.
And I'm like, started working out when I was 16.
And with other than a few breaks for injuries, it's been pretty much my routine three, four, five times a week at a minimum for, I don't know, as long as that's been 30-plus years.
It's hard for people who haven't tried that to understand what an enormous difference it makes in your life.
Exactly. It's one of those weird things where...
I just want almost like an appeal to authority.
Like, guys, I've done it. Just do it.
I don't want to argue with you.
Just go to the gym for six months.
Don't eat like a dumb slob.
Don't get drunk and waste it all.
Just try it. Trust me, I'll be right.
And that's why I said just...
It's like one of those things where it's just...
It's irrefutable. There's nobody who goes to the gym, especially men.
Women, too. I mean, Shauna, she lifts weights.
That's why I always like the idea of, I don't want to get too bulky.
It's like, do you have any idea how hard it is to get too bulky?
Men have to take anti-box steroids to get too bulky.
That's hard. Just do it, and I'm not even going to argue about it.
That's one of those things where I'm I'll argue about free will or disgust or whatever, but if you're like, well, prove to me that going to the gym and being fit and healthy is going to prove my life, all right, buddy, I got way more other things to do.
Read old books to understand the news.
Now, this is really fascinating, and you and I are of an age where, and I've talked about this with my daughter a number of times, what was it like to grow up without the internet, to grow up without cell phones?
To grow up, I was just thinking something as basic as this, to grow up At the school, having a shower, not thinking someone's going to take a photo of your butt and share it with someone.
Like, that is a wild, wild thing.
And also, because there was none of that, I spent huge amounts of time in the library just reading books and all that kind of stuff and recognizing that fake news, you know, of course, it's erupted since the non-leftist media took over the term, but...
Man, you know, I mean, I was just looking the other day at a documentary on the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, oh, we were fired on and the Gulf of Tonkin started Vietnam.
It was completely false. Never, ever happened.
And the reason why we know about fake news now is it doesn't take 40 years for the crap to be declassified, for everyone to go, oh, Joseph McCarthy was right.
Oh, the Reichstag fire was planted by the Nazis.
Oh, the Gulf of Tonkin was.
Now we've got this real-time deconstruction, which is incredibly powerful and never has existed before.
In human history. And I think realizing now that fake news has the least power it's ever had because we actually have a term for it.
They used to just call it news. It's incredibly empowering to realize that.
Yeah, a great example of that is the Joe Barton story, how the media had tried to spread fake news that he was another congressional harasser because it sounds pretty bad.
Oh, congressman is sending nude pictures out there.
Well, that sounds kind of bad.
Well then, no, no, no, you actually dig into it.
He was in a consensual adult relationship with another woman.
They were exchanging, you know, the kind of things people exchange in 2017.
She got mad that he was talking to other women, and then she started sharing those images with other women.
He then said, hey, I'm going to call the police if you're sharing these images because there are revenge porn laws.
So WAPO goes, Joe Barton threatened a woman For revealing his secret life.
Now, five years ago, that's the narrative.
Today, people are like, what the hell?
What is wrong with you people?
No, he was going to call the police for revenge porn, which he's perfectly entitled to.
And as if this were a female congresswoman, there wouldn't even be a debate.
And that's really why the mainstream media, the fake news media really does hate social media, because that narrative It was completely flipped and completely stopped.
But even CNN, they go, oh, you know, all these congressmen are caught up in sex scandals, you know, Conyers, Franken, Barton.
No, no, no. One of these things are not like the other.
Joe Barton is not in a sex scandal.
Joe Barton is a victim, a crime victim of revenge porn, and yet the media is trying to smear him via association.
But they aren't able to get away with it in the way that they could years ago.
So, you know, Nassim Talib had said, if the news is fake, imagine how bad the history is.
Well, and it's funny, too, because in the story that you gave to BuzzFeed that they broke about Congressman Conyers, Now, within, what has it been, just a couple of days, we've got legislation entering into Congress to unseal all of these records.
Of course, all this stuff needs to be unsealed, because I'm convinced that a lot of these people are compromised.
I mean, you look at the Awan brothers having access to, what, 80 different congressional computers?
And congressional offices over time?
Do you think they never found any of this information?
Is that part of the terabytes they uploaded to the cloud?
Do other people have this information?
Does everyone except the American voter have this information?
I mean, I think a lot of these people are compromised.
And we need to find out what information is not only available internally, but what information may have been shared externally, because that's a huge security issue in my view.
Yeah, and it's one of those issues which is kind of It's on the one hand a no-brainer, but two, it shows how corrupt the media is.
When BuzzFeed did break the story, there was a lot of journalists on Twitter saying, I can't believe that they got information from Cernovich.
And I said, well, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Let's take a step back here for a minute.
You now know that there are 264 confidential settlements involving powerful people in Congress.
How about we not talk about me?
Why don't you go to some real, you know, not that I love people, you know, they want to talk about me all day, that's great for me or whatever, but it really shows how craven and dishonest they are and how beholden they are to the establishment.
Me, when I saw there was a list, 264 people, I was like, oh man, it's Christmas time.
I gotta find these.
I'm gonna hunt these down and that's how I found the Conyers thing because it put it on my radar and my impulse was to say, I need to find this.
The media's impulse says, well, how can we defend Congress from people like me and Mike Cernovich?
Oh, horrendous. And yet you'd get called the misogynist for coming to the defense of women who were accused of groping, who were accusing a very powerful man of groping them.
Seek meaning and fulfillment.
Not pleasure. I loved unfolding this particular fortune cookie.
And you say, I've had every pleasure imaginable.
Nothing feels like the look of your newborn daughter or son.
It's not pleasurable in the ways we typically think of a good feeling.
It's a deep sense of connectedness.
And let's talk a bit about that, because this hedonism of this sort of empty post-Christian universe is, I think, quite distracting for a lot of people.
Yeah. And I've done it.
I've done that YOLO kind of life.
So I speak from experience. And I even tell men, especially who are younger, I go, the problem is most people don't know when to get out.
And I've seen that happen for a lot of people.
You want to go for a year and have fun and do these things?
Hey, I've done it. I have no regrets about living a little bit of hedonism for a little while.
But then people think, well...
Why would I ever have kids?
Because I can go to this forever.
Why would I ever actually have a real relationship?
And then those people are the miserable people you see at the bars.
They look completely out of place.
They're not happy. They're miserable.
The people are happy that they're there.
So people kind of get caught up in the game, as so often happens.
And that's because we're only taught about pleasure as in sensual pleasure.
And Jonathan Haidt talks about this, of course, in the happiness hypothesis.
With relationships is, you know, you have this burning passion, and then that passion kind of goes away, and then suddenly people go, oh, you need to get divorced.
And then if you read the women's magazines, oh yeah, your man isn't making you feel passionate, you better just leave him, and now you have all these broken homes, divorces, and everything.
But you actually, it's a very natural thing for a lot of these emotions to change.
From raw pleasure, animal pleasure, to a sense of meaning and a sense of connection.
But in society, we're all so degenerate and stunted collectively that people don't realize, no, your relationship is going to evolve and not only is that natural, but that's desirable.
Right. Seek community.
And this is a huge issue, of course.
When people are, in a sense, insulated in their communities, a lot of this has to do with diversity and multiculturalism, people not feeling as comfortable in the outdoors.
You have video games, you have pornography, you have movies, Netflix, and all this kind of stuff that is keeping people with these imaginary relationships, which is part of the celebrity culture.
We were talking about post-religion, you end up with this pantheon of famous people that is not particularly healthy because there's no call to virtue in that.
But you say, we belong to a hive mind, what Howard Bloom calls the global brain.
Community and connection have been taken away from you by design.
Atomization is suffocation.
Find your community, form deep and meaningful connections, which means you have to stop making it about you.
Yes, you have to have values in common in order to trust people, but you can only have values if you're willing to subjugate your ego to something bigger than yourself.
Yeah, Howard Bloom, by the way, is an amazing thinker.
His book, The Global Brain, is fantastic.
And... One, you know, like a philosophical question I think about, or I guess it's more psycho-philosophical, is why does shame work?
Shame hurts. It's been proven scientifically.
You've been shamed, public hate mobs, I've had them.
When you're being, you know, you have to fight it, but people who think that I don't feel that shame and that it doesn't impact me in a certain way haven't been paying attention, because it does, but you, courage is facing whatever fears you have and going forward with it.
So the same is true of social approval.
Social approval And Aristotle, of course, talks about this.
Social approval from other people of virtue is the highest calling that you should seek.
But again, we're so atomized as a society where people say, oh, just be yourself, be you, be true to yourself.
But that isn't true.
We're actually part of a global society.
I don't know if it is a global actual consciousness in the literal sense, but there certainly is.
We all know it. You walk down the room and if people are looking at you a certain way, you can kind of sense that and feel it.
And if we weren't part of some kind of global consciousness or we weren't kind of nodes sort of plugged into the same matrix, none of that would register.
Shame wouldn't feel anything.
It wouldn't have any impact on you because why care?
And social approval wouldn't feel good because, again, why care?
And that's why people who always try to make it About themselves are the ones who are cast out of the community because the community is going to have its own kind of vibe.
Now then a lot of people go, but wait a minute, that sounds like collectivist thinking and you're saying sacrifice, right?
Which is like, go read principle number three.
You're going to be frustrated throughout most of this discussion.
Well, you can become more yourself in a community if the community shares and reflects back the values that you have.
So you subjugate yourself to values, and then you find people who share those values, and since the values become more important to you than your own personal ego, then the reinforcing of those values strengthens your identity.
If your identity is only about your own pleasure, then you're just an input.
There's no sharing. And you will end up with less and less of what you want.
It's sort of like the idea that if your sexual pleasure with a partner is only about your pleasure, don't care at all about whether your woman is enjoying the thing or not.
Well, okay, so you get a little bit of extra pleasure for a short amount of time.
And then you end up not having much pleasure at all because she doesn't want to have sex with you and probably doesn't want to even be around you.
So this idea that you can somehow just chase your own endorphin rush and have it forever is a complete delusion.
And by the time, again, by the time it plays out, you might be pretty wrecked spiritually.
Exactly. And it goes for all things.
And a lot of this stuff is improved psychologically in studies where if you volunteer, you feel good, right?
Why? You do.
People can search for the mechanisms.
You can try to figure out why.
My answer would be the more Howard kind of Blumian thing is because when you're serving other people, you do feel greater network node connection, which incidentally, not to go on too much of a digression, but the Mushroom podcast and the Joe Rogan, and they talked about the Japanese subway experiment.
And how when mushrooms grow, they form nodes in kind of the same way that the Japanese subway would.
And they do it even better.
They would do mazes where they put nutrients in certain parts of the maze.
It's actually fascinating. It's called the Japanese maze experiment.
And, you know, magic mushrooms, of course, have a very powerful effect on our own perception.
Then you start to think that, yeah, if we are a node and a part of consciousness, a part of a global consciousness, then when we are doing good, We become a source of energy and then we become a node where then other people are trying to connect with us in these kind of neurological patterns and then you become stronger, you feel better about yourself because other people are nourishing you and then you're nourishing other people and you're nourishing the whole collective consciousness of it all.
Now, I wouldn't make that in a really like hardcore argument like let's debate every point of it.
It's more of metaphorical thinking And just explaining how I view the world and how I view man or woman's relationship to humanity.
Yeah. And I mean, there are other teams in the world.
So if you don't have a team, you're going to lose.
Islam is a team. The left is a team.
There are just endless amounts of teams in the world.
And if we're all so individualistic, well, they have a team and we don't.
So guess what? We are deep in the rear view.
All right. Number 10. Learn how to breathe.
Breath controls mood.
An anxiety attack happens when you lose control of your breathing.
The Wim Hof breathing method course has ended any fear I ever had in public speaking.
You cannot be afraid if your breath remains even with you fully in control.
Now this is the body stuff that freaks out a lot of the hyper-intellectuals who move in our circles.
The idea that the brain is an effect of the body and you must take care of the body in order to have a good mindset.
It's kind of hard for people because they just want to talk themselves in and out of intellectually and Being in a good mood.
Yeah, and it's been proven.
I don't know the exact percentage off the top of my head, but 50% of our serotonin is actually in our gut.
Something like 70% of the dopamine is in your gut and serotonin and dopamine are the primary regulators of your positive outlook on life and how you feel.
So it's undeniable that we do have a neurological connection between our gut and our brain.
And if you breathe heavy You feel that internally.
You have different stress hormones.
If you are stressed out, you are going to be frenetic.
You're going to be spazzy, if you will.
And that's going to affect your mood.
That's good. You're going to be afraid to public speak.
People go, oh, I'm afraid of public speaking.
And I go, well, what happens when you're about to speak?
Well, my pulse quickens.
I become tight. I go, great.
Then instead of focusing on, hey, I'm about to do a speech, And your brain get into your head.
Why don't you just focus on your breathing?
And then you find out by changing your focus from being stuck inside your head, and by changing that focus to your breath, you are now calm, more in the moment, more in a kind of a flow state.
And the intellectuals will try to argue with it, but my answer to that is we'll go do a few speeches and argue with reality and the physiological response of this stuff.
Accept that you can't change others and move on quickly from the negative and toxic.
I mean, this is amazing to me.
And... Again, I don't think it's a tangent, but I was thinking the other day, Mike, about how the left with their focus on, let's import third world cultures, don't worry, everyone's going to end up getting along together, there's going to be cultural assimilation or whatever.
They can't even, if you look at the way that they're defending these sexual predators, they can't even have integrity to their own beliefs, like beliefs that they publicly proclaimed for many, many decades.
They can't even have integrity to their own beliefs, but they're somehow imagining that other cultures will somehow adapt to beliefs that they have.
Well, if you can't adapt to it, I wouldn't accept that people from Somalia can't.
But this idea that changing yourself is hard, changing others is impossible.
Fantasy of changing other people.
I don't know. It is a form of low-rent delusion that really gets people trapped in this repetition compulsion of futility, this nagging, this endless, well, we're going to just do this, do this, do this.
It doesn't work. And of course, if it was easy to change yourself, then you'd change yourself to stop nagging.
But people can't even change themselves to stop nagging.
So the idea that can change other people is almost beyond comprehension.
Yeah, and you learn that right away and you watch people repeat their same patterns.
Women is special. I'm going to change this man, right?
It's been, you know, you're not.
It's just not going to happen, right?
The idea that with, you know, this works on the micro and macro level.
The idea that we're going to bring in a bunch of people from the rest of the world who think that women are garbage and should be enslaved.
Oh, we're just going to convince them to think like us.
Magic dirt, that's of course a delusion.
It's not true. Shared values matter.
Shared values take a long time to create.
Change within yourself, change within other people takes a long time.
It's not going to work.
I've been caught up in this too with friends where I would say, look, all you have to do is listen to what I'm about to tell you and your life will be amazing.
Just do it.
And then they would argue or they'd do their own thing.
Eventually, a lot of that too is ego, which goes to point one, your self-importance.
I don't view myself as being important enough that I can just change everybody into what I think they should be.
I'm not important enough, so when people want to do their own thing, you just have to let them go, let them be free, and then you need to go be free in your own life.
Character is destiny.
Your actions become your habits and your habits become your character.
Fighters fight. Weak people quit and strong people survive and thrive.
Even if a challenge you set is arbitrary, meet the challenge because small victories like small surrenders add up.
And this, you know, as a parent, right?
I mean, you'll get into this when Syrah gets older.
Commitments matter. You know, if my daughter commits to something, it's like, you know, I'm going to view that as physics.
You know, unless you get, you know, something unforeseen happens that's beyond our control.
If you commit to this, that's important.
You know, like I had some people at the house today.
It took a little while to settle things up.
I was a few minutes late for, and I was like...
I'm sorry, you know, like I was going to be here at one and, you know, these little things matter.
And again, it's the don't sweat the small stuff, but recognize that if you have a life where you're only making large commitments, it will be impossible because large commitments flow out of small commitments.
You know, like I came out to California to work with you on Hoaxed.
And I had to actually be at the airport on time.
You know, like, there's big commitments that come out.
I had to set my alarm.
I had to drive to the airport.
I had to have everything I needed.
Like, all these little small things end up with the big things, and a lot of people focus on the very big commitments without having the details in place necessary to achieve those big commitments.
Exactly. And we could all...
You know, Warren Buffett, actually, despite his politics, has a lot of this kind of homespun wisdom, which is that the...
How does he say it? The threads of habit aren't felt until they become the chains of habit.
The idea that when you're younger and you're doing all these little things, you don't realize that this is becoming who you are.
And if you just lie to people and you're in the habit of lying to get out of something, next thing you know, you're 50 years old and you can't tell the truth to people.
And now you say, well, I don't want to be a liar.
I want to be a more honest person.
I want to be a more punctual person.
Well, they're just little threads that you feel.
Those threads do become chains and it's like that for everything.
And the answer to that is just being aware of your habits, right?
So for me, this kind of relates to the whole think big, start small.
The reason I'm kind of where I am now is I just said I'm going to habitually do something on the internet years ago.
Maybe a blog post, maybe a podcast.
I don't know. But every day, seven days a week, I'm going to do something on the internet.
And then as you do these somethings, you become better at it and you become more fluent and you recognize more opportunities.
You level up and level up and level up and then eventually you're doing very, very big things because good traits become character, right?
So same thing as, you know, it's amazing.
So much of these habits of life You can see them everywhere.
Authors will say, you know, Stephen King, he'll go, people ask me, how can I write a book?
And he said, well, do you write every day?
Well, I don't know.
Well, write every day for an hour.
Maybe something comes out, maybe it doesn't.
But if you do write every day, eventually you will.
And you just finished the book, so you know that as well as anybody.
You have this conception of a book in your head, which seems sort of daunting and abstract, and how do you do it?
And then you go, well, I'm just going to write 500 words about whatever I feel like writing about.
Maybe I'll use it, maybe I won't.
You do that every day.
After a year or two, you have a book.
Right. Yeah, I know.
I mean, and just freaking work.
I mean, there's no substitute for hard work.
There's no magic. Like I was just talking with my producer this morning.
Like yesterday, I did some research in the morning, did a long show with Tom Woods about economic misconceptions, and then I talked with the researcher about the Manson presentation, did the Manson presentation, and did a three-and-a-half-hour call-in show.
Now, that's a little bit more than usual, but those are the kind of days you just have to have sometimes.
It's that 10,000-hour thing.
It's the Beatles playing in Hamburg for two years, seven hours a day.
You just have to work.
There's no substitute for putting the grind in.
It really pays off.
It's like going to the gym. You just have to go.
You have to do it. Yeah, people always go, oh, you know, especially when I was like really super jacked, people always were like, that's why I'm glad I'm not like jacked like I used to be because people don't ask me for training routines because it's just like a waste of my time, right?
How do I get super jacked?
Like, well, how many times do you go to the gym this week?
Well, you know, I've been busy and I got work.
It's like, okay, you're wasting my time.
Just get away from me.
But then I told the person who was actually serious, I go, look, what I'm about to tell you is going to sound dumb and you're not going to believe me, but trust me.
And he goes, what? I could just go to the gym for an hour.
Just walk around. What do I do?
Just walk around, stretch, do whatever you feel like doing.
And the person thought I was insane.
And I go, no. And I go, what's going to happen is don't get on your cell phone, put in airplane mode.
If you walk around, nature abhors a vacuum.
You're going to be like, God, I'm just bored doing nothing in the gym.
And then you're going to say, OK, well, I'm bored doing nothing in the gym.
Therefore, I should do something.
And then you're going to do something.
And then you do another something.
And the next thing you know, eight weeks later, 12 weeks later, you're now just a regular kind of gym guy.
Because it's that habit of just going there.
Because there are times I go to the gym and I don't do anything.
I just stretch.
And I'm there for half an hour.
I'm like, well, I went. I'm not, you know, 29 anymore where I just go in and grind away for an hour and a half.
It's cool, but I just go in to get myself in the habit.
Same thing, I walk every day.
I might walk for a mile, I might walk for 10 miles, but it's just an idea of getting out and kind of doing something.
Seek small victories.
Comparison is suicide, as Ralph Waldo Emerson told us in Self-Reliance.
Your victories are yours and it doesn't matter how they size up with anyone else's.
Plus, I've met the obscenely rich and famous.
For the most part, they are bland people who struck it big one time.
Which isn't hating on them, but they are petty and nasty like everyone else.
And yeah, you look at the top of Everest and you say, well...
I can never get up there.
And it's like, well, you don't look at the top of Everest.
You look 10 feet up from where you are and you get there.
And that's how everyone gets to the top of Everest is 10 feet at a time.
It's the old cliche that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
If all you do is focus on your distance from your ultimate goals, it's going to be disheartening.
And give yourself something you can achieve every day.
Otherwise, how do you know if your day has been worth it?
Exactly. Because a lot of people fail to take action because they feel like they're not consequential.
But I'm not this thing I'm doing.
It's just a small business.
Well, yeah, sure. I remember I tell this story over and over and over again until people get bored.
As I go, the biggest month for me ever was when I made $13 off a website.
Because I knew I could now.
And I know that if I can make $13, I can do $1,300 and I can do $13, I can do...
I just knew that, like, okay, I figured out how to do it.
Now I just have to figure out how to scale that and how to make it bigger.
And... A lot of people would say, well, you only made $13 a month off a website.
Why would you feel good about that?
Because there are all these people doing all these other things, and I go, well, I felt good about it because I never knew how to do it.
Well, does anybody understand the term proof of concept anymore?
Right. Yeah, they don't.
We can't possibly manufacture every car for how much it took us to make the first one.
It's like, that's not the point.
That's not how it works. You put a huge amount of effort to make that first sale, and then you scale it from there.
But once you've made that first sale, once you've made that first $13, you've crossed the Rubicon.
Now it's just a matter of time and effort.
Exactly. And that's another kind of way, too.
People... Even friends and family will try to sabotage you.
If you're excited about it, they'll be like, well, I mean, that's not really that big of a deal.
And no, you want people who are saying, wow, that's amazing, that's exciting.
Imagine what you can kind of do from here.
And that again goes back to the importance of community and keeping the right people.
My very first donation, $5.
$5. I wish I could have printed it out and framed it, but it was...
And that was like, wow!
Are you kidding me? So from here...
Okay. 14. Play the odds unless you have an edge.
I was having a little trouble with this one.
You could break it down. You say, this goes for investing in the stock market, dating, and living...
Generally, certain rules, don't day trade, but instead dollar costs average into the market.
I got that. Don't quit your job to follow your passion are going to lead you to the best outcome frequently enough that is folly to break those rules.
Now, the don't quit your job to follow your passion, well, I guess you were a lawyer, I was an entrepreneur and so on.
There is, I mean, if you've got some place to go, then go, right?
I mean, don't just say, oh, I made five bucks and then quit your job because you need to figure out how sustainable and how sustainable.
Scalable, there certainly is.
But help me sort of understand what this means for people's lives.
Right. A great example is people go, well, certainly if you have a daughter, what would you tell your daughter?
Here's exactly what I'll tell my daughter.
You will probably be happier if you play a more supportive role in a respectful but sort of alpha male and have a family.
Probably, almost certainly.
But if you want to go be the big career woman, that's great too.
Just know that the probabilities are not on your side.
So if you find a rule that works, generally you want to say that that's the rule that's going to work.
The same thing, too, with start a business.
We always watch these big specials and they go, this man came up with this invention and he was hopeless and then he double mortgaged his house and maxed out his credit cards and then now he's worth a hundred million.
Well, they don't show you the nine guys who did that and they're now bankrupt.
Right? This guy won the lottery.
Everyone should play the lottery.
Right. So I didn't just quit and say I'm going to be a professional blogger, entertainer, journalist.
I worked and then at half an hour a day I would build up my websites.
I would learn how do you do a WordPress site?
How do you do a blog? How do you do this?
How do you do this? How do you do that?
But I just work. I didn't say, oh, this is what I really want to do.
And then once I did make that $13 and then I had the infrastructure built, I said, oh, you know, I know how to do it now.
I'm going to make a ton of money off of this internet stuff.
And then I went there. But most people go, oh, I'm at work and I feel unfulfilled.
Yeah, it's because it's a job.
People are paying you to do the job because they can make a profit off of you, right?
So yes, you are underpaid.
You are undervalued.
That's the whole point of somebody giving you a job is because they want to reap as much of a financial benefit as they can off your labor.
That's just the nature of the beast.
So no, don't quit your job.
Work on it and then go work on a side thing as you move along.
And then once that side thing becomes viable, then you transition to that.
So there are so many So many views like that.
For example, most men will be happier if they get married a little bit later in life.
Just the reality. Getting married at 25, you're not in your peak as a man.
As a man, you peak in your late 20s, early 30s.
So why not wait until you're at your peak value before you make that big commitment, right?
But then people, I'm in love, and this is a unique thing.
I was like, okay, fine. I'm not going to argue with people who think they're in love.
It just shows the probabilities are you're almost certainly going to be better off if you do wait until you're, say, in your early 30s to get married.
You'll probably have a better relationship.
You'll have a better companion.
The odds will be on your side.
So people have to make their own choices in life, but you've got to realize you have to ask yourself, what is it about me that is special that I'm going to go against this rule that is highly effective and that is most likely going to lead to a good outcome?
You might have a good justification, but just think that one through.
Yeah, don't squander your optimism against the odds because optimism is a pretty important resource to have in life.
Now this one, we're skipping one or two that we've talked about tangentially.
Read fiction like it's non-fiction.
Oh man. So I do these reviews of movies and I do these reviews of stories and so on and people are like, what's this doing in a philosophy show?
Is it because I understand the world runs on stories?
I mean, the left lives in this world where there's these predatory men, and the cops are all killers, and it's real for them.
Like, their cortisol will activate.
It's their worldview.
You can compare it to objective reality, but if they're not willing to do that, it remains their worldview, and it's impenetrable to reason and evidence.
So, this idea that fiction is somehow completely different from this objective world that everyone else lives in, and it's somehow lesser, to me, is nonsense.
sense.
So you wrote, fiction isn't fantasy because characters and their actions represent the author's view of humanity.
A Bonfire of the Vanities, ostensibly the great American novel, read it and tell me if it doesn't sound like a nonfiction work about current affairs.
And you mentioned a couple of other books.
So your relationship to sort of fiction, and also, I just wanted to mention as well, studies have pretty conclusively shown that reading novels is key to developing empathy.
Because novels gives you, it's the only artistic media, movies don't really get it unless you get this monologue, which is pretty rare.
But it allows you to really try on somebody else's life for size.
A novel has the capacity to tell you what someone else is thinking and its relationship to their action, which you never have Direct a view of outside yourself.
And it's even tough to catch yourself in terms of the quicksilver thoughts that move through your mind.
But it's very powerful.
It's very important. I don't like this differentiation between stories and objective reality and this hierarchy where objective reality is so important and stories are just somehow fiction and frivolous.
It's not the way that the world works at all.
Yeah, the way you have to look at it, the way that that's how I sort of explained it was that If I'm writing a fictional book and I create a character protagonist, well, that's based on my view on how characters are going to act, how the world is going to interact.
And there is a non-fictional component.
So I'm making a decision as an author or a writer, as a storyteller, that here is what you would do, actually.
Here is what this person would do.
Well, why? Because that's the way human beings behave or should behave or could behave or something like that.
So it isn't just a frivolous story.
You're not just telling stories. You're talking about structures and narrative structures and character arcs that tend to be universal, and that is the author's perspective on the way people act.
Now, it doesn't mean you accept it as true, because I don't even read nonfiction and accept nonfiction as true.
Right? I just read nonfiction as this is what the person believes to be true.
It is per se true.
Same thing with fiction as I believe it as if, oh, this is, you know, Bonfire of the Bandies, for example, for those who haven't read it, is a great book about Wall Street in the 80s and a man is falsely accused, but because he's a white man, he becomes what they call the great white defendant.
And all the characters in there, if you read it, you would think you were talking about the Duke Lacrosse case.
You would think you were talking about racial relationships today.
And this is a book, again, I think it was in the 80s or maybe the 90s, but it is in a new book.
But it reads just as well today because that is the way racial relationships are now.
That is, the race baiters are still alive and well.
They've been around forever. The identity politics problems are alive and well and are going to go away.
And that's why I always tell people, if you want to understand race in America today, go read Bonfire of the Vanities.
And for God's sakes, don't think that the movie is a substitute because it sure as hell isn't.
All right. Make one big move a year.
So this is something your reincarnation of ambition is something that's quite dizzying to watch.
So you say, in 2017, I started to become a journalist.
In 2016, I moved into films.
In 2015, I published my first book.
Now, a lot of people in 2015 would say, woohoo, book worked.
I'm going to be a writer. But you keep moving to new areas.
And what is the thought process behind that?
The thought process is that whenever you level up, level up, because life is going to level you down eventually.
Down six feet, I think.
Yeah, well, you know, you always, like you said, you don't want to lose your optimism.
You do want to remain optimistic, but you also want to remain realistic.
People go, Cerner, when are you going to slow down?
And I go, oh, trust me.
Life always has something planned for you.
Let's worry about that when life kind of comes at you.
So you always want to rise to the highest level that you possibly can.
You always want to play the game in the major leagues as much as you can.
And why?
Well, because one day you're going to reflect on your life and think, wow, we did all these things.
And you can always go back to chill mode, right?
That's the way, because that's when people go, why are you doing this journalism stuff instead of the mindset?
And I say, well, because...
I will never probably be able to do this again.
This, for me, was a once-in-a-decade opportunity where, sure, I'm going to go report from the White House.
I'm going to break these big stories.
We're obviously at a unique historical time.
And if I want to go back and do mindset stuff, I can go do that in another year or two.
So, people, you've got to realize life is a very special event.
You're not any younger.
You're not going to have any more energy the next day when a big opportunity arises.
Take it. If a big opportunity isn't arising, then make it.
So here's one that I'll try and keep the red short, but it does frustrate me no end when people get down on themselves, because I view it as a fundamentally selfish thing.
To self-attack is fundamentally selfish because you're avoiding your fears by attacking yourself rather than providing value to the world and generally self-attack is an invitation to a pity party which drags people in to try and prop up your self-loathing or your despair or your lack of trust in yourself and so on and it tends to be a very selfish action it's a demand for attention it's a demand for resources which almost never seem to get paid back and it's hard for people to see just how that so when in your stop rejecting yourself this number 21 You say,
people, in my coaching talks, people give me 10 reasons why they can't do something.
All of those reasons are completely made up.
Give the world the opportunity to reject you.
And that, I think, is really important to get people out of this self-doubt or the idea that the self-doubt is something that needs to be fixed by other people in particular.
Yeah. I've told people, I use the example, I've done things that I thought for sure were going to hit and they didn't.
I've done things that I didn't think would ever hit and they did.
And there's this great thing, especially that we right-wing thinkers understand, is there is this great thing, this invisible hand.
There is this market, and this market are other people.
So you don't know what is good until you test it with the market.
You test your ideas with the market, and then you're going to get the pushback from the market.
So I always ask people, why do you think you know so much?
You must be omnipotent.
If you know that you can't do this because it's a surefire way, you're going to fail.
I would not have your level of omnipotence because even today I'm trying new things and getting pushed back from the market and accepted or rejected from the market.
That process is never going to go away.
Oh, the...
This is the greatest thing I've ever done.
People are going to love this. And it's like this massive yawn of indifference.
And it's like, I'll just toss off this little video.
You know, I got a few minutes. And it's like, woohoo!
And it's like, oh, I just, I give up.
And this is what they say in Hollywood.
Other than bend over, they say nobody knows what makes a successful movie.
Otherwise, every movie would be that way.
All right. Affirmation time.
I guess we're going to dip past the Stuart Smalley world in people's minds.
You say, every day say to yourself, my heart is filled with love and overwhelming abundance from the universe.
And that is this fear of abundance, this fear of success.
I don't know if that's people's internalized fear.
Because you'd only have fear of something that you want but thought you couldn't get.
Like, I'm not afraid of going on a ballet audition because I'm not going to be a ballet dancer and I don't care.
So I don't want it. Anxiety about a goal, it's how you know you want it.
Like if there's some girl you really, really want to date, then you're going to feel nervous asking her out because no is going to be painful.
So I don't know this fear of abundance, this fear of success, whether it comes from people internally or whether it's other people's fear, like we don't want you to succeed because that raises the goals for us or that raises the game for us.
But this fear of abundance, this fear of success is really challenging.
And it's one of the great stoppers in human potential and human flourishing in the modern world.
Yeah, because we fear that we might lose it if we have it.
That's why this nihilism that we live under, people are like, oh, I'm above it all.
I'm just going to go do nothing with my life because who cares?
Caring is slavery and everything else.
No, that's just their recognition that they do want more out of life, but they're afraid that they might not get it or they might not get everything they want.
But again, this is the whole paradoxical reasoning that you have to become comfortable with is If you chase what you want, you're going to be happy even if you don't get it.
People go, that can't be possible.
How could that possibly be true?
Well, because you're going to get something else, right?
Like, you're going to get something even if it's not that specific thing.
And then, of course, what you realize is when you get older, I don't think, oh, man, I didn't have everything I wanted at 30.
You forget all the things you never had.
Because once you do eventually make it, even though there's an end point of making it, When you do come, you know, whether you're 70 years old, I would say George R.R. Martin, look at that guy.
He was a middling, no successful author for whatever.
He's 65, Game of Thrones finally hits big.
I bet you he's not thinking about crying about when he was 50 and his failures at 50.
He's thinking, oh man, I made it.
You know, I'm 65 now. This is great.
I'm going to go. And of course, that's why fans aren't getting these books because he's been having so much fun in his life that he doesn't want to Doesn't want to finish them.
So that's what people realize is once you do start searching for what you want and striving for it, even if you don't get that specific thing, you will get something amazing and it'll make it all worthwhile.
Make it the money. Make it the money.
And of course, you know, it goes without saying, but you do mention it without compromising your ethics.
But yeah, people's relationship to money as well.
You know, there is that, you know, more money, more problems kind of thing.
But I mean, I think like you, I've been an entrepreneur and had some money and I've been broke and...
It ain't fun being broke.
It's not fun.
It never leaves your mind.
There's this scarcity mentality.
Do I have enough rice to make it through the winter?
It's pretty nightmarish.
And it's tough to be enthusiastic and happy and positive when you're genuinely worried about how to make rent.
People seem to have a barrier, too.
And it's one thing I really, really hate about the Marxists and the leftists is how much, how much they infect people this idea that money is corruption, that making money is bad, although they're willing to accept their $150,000 for working freaking three or four hours a week sometimes in colleges.
But this idea that going out into the market and providing value to people and getting money somehow compromises you and makes you a bad person and you're Working for the man and you're a wage slave and all that, like that Jim Morrison line, trading your hours for a handful of dimes.
And it's like this contempt for hustle, this contempt for work, and this contempt for providing value really cripples people.
It really cripples people.
It's almost as dangerous as, you know, the all-men-are-patriarchal-rapist stuff that keeps love from forming between men and women.
But this relationship that people have with money is very messed up these days.
Yeah, and that to me, it relates earlier to the whole fit or fat thing.
Broken poor or broken fat, very, very bad way to go and try to fix that.
Objectively speaking, having some money in your pocket and being in good shape is just a better way to go through life.
And I always tell people, I even talk about this in the world of mindset, I go, if you really think money is bad, go make as much money as you can and then give it away.
You have to keep it. You have to keep it.
So, you know, if you think, you know, Mike, you're wrong.
Money is actually really bad.
Go ahead and do it. And then once you have all this money and you realize how bad it is, you can go ahead and just give it all away.
And other people will be quite happy to get the money you want to give to them.
Let's close on failure.
Ooh, let's end on a low note.
And we'll put a link to 40 Principles to Live By on my 40th birthday.
We'll put a link to that below. But let's talk about failure as a whole.
Failure is really paralyzing for people.
It's like they have one ounce of enthusiasm, and if it gets stomped on by the elephant of bad luck or bad planning or bad decisions or bad outcomes, it's like, that's it!
I've got one cast, and if I don't catch a fish, I'm throwing it all!
I'm setting fire to my fishing rod, and I'm just taking my ball, and I'm going home.
This idea that...
Failure is it.
There's high stakes. It's now or never.
It's this or nothing.
You know, like if you had to go to a monastery, if the first girl you asked out said no, then you had to go to a monastery for the rest of your life, you couldn't possibly have any game.
You want things to be important.
You want to care about them, but not so much that you fear the loss, that you fear the catastrophe that arises from not getting what you want.
This is another one of these contradictories.
Want it bad, but not so badly you can't have it.
Yeah, it all goes back to a lot of fairytale thinking that is happily ever after.
There is no happily ever after.
And fortunately, there's also no unhappily ever after.
So you fail.
It's going to happen. That isn't an end state.
That is just a transitory state.
And you can say, I failed, therefore I'm a failure.
Or you can say, I didn't hit my mark here.
And that's fine. I learned a lot of things.
This is preparing me for the next endeavor.
This is preparing me for something greater in life.
And by the way, that applies to success too.
Trump, of all people, even wrote about this in one of his books where he said that The reason he went through, he personally, he'll say he didn't personally plead bankruptcy.
It was his company design. You know, I don't want to get into all that.
But Trump definitely was not who he is today at a certain time.
And that was because he felt like, oh, I made it.
I'm just going to go party and YOLO it.
That doesn't work that way.
So even if you're a success, that isn't an end point.
You have to keep rising and keep aspiring.
Excuse me. And then people, of course, are going to say, But wait a minute.
How can you be successful and want more while being grateful for what you have?
You're saying to have an abundance mindset and a gratitude mindset.
Now you're saying never be happy with what you have.
And again, you know, I tell people we can nuance this stuff to death, but you'll realize that you can simultaneously think, I live an amazing life.
I can't believe this is what I'm doing.
Oh, but there is more.
Out there, let's go get this more too.
You can hold both beliefs simultaneously and It's an error to think that you're ungrateful for what you have simply because you're aspiring to achieve more, to bring more value to the world.
Right. Yeah, you're happy at your child's development, but you'd be unhappy if they just stayed at that development for the rest of their life because that would be pretty bad.
And if you think, like if you end up, let's say you end up with the woman that you love, you're married to her, you end up with the woman that you love, then you should be happy that every prior relationship failed.
Because that's what paved the way for you to be with the woman that you love.
If you end up with the career that you love, then every prior career you have that you bailed on paved the way for that.
So it is really, I think, important.
Now let's, if you could give a pitch, shill away, my brother, give a pitch for Guerrilla Mindset, what people can expect out of the book.
We'll put a link to it below.
I recommend it, of course.
But why should people read it and what are they going to get?
The best pitch I have for people is the meta pitch.
Which is, I'm not some guy who wrote a book on mindset, who had never done anything.
And then I said, come to my mindset seminars and learn about mindset.
And then I become the number one mindset guy by selling you mindset stuff.
I'm the guy who said, oh, here's a book on mindset that I've used and that will work for me and work for you.
But you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to go to the White House and report from the White House.
I'm going to call every fake news journalist out for not calling Antifa violence.
I'm going to report stories other people aren't going to report.
I'm going to bring down a congressman and get new federal legislation passed because it wasn't enough that in the book.
So the results are plain for anybody to see.
Does Gorilla Mindset work?
Well, I live my book.
I'm not in the self-help business, although I do have mindset seminars and people should come to them.
But there's no question that does grow a mindset work?
Well, hey, you go in the White House press room, face down, the hostile enemy, you're the only guy there, and you just tell them all, I think you're all bad people, and I think that you're all fake and horrific, and maintain your composure, not get angry, do it in a way that nobody can say you did anything wrong, because you're completely in control of your thoughts and emotions.
That's what I tell people is if you like the work that I'm doing, the political stuff, then look into the mindset stuff because the journalism stuff didn't happen in a vacuum.
The only way that you can do what I'm doing and play at the level I'm playing at is to have all the mindset stuff in order.
And of course, Gorilla Mindset is a complete guidebook with every chapter on every little component of your life that maybe you need to repair because I'm an introverted guy, right?
So for me, self-talk was the most important chapter.
And other chapters in the book, you know, state or mood, I'm usually pretty mellow anyway.
But the self-talk is what works most effectively for me.
But for other people, maybe if they're more extroverted, they're going to need to worry about or fix or improve other areas of life.
And that's why it's a guidebook to your complete mindset and your complete life.
And it's a short read.
It's an easy read. It's well written.
And I would put out you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
But I hope that the recommendation is strong enough that people should go and read this book.
Mike, thanks so much for your time today.
Thanks, of course, for sharing your thoughts.
People got to follow you on Twitter.
It's one of the most explosive and powerful Twitter accounts in the world.
Twitter.com forward slash Cernovich.
Mike on Medium.
Medium.com forward slash at Cernovich.
Cernovich, and of course, cernovich.com, the new website as well, both checking out.
