On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins us to talk about what it's like to be 35 years old and still be in the same job you were a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s. He also talks about how he almost died at the hands of a man who thought he was a genius, and how he survived a near-death experience in the early days of his career as an assistant in Hollywood. And he talks about the time he was spooked by a man he thought was a co-worker and almost killed him. Joe also tells us about a time he almost got into a fight with his boss and how it almost cost him his job. And, of course, he tells us the story of how he was almost killed by a guy he thought he might be a genius. This episode is a must-listen, if you haven't heard it yet, you should definitely check it out! It's funny, it's weird, and it's a good one, and you should listen to it at least once before you listen to this episode. Enjoy! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'd like to learn more about you, the listeners. Thank you so much for all the support you've been showing us love, support, and support and support us in any way you can. We really appreciate it. We appreciate it! -The Joe Rogans Podcast. Thank you, thank you. -J.R. Experience -Jon Sorrentino and Jon Rogan Thanks, Jon and Jon, Jon, and thank you for being a friend of the show, and we really appreciate all the love and support you're giving us the chance to be a part of this podcast. Jon, Thank you Jon, again and again, again, for being here, again again, and again and more and again. XOXO -Jon and Jon and again - Thank you for listening and again again for being there and again Thank you again, Jon & again, more than you can do it. Cheers, again & again. -Jon, again... thank you, Jon. -- Thank you. -PODCAST Jon & Jon, Again and Again, Again, Thank You, Jon - Thank You. and Again. -SORRY for listening.
00:00:39.000Well, I was, like, successful pretty early in my life, so, like, I was always, like, the kid.
00:00:43.000You know, like, I dropped out of college at 19, and so, and I worked in Hollywood, and so I was always, like, the youngest person in the room by far.
00:00:51.000And so, like, that's, it's not been part of my identity, but I, like, felt it, you know?
00:01:42.000Well, no, so I was working for Robert, and I had the 40 laws of power on my desk because I was working on it, and one of the partners became convinced that I was up to shit.
00:03:03.000And then all of a sudden I hear like footsteps down the hall and it's like his assistant and the assistant is like looking through the door and see.
00:03:10.000And I'm like, oh shit, I hang up the phone.
00:03:52.000I dated a girl when I was like 27 and she was an assistant for an agent and she would wake up in the middle of the night terrified that she fucked something up.
00:04:02.000She would just have these fearful moments.
00:04:05.000She worked 16, 17 hours a day for nothing.
00:04:23.000Just a fucking asshole to everybody who worked under him.
00:04:26.000It's the dumbest system in the entire world because, like, the person who is good at being an assistant, and I was so bad at it, and would put up with it for, like, five or six years is not the person that anyone would then want to be their agent.
00:04:41.000It's, like, filtering out for, like, pencil pushers and, like, nerds and, like, you know, it's the craziest system, uh, And that's why most agents are horrible.
00:04:54.000It's because most people would get up and quit or just not be interested in it at all.
00:05:01.000Because then you abuse, if you ever get to that position where you're an agent and you get an assistant, you're just going to abuse them because you were abused when you were an assistant.
00:05:32.000He was telling me about this famous producer who kept a bedroom in his office where he would take the starlets and he would bang all the starlets.
00:06:09.000But does it in a world where everyone's a piece of shit, like depending upon what, like there's different cultures of different, you know, businesses.
00:06:17.000And when you have a business like that where, you know, there's, one of the weirdest things about Hollywood is that there's literally people that just decide to pick you.
00:06:28.000And if they pick you, your life becomes your wildest dreams.
00:06:33.000You're in the cover of Vogue magazine.
00:06:36.000You're starring in an action movie right next to the biggest A-list celebrities in the world.
00:06:56.000You can see by someone like Amber Heard, she's not a good actress, but if you get into the right spot and you do the right thing and you fucking make the right noises, you can become famous and successful.
00:07:08.000Well, I think any industry that has gatekeepers is inherently susceptible to being corrupted because those people have a certain unearned power.
00:07:17.000And they probably, deep down, know That they don't really do anything and that they're just, like, guessing, you know?
00:07:25.000And there's probably something in that, too, where you're aware of the inherent bankruptcy, like, we don't make anything, we don't do anything, and it probably goes to your head and you need distractions and stuff.
00:07:39.000Well, I think this is an interesting jump-off point to talk about your work and your fascination with stoicism because what you're talking about there is like a truth.
00:07:51.000You're talking about there's a reality to that job.
00:07:54.000It's that these people who are the gatekeepers, there's a lot of people that work in Hollywood that work as executives that are really not talented people and I've known them forever and I've seen them fail upwards I've known them since I've been there.
00:08:09.000It was like 20, 30 years ago, and they're still around.
00:08:12.000And they were retarded then, and they're stupid now.
00:09:18.000I wanted to be a writer, but I got this really good advice from a writer, and he said, writers live interesting lives, so you have to, like, go do stuff.
00:10:21.000And when I first read the Stoics, I was just like, shit, this is it.
00:10:26.000Like, when I read Meditations for the first time, I was 19. I was sitting in my college apartment.
00:10:33.000And I was just like, not only have I never read anything like this, I've never even heard of anything like this.
00:10:38.000Because you have the most powerful man in the world writing notes to himself that he never thinks are going to be published.
00:10:44.000Like pretty much every other book ever written was like a writer writing to an audience.
00:10:51.000And Meditations was never intended to be published.
00:10:54.000He'd probably be mortified that we even have it.
00:10:57.000And so it was just a kind of philosophy and a way of thinking that I hadn't heard in any school, you know, in any class from any adult in my life.
00:11:07.000And I was like, I want to tell people about this.
00:11:12.000Marcus Aurelius, one of the more interesting things about the stuff that he writes is how relevant it is today.
00:11:19.000When you read it, you wouldn't imagine that this is being written by a man.
00:12:05.000Well, it does depend on the translation, right?
00:12:07.000Because, like, if you are reading, and people do this, and I'll recommend Marcus to read this, and they'll just get what's free on the internet or whatever.
00:12:14.000If you're reading a translation from the 1850s or the 1600s, it's going to be in Shakespearean English.
00:13:53.000But I think your point about how it feels timeless, that actually does feel like a thing I've heard comedians say, which is that the specific is universal.
00:14:03.000I don't think he was trying to talk to the audience.
00:14:06.000I think he was so unflinchingly honest with himself that he was touching something universally human.
00:14:16.000Because we should not be able to relate to his experience at all.
00:14:21.000There is literally a cult of the emperor that worshipped the emperor and their spouse as living deities.
00:14:27.000And he controlled the largest army in the world.
00:14:32.000He could kill or murder or torture or exile anyone he wanted.
00:14:39.000People cheered him as he walked in the streets.
00:14:42.000There's no way we should be able to be like, this passage was talking about struggling to get out of bed in the morning and you want to huddle under the warm covers.
00:14:53.000Because I guess people are people no matter where you get in life.
00:14:57.000People are people and not everyone gives in to the temptations of being in that position.
00:15:05.000And in his case, I think it made him more apt to reflect upon his thoughts and find the source of why he believed what he believed and why he thought what he thought.
00:15:20.000Yeah, he says in meditations, he says, be careful not to be Caesarified.
00:15:26.000Because the emperor wore a purple cloak.
00:15:29.000And purple, now we're just like, the color purple.
00:15:33.000To get purple, it was this complicated process of different merchants.
00:15:38.000Actually, the founder of stoicism was a merchant in Tyrion purple.
00:15:42.000Slaves would smash up sea slugs or sea snails, dry them on rocks, and this dust would eventually become the source of purple.
00:15:52.000And he's like, don't be stained purple.
00:15:55.000So when he becomes emperor, he's like, this will change you if you're not careful, and you have to actively work to make sure that doesn't happen.
00:18:25.000And Hadrian realizes he's too young to name him emperor.
00:18:30.000So he selects a man named Antoninus Pius, who's the great politician of the time, and makes him emperor on condition that he adopt Marcus Aurelius.
00:18:41.000So Marcus, and then the thinking was Antoninus Pius would live for like five years and then Marcus would be king.
00:18:49.000And in fact, he lives for like 19 years.
00:18:53.000So Marcus has like a 20 year apprenticeship in being the emperor.
00:20:51.000So that's one of the sort of, not rationalizations, but if you're like, how does it go so wrong that this great man leaves the empire to his son?
00:22:04.000So the precedent was, like, you can't have too many Caesars.
00:22:09.000Like, you can't have more than one viable heir.
00:22:15.000And Marcus, when he's Antoninus' favorite, Antoninus preps him, he ascends to the throne, the first thing Marcus does is he names his brother Lucius Ferris co-emperor, which has not only never happened basically before Orsons,
00:22:36.000The Republic of Rome, before it becomes a monarchy, is led by two consuls, like two elected presidents who served together as a check against power.
00:22:47.000So Marcus, by naming, he can't put it back to a republic, which is the plot of Gladiator.
00:23:48.000And then the suspicion is that he catches it at the end, realizes he has it, has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to his son, sets in motion a series of advisors who should lead his son, and then his son promptly gets rid of all of them and goes bad.
00:24:07.000So how does a man like that, who's so introspective and so thoughtful, particularly for the times, how does a man like that have a son that's such a piece of shit?
00:24:27.000The other argument, the more likely one, is like most great men, and we're talking about history, so it's mostly great men, but again, Queen Elizabeth has crappy kids.
00:24:57.000I think growing up with that amount of wealth and that amount of power that your mind develops in this privileged position that Where you never have to struggle, you never have to develop character,
00:25:13.000and you always feel entitled to everything.
00:26:15.000Well, they're almost all drug addicts.
00:26:17.000They're almost all completely wrecked.
00:26:19.000Their personalities never fully develop.
00:26:22.000They develop under this weird position where everyone loves them.
00:26:28.000From the time they're little, and they get exorbitant amounts of attention that are completely unearned, then they never have to develop character under adversity.
00:28:24.000They're all fucked in one way or another.
00:28:26.000They're all like, I'm sober now or I'm going to do this now or I'm going to do that.
00:28:30.000There's never like this sense of calm and discipline and being centered and there's always like this state of change and improvement.
00:28:41.000Like they're always like in this weird place where they don't feel fully centered or they're always like falling over to the left or falling over to the right.
00:29:49.000My kids are involved with a lot of athletics because I think people have this faulty position on athletics that don't participate in them and they think of athletics being something that is for the body.
00:30:29.000But so is the ability to perform under pressure.
00:30:32.000So is the ability to deal with a loss and sort of reestablish yourself and come back feeling better.
00:30:41.000The feeling that you get of the shame of loss is very valuable and that's a mental thing.
00:30:47.000And there's mental sort of challenges that you acquire from sports that I don't think are available in any other way.
00:30:56.000I think you get different mental challenges and there's different lessons that can be learned from academic pursuits.
00:31:05.000But there's mental challenges that you only get from athletic pursuits.
00:31:10.000You only get when you have to force your body to keep going even though your mind is exhausted, your body is exhausted, and your will is leaving you, and there's parts of you that are telling you to quit.
00:31:25.000And you have to learn how to manage that, and that is a mental thing.
00:31:29.000But it's a mental thing in a different way than calculus is.
00:31:32.000It's a mental thing in a different way than learning languages.
00:31:38.000I think one of the things I think a lot about and that I dislike, like, if I was like, describe a philosopher, he'd be like, university professor, turtleneck, like, tweed, you know, a jacket with pads on it or whatever.
00:32:24.000In America, unfortunately, there's this sort of intellectual elitism.
00:32:30.000There's this mindset that some very smart people have because they're very good at certain intellectual pursuits and they look down upon pursuits that are physical in nature because of this sort of prejudice.
00:32:47.000I think it's also like a fear of encountering something that you're not good at or something that's going to humiliate you and something that's going to make you feel bad.
00:32:57.000It maybe came from gym class, maybe came from being forced to participate in sports when they were younger and they didn't enjoy it.
00:33:04.000So they have this thing in their head that there's no value there.
00:34:54.000It's how the mind understands how to manage difficult situations.
00:35:00.000Well, and I think it's a transferable skill.
00:35:02.000So, like, you're doing it in the cold plunge or running or fighting or whatever.
00:35:06.000And then when you're, like, when I'm working on a book and books are hard, you know, and they're, like, halfway through, I'm like, this isn't coming together.
00:35:26.000Like, you have to build that – because you're going to go through hard things in life, and you want to have cultivated a sense of, like, not quitting when things are hard.
00:36:17.000So he has this ability to just stay in this like steady state.
00:36:21.000So when he's at the top of a mountain and there's a giant bugling bull that's like 50 yards away, he can center his pin right on that bull's vitals and release a perfect arrow every time because he's so good at managing uncomfortable states.
00:37:00.000Mark Aurelius talks about, he says, be like the rock or the cliff that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around.
00:37:08.000I think when you've been in crazy stuff or you've exposed yourself or you've endured things, you just realize that I've got to slow this down, I've got to center myself, and that being excited is not a positive contributor to this situation.
00:37:51.000I think you are better off than someone who has never encountered something difficult.
00:37:56.000But I think there's a reason why fighters take warm-up fights, and fighters when they're active, when they fight all the time, they fight better.
00:38:05.000When I was competing, I would be at my best if I had just fought like a week ago.
00:38:10.000Like if I fought a week ago, I was like, I know this experience.
00:38:25.000And I think there's something to forcing the brain, forcing the mind into these difficult positions, into these difficult situations, so that the mind gets accustomed to that feeling.
00:38:47.000Well, I try to design my life around cultivating slash protecting that feeling.
00:38:54.000So I know people, they get up, and then the first thing they do in the morning is they're just sucked into social media or the phone, right?
00:39:02.000And then they're already riled up from before their feet have even touched the floor.
00:39:08.000They're like, can you believe so-and-so said this?
00:39:36.000And he's a man who has a bunch of clients, and if a client emails him, hey, my foot's numb, and I can't see it on my left eye, there's this fucking...
00:43:08.000Like, when, like, maybe, like, if you go back To the beginning of social media, if someone would say something mean to me, I'd be like, what is this?
00:43:46.000But they can say something and just throw it out there and it reaches you and it causes emotional pain to people.
00:43:53.000And they know it does, but they feel disconnected from it.
00:43:56.000And so it takes a long time for someone to understand what that is and how this is A negative thing that you really probably shouldn't have in your life.
00:44:41.000Take a little bit of it, you develop a tolerance, but if you get too much of it, it's gonna fucking kill you.
00:44:47.000Yeah, it's like if this is the way of the world and this is how things are, to totally step back from it, pretend it doesn't exist, live in a fantasy world, there's kind of a fragility to that.
00:45:00.000It's like you haven't been exposed to germs, so your immune system is now more vulnerable.
00:46:29.000The one that I dislike the most is like when a dump truck or something goes through an intersection in New York and the back kind of lifts up and then it...
00:47:34.000But the city wouldn't function if you thought about it.
00:47:37.000And so you have to turn off that part of your brain.
00:47:40.000I think that's also a problem with social media.
00:47:42.000You know, I've discussed this many times that I just don't think we're supposed to absorb the problems of seven point whatever billion people.
00:48:05.000It's not remotely possible for you to take in all of the violent and sad moments that happen all throughout the day in the whole planet Earth.
00:48:58.000I think this is a very recent thing, right?
00:49:03.000Social media has only existed for the last 13 or 14 years as we know it.
00:49:07.000And I think we're going to get to a point where the mind has to adapt to deal with the volume of information that comes in and the way we receive it.
00:49:19.000And I think along the way, there's going to be some sort of a technological intervention.
00:49:26.000And it's probably going to be something like Neuralink.
00:49:28.000And we're going to accept it because it makes the management of all this data more easy.
00:49:34.000Yeah, I don't know anything about that.
00:49:37.000Neuralink is an idea that Elon has that is initially going to be used for people that have spinal cord injuries and it's going to change the way your brain communicates with all your muscle tissue.
00:49:48.000So you're going to be able to move your body even with spinal cord issues.
00:49:52.000It's going to be fantastic for people that have been paralyzed.
00:49:54.000They'll regain use of their body because instead of the spinal cord being the conduit for all the information and all the signals that you're sending, there's going to be an electronic interface.
00:50:07.000And this electronic interface will, I think it will initially mimic What the mind does with the spinal column and then ultimately be far superior.
00:50:20.000And then one of his things that he said that always freaks me out, he said, we're going to be able to talk without words.
00:50:27.000I think there's going to be an information, a transfer of information, hopefully, that surpasses language, meaning that there'll be some way of universally expressing information, where you don't have to,
00:50:43.000like, you know, you don't have to write it in Greek, you don't have to write it in Latin, it'll come out as intent.
00:50:50.000Yeah, I know having moved here, one of the really beneficial things was that I know, but I don't see that regularly, people who do what I do.
00:51:01.000So it turns off kind of a competitive part of my brain, where I just get to be me and do what I want to do and focus on what I think is cool and what I want to create.
00:51:11.000There's not that keeping up with the Joneses part that can be a powerful driver of your career, but also a source of Unhappiness?
00:52:26.000Like, you're looking for reasons why your life sucks when you're in one of the best positions that a person could ever be in in your line of work.
00:52:34.000You're literally on a successful television show.
00:52:49.000Yeah, that's one of the things that Stokes say is, like, you would be jealous if you didn't have what you had and someone else did, you would be jealous of that person.
00:53:07.000But I think it's also, if good work comes from being present, it's preventing your ability from actually being great on the television show that you're on.
00:53:16.000Because you're spending energy out in the world on stuff that doesn't matter instead of being like, I'm going to be the best that I can be in the thing that I am.
00:53:25.000If you are constantly dwelling on other people's opinions, if you're constantly dwelling on other people's success, it will 100% diminish your capability of doing good work.
00:53:35.000There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it, because the mind has a certain amount of bandwidth.
00:53:40.000And the way I always express this when I talk to people about it, I go, look at it like a number.
00:53:45.000If you had 100 bandwidth, like if your bandwidth was 100, and then someone said something mean to you on Twitter, and you read that and responded, and you're going back and forth, now how much do you have?
00:54:47.000It's such a normal thing to do, to, you know, read some mean quote that someone said about you, or read an article that someone wrote that pisses you off.
00:54:59.000Or, you know, I know friends, I have friends that I'm not close with, but I'm close enough to them that I pay attention to them, and their career is a disaster.
00:55:11.000But when I go onto their Twitter page, they're so deeply involved in politics, like massively, where they're quoting spending bills that I don't even know, and they're talking about what the problem with these bills are.
00:55:24.000I'm like, if you spend a fraction of your life Paying attention to your own career and doing what you actually love doing instead of focusing on this.
00:55:37.000You're focusing on this because you feel like this is something that you can get involved with mentally where the burden of performance is not on you.
00:57:16.000And have you done the work on your own self?
00:57:18.000Because if you have not, you're going to look for these struggles in other places because you're uncomfortable dealing with your own personal struggles.
00:58:18.000How do we know we're not living in a computer simulation?
00:58:20.000Which is fascinating, but first we should probably focus on what is in our control and what is not in our control.
00:58:27.000Once you've mastered that, think about all the big questions you want.
00:58:30.000Right, and how does the mind handle adversity?
00:58:33.000How does the mind handle difficult situations?
00:58:35.000And the knowledge that if you force difficult situations into your life that you can control, like rigorous exercise, like meditation, like sauna and cold plunge, there's many different things you can do, like writing, like sitting down and forcing yourself to do work.
00:58:52.000That will free your mind in so many ways and allow you to have a philosophy or at least a philosophical perspective that's based on how you actually think, not based on overcompensating for deficits,
00:59:09.000not based on trying to pile dirt on the problems that you've created.
00:59:16.000Yeah, it forces you to wrestle with yourself and your shit.
01:00:00.000Television, the same way we talk about social media today, and he compares television to the way they talked about the printing press.
01:00:08.000When the printing press was first made available, a lot of people thought it was a disaster and that really the written word on a piece of paper, in a book, like a written book, was the way to go.
01:00:23.000And this printing press was some cheap, easy cop-out that was going to make people stupid.
01:00:29.000Well, I love him using Marcellus to death.
01:00:31.000There's another book called The Image by Daniel Borsten, which was written in the 60s, and he was talking about this thing called pseudo-events.
01:00:38.000Like, a press conference is a pseudo-event.
01:00:41.000He was like, it exists for no other reason but to get media attention.
01:00:45.000That's why they do a weigh-in in a fight, right?
01:00:49.000Like, so cameras will be there, maybe something will happen, and then we'll get more attention, right?
01:00:55.000So he's talking about how much of what we respond to, even then, It was not real, but things that were made for the media to suck our attention away.
01:01:05.000And then, you go back even further, there's another book called The Brass Check, which was written in, I don't know, 1910, 1912, 1930. Anyways, Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle, you know The Jungle, the expose of the meatpacking industry?
01:01:18.000He wrote an expose of the media industry in, like, the 1910s about how Almost all the same things that were happening then.
01:02:14.000Yeah, they told people to go home for dinner and come back for four more hours.
01:02:17.000And so they would make these agreements like this man would speak for an hour and a half, and then he would have a rebuttal for a half an hour, and then he'd have his own speech for an hour, and then the other guy would rebuttal.
01:02:27.000And it's like they had these attention spans that it was based possibly on that there was no TikTok.
01:02:38.000There was no distractions, no real, like the kind of media that we have available, the touch of our fingertips just did not exist back then.
01:03:20.000Language in a sense that you had to be able to communicate things in an eloquent and sophisticated way because it was part of being a fully formed, grown adult.
01:03:29.000Well, the thing is we don't always think of things as technology because when you think of technology, you think of tech, right?
01:04:17.000So it's good medium versus bad medium.
01:04:21.000The only recent medium that I think is somewhat positive, it's not totally positive, but podcasting is a medium that I think generally extends out.
01:04:43.000Podcasting, I think, is better than most of the other online tech-focused mediums.
01:04:49.000But I think what Postman's point is, is you have to think about the incentives or the language that a medium is built around.
01:04:57.000And then you have to ask yourself, does that make people smarter or dumber?
01:05:01.000And a lot of these mediums inherently make us dumber, or at least they make it harder to get to truth.
01:05:08.000And it's interesting with podcasting how one of the things that happens is that you take social media, which is inherently a short attention span platform, and then people will take out of context clips of podcasts and then insert them into their world of outrage farming.
01:05:32.000And they'll instead of like looking at a conversation in terms of the entire three plus hour conversation They'll find a sentence from someone may have misspoken or a disagreement that someone might have had and they'll Force it into their world and then attack it with also short attention span non sequitur short little 140 280 word sentences or letter sentences Well,
01:05:59.000I think Twitter broke a lot of people's brains.
01:06:01.000You think about what a journalist was 20 years ago.
01:06:05.000They were someone who thought long form, so a couple thousand words.
01:06:09.000They thought not the day's news cycle usually, but they might be working on an investigation or a piece over a somewhat long period of time.
01:06:20.000It would be edited, it would be fact-checked, etc.
01:06:23.000It was supposed to be objective, so you had to consider multiple perspectives.
01:06:27.000Now you contrast that with Twitter, which is like driven primarily by journalists, right?
01:06:32.000And they're like, throw all that out and think about the world In 240 characters.
01:06:42.000But you could have like Twitter threads where you can have one thing and then you have a second comment on a third and fourth and people do that and they do get coherent points out.
01:06:52.000But nothing is—the most viral is a singular tweet, right?
01:06:56.000And you're not like, hey, it's pretty complicated.
01:06:59.000There's a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
01:07:01.000You're like, screw this person, or this is evil, or this is the worst thing I've ever seen, right?
01:07:07.000It inherently—Postman, I think, talks about this really—it is inherently driven by the demands of that medium.
01:08:58.000Because I was talking about media manipulation and I was saying the primary manipulators of media are not just bad people like dictators or marketers or whatever.
01:09:08.000Journalists themselves are inherently manipulative.
01:09:13.000You would never want a reporter to write a story about a company they own stock in, because that would be a conflict of interest, potentially.
01:09:22.000Or if they were shorting the stock, that would make them write negatively.
01:09:25.000If they were long, the stock would make them write positive.
01:09:28.000But what happens when the journalist is compensated, or at least evaluated, based on the number of views that that piece gets?
01:12:56.000Well, the reason that fundamentally was, and Upton DeClaire was talking about this in the 1910s, whenever that was, he was saying that, okay, when the newsboys are selling the paper, like at the street corner, it's a similar competition, right?
01:13:12.000So when we think of yellow journalism, it was, you know, extra, extra read all about it.
01:13:16.000So you had, let's say there's 50 newspapers in New York City, and you get off a train at Grand Central, and there's newsboys for all of them.
01:13:24.000They have to have the most salacious headline or breaking story that day to get you to buy it.
01:13:29.000But then as the 20s, as we got into the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, the newspapers stopped being sold one-off at newsstands, for the most part, and most people subscribed.
01:13:43.000We'd say, I take the New York Times, or I take the Washington Post.
01:14:26.000I know you don't really think about the audience too much, but your point is you have a fan base that you are making stuff for as opposed to a thing you are trying to sell and shout over everyone else to dominate the news cycle that day.
01:14:40.000That's an interesting point because that was one of the things that actually came up when I first came over to Spotify.
01:14:46.000The first week of Spotify shows, they're like, who's the guest gonna be?
01:15:56.000He wound up in Russia, because he was in the Arctic, in Siberia, during the time where Russia invaded Ukraine, just coincidentally, and then they thought he was a spy, so they arrested him, and he's in jail in Russia for a month?
01:17:35.000I like Substacks that way, the idea that you're writing for an audience, and ideally that audience is paying you, so you're not doing this sort of virally thing.
01:17:44.000I think the only downside, the only risk can be, do you get in a place where, I'm not saying you are, but some people are, where you're like, if I tell these people what they don't want to hear, that costs me money.
01:17:57.000I think the big risk today is someone like Substack decides to disempower you and to take away your platform, and that's a real issue.
01:18:06.000I mean, I know people that have been banned from PayPal.
01:18:09.000I know people that can't use PayPal anymore.
01:18:12.000I know people that have been kicked off of YouTube.
01:18:16.000I know a lot of people where things have happened where someone has decided that they're going to censor this person's positions on things.
01:18:25.000But they call this audience capture, though, like where you're – because these people are paying you, because that's your audience, you're not necessarily thinking about what's true.
01:18:36.000You're thinking about what they want to hear.
01:20:10.000You can talk from a pure left-wing progressive perspective and attack everyone as being far-right or Nazis, and you can get a lot of money that way.
01:20:26.000It's not good for you intellectually, because...
01:20:29.000You're not going to be examining things from a purely objective perspective.
01:20:32.000You're not going to look at your own flaws in your own thinking and the way you formulate ideas and go, hmm, why do I think like that?
01:20:39.000You're not going to do that if you're captured by the progressives or captured by the Republicans.
01:20:46.000The people that get locked into that, it's like, man, and when they transition, like if someone transitions, it's very similar.
01:20:53.000The word transition has been captured right by transgender today, but it's kind of similar because if you go male to female, you're most likely not going back.
01:21:24.000They talk about one issue and then that issue gets so much attention and then it's like, like magic, they suddenly also have the same right wing opinion.
01:21:34.000And you're like, yeah, because you're not going to be the one guy who has one out-of-step opinion and then stay in this group.
01:21:41.000You stepped out in the middle into no man's land, and now these people don't want you anymore.
01:21:46.000So you're like, I might as well go over here.
01:21:48.000But it's only if you choose to align yourself with a very specific ideology.
01:21:54.000If you don't do that, you can have opinions like...
01:21:59.000I mean, I have a lot of opinions that are on both sides, and I think most people do.
01:22:03.000I think most people have conservative as well as, like I'm very socially liberal, like about as socially liberal as you can get.
01:22:13.000But more and more as I get older, I start looking at things from a perspective of being a pragmatist, and I start looking at things, and instead of looking at what do I hope people will do, If you give them free money and if you give them free education,
01:22:32.000if you give them free this and free that and take care of them, I start going, well, what does that do to the psyche?
01:22:40.000If everyone in this country, let's imagine a world where everyone in this country gets $50,000 a year, everyone, how much less productive would we be?
01:23:16.000And also, how could you provide- A service or whether it's art or something that other people are going to enjoy and appreciate and that could elevate you past the middle class,
01:23:32.000past making $50,000 a year into becoming affluent.
01:23:38.000But wouldn't that be nice if you didn't have to struggle and spend your resources thinking about how am I going to feed myself?
01:23:46.000And instead, let me write the best book I can write.
01:24:40.000There's a lot that's attached to poverty that's horrific.
01:24:43.000However, it is an incredible motivator to get people to to get moving and to do something and Desperation much like loss and humiliation are great motivators to make you work harder to be better at whatever thing you were attempting to do that failed There's something about being poor that forces people into this feeling this this hunger that causes Greatness in
01:25:13.000so many human beings, so many artists, so many great musicians, so many great comedians, and so many great people that have accomplished amazing things came out of nothing.
01:25:24.000And there's this inherent hunger And this desire to be someone, to be something that creates greatness, that gets recognized by so many people and enriches so many people's lives.
01:25:37.000If you think about how many hip-hop artists who are so poor became so rich and inspired so many people with their music.
01:25:47.000How many people who wrote books have come out of utter poverty And through the struggle and pain of their existence, it gave life to their words in a way that you're just not going to get sleeping on silk sheets.
01:26:03.000Yeah, but are you sleeping on silk sheets making 50 grand a year?
01:26:41.000It is a motivator that is unlike anything else.
01:26:45.000The pain and the discomfort of poverty and of feeling like a failure or feeling like a nothing is an insane vehicle for your human potential.
01:27:02.000It can push you if you get on it and ride it.
01:27:09.000I mean, it causes so many people to become drug addicts and so many people to become criminals because they're desperate and they're poor and they feel like the world has abandoned them.
01:27:18.000You know that quote, like, if you aren't liberal when you're young, you have no heart, and then if you're not a conservative when you're older, you have no brain?
01:27:27.000There's probably a truth to that, but I also really hate that expression because it sort of means you're supposed to care less about people or think less with your heart as you get older, which strikes me as kind of one of the problems in the world.
01:29:13.000Okay, there's people out there that don't have anything.
01:29:14.000And I don't even think most of these people saying that, like, you just got to put your nose to the grindstone and get to work.
01:29:21.000You don't even understand where these people are starting from.
01:29:24.000And if you're these kids living in Brooklyn, walk around sucker punching people in the street and stealing money from them, Like your morality is so fucked.
01:29:34.000It would take so many mushrooms and so many psychedelic trips and so much therapy and so just to try to realign you with good and love.
01:29:44.000So this is like the liberal part of me.
01:29:49.000The liberal part of me feels terrible for the guy who got killed but also feels terrible for these boys That sucker punched this guy because in my mind, I think if I lived their life, I would be them.
01:30:03.000If I was in that situation of dire poverty and probably a lot of emotional and physical abuse, but if you're accustomed to just walking up to someone and punching them, you've probably been punched.
01:30:17.000And you probably have like deep anger towards society and civilization and you've probably been conditioned to think that you you deserve this and that you got to go get what's yours It's a horrible failure on all of our parts so even though like I might have some conservative ideas.
01:31:29.000So many people have been trapped in it for so long.
01:31:32.000And there's been decades upon decades of these places There's multiple ones in this country that have been completely ignored by this country that supposedly wants everything to work out better.
01:31:43.000Well, if you want something to work out better, you've got to look at the people that are in the very worst starting position that's available in the United States of America and change that.
01:31:57.000There's a really good book, and I read it not that long ago.
01:32:01.000It's basically about people who, because of the financial crisis and other stuff, it's like old people who lost their houses, and so now they live in vans or campers, and they just drive around the country working at different theme parks or Amazon seasonal warehouses.
01:32:21.000These companies recruit those people because they're like, old people work hard.
01:32:50.000And I realized that I was doing that because if it was their fault, then it wouldn't have to make me sad, and I wouldn't have to do anything or change any of my habits or viewpoints.
01:33:04.000And then you're like, no, the system failed these people.
01:33:07.000These people have worked their whole lives.
01:33:09.000Maybe they messed up once, they got addicted to alcohol, or they went through a divorce, or they got fired from one...
01:33:17.000The system failed them in some way because if you work your whole life, you shouldn't end up in a van down by the river.
01:33:25.000These aren't people addicted to crack on the side of the street.
01:33:29.000These are people who, if you saw on the street, you wouldn't know that they live in a camper.
01:33:37.000I think the idea that the system has failed huge amounts of people And that you can't individually hold someone responsible for something that is a collective failing.
01:33:52.000And many of these people have not had access to anybody who thinks outside of the box.
01:33:59.000The access that they have to other people are the people that live in their small community that are also troubled by the same problems that they are.
01:34:56.000So you could go to Jamie, and Jamie could prescribe you the pills, and then you could come to my office, and I would prescribe you the pills, and people would do that, and they would go to 10, 15 different doctors, and they had it set up that way, specifically to make the maximum amount of profit.
01:35:10.000So they knew that they were doing this, and then these people would take these pills, they'd have a trunk full of them, and they'd drive them up through Kentucky, and that's the OxyContin Express.
01:35:19.000Yeah, and then we're like, that person lives in a camper park because they were a drug addict, as if they weren't exploited and basically like their humanity extracted out of them by these doctors and these multi-billion dollar conglomerates that they're doing fine.
01:35:38.000Well, you know, the people that are running it, it's a side effect.
01:35:41.000These fucking people, if they weren't hooked on drugs, they'd be hooked on something else.
01:36:04.000But if that same four-year-old grew up with, like, a really healthy person who lives in an upper-middle-class suburb and spends time going over the homework with the kids and takes them to practice and gets them involved in sports and, you know, maybe exposes them to some activity that will eventually be their career,
01:36:22.000that person could be a functioning, thriving member of society and be a benefit to everybody.
01:36:27.000It's really in where you fucking start from.
01:36:30.000And this is why the whole If you are young and you're not a liberal, then you have no soul.
01:36:37.000But if you're old and you're not a conservative, you have no mind, doesn't work with me.
01:36:41.000Because I'm forced to look at the reality of the situation.
01:36:44.000I didn't have the best childhood, but I had food.
01:36:57.000It was enough bad to make me motivated.
01:37:01.000But it ain't shit compared to what someone who lives in Appalachia, who lives in a fucking trailer park, whose whole family is a bunch of drug addicts and criminals.
01:37:10.000There's people in this world that are fucked.
01:37:14.000Their starting block is miles from yours.
01:37:20.000I think about that even with the student loan thing, which I'm a dropout, so I don't have any student debt, so I don't have super strong opinions on whether it should be forgiven or not.
01:37:28.000But you think about how exploitative and extractive that system is, where colleges were like, oh, you're 18, you can't even legally drink, but sign this contract to pay $70,000 a year for your, you know,
01:37:44.000insert obscure degree that has no viable job prospects.
01:38:10.000The reason they didn't buy a house like I did when I was in my mid-20s is because they have a house that they're carrying around on a bank balance.
01:38:26.000Why do they go get a job on Wall Street or whatever?
01:38:29.000It's because they have to pay back this obscene debt.
01:38:32.000Meanwhile, the college is just hiring more and more bureaucrats and administrators and putting in a fucking lazy river and, you know, all this nonsense.
01:38:41.000And this is coming off the backs of a generation of people who were misled or outright conned into a thing that, you know, is totally unjustifiable.
01:39:02.000I read a story about the prevalence of people who are getting their Social Security checks docked because they owe student loans.
01:39:13.000Can you imagine carrying that your whole life?
01:39:15.000And you have a piece of paper to show for it.
01:39:18.000And you're at the end of your life, and this is your subsistence income.
01:39:21.000Your subsistence income is reduced because of a debt that you can never get rid of that didn't serve you, obviously, because you don't have any money.
01:39:30.000If someone sells you a house that you paid too much for, filled termites or whatever, you would get a bad deal on a house.
01:39:39.000You'll take a bath on it, but you can just walk away.
01:39:42.000If you got conned into some for-profit school or they over-promised that, hey, this is what you'll make if you become a physical therapist, you get your master's in this or whatever, You have no recourse.
01:39:57.000And those people in their middle class houses or bigger, the people that profited from that money.
01:40:04.000So people sometimes say this about me.
01:40:06.000They're like, oh, you're profiting from philosophy because I sell my books and stuff that I'm profiting from it.
01:40:12.000And I go, you think this college professor who has job security for life paid for by the U.S. government, subsidized by the U.S. government, meanwhile is charging students $50,000, $60,000 a year for the courses,
01:40:58.000You're getting paid for work, and if you put together a good book That is your effort, and you will profit from that because people enjoy it.
01:41:38.000But the system is inherently exploitative and extractive.
01:41:43.000Against people at their absolute, and not their most vulnerable, but vulnerable people who don't understand that they're signing away their financial freedom or the choices they can make as far as their careers goes for their entire life because you'll never be able to get out of this.
01:41:59.000Yeah, and the thing is, too, that information is available.
01:42:05.000It's like that scene in Good Will Hunting, where he talks about going to the library, like, you could learn all this from the library, you don't have to spend all this money on education.
01:42:48.000You probably would have to have some sort of a degree to qualify you for something like that.
01:42:52.000But for just general education in terms of elevating your intelligence or elevating the information that you possess, that's readily available.
01:43:01.000When you think about probably what Harvard cost when that movie came out versus what it is now, I bet it's doubled or tripled.
01:43:08.000I remember when my son was born, someone told us that there's a thing in Texas where if you want to send them to UT, you can prepay for their education now.
01:43:19.000But the bet there is that, let's say it's 200 grand, that 200 grand compounded in the stock market for 18 years will be less Yes.
01:43:32.000Will be less than just the natural increase in tuition over 18 years, which is obscene.
01:43:38.000They are implying that they plan to beat the stock market compounded every year with their tuition increases.
01:45:41.000It's like whoever the poor immigrants are that are scratching, clawing, yeah, those are the people that have the most hunger and the most anger.
01:45:50.000And unfortunately, they've probably experienced the most physical abuse, which is a significant factor in your ability to dish out punishment.
01:46:00.000Yeah, because if they're your kids and you could choose, you want them to play lacrosse or something where they have the most upside but the least downside.
01:46:23.000Because, you know, I don't follow football, but I watch it occasionally.
01:46:27.000And when I watch those giant super athletes just running full clip and slamming into each other, that is just car accident after car accident.
01:46:37.000And then you've got to take into account all the ones that happened in high school, all the ones that happened in college.
01:46:41.000And then by the time they get to the NFL, they probably are already severely mentally compromised.
01:46:48.000They probably, like, there's a number.
01:46:59.000Yeah, CTE. And they did it from, they measured from children playing Pop Warner football all the way up into the NFL. And they found an astounding number of people at every step of the way exhibited symptoms of CTE. It's a sport where you...
01:47:20.000I know fighters that don't have, like, visible CTE, and they're really good fighters.
01:47:27.000The Journal of American Medical Association found CTE in 99% of brains obtained from the National Football League players, as well as 91% of college football players and 21% of high school football players.
01:48:43.000Which, one of the reasons why I stopped, and I stopped when I was young, when I was in my early 20s, because I knew that I was compromising my ability to think.
01:48:58.000When I see it now in friends, and I see it in people that I care about, and I've seen all that they've gone through, and I know what's ahead of them, I get terrified for them.
01:49:07.000And I try to sound the alarms, and when anybody's thinking, like, man, I don't know how much longer I'm gonna be able to do this, get out now.
01:49:44.000I mean, there might be some therapies that come along in the future, but right now, from what I'm aware of, I don't know of anything that makes me comfortable saying, like, you're going to be fine.
01:50:19.000If you choose to spend a good portion of your life living the wildest, most dangerous, and extreme way Outside of war and law enforcement and firefighting and being an EMT or something like that,
01:50:38.000being a professional fighter is one of the craziest fucking things you could do with your brain and your body.
01:50:45.000You're literally playing a game of, I'm trying to steal your health.
01:51:27.000Because ultimately you know that the end product is so entertaining.
01:51:31.000If you watch an incredible, incredible fight, it is so entertaining that the joy that you bring to people.
01:51:37.000When those guys, like if Michael Chandler is sitting on top of the octagon cage with his arms up in the air and the whole arena is like, yeah!
01:51:46.000And then millions of people around the world are watching that and they're feeling the same like, wow!
01:51:54.000You're literally providing an endorphin rush to millions of people.
01:51:58.000And you're doing so at the cost of your own health.
01:52:04.000You're doing so where you're compromising your lifestyle to dedicate yourself to the Spartan existence, where all you're doing is training and eating clean and resting right and going through all of the recovery modalities.
01:52:48.000I use the example of Michael Chandler.
01:52:50.000I don't really know about Michael's background in terms of how he grew up, but I knew he was a very high-level wrestler in college, and generally that means he's got an education, and he chose.
01:53:02.000He's a competitor, so he chose to fight.
01:53:04.000A lot of people just come from Conor McGregor.
01:53:08.000Conor McGregor, who's a great fighter, came from poverty.
01:53:12.000There's other guys that have come from various levels of struggle, but ultimately were compelled by the challenge of this insanely difficult pursuit and the glory of victory.
01:53:29.000So in that sense, yeah, they have a choice.
01:53:33.000No, no, there's definitely ones that have a choice, but I'm just saying when you look at some of these athletes or fighters or whatever where the alternative was like jail, drugs, like nobody.
01:53:44.000So they chose it, but they didn't have a lot of choices to choose from.
01:53:49.000And so is there something inherently exploitative then in being like, well, it's horrible, but they chose it, but they didn't really choose it because nobody actually gave them any options.
01:54:29.000But at a certain point in time, Mike Tyson could have retired.
01:54:32.000The amount of money that he generated by the time he was 20 years old, he could have probably lived off if he lived well for the rest of his life, if he decided to.
01:54:40.000It's just the glory of it, and the excitement of it, and the thrill of victory.
01:54:47.000You know, it's the old sports thing, ABC Wildwater Sports.
01:54:51.000The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.
01:54:58.000You certainly can make an argument that is exploitive because you exploit people's desire for victory and their desire to conquer and their desire for wealth beyond what they can imagine.
01:55:12.000If you're the average fighter that becomes a world champion, you're going to make millions of dollars.
01:55:17.000The average person doesn't make millions of dollars.
01:55:19.000You have a path that is an incredibly lucrative path if you can get to the tippy top.
01:56:20.000And then there's a lot of fighters that were beaten up when they were young.
01:56:25.000They were bullied or they were abused by someone close to them and they got good at lashing out.
01:56:30.000And they got good at dishing out punishment on other people because they know how horrible it feels when it's dished out on them.
01:56:36.000Well, the positive argument, and they also make this about porn, is that this is an empowering way to recover from that trauma, to take this thing where you were small and little and vulnerable and turn it into a strength of yours that you can channel that energy and that rage into something positive,
01:56:57.000Like, clearly, I think, when I think about, like, why did I become a writer, clearly there was some Desire to be seen or heard that went fundamentally unfulfilled as a kid.
01:57:08.000Because why would you develop the skill to sit at your computer and just, you know, if I just get it perfect, they'll understand me and it'll match.
01:57:30.000Maybe their circumstances were dire and awful and unpleasant and it drove them to pursue a world that they could control and make, you know, and explore and have agency over.
01:57:54.000Vincent D'Onofrio played him in a film a few years back that I never watched, which is really odd because I'm a giant Robert E. Howard fan.
01:58:09.000Yeah, I love the gum more than anything.
01:58:11.000But Robert E. Howard was like a really fucked up, depressed guy who lived with his mom, you know, and his life was kind of a disaster.
01:58:22.000And he wrote the greatest fantasy novels the world has ever known.
01:58:26.000I mean, his character to this day is like, I don't know how many millions of copies of the Conan books, but I read them all when I was a kid.
01:58:48.000But before he did that, he wrote about this unstoppable, unconquerable man who was a giant amongst men who slayed everyone before him and fought demons and dragons and...
01:59:03.000He carried you through these incredible adventures that Conad would go through.
01:59:21.000But he wrote about someone who he wishes he would be.
01:59:25.000I think also if your life sucks or you're struggling with something or you don't feel good or you don't feel your parents are proud of you or whatever, there's something inherently satisfying and rewarding about just mastering something because you have power over it.
01:59:39.000So whether you're mastering writing fantasy or archery or fighting or trading stocks, there's something about I go into this place And in that place, it doesn't feel quite like real life.
02:01:35.000And Ryan Katici, there's a value in figuring these things out.
02:01:40.000And I think that is inside of our minds and we activate those human reward systems.
02:01:46.000We activate them whether it's through creating literature, or whether it's through music, or whether it's through getting better at things.
02:01:55.000There's like this pathway that's ingrained into us that's incredibly human.
02:02:00.000That we get rewarded for getting better at things.
02:02:03.000Yeah, you go back to the first cave paintings.
02:02:05.000Like, what's motivating a person to do that?
02:02:07.000And then you look at, like, where they were and where we are now and this sort of unbroken passing of torches from, like, these rudimentary buffalo or horses or whatever to, like, the Sistine Chapel.
02:02:19.000You're like, wow, that is a chain of masters.
02:02:28.000The difference between the cave paintings and St. Peter's Basilica, which when I went to when I was in Rome a few years back, I couldn't believe how big it was.
02:02:40.000When you look at that and you're like...
02:02:44.000Because you see it in a photograph, and it's pretty beautiful, and it's gorgeous, but when you're there in person and you're walking around, you're just like, holy fuck.
02:03:48.000I've always said that if you were something from another planet and you came to observe us, you'd be like, what's going on here?
02:03:53.000Oh, there's this one creature that can manipulate its environment in a very sophisticated way and all it does is make better and better stuff.
02:05:09.000And whole civilizations and whole eras.
02:05:13.000We're just all part of this giant collective thing that's just going on, and we all think we're so important, we're so integral, but we're really just one part of a process that randomly produces progress, for the most part, sometimes produces the opposite of progress, but randomly produces these sort of evolutionary improvements,
02:05:32.000and then that's how you go from there to here, but it's this timeless, enormous thing that you're just a minuscule part of.
02:05:40.000And there's certain instincts that we have that we think are detrimental, like the instincts and inclination towards materialism.
02:05:49.000Well, that ensures that you keep buying the latest and greatest stuff, which ensures that we keep making the latest and greatest stuff, so innovation keeps pushing forward.
02:05:57.000If everybody was wise and didn't need anything and was pragmatic and was relaxed and wanted to just live in a log cabin, we would stay static and nothing would improve.
02:06:09.000And then when something comes along, like some horrible situation where things go badly, like war, like the Nazis, like Hitler...
02:06:20.000Well, the reaction to that is so intense that it forces people into action, and it forces them to go out and stop that, and then you look at the innovation that happens after World War II, and it changes culture all around the world.
02:06:35.000This horrible event takes place, and through this horrible event, we realize, oh my god, this can happen.
02:06:41.000And now, we got through that, and there's V-Day, where they're kissing in the street, and everybody's celebrating, and then civilization moves forward in this beautiful way for a while.
02:06:52.000Well, there's a beautiful kind of symmetry to it.
02:06:54.000It's like, horrible thing, reaction to the horrible thing.
02:06:57.000And so, if you look at world events up close, you're like, Russia invades Ukraine.
02:07:02.000It's this horrendous, violent, awful thing.
02:07:05.000It's also, though you zoom out, you look at it on a 100-year timeline, a 200-year timeline, it's Humanity staggering towards some sort of global balance of power.
02:07:16.000Then it gets out of balance, then it has to rebalance.
02:07:19.000And so we take these things personally when in fact they just are what they are and it's always been happening, just like waves have always been crashing on the beach and trees have been growing and falling down.
02:09:34.000And then he weeps when someone kills Cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of Forgiving him, of like giving him clemency.
02:09:43.000And he orders the Senate, he says, do not execute a single person for this.
02:09:49.000He says, do not let my name be stained in blood, which is maybe impractical, maybe too philosophical, but there is a beauty to that, that, you know, he talks about forgiveness in meditations, but But then he has to actually apply it in his life.
02:10:10.000When there's truces and people have to sort of...
02:10:16.000They have to deal with whatever just happened.
02:10:18.000That was a real issue with the Civil War in the United States.
02:10:22.000For a long time, there was a lot of murder that happened where people were punishing people for their participation in one side or the other.
02:10:31.000And they would go back and forth and kill people.
02:10:35.000It went on for decades and decades of people murdering people who were responsible for killing their relatives in the Civil War.
02:10:43.000Yeah, I mean, the horrible part of the Civil War, the genius of Lincoln is he said, both Lincoln and Grant are like, just let him go home, right?
02:11:39.000There's other sort of almost battles of the Civil War.
02:11:43.000And the US really struggles with how do you pacify after a war like that?
02:11:49.000The argument is we kind of learn this lesson in the Second World War.
02:11:52.000We go and there's a process of denazification in Germany, which we don't manage to do after the US Civil War because Lincoln is assassinated, which you could argue is why he was assassinated.
02:12:06.000But we never fully sort of get rid, not get rid of, but change the hearts and minds of the people who went to war for like the worst possible cause you can think of for going to war for next to the Nazis.
02:12:20.000And so like there's a Confederate statue in the little town that I'm in.
02:15:12.000It takes a long time for people to figure that out.
02:15:16.000And I think what we were talking about before, and this is something I discuss ad nauseum, the lack of attention to the worst spots in this country.
02:15:26.000I've always said that if you want to make the world a better place, make less losers.
02:15:34.000I don't think you should hand things to people necessarily, but I think there's a real value in making communities safer and more conducive to people advancing and getting ahead and showing people more examples of it.
02:15:47.000Then you have a better, more robust civilization because you have more competition.
02:15:52.000You have it filled with more people that are doing exciting things and doing things that are fulfilling.
02:15:58.000And I think you probably have less finger pointing because you'd have a better perspective.
02:16:02.000Introspective of what our society actually is.
02:16:05.000Our society is a society that lifts people up.
02:16:09.000America is a great place because we treat people not just equally, but we look at people who don't have an equal shot and we want to give them a head start and give them a hand up.
02:16:20.000Some people have criticisms of that in terms of aspects of it.
02:16:24.000Some people have criticisms of affirmative action because they think that affirmative action rewards people that are less qualified simply because they came from another place.
02:16:34.000I think there's a way to do that where we don't feel like that.
02:16:46.000Give them places where they feel like they're a part of a great group of other human beings that are also striving.
02:16:54.000So the environment that they're around is an environment of information.
02:16:59.000Education, they're learning how to think and behave and rewarded for progress, rewarded for improvement, rewarded for succeeding and overcoming bad situations, and also rewarding themselves for discipline.
02:17:12.000And then also learning that loss and learning that failure and humiliation are valuable teachers.
02:17:19.000And you don't have to be defined by your worst moments.
02:17:23.000Those worst moments can actually enable you to produce a better result in the future and Show other people that have done that and help them lead the way.
02:17:44.000No, no, but I mean like Ruby Bridges, you know, from the famous photo, she integrates that school, she's the little girl, all the parents are yelling horrible things at her, right?
02:19:20.000It's inconvenient for people to concentrate on things that have happened in the past when they can say, well, hey, I had nothing to do with that.
02:19:27.000I'm just living my life and I'm doing the best that I can.
02:19:30.000But I also think that it's like you were talking about before with the negative things that happen and then through those there's this kind of yin and yang effect, right?
02:19:40.000I think one of the things that we're going through today is just that.
02:19:44.000It's just like we're in the middle of it.
02:19:46.000So we can't recognize that progress is being done.
02:19:49.000It's just there's so much work to do and it's one of the reasons why greedy politicians are so disgusting.
02:19:56.000When we find out that politicians are making hundreds of millions of dollars off illegal insider stock—well, I guess it is legal—insider stock trades, and that's really what they're concentrating on.
02:20:05.000They're not really concentrating on their constituents.
02:20:06.000They don't give a fuck if people get ahead.
02:20:10.000When you hear the White House press secretary talk about, you know, the economy's in a better place than it's ever been before, like, you know that's horseshit.
02:20:19.000And that anger is there to encourage people to act.
02:20:25.000It's encouraged people to take steps to do better, to force politicians to be more upfront, to force honesty, and also to get people that are maybe qualified to be better leaders but are reluctant to get involved in that.
02:20:42.000I even think, like, I'm very critical of, like, woke ideology because I think it's essentially a religion, but I think the overwhelming thing about woke ideology that gives me comfort is that all of it Is encouraging people to be more inclusive,
02:21:00.000kinder, more accepting, even if it's wrong.
02:21:04.000Even if you're in doing so, enforcing this ideology, you're really victimizing other people, which is possibly the case in some ways.
02:21:13.000The overwhelming direction that things are going is to make it so that everything's okay.
02:21:19.000Sometimes when they make everything okay, they make people that are not guilty, guilty, and they make victims out of people that were innocent, but the direction that it's going is supposedly in kindness.
02:21:33.000Now they're being vicious and mean in enforcing their kindness, but this is sort of a natural aspect of human ideology anyway.
02:21:41.000Like when people have an ideology that's rigid, they enforce it, and they enforce it the same way they enforce a religion.
02:21:47.000No, that's a good way to think about it.
02:21:48.000At least virtue signaling is pointed towards virtue as opposed to like open cynicism or nihilism.
02:22:06.000That's an ideology that you signal to all the other Nazis that you are on board, and your cruelty to Jews, and your decision to enforce genocide.
02:22:17.000You're signaling to your tribe that you're doing...
02:22:20.000So that's humanity in a terrible direction.
02:22:23.000This is humanity in a good direction, but it's been hijacked by terrible people.
02:22:29.000And generally by people that are failures, that don't have good character or will, and don't have the ability to objectively assess their own thoughts and their own actions, and try to figure out why they're motivated to do what they do.
02:22:41.000Instead, they just do what gets them attention, because this is part of what people do.
02:22:46.000They try and strive to rise to the top.
02:25:39.000And obviously, if there's one thing we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat, it's that Russian agriculture is in dire need of mechanisation.
02:26:33.000Yeah, nobody ever has that realization, though.
02:26:35.000They're in the middle of it, and they just keep doing what they're doing.
02:26:38.000And I think it's also the culture that they're involved.
02:26:42.000People imitate their atmosphere, right?
02:26:44.000I think, going back to politicians, one of the things that got revealed when this whole Nancy Pelosi thing happened, when they started looking at the insane amount of money that she's made from insider trading, they started looking at all of Congress.
02:28:01.000There's this great book called What Makes Sammy Run, and it's about this Jewish agent, Hollywood agent in the 20s or 30s, endlessly ambitious.
02:28:10.000We're talking about boxers, because he's from the disenfranchised group then.
02:28:14.000He comes from the slums, becomes the most powerful man in Hollywood.
02:28:50.000I mean, that obviously, we have to look to that when we look at horrific moments in history like World War II or like Genghis Khan or like any of these horrific moments where things are so hard to imagine years later.
02:29:10.000Like when we're looking back on the Inquisition and looking back on the horrific methods of torture that they used on people that were infidels.
02:29:20.000Who the fuck are these people and how could they have done this?
02:30:22.000We don't give ourselves enough credit for the progress that we've made collectively as a society away from cruelty.
02:30:29.000At the founding, obviously the founders were horrible hypocrites, owning slaves, but the idea that cruel and unusual punishment should not be a thing, that that was an advancement not that long ago.
02:30:44.000And even the ones they said were not cruel were still super cruel, that we've made a lot of—like, I mean, in World War II, they still executed soldiers by firing squad.
02:30:55.000And just like how horrendous or heinous that you would just make a bunch of your troops just murder another one of your members of— For doing something wrong.
02:31:06.000And that the progress away from cruelty is a huge improvement.
02:31:10.000And so when we watch something like George Floyd or the video of Ahmaud Arbery, and you're just like, that's the worst thing I've ever seen.
02:31:19.000That does say something about the progress we've made as a society because not that long ago, people would have seen that many, many times.
02:31:27.000Yeah, and even though horrific things still do exist, it doesn't minimize them by recognizing that the trend is towards people being kinder and better to each other.
02:31:41.000His work has been roundly criticized by woke people because they're saying you're spending too much time concentrating on how much better things are.
02:31:50.000Instead of how much better we need to get.
02:31:56.000I'm studying the progress of the human race, and over time, things have gotten far safer, and people are far kinder, and they're far more educated than ever before.
02:32:06.000Well, the problem is if you just look at the trend and you're like, this is just happening, you're missing the point.
02:32:11.000Like, you know, there's that quote, like, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
02:32:18.000That's because people are pulling it that way.
02:32:21.000Like, Martin Luther King pulls it that way.
02:32:26.000Harvey Milk, the activists that were, by the way, widely hated in their own time, criticized, often assassinated, etc., they were pulling it that way.
02:32:39.000It could have just kept going in the horrible direction that it was.
02:32:55.000And we collectively have an ability to communicate these ideas that is unprecedented.
02:33:05.000There's never been a time in history where we could communicate these ideas better and you're going to get a lot of fog and a lot of noise and a lot of background noise and a lot of people trying to take advantage of this opportunity because of the fact that there's unprecedented models of communication.
02:33:21.000But overall, the ability to change things for the better has never been We've never had a situation that is this positive.
02:33:38.000Yeah, there's potential for a nuclear war with Russia.
02:33:42.000But just our understanding of the inequalities of life, our understanding of what could be possible, our understanding of the positive aspects of being a good person, they've never been more highlighted.
02:33:54.000Well, yeah, and it's kind of weird why we so focus on misinformation.
02:33:57.000Like, all this bad information is spreading out in the world.
02:34:22.000Somebody was explaining to me that the early books that were first printed, the vast majority, it wasn't like, you know, how to learn French.
02:36:58.000If you think it's impossible, it's impossible for you.
02:37:01.000If you think you're not capable of it, if you think it's unfair, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that sense.
02:37:08.000But it doesn't mean that if you think it's possible, it's going to happen.
02:37:11.000If you visualize yourself beating Mike Tyson, he's still going to fuck you up.
02:37:16.000Yes, but if you visualize that you're capable of making a better life for yourself and then you fucking work at it every day, chances are, barring some insane, unforeseen, unfair circumstances, you will likely get there.
02:38:31.000Well, it works because it's effective.
02:38:33.000Like if you read the book, what's interesting to me about the book is it's clearly you have absorbed yourself into the writing of the Stoics and you relay it in a manner that's very absorbable and applicable.
02:38:58.000So, you know, through this fascination that you have with this philosophy, I mean, you've generated a lot of really positive thoughts for people, and you've really got people moving.
02:39:08.000And generally a good direction because you give them these quotes in this book, all the different philosophers that you quote and all the different scenarios where you apply these thoughts, those things, they stay with you.
02:39:23.000And they're like little sparks that you have in your head that you can blow on those embers and start a fire with.
02:39:29.000Yeah, that's a good way to think about it.
02:39:31.000The funny thing, so I got offered to write a book about stoic philosophy because I'd written an article about it that was popular online in like 2008, 2009. And I went to Robert and I was like, this is my dream.
02:40:00.000What was his – I think he was like, look, you're getting better every day as a writer, so you're going to only write this book one time, so you should, every day that you wait, you'll be more prepared, you'll be better for it.
02:40:12.000And he was like, also, the difference between 21 and 27 is...
02:40:34.000I would have just been speculating about the ideas if I wrote it when I was 21, I think.
02:40:39.000Well, luckily we're talking about stoicism and you literally are preaching the philosophy in your books that any sort of negative happenstance or anything that sets you back will probably ultimately be to your benefit.
02:40:59.000So you had to practice what you preached.
02:41:02.000And then when it came out and it sold enough copies to hit the list and it wasn't there, You're like, oh, is it something I control or not?
02:41:50.000There's a company that helps you do it.
02:41:53.000But, like, if you look at the fine print in the New York Times list, and I know this now because I have a bookstore, and so we report to the list.
02:42:23.000I wrote a book about this a couple years ago, but they explicitly filter out what they call perennial sellers, which are books that sell every year a shit ton of copies because schools buy them.
02:42:34.000So there's a certain amount of filtering, but the big one for the bestseller list is You know, how many of your copies were sold on Amazon?
02:42:42.000How many of your copies were sold in independent bookstores?
02:42:46.000Was it all in New York and LA and San Francisco?
02:42:48.000Or did you sell a lot of books in Cincinnati?
02:42:53.000It's not that they're putting their thumb on the scale, but they are trying...
02:42:57.000Well, they are putting their thumb on the scale.
02:42:58.000There's certain books that don't appear for suspicious reasons, people allege.
02:43:02.000But, like, they are trying to create a more robust definition of what bestseller is.
02:43:09.000Not just objectively who sold the most because that could be unfair.
02:43:14.000Well, it's okay because of those reasonable examples that you used, but not because of the ones where they just decide that your subject matter is problematic.
02:43:23.000So do you think that they decided that stoicism is problematic?
02:44:35.000General nonfiction, like the general nonfiction list, like maybe the 10 spot is like 5,000 books.
02:44:42.000But the 10 spot on the advice how-to miscellaneous, because you're competing against the Guinness Book of World Records and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is...
02:44:54.000Like Malcolm Gladwell, because he's sort of part who I love, is a super awesome guy and I think one of the greatest in the world at what he does.
02:46:11.000All of these organizations, these gatekeeping organizations, are inherently about keeping some people out and keeping some people in.
02:46:22.000And so Marcus says in meditations that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
02:46:31.000Insanity is tying it to your own actions.
02:46:34.000So you have to get to a place where you're like, I'm good, and any of the recognition or respect or ranking is extra.
02:46:41.000Yeah, I think that has to be the case when it comes to selling books, right?
02:46:45.000Because the most important thing you have achieved is that your books resonate with the people who read them, and they enrich people's lives, and that's what you set out to do.
02:46:53.000You didn't set out to, I don't know how many people are involved in curating the New York Times bestseller list, but you didn't set out to please those people.
02:46:59.000You don't even know who those fucks are.
02:47:01.000But some people, that is all they care about.
02:48:14.000There's a story about Jimmy Carter, who was not the best president, obviously, but he was being interviewed by Admiral Rickover, who was the head of America's Nuclear Navy.
02:48:25.000And Jimmy Carter, people don't see him this way, because maybe we think about him as this old man.
02:48:29.000But he was like, he went to the Naval Academy, he was ambitious, successful.
02:48:35.000He was driven to be great from a very early age.
02:48:40.000He just graduated from the Naval Academy.
02:48:42.000It's like 48, 49. And he wants to get on a nuclear sub.
02:48:46.000But the way to do it is this guy, Admiral Rickover, decides, who's one of the unsung heroes of American history that very few people know about.
02:52:29.000And it's like all about the thrill of like diving and discovering something and the mastery of this thing that could kill you at any moment.