In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with a good friend of mine to talk about what it takes to be funny or not funny, and why it's important to have a good understanding of what makes a funny person. We talk about the difference between when someone is funny and when they aren't funny, how to figure it out, and how to find a good balance between being funny and not funny. I hope you enjoy this episode, it's a good one! -Joe Rogan is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster based out of Los Angeles, California. He's been in the comedy game for a long time, and I think he's one of the funniest people I've ever met. He's funny, smart, and has a great sense of humor. I really enjoyed talking to him, and hope you do too! -JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCES is a podcast by day, podcast by night, all day. Check it out! -J.R. is a writer, comedian, and all-around badass. -The Joe Rogans Experience is a show about comedy, comedy, and life in general, hosted by J.R.'s good friend Chris, who has been in comedy for a few years now, and we talk about it a lot. . If you like what you hear, tweet me and tell a friend about it! :) if you're a friend who's funny and/or have a story you'd like to share it with a friend, I'd love to have it on the pod? I'm looking for a friend that's funny! or just want to help out with a podcast about something funny, or just need a good story about it? I'll be listening to someone else do something funny and they're funny, I'll get back to you :) -Joes podcast is a good listen :) -Jonah Rogan Podcast by night - Joes Podcast by day - by night - all day, by night. Joes podcast - by day - The Joes Radio Podcast by Night all day by night Joes Rogan Experience by Night - by Night, by Night by Day by Night JoesRogan Podcast by Day - by Day, All day, All Day, By Night, All By Night by Night by Night All Day by Day
00:00:37.000We were talking about when someone's funny and when they're funny and not funny and why, and I don't know.
00:00:44.000There's some people that I know that weren't funny for a long time, and then they became funny.
00:00:49.000Like comics that were like they're starting out and they just maybe they were kind of okay I think maybe you have if you have a spark like a little haha just a spark you could turn that into a flame but if you don't have the spark if there's no there's nothing there you're never funny ever You're fucked.
00:01:05.000Well that's different to training, like we were saying.
00:01:07.000You can be the skinniest or fattest guy or girl, the right training program and some good macros, you're fixed.
00:01:19.000Cardiovascular fitness is 100% achievable.
00:01:24.000As long as you don't have some sort of a problem physically, some sort of an ailment, you could definitely get better cardio.
00:01:30.000Is it true about comics needing a messed up childhood, or that's a performance enhancer, that they say the pain that they've gone through in the past is something that helps them to be funny when they grow up?
00:02:45.000I feel like it's a skill that people can develop.
00:02:46.000But yeah, if you've got the wrong spark, I mean, everyone's seen that comedian that's trying, really, really trying, and there's just something not there.
00:02:53.000And then it's the same, I guess, if you look at absolute elite athletes, the best of the best of the best.
00:03:03.000Yeah, yeah, but then you get someone who has all the things, and that's how you get a Michael Jordan.
00:03:10.000You get someone who has physical talent, genetic gifts, the mind for it, discipline, consistent work ethic, and then you get greatness, but also mental illness.
00:03:25.000You need to be, like Michael Jordan, with all due respect, Is considered, you know, absolutely one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player of all time, but is kind of mentally ill.
00:03:38.000He's obsessed with winning to the point where he's an asshole.
00:03:41.000But that asshole, like, he'll tell you, like, you just don't want to win enough.
00:05:16.000Well that is like an amazing example of that like having a Golf Club in your hand at two years old having a father who's maniacal and obsessed and forcing you to do this and then getting all that time in as your body is learning and developing and So the thing about Tiger that was interesting with his father is he would push him incredibly hard,
00:05:38.000say, these white people are never going to accept you on this course.
00:05:41.000And he had a safe word, the same way that you would do during rough sex.
00:06:04.000Roll the clock forward now, so talking about the price that people pay to be the person that you admire, everyone would look at Tiger Woods narrowly bound, like...
00:06:14.000I want to be as good of a golfer as Tiger Woods.
00:06:16.000And you go, yeah, okay, but do you want the childhood?
00:06:18.000Do you want to spend nearly half a decade out of the sport with injury because of how hard you've pushed yourself?
00:06:23.000Do you want to struggle with self-worth to the point where you basically can't have a long-term marriage?
00:06:29.000Do you want to be chased down the driveway with your wife in a golf club?
00:07:30.000It's a necessary feeling in human evolution because it forces people to compete for breeding, it forces people to compete for resources, and it makes people work harder in some ways,
00:07:48.000You can have that feeling of admiration and of respect for someone's ability and inspiration Looking at someone's accomplishments and avoid the jealousy part.
00:08:01.000But you have to treat it like it's a personal weakness.
00:08:03.000You have to treat it like that thing inside of you that looks at someone and wants to diminish their accomplishments and wants to look at their accomplishments in an inaccurate light.
00:08:15.000In fact, it lies to you and it makes you feel like you're better than you are so you won't work as hard and you won't accomplish as much if you give in to jealousy.
00:08:25.000But instead, if you look at someone, even if you don't particularly like that person's personality or what they stand for, If you can look at what they've done, even if it's someone that you really despise, you can find something in them and say, that is it.
00:08:41.000You can find admirable things about Donald Trump.
00:08:45.000One of the things you can find about it is the way he brushes off criticism.
00:08:49.000He just like keeps going like like they were In the beginning of the the presidential campaign coming at him with every fucking thing in the world And the guy would get out there in front of all his people is like I'm the best I've always been the best No one loves the Bible more than me and he was able to do that in a way that you know a lot of people Maybe he has a psychotic belief in himself.
00:09:30.000He was old running for president, but he looks older because of the pressure and the stress of the White House.
00:09:36.000It's kind of admirable that Donald Trump didn't do that.
00:09:40.000So you can find things, even in people that you think are problematic human beings, you can find things in what they do.
00:09:47.000And if there's someone that's in your line of work, and that person is achieving great success, there is a human tendency, a natural human tendency, to be jealous of that person.
00:11:59.000When kids grow up, the American dream still very much is a real deal, I think.
00:12:03.000And people are told that they can have blue sky vision and helicopter thinking and be whatever they want to be.
00:12:07.000But the problem that you have is when those people grow up and become adults and the world doesn't deliver them the thing that they were promised, they feel a delta between where they are and where they could be.
00:12:48.000I think that will be two of the major factors, right?
00:12:51.000The fact that it's real living wages have stayed static since the middle of the 1970s, something like that, and getting onto the property market at the moment is pretty difficult.
00:13:00.000But more than that as well, a lot of the things that we used to have, the traditions that we used to have for people, guys and girls, the roles that they used to take, have been outsourced to the state.
00:13:09.000So if you think about the protector-provider role that men typically would have had, You don't need that so much when you've got a robust legal system and you've got a government that's going to look after people in case they fall through the cracks.
00:13:21.000You've got social safety nets and things like that here and there.
00:13:23.000I think that what happens is people end up feeling wistless and existentially lonely.
00:13:28.000So not only are they materially less effective, they're unable to get as much money, they're unable to find a house as easily, but then existentially the role that they have, something that makes them feel innate and of themselves, that doesn't feel like it's helping either.
00:14:49.000It's pretty shitty and ineffective, depending, of course, upon the neighborhood that you live in.
00:14:54.000Some neighborhoods have good public systems of education.
00:14:58.000In terms of a social safety net, it's not that good in America.
00:15:06.000I think in the worst case scenario, The worst worry is that a social safety net encourages people to not be ambitious.
00:15:22.000That's what people were concerned with when it came to things like universal basic income.
00:15:28.000They were concerned that it was going to alleviate people's ambition.
00:15:32.000And on the best-case scenario side, I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses, I was like, maybe it'll encourage people to go out and do something they actually want to do for a living, and having their basic needs taken care of, like food and shelter, maybe that will give them whatever extra motivation they need to go out and do a thing that they really want to do.
00:15:55.000Whether it's create music, or become a painter, or whatever the fuck it is.
00:15:58.000Do you think that's the way that people are going to lean?
00:16:00.000I think you have to have that in you, unfortunately.
00:16:03.000I know people that are just not fucking ambitious.
00:16:08.000And if they didn't have any social safety net, maybe they would develop some discipline.
00:16:14.000But if there is a social safety net, they don't.
00:16:16.000And the thing that you were talking about earlier, like this...
00:16:21.000There is a problem with generations that feel entitled, and there's this attitude, there's this sort of overwhelming idea that the government is responsible for you in a certain way, and if you're not doing well, the government has fucked you over.
00:17:09.000And I think that capitalism is a game.
00:17:12.000And whenever you're going to have a game, you're going to have people that are like weekend players that go out there and put a little bit of effort into and they're kind of okay at basketball.
00:17:21.000And then you're going to have Michael Jordan.
00:17:22.000And you don't get a Michael Jordan without massive amounts of effort and time.
00:17:28.000And that's the same thing with capitalism.
00:17:30.000If it's a game, if we're all agreeing, even if you're a waiter, you're waiting on tables, you do a good job, they give you tips.
00:18:12.000But there is a thing in terms of, I don't agree with people getting paid less than minimum wage and relying on tips.
00:18:20.000I think that's a fucked up way to run a business.
00:18:23.000I think it's way better if you got paid a living wage and then people could tip you on top of that if they say, hey, she was a really good waitress.
00:18:46.000in the morning, the only people that are out are club promoters, the people that are going to our parties, and homeless people.
00:18:50.000And the way that they act, their demeanor, the fact that they're The US has so much more sketchy, aggressive, talking to themselves, shuffling along the street.
00:19:48.000There were some sweeping acts in the Reagan administration that just literally, like, released people from mental health institutions that couldn't take care of themselves.
00:19:58.000And these people were pretty fucked up.
00:20:42.000That's a lot of people, you know, and you look at the number of homeless people that we have and the number of people that really need help.
00:20:52.000And there's this idea that these people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like...
00:20:57.000That is a fucking really dumb way of looking at it.
00:21:00.000And it makes a problem for everybody else.
00:21:02.000So when you look at what's happening in Los Angeles, this sort of attitude that, you know, we need to respect homeless people and let them just fucking camp out whenever they want.
00:21:21.000You just let them fucking put up their tents at the beach.
00:21:24.000Now you have just people that don't want to go to the beach, so all the surrounding businesses lose revenue because people don't feel comfortable going there anymore.
00:21:31.000I mean, I'm sure you've seen what it looks like on the beach in Southern California.
00:22:17.000I'm like, why is this not front page news?
00:22:19.000This is literally like multiple city blocks Filled with people just laying around on the street, shuffling around, and going into these hospitals, not hospitals, shelters to get food, and then coming back on the street.
00:22:59.000So the Cecil Hotel is like in the heart of this area.
00:23:03.000And the documentary is sort of highlighting how all these people got duped when they're coming from other countries and they're coming into America.
00:24:54.000Faced with the reality of these progressive liberal choices where you look at things with, you know, through the lens of ideology rather than the lens of objective assessment of reality.
00:25:09.000So the thing is, an absurd ideological belief is less about the actual facts and it's basically a show of fealty to your side.
00:25:16.000It's like you're waving a flag, saying, I am a part of this.
00:25:19.000And the more absurd the belief, the greater the show of fealty, right?
00:25:23.000If you're saying, I will put to one side facts, reason, what my own brain is telling me, everything that reality is putting back to me, and what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to believe the ideology because that's why.
00:26:45.000How long ago were people saying this sort of stuff about the fact that intersectionality inevitably leads to one person that is the most oppressed in the entire world and they're the only person that's allowed to speak?
00:26:55.000And as soon as you see white gay privilege, you think, well...
00:27:11.000I mean, that's what's happening to women in sports, right?
00:27:15.000Women have always been protected, right?
00:27:17.000We've thought of that women being oppressed, whether it's, you know, income inequality, or it's the glass ceiling in the workplace, or it's like, we've thought like, hey, we've recognized there's an inequality with women, but you know where there's a bigger inequality?
00:30:27.000You've also got news articles at the moment saying, Military veteran jailed or arrested for gay swastika, which is one of the best headlines.
00:30:38.000So anyway, the police arrive and they say, or they contacted him and they said, 80 pound fine, and you have to go to a re-education course.
00:30:47.000So he said, no, I don't want to do this.
00:30:51.000And they said, okay, well, we're going to come and arrest you.
00:30:53.000So he asked for a time when they were going to come around.
00:30:55.000And he got Lawrence, the guy that made it, and also has a huge social media following online, got him to be there.
00:31:01.000So Lawrence live-streamed it as it was happening.
00:31:03.000And as the police are there, he's live-streaming this thing, and there's a clip that's 30 seconds from the middle of it, which has gone super, super viral online.
00:31:09.000It's had like three million plays over the weekend.
00:31:11.000And they ask the police officer why it is.
00:32:31.000It's either guns in the U.S., good for protection, not good for shootings, or freedom of speech in the U.S., but in the U.K., no guns, no mass shootings, but...
00:32:43.000A lot of hate crime incidents, a lot of people being arrested for doing dumb stuff.
00:32:45.000But can't you have freedom of speech in the UK and not have all the guns?
00:33:02.000But I don't think that the UK has quite the same amount of capture that the US has.
00:33:10.000People are still very spit and sawdust.
00:33:13.000Everything in the UK, Constantine and Francis said this to you last week, it's very much a class-based system.
00:33:17.000You don't get outside of your lane with regards to your class.
00:33:20.000And I think a big part of that is we've just had longer to establish what different schools mean, what different areas that you live in mean.
00:33:28.000I mean, dude, we've got trees in the UK that are older than your country.
00:33:50.000It's maybe even a little bit more restrictive in some ways, but it means that we haven't been quite so captured by the new stuff.
00:34:00.000That, I think, is interesting when you have a country that is established and has been around for, I mean, England's a thousand years old plus, right?
00:34:10.000I mean, if you really go back to, and look at, and other countries as well, there's many other countries that have these class systems, like China's probably the best example.
00:34:21.000Which is wild when you really think about how young America is and the way China is completely locked down and the way the government has absolute control over their population in terms of like what they spend money on,
00:34:37.000how they spend money, what they get to see on social media, what they get to see on the Internet, what they get to say.
00:34:43.000I mean even in terms of their Most respected population.
00:34:47.000They're billionaires and super successful entrepreneurs.
00:34:50.000If they speak out against the government, they either get eliminated, they vanish.
00:34:55.000There's people that are like high-profile billionaires that have gone missing.
00:37:28.000If that's not ideological capture, that way of talking and behaving, that's the wokest of the woke signaling because that's what people do because the idea is that you're stating your pronouns.
00:37:44.000She's also wearing a mask, which is preposterous.
00:37:57.000And then also, you don't want to be ableist, so you want to signal to all of your people that are colorblind that I'm wearing a blue dress.
00:38:05.000I think it's blind rather than colorblind.
00:38:50.000So, a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.
00:39:32.000A recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market lasting more than a few months.
00:39:42.000Normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale retail sales.
00:39:58.000So that's what's changed, that the United States used to define it as two consecutive quarters, and now we don't anymore?
00:40:04.000And people have pulled it up on the archive.
00:40:05.000So a bunch of advisors, economic advisors, have got quotes of them saying what a recession is, especially when Donald Trump was in office, that there is a recession that's coming.
00:40:14.000It's negative GDP growth for two consecutive quarters.
00:41:03.000You think they've been trained in that, some neuro-linguistic programming, if you put your hands here when you're saying this sort of a thing, blah, blah, blah?
00:42:05.000And the reason, obviously, is that you've got midterms coming up, and you need to make sure that is in a recession is not something that can be thrown at the Democrats.
00:42:29.000And just that alone, you know, people would think that it's trivial because they are talking about this economic downturn, but it's not trivial because we've always used that term recession.
00:42:43.000And we've always used that term to define whether or not the economic policies that are currently in place and whether or not the management and the government has done a good job of making sure that the economy stays in a good place.
00:44:32.000People just take on the opinion of whoever their favorite thought leader is.
00:44:36.000So you could basically argue that the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers above them.
00:44:48.000And that is kind of what's going on with a great majority of people or a large number of people.
00:44:54.000I don't know if it's a majority, but it's enough to make noise.
00:44:57.000It's enough to show you that there's a real problem with ideologies and with tribalism.
00:45:03.000Because that's what people gravitate towards.
00:45:06.000They gravitate towards a group of people that they feel like they can fit into and then they can adopt those patterns of thinking and those thoughts.
00:45:16.000And instead of coming up with their own opinions, they form this sort of conglomeration of other people's opinions and then they fiercely defend them.
00:45:25.000And you see that a lot on Twitter, and you see a lot of ideological capture on Twitter, and you see a lot of people.
00:45:30.000There's people that I'm friends with, that I follow, that I go to their thing, and all day long, they're just tweeting about politics, and they're tweeting about the Democrats, and defending the Democrats, and attacking the Republicans.
00:45:45.000Because it's some sort of a strange distraction because to a person, every one of those people that I'm talking about has a disappointing career.
00:48:35.000They haven't like, no one has put forth any like, and especially no one that's progressive has put forth any realistic argument for why that's bad for you.
00:48:46.000Why that's bad for your thinking, why that's bad for even the group that you support.
00:48:51.000You're encouraging the other side to attack you.
00:48:54.000You're encouraging this sort of divide that I think America is stricken with at the moment.
00:49:01.000It's not to say that there's not negative things about the Republicans, and there most certainly are, but there's negative things about the Democrats, too.
00:49:09.000And I think that aligning yourself with a particular party is always going to be a problem because Some people feel like they can't talk about things that are not aligned with their party's values.
00:49:21.000Like maybe they're a person who is very progressive but they're also a free speech absolutist.
00:49:27.000And then they see people getting censored and they see like the Hunter Biden story getting censored by Twitter and they see certain stories not making their way into the news because the actual results The actual facts and statistics that points to this argument are problematic to their ideology.
00:49:47.000And so they either ignore them or they push against them.
00:49:55.000Ideologically captured people, and it's very hard for people to break free because then you run the risk of being attacked by your own community.
00:50:05.000When you have this very binary perspective on politics and social issues, Whenever you deviate in any way shape or form you run the risk of being attacked particularly right now because again people are so divided and I really think this started I mean always but it's always been the case but from 2016 on it became much more aggressive in 2012 I think?
00:50:46.000And it was more about I am not that than I am this.
00:50:49.000And it goes back to that fragile hatred of an out-group, not mutual love of an in-group thing from before.
00:50:54.000You're constantly looking for who can we shave off, who can we get rid of.
00:51:00.000Because I can't remember a time, mostly because I had my head up my ass, but I can't remember a time when the news...
00:51:06.000Wasn't talking about politics, but I know that there was one, you know, when it was other sorts of stories, but everything now seems to be so captured.
00:51:14.000And any, do you remember, was it Nicki Minaj who became co-opted by the Republicans briefly when she was like vaccine skeptical a few years ago?
00:51:42.000If you can just point to someone having some sort of heterodox perspective that is problematic, you can attack them based on, you know, wrong think.
00:52:51.000And then they just join another group.
00:52:55.000They just join this other group that supports them.
00:52:57.000And one of the things that's really interesting about the Republicans during this time is that whenever anybody does step out of favor with the Democrats, the Republicans endorse them and take them in.
00:53:16.000But look, the things that they're supportive of are things that we tend to agree with.
00:53:21.000I don't believe in this sort of one-size-fits-all, government-mandated healthcare remedy for a pandemic when there's other ways to address it.
00:53:33.000I think people should have autonomy about their body, the same way I think that a woman has a right to choose.
00:53:38.000You know, it's like my body, my choice, except when it comes to this one thing, this vaccine that I want you to take no matter what, or I'm not going to let you work and you can't travel.
00:53:47.000But that's problematic because you're now showing that you don't hold the wholesale opinion of the Republicans.
00:54:52.000But it was enough that I could see, like, my wife is very healthy and fit and for her to get it like that, it indicates that there's, you know, some people...
00:55:02.000It depends on what is going on with your body at the time.
00:55:07.000And there's times where your immune system is robust and strong, where you've been working out a lot, drinking a lot of water, and taking a lot of vitamins, and taking care of your mental health, and your immune system is powerful.
00:55:18.000And then there's other times where maybe there's a death in the family, and maybe you lost your job, and maybe you haven't been sleeping, and maybe you have some mental health issues, and then you're worn out, and then you catch it, and it's really bad.
00:55:32.000And they'll say, well, that's because the disease is really bad.
00:55:34.000Well, it's really bad for you, given that set of circumstances.
00:55:38.000And the idea that you just need to get boosted, no matter what.
00:55:45.000One-size-fits-all healthcare policies are stupid, because they don't address the fact that there's a wide range of different human beings in this country.
00:56:43.000And I'm also skeptical of the fact that pharmaceutical companies have extraordinary amounts of money and influence, and we have always thought of them as being deceptive, and there's a lot of evidence that points to the fact that they have misled people on the dangers,
00:57:00.000misled people on the results of their trials, they have hidden trials that showed negative results, and highlighted trials that were clearly biased.
00:57:14.000There's a shit ton of evidence, whether it's their release of Vioxx, there's many different drugs that they've been fined for in the terms of billions of dollars.
00:57:25.000So it's not that I'm a vaccine skeptic.
00:57:29.000I'm a skeptic of undue influence of massive corporations.
00:59:12.000The result, it's going to be interesting to see if they do that, what the results are, because psychedelic drugs, one of the things that they do encourage is they encourage compassion and dissolving of the ego, and they encourage community,
00:59:54.000So maybe we can have some sort of a brand of capitalism that encourages psychedelic uses because it's profitable.
01:00:01.000And then because of that and through that, people can abandon a lot of their aggressive tendencies and a lot of their ideas that are not suitable to a loving community.
01:00:12.000Because you're going to align something which is good for society with something that is good for the company.
01:00:19.000Yeah, and maybe these companies in profiting off of these psychedelics would start to invest in community centers and start to invest in rebuilding neighborhoods and rebuilding fucked up cities.
01:01:02.000There's a lot of people that are using psychedelics in big tech, and they're using them in microdosing, and it's changing their perspectives.
01:01:12.000It's changing the way they interact with the market.
01:01:17.000And their dog, and the mirrors, and everything else.
01:01:22.000Yeah, well, you know, to get back to what you were talking about, about embracing views, like, you know, being pro-Second Amendment, but also being pro-choice.
01:01:32.000You know, like, these things are supposed to...
01:01:53.000And then you look at this, and you realize that, like, there's some things on this side that I don't agree with, and there's some things on that side that I agree with.
01:02:02.000And then you realize, like, oh, wait a minute, I'm just a person.
01:02:05.000I'm a person with my own ideas on things.
01:02:07.000And I'm not a Republican and I'm not a Democrat.
01:02:10.000And I resist these notions that I have to be classified in this very fucking clear and specific box.
01:02:19.000The problem is, if I know one of your views, and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe, you're not a serious thinker.
01:02:26.000You've just adopted somebody else's ideology and you've plugged it in.
01:02:31.000I think this is one of the reasons why Whenever I see people online that always talk about the same stuff, you know, it's like an old leather pair of shoes.
01:02:40.000You can almost feel where it's going to go.
01:02:42.000You know what the opinion's going to be.
01:03:28.000It is the potential to become a human being.
01:03:30.000At what point in time are you comfortable with terminating that?
01:03:33.000And who do you think should be allowed to say whether or not another individual, not you, not your partner, but another person, when they get pregnant, when should they be allowed to have an abortion?
01:04:34.000The way that the abortion debate comes about, I got asked on a Q&A recently, what opinion do you hold that most of your audience would disagree with?
01:04:43.000And I said that both sides of the abortion debate feel to me like a kind of righteous side.
01:04:51.000Like I really find it difficult to work out.
01:04:53.000Like when I hear a Shapiro going like really, really good on the pro-life thing, I'm like, fucking hell, like that sounds kind of compelling.
01:04:58.000And then when I hear someone that's completely talking about the pro-choice in a really, really good way, I find...
01:07:56.000But this is May of 2022. Uterine transplants are not new.
01:08:00.000The first successful uterine transplant was done in Sweden 2013. America boasted its first successful uterine transplant three years later at Baylor.
01:08:08.000But these were cis women born without a functioning uterus.
01:08:12.000Now an Indian doctor is proposing uterine transplantation for trans women.
01:08:43.000Hormone cascades and a whole bunch of other stuff.
01:08:45.000Someone got really criticized online a little while ago for replying to Elon Musk's problem about underpopulation and population collapse that test you babies will fix everything.
01:08:54.000He's like, well, it's the mother's heartbeat.
01:08:56.000It's all of the ways that you interact, that the baby interacts in utero with the mother.
01:09:00.000It's not just, it's not simply just like a vitamin pill that you could take or a particular solution that you could leave this fetus in and then you get a child nine months later.
01:09:10.000Yeah, who knows what happens if we actually develop a full child outside of a human body, I mean a real test tube baby, where there's some sort of an artificial environment, and then they all turn out to be sociopaths.
01:09:24.000They have no connection with other human beings, so they didn't develop a connection with their mother while they're in the womb.
01:10:00.000I know that you can be effective over short periods as a psychopath, but over long periods of time, it doesn't end up being very good for society, and I thought it would have been bred out.
01:10:10.000He said, yeah, you're right, except for the fact that over the entire size of a population, a few psychopaths actually make sense.
01:10:17.000If you're a raiding party, a Viking raiding party that needs to go over and fuck everybody up in Lindisfarne, which is near to where I lived in the UK, I think?
01:10:42.000It's actually quite adaptive and quite useful.
01:10:44.000It's like a weapon, like a very specific sort of weapon that you can use.
01:11:24.000But if you fuck over people one too many times, this is the reason that socially we're so careful of status.
01:11:30.000It's one of the reasons why we are concerned about public speaking, because one of the few times you would have done that is when your status would have been in...
01:12:10.000It also makes sense that psychopathy would have been more common because it would have been more useful when you're constantly in tribal war.
01:12:19.000Psychopathy, to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath, you actually have to have committed criminal acts.
01:12:24.000So you can't be, because of the way that the current psychopathic checklist is called, I think you have to be 28 out of 40 in the UK or 30 out of 40 in the US. The US has got a higher threshold for psychopaths, which is kind of funny.
01:12:37.000And there was this guy, this researcher, who was researching psychopaths.
01:12:40.000And what you see is a particular area of the brain is downregulated, right?
01:12:43.000So you don't see as much activity when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy.
01:12:48.000So he decides that he's going to study a bunch of psychopaths, many of whom I think are actually in prison, because you have to commit a criminal act.
01:14:20.000It might even be available online, I'm not sure, but...
01:14:23.000Big long checklist of things that you need to go through, a bunch of questions that you answer, and they go through this diagnosis.
01:14:28.000But in order to breach the threshold of clinically being diagnosed as a psychopath, you have to have used it to commit crimes.
01:14:34.000So this meant that although this particular professor had all of the raw ingredients, and it looked like he was psychopathic, by the, what is it, the DNS? What's that thing?
01:15:13.000So, someone that has very outgoing traits, they're super self-assured, you know, you have narcissism as well, as long as it's not vulnerable narcissism.
01:15:23.000There's two types, grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.
01:15:26.000So, grandiose narcissists are the ones who genuinely believe that they are better than everybody else.
01:15:31.000They are constantly proving this to everyone.
01:15:35.000Vulnerable narcissists manifest their narcissism in a similar way, but it's to try and hide the fact that deep down they don't believe that they're anything.
01:15:43.000So both types of narcissism will manifest in a similar sort of way.
01:15:49.000Both of them will be out there, but one person is desperately seeking approval and needs people to tell them that they've done well, and the other one doesn't.
01:15:56.000They're just going to continue believing no matter what reality brings to them.
01:15:59.000Now, the vulnerable narcissists are actually really dangerous, and the reason for that is that if the world doesn't give to them that which they think, They're going to get very, very angry and aggressive because that taps into something that maybe they're fearful about that's deep down.
01:16:14.000That makes sense where a lot of people who have a distorted perception of where they should be in the world are angry at others who are doing well.
01:16:26.000And if someone takes them down, if somebody was to take the piss out of them, the grandiose narcissist, it would just be water off a duck's back.
01:16:34.000Definitely a grandiose narcissist, right?
01:16:36.000He's not got vulnerable narcissism in him.
01:16:38.000Someone that's a vulnerable narcissist, everybody knows that friend that just can't not bring up the most recent brilliant thing they've done, but they know that if they poke them a little bit too hard, that it would really, really hurt.
01:17:32.000Is there a difference between desensitization, which is something that absolutely has happened with people being able to access horrific images and videos and stories online?
01:17:44.000Because your access to horrific images is...
01:17:48.000So much greater than at any time in human history.
01:17:51.000However, for the most part, our physical interaction with horrific imagery is down way more than it ever was during times of war and during times of famine and in the past when things were way more brutal in history.
01:18:09.000But our access to images There's a certain argument that video games and violent films and all these things have desensitized us to imagery.
01:18:21.000So everyone's maybe become a little bit more psychopathic in that way.
01:18:24.000Right, because if you're studying a person's reaction to things, it's not like you're taking them to a rape scene.
01:18:32.000It's not like you're taking them like, hey, we're going to watch this guy get murdered, come with me.
01:18:53.000But I mean, this is the problem with any lab study, right?
01:18:56.000Any time that you want to try and talk about arousal response or all of that, it's in a lab.
01:19:03.000So there's a conversation analysis is another type of science that's done.
01:19:07.000And most stuff that's done to do with the way that people speak, they'll bring them into a lab and then they'll analyze the conversation or they'll watch them perhaps under multiple cameras.
01:19:14.000Conversation analysis is actually done of this.
01:19:35.000Perhaps there are people that are totally fine looking at the images and not being there in front of the situation itself.
01:19:41.000Yeah, I would really worry about that analysis today because I do think that people are so much more comfortable with seeing horrific things today.
01:19:51.000And particularly things that are not quite real, like violent video games.
01:19:56.000Like if you play Grand Theft Auto, you could beat someone to death with a crowbar.
01:20:00.000It's a part of a game that's been played by millions of people.
01:20:21.000How much crossover is there between what we do in video games and how we see the real world?
01:20:26.000I mean, this is like the billion dollar question, right?
01:20:28.000Just how much impact is there of violent video games on the way that people show up in day to day life?
01:20:33.000I think it might entirely depend on the resolve of your personality and how you've been raised.
01:20:44.000I think if you're a person that doesn't get a lot of interaction with human beings, maybe have negative interactions with family members and parents, and you seek escape through these violent video games, and you play these violent video games,
01:21:01.000and the imagery is stimulating and exciting, and you get feelings of victory and of satisfaction by achieving these goals, which include shooting people.
01:21:15.000Like say a person like yourself, like a fully formed adult human being, nice guy, I'm sure video games are not going to turn you into a psycho.
01:21:23.000But if you're being raised on the internet and you're on fucking 4chan all day looking at people getting shot in the face, And then you go and play violent video games and then you don't have any interaction with loving people.
01:21:38.000I mean there's people like that that the vast majority of the human interaction is through a screen to a faceless person somewhere else and you're just getting data in terms of like text from posts and articles and you're laughing at horrible memes and then you're playing violent video games.
01:21:59.000You are, in some way, I don't know what the equation is for nature versus nurture, but I would imagine that there's some impact that all of that stuff has on your overall being.
01:22:13.000The question is like, what's that number?
01:22:16.000Have you had a look at behavioral genetics much?
01:22:19.000So it's how heritable a lot of the traits that we have, especially psychologically, are.
01:22:23.000So there's this guy called Robert Plowman.
01:22:25.000He did the biggest twin study ever in history.
01:22:28.000It was every twin born between, I think, 1991 and 1994 in the UK. He invited them to be a part of this study.
01:22:36.000It's something like 60,000 pairs of twins that he did.
01:22:39.000And what he was trying to do was he was trying to tease apart the difference between nature and nurture.
01:22:42.000How much of what we are is because of our genetics and how much of what we are is because of our environment.
01:22:47.000And the only way that you can really do this is with identical twins.
01:22:51.000And what you can do is identical twins that get put up for adoption, you get to use the same genetics, but you split test what happens in terms of the environment.
01:23:01.000And dude, the number, the amount of impact that our genes have on us is absolutely terrifying.
01:23:07.000Pretty much 50% of everything that you are psychologically is because of your genes.
01:23:34.000There'll be a chart that we could get on the internet of how heritable Robert Plowman's work says everything is.
01:23:40.000But stuff like depression, alcoholism, all of this stuff is super, super highly heritable.
01:23:44.000And people don't like this because in a world that's a meritocracy, you want to believe that you can be anything that you dream to be, right?
01:23:50.000If the people that are successes are worthy of their successes, then what does that mean?
01:23:55.000The people who fail are worthy of their failures.
01:23:58.000But this genetic research would suggest that there's a lot of restrictions that get placed on people before they actually end up even stepping onto the field of play.
01:24:06.000And that makes people feel very uncomfortable.
01:24:09.000You know, just around the corner from talking about eugenics, it's just around the corner of talking about determinism, that there's racial differences in IQ, all of this sort of stuff.
01:24:17.000It's in the same region as some pretty touchy subjects that nobody wants to go close to.
01:24:21.000But when you're talking about psychopathy, a lot of that is coming through.
01:24:25.000Yeah, maybe it's activated in the environment, but a lot of this needs to be triggered in the parents.
01:24:30.000And you go, well, that's a difficult situation to work out who's morally responsible.
01:24:34.000Is the psychopath morally responsible?
01:24:40.000The argument of free will versus determinism is very compelling when you get down to the bottom of it and you really start thinking about how much free will do you really have?
01:25:37.000I think Sam makes a very compelling argument, but I do think there's something...
01:25:45.000To external pressures that you get from the community that affect your choices because you say and do things that people think are either a problem or are negative or have some sort of negative effect on others and so you realize that people don't like that and then it shifts the way you think and behave in the future.
01:26:08.000And then when faced with a similar situation, you then, instead of relying upon this accumulation of data and genetics, you also take into account, into consideration, the thoughts and feelings of others.
01:26:26.000Because then you decide, you know what, I think I'm thinking about this wrong.
01:26:31.000And I think my natural, I'm compelled to act in this way, but I think maybe I should lean more towards that, and maybe I should try to do the right thing, and that's free will.
01:26:41.000It definitely makes people, I think, believing that you've got that impact, it definitely makes them feel more empathic, right?
01:26:46.000If nothing matters, then you're only two steps away from fatalism or nihilism.
01:26:50.000That doesn't seem like a very good way.
01:26:52.000So, I mean, you could say that learning about determinism is an information hazard.
01:26:55.000That if you learn about it, it may cause you to be less caring, to be less diligent, less conscientious with the things that you do.
01:27:03.000It's interesting, thinking about the role model thing that we said earlier on, A lot of the time, or at least where I grew up in the northeast of the UK, there's not a massive amount.
01:27:12.000There weren't many people that were like the people that I wanted to be.
01:27:15.000And I realized that I didn't have any role models or many that were fantastic for me to be around.
01:27:20.000But having a negative role model, so someone that you know that you definitely don't want to be like, I actually think is maybe just as useful.
01:27:31.000If you don't have anybody around you that you want to be like, and you do have people around you that you like, I don't want to have his relationship with his father, his type of way that he shows up for his kids, the financial setup that this person's got in their life, that person's body image, that person's relationship with their diet,
01:27:49.000Those are all flags that you can plant in the ground that are going to say, okay, I'm not going to be this, I'm not going to be this, I'm not going to be this.
01:27:54.000And avoiding ruin is probably more useful than actually trying to achieve success.
01:28:00.000People can get themselves out of the game a lot more easily than they can get to the top.
01:28:05.000And if you end up with a criminal record or dying in a car crash because you were drunk driving or getting a girl pregnant when you were both too young to support the baby, all of these things are huge problems.
01:28:14.000And the downside of that is much worse than the upside of being more inspired.
01:28:18.000So I just felt like looking at negative role models is potentially a useful way to go about things like that.
01:28:25.000Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people who are very successful came from a horrible environment.
01:28:30.000Like they realized that's not how I want to be.
01:28:32.000That's a big factor with alcoholics' children.
01:28:36.000The children of alcoholics either become alcoholics themselves or really have a great disdain for alcohol.
01:28:44.000Yeah, but if you grew up on an island, the genetic predisposition for alcoholism is pretty high.
01:28:50.000But if you grew up on an island that had no alcohol on it, you wouldn't be an alcoholic.
01:28:54.000So everything isn't fully determined by your genes, right?
01:29:42.000And it was me and this guy Scott that I was doing this gig with, and I remember we went back to the place we were staying afterwards, and we were like, never again.
01:30:27.000I've never encountered an audience like that where everyone was shit-faced.
01:30:32.000There's got to be a table that I could turn to with a rational group of people that are just out having a good time going, what the fuck is going on?
01:35:11.000And I won by knockout in two of the fights.
01:35:14.000And I was very lucky that I did because I probably didn't have enough energy to fight hard for all the rounds.
01:35:22.000And then the next year, so between that year and there was a few competitions before the state and national championships.
01:35:32.000And so I said, I'm having a really hard time maintaining this This weight and getting down to this weight was so brutal for the state championships, I'm going to try to do something different.
01:36:31.000I mean, I think if I was like supplementing one of the hemp protein and making sure that I got my B12 in order, then I was, you know, taking supplements and doing it the correct way and getting my blood work done and making sure that my levels were all good.
01:37:22.000But the allegations that I'm hearing are that they sold so few tickets that it would be a real problem in terms of financially to even break even.
01:37:33.000Dana White said that he had heard they had only sold a million dollars worth of tickets.
01:37:38.000If you want to turn the lights on in Madison Square Garden, it costs a half a million dollars.
01:37:43.000You have to sell a lot of fucking tickets if you want to make some money in Madison Square Garden.
01:37:49.000And if you want to make money on pay-per-view, there's a threshold.
01:37:52.000Like, say, up until like 100,000 buys, depending on what the deal is, you might not make any money.
01:37:59.000And then after 100,000 buys, then you start making money.
01:38:02.000And who the fuck wanted to see that fight?
01:38:06.000Nobody wants to see that fight, except Jake Paul's family and his friends and his fans.
01:38:10.000I think, and Rachman's family and friends and fans.
01:38:14.000But I think that if he had fought someone who was either a ranked opponent or someone with a big name, Jake Paul is obviously very popular, and he's very talented.
01:38:27.000He knocked out Tyron Woodley, who's one of the greatest welterweight champions in the history of the UFC. I mean, obviously Tyron Woodley's not a boxer, his background was in wrestling, but you're still talking about an elite combat sports athlete, and Jake Paul flatlined him with one punch.
01:38:49.000I think he could be a legit pro boxer.
01:38:51.000And I also think that if he wasn't Jake Paul, and you watched his performance, like the way he knocked out Tyrone Woodley, if he was just an up-and-coming boxing contender, I would say, that guy's a fucking killer.
01:39:55.000But you gotta have a fucking dance partner.
01:39:58.000And even though Rahman is Hasim Rahman's son, and there's legacy to that, and he's like 12-1 as a professional.
01:40:07.000He lost his last fight, but he's still 12-1 as a professional as far as credentials go.
01:40:12.000He's bigger than Jake Paul, and they wanted him to be at 200 pounds, so he's supposed to weigh in at no more than 205, and he was like 215, and that's why they're canceling the fight.
01:40:23.000Maybe, maybe, or maybe the interest in this fight was a lot less than they had anticipated.
01:40:31.000He was supposed to be fighting Tommy Fury.
01:40:35.000Second time that Tommy's pulled out of the fight.
01:40:38.000It can be because of originally an injury, I think, back in last year, and then this time it was something to do with immigration problems.
01:40:44.000But in the last two fights that Jake's had, three people have pulled out.
01:41:36.000There's an interesting question coming up now, especially to do with boxing, that it's the sweet science and it was held in very unique prestige.
01:41:45.000There's a question about how late can you start and still become absolutely great.
01:41:50.000Who's the guy that fought Tyson Fury for the Deontay Wilder?
01:42:53.000Because some people just have an inherent ability to learn athletic pursuits.
01:42:59.000They have just a better understanding of their body.
01:43:05.000They have a better relationship with movement for whatever reason.
01:43:09.000And you can say that it's important to have traditional martial arts or boxing training early on.
01:43:18.000And for the most part, that's correct.
01:43:21.000But there's a lot of things that people do, whether it's just fucking around with their friends or whether it's other sorts of athletic pursuits that can enhance your ability to learn boxing and can enhance your ability to learn MMA. But to be the best of the best,
01:43:39.000I think there's a real good argument that you need to start early.
01:43:42.000Because Tyson Fury obviously started early, Deontay Wilder didn't.
01:43:48.000I mean, the physical gifts that he has are undeniable.
01:43:53.000And the guy's mind, I mean, he's a fucking animal.
01:43:57.000Like, when he goes in there, when he was talking to Deontay Wilder and they were doing the pre-fight instructions, he's looking at him and goes, you're a fucking bitch!
01:44:44.000Canelo Alvarez really should have never fought at 175 pounds, which is when he fought Dimitri Bival.
01:44:50.000He lost the title at 175 because Bival is an elite, legit world champion at 175. And a lot of people feel like that's why he avoided the rematch with Bival, and that he's going down to super middleweight to fight Triple G. Because if he fought...
01:45:07.000Again, Bival would have his number because Bival had him in real trouble in moments of that fight where he had him up against the ropes and he was absorbing punches.
01:45:15.000You know, there's another guy at 175, he's even more terrifying, and they were talking about setting up a fight with him and Canelo.
01:45:39.000And they were talking about setting up a fight with him and Canelo Alvarez.
01:45:43.000There's a reason why there's weight classes.
01:45:45.000Canelo Alvarez fought Floyd Mayweather at 152 pounds.
01:45:49.000Mayweather made him go down to 152 to weaken him, right?
01:45:51.000He really was fighting at 154. And then he goes up to 60, wins titles there, wins titles at 68, wins, he beats Sergei Kovalev at 175, but Sergei would already, he was on the decline.
01:46:30.000He's just pursuing big money fights at a weight class that it's not his natural weight class.
01:46:34.000Like when he fought Teofimo Lopez, he fought Lopez at 135. Now Lopez is a big 135. He drops weight to get down to 35. Whereas Lomachenko really should be a champion at 130. And I think he started off his career at 26. So he's like going up in weight class to fight these bigger power punchers and it's having an effect on him.
01:46:55.000And also I think he went into that fight with compromised shoulders.
01:46:58.000There was something wrong with his shoulder and he wound up getting an operation on it after the fight.
01:47:02.000But his footwork was because his father, who's his trainer, told him to take two years off of boxing and just concentrate on Ukrainian traditional dance.
01:47:41.000When you look at his highlights, what he does is he'll stand in front of someone, he'll hit him, and then he does this step to the side, hits him here, and then spins him around and hits him at a different angle.
01:49:14.000When you look at how he started off his career and the guys he was fighting and the size of them in comparison to Teofimo Lopez, the guy who he lost to last, it's a giant difference in size.
01:49:27.000And that has a huge impact because there's a lot of things he can't do.
01:49:31.000When he was standing in front of Lopez, every punch that Lopez threw at him had disastrous consequences.
01:49:42.000And also Lopez, super fucking talented on his own.
01:49:45.000And Lopez rose to the occasion and Lopez beat his ass.
01:49:49.000But there was moments in that fight where he was putting it on Lopez, particularly the 11th round where he poured it on because he was realizing that he was behind in the scorecards.
01:49:58.000Is that typical for fighters then in boxing?
01:50:00.000They started a weight fight and then they go up and up and up and up?
01:50:21.000He was the king for a long fucking time at 160. I'm going to guess that that's how people accumulate tons and tons and tons of titles, though, by moving up through weight categories.
01:50:29.000And that's just as they grow as athletes, as they accumulate more muscle mass generally with training age.
01:53:15.000What do you think about masculinity in the modern world?
01:53:17.000This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently.
01:53:18.000I've got young guys that follow the show and sort of ask a lot of questions to do with that.
01:53:23.000Obviously, we were talking earlier on about the fact that It's a strange time at the moment culturally for men and women, especially with how criticized it is of what a man and a woman means.
01:53:32.000But in terms of masculinity at the moment, it feels like there isn't a very firm place very much for men to stand on.
01:53:38.000You know, a lot of the traditional roles that they would have had have kind of gone away.
01:53:43.000Patriarchal superstructure was something that was bad and then lumped in with that was masculine values as well.
01:54:43.000They don't want all those awful things that come with it.
01:54:46.000They don't want people that have a genuine disdain for women.
01:54:51.000But traditionally, masculinity was always like having a respect for women, having respect for your mother, being a protector and a provider.
01:55:01.000That has kind of gone away in the eyes of a lot of people, unfortunately.
01:55:07.000That those positive aspects of what we consider to be masculine characteristics, those positive aspects are no longer considered when you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
01:55:59.000Well, I mean, the masculinity thing, I just find very, very interesting because it's strange for men at the moment to try and find a firm place to stand, I think.
01:57:11.000It's hard to know from the masculine side, like how many men have been raped that are underreported, and how many women who've been raped that are underreported, and also women that are sexually assaulted by other women, which is also real.
01:57:25.000The unfortunate thing is that people with power over other people have always exerted that power over people.
01:57:31.000And so when you're saying that a man is a protector, okay, but who are you protecting them from?
01:57:37.000You're protecting them from other men.
01:57:45.000It's very rare that you're protecting women from other women.
01:57:48.000It's more common that you're protecting them from other men.
01:57:53.000Yeah, I think when you're thinking about what it is that men are supposed to do in the modern world, and yeah, the protector-provider role is up against other people that are coming in, but the status element of this is why I think universal basic income is such a strange option, because people are inevitably going to start competing with each other.
01:58:10.000You have to have an element of competition.
01:58:12.000You want to keep up with the Joneses, but if everybody's flattened down that status hierarchy because earning has now been competed to the exact same level, what are you going to compete on now?
01:58:22.000Right, but that's not real because universal basic income is not a lot of money.
01:58:30.000What about if you roll it forward to the point where automation comes in and takes out everybody's jobs?
01:58:34.000Think about into the medium to sort of far future.
01:58:37.000If most people's jobs end up being automated and no one's got anything left, what about then?
01:58:41.000Yeah, that's Andrew Yang's perspective, is that we're going to need a universal basic income because automation is going to take away all the Truck drivers and, you know, factory workers, and there's gonna be a lot of jobs that are just gone, and we're gonna have to figure out a way to not have society collapse,
01:58:56.000and one of the ways is to institute a universal basic income.
01:59:00.000Well, people start competing on crazy things.
01:59:02.000I had this guy on the show, Will Storr, who spoke about the status game, and he was looking at how status comes about in loads of different areas ancestrally and in the modern world, and he found that There's this tribe where the men, they compete...
01:59:44.000That makes sense, kind of, if you're in an area where you're farming and the size of the vegetables is, that means, like, how many people are going to eat.
01:59:54.000Perhaps, but I don't think that these are for eating.
01:59:55.000This is kind of just a random display.
01:59:58.000Right, but I think it's perhaps a legacy thing, you know, left over.
02:00:01.000It says here that they would give their big yam to their worst enemy to make him obligated to grow an even larger one, to have his status fall when he was unable to do so.
02:01:19.000Yeah, to become a man, and in essence a warrior, these young men are taught how to detach themselves from their mothers and the women around them as a means of showing that they can live without them and prove their masculinity.
02:01:32.000The six-stage process of affirming one's manhood can take anywhere from 10 to 15 years.
02:01:37.000Until these young men father a child much of the initiation and training is characterized by what some have deemed to be highly erotic and sexual and the first stage is a sharp stick of cane is inserted deeply in the young boy's nostrils until he bleeds profusely the young boys are also introduced to older warriors who are told that bachelors are going to copulate with them to make them grow Throughout much of the sixth stage,
02:02:05.000the act of having the stick of Cain inserted into the nostrils and the performance of fellatio are integral to the process of becoming a man.
02:02:14.000While the former practice is often derided by many as inhumane and the latter is often referred to as homosexual behavior, the Sambia's understanding and purpose behind these two processes differs from our conventional understanding.
02:02:31.000While much of it viewed the practice of inserting the cane stick in the nostrils being inhumane because of the obvious infliction of pain and injury to the body, for the Sambi, it's a symbol of strength and his ability to sustain pain, which is indeed a requirement of a warrior.
02:02:44.000Additionally, the act of performing fellatio and the act of ingesting semen is seen as an integral part of manhood because boys are unable to mature into men unless they ingest semen and they adhere to the notion that all men have, in quotes,
02:03:03.000According to Sambia belief, the semen of a man possesses the masculine spirit which young boys would be able to attain through the ingestion of semen.
02:04:38.000I don't think that's true because the brotherhood that men have that they form in combat and the brotherhood that men have when they're a part of combat sports teams and people that do very, very difficult things together,
02:06:05.000That's people that have gone through something where they've proven their worth and value, and also their self-esteem is based on that, that they have gone through this thing, and they know who they are.
02:06:18.000They have accomplished this thing, and they've passed through this test.
02:06:22.000It certifies that the people that are around you are worthy of being around you.
02:06:37.000One of the issues that you have here is this chasm of comfortable complacency that a lot of people are caught in at the moment.
02:06:43.000So I learned about this idea called the region beta paradox, right?
02:06:47.000So the region beta paradox, imagine that if you were to go a mile or less, you would walk it.
02:06:53.000And if you were to go more than a mile, you would drive it.
02:06:56.000Paradoxically, you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile.
02:06:59.000So that means that sometimes worse situations can be better than better situations.
02:07:04.000And this is an issue when if you only decide to act after you cross a certain threshold of badness or whatever, you can end up being stuck in region beta.
02:07:14.000So for instance, the friend that should leave his job really, really needs to leave his job, but it's just about passable.
02:08:01.000Do they have to have high expectations and high standards?
02:08:04.000So that even, like, for a guy like yourself, who now makes a living independently, if you had to have a job and you had to be working around some boss who's kind of a dick and took credit for your work and wasn't, you know, happy with your performance, was always,
02:08:19.000like, nitpicking and fucking with you and, you know, you know how it works in office environments and...
02:08:26.000I've not had a boss for 15 years, but yes.
02:08:30.000So it's a perfect situation, because if you did have to go to that place where a large percentage of the population is in on a daily basis, bosses suck.
02:08:51.000If you had to go back to that now, it would be horrendous.
02:08:54.000But if you were conditioned to it, if it was a normal part of your life, it was just say, look, I like playing softball on the weekends with my friends and I love my family.
02:09:59.000We artificially inseminate it into our lives.
02:10:03.000Without training and hot and cold and meditation and all of the other things that we do, reading, doing deep work, all of those stuff, without that, if you didn't actively go and seek it, you could easily just breeze through life, right?
02:10:17.000I guess, but I think you'd be overwhelmed by anxiety.
02:10:29.000And people that I care about, that I've tried to talk to, don't recognize that.
02:10:33.000And I think sometimes when I give advice to people that I care about, My personality is so overwhelming, and I'm so crazy, like with what I do, that it's like people, they're like, I don't want to do that.
02:11:00.000Because I create my own bullshit, and my own bullshit's way harder than whatever I'm facing in the world, and that's how I mitigate the stress of success and pressure and criticism and all that stuff.
02:11:11.000I do to myself way worse than they're ever going to do to me, so that's how I mitigate it.
02:12:38.000Maybe the local community and the values and the norms that they've given you aren't all that's out there.
02:12:57.000Achieved success in the way that modern culture might tell you that you're supposed to.
02:13:01.000So being a club promoter, constantly being around lots of women and always having money and everybody knew who you were and there was status and acclaim and all this stuff.
02:13:10.000But then it felt like I was thirsty for something and I didn't know what I was supposed to drink.
02:13:38.000And then came off and thought, is this really all that I've got to offer the world?
02:13:41.000And the problem was that I'd taken the rules of what life is supposed to be, of how you're supposed to enjoy yourself, of what is supposed to be valued, that it's supposed to be weekend warrior, it's all about the girls that you're sleeping with, or the money that you're earning, or how many people know you.
02:13:57.000And it turned out like I'd reached the top of that tree.
02:14:11.000So I started asking different questions.
02:14:14.000I said, well, look, if I've done everything that I'm supposed to do in terms of social norms from a working class guy in the northeast of the UK, what are you supposed to do?
02:14:23.000You're supposed to go out and do all this stuff.
02:14:25.000And then I went and did the Champions League World Cup Final, which is going on Love Island, one of the biggest reality TV shows in the UK. And that still didn't satisfy.
02:14:33.000Okay, like there's something wrong with that.
02:14:35.000So I started consuming stuff like, this is a great time, 2016-17, this is the advent of Jordan Peterson, you with conversations with people like Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from the School of Life, massive influences.
02:14:49.000Because for the first time I was being told as a young guy that there are different things that you can value.
02:15:39.000And from the outside, you go, well, it's a guy that's got the club stuff and is doing modeling and reality TV and things like that.
02:15:44.000And from my side, it was so vapid and hollow and there was nothing there for me.
02:15:50.000There was nothing there that I wanted at the end of that that really, really mattered.
02:15:53.000And then I started the podcast, Modern Wisdom, like four and a half years ago because I wanted to speak to people That might have the answers.
02:16:00.000If I'm getting this from listening to other people's conversations, maybe if I get to sit down with other people that I think are interesting or useful or have insights, perhaps that'll move me a little bit closer to where I'm supposed to be.
02:16:11.000And over time, four and a half years and more than 500 conversations or whatever, every single time there's just like a little 1%.
02:16:34.000If I didn't speak on a show, if there was silence ever, I would presume that it's because I wasn't interesting or the guest wasn't interested in me or maybe the audience would think that I was stupid or whatever.
02:16:45.000I was always outsourcing my sense of self-worth to what other people were thinking about me.
02:16:52.000And that was a byproduct of how I'd lived most of my 20s.
02:16:55.000And it took a long time for me to deprogram that, to think, okay, find somewhere firmer for you to stand.
02:16:59.000I think that's why I brought up the masculinity thing earlier on as well.
02:17:02.000So I'm like, look, I can feel very comfortable in myself chasing something that I want to do.
02:17:29.000And every single time that I leaned into something that I wanted to do a little bit more...
02:17:34.000It reminded me of the direction that I was going in, and that was the drink that I was thirsty for.
02:17:40.000You know, the first time that I got a message that says, hey man, just wanted to let you know I listen to the show, and I'm a rugby player from the northwest of the UK, and I don't really have anyone around me that understands me, but dude, when I listen to you and your friends talking, it feels like someone gets me.
02:17:54.000It feels like I'm in the room with you.
02:17:57.000There was this guy came up to me at Body Power, which is like a fitness expo, it's like the Arnold Classic or whatever, fitness exposition.
02:18:03.000And it's all of us with our tops off lifting weights and fucking about and doing stuff.
02:18:37.000I'm supposed to be like the super testosterone guy that's, you know, the Love Island-y thing and the blue tick and all of this stuff.
02:18:43.000And then continual interactions like that made me realize that All of the bravado and all of the front that I'd put up and all of the who did you sleep with last week or what's the girl that knows your name or how many followers you've got on Instagram,
02:19:11.000You're constantly taking your sense of self-worth as an abstraction of what other people think about you.
02:19:17.000And it took, you know, it's still an ongoing process, but it took four and a half years of constantly speaking to people three times a week, every single week, having a conversation, researching, looking at whatever it is that they might have that would help me a little bit.
02:19:33.000And dispensing with those previous values has been a big deal for me.
02:19:38.000Well, it's a beautiful thing that comes with the conversations.
02:19:43.000It comes with this inadvertent education that you get from podcasts.
02:19:49.000Having these conversations with these people and absorbing...
02:19:53.000I love that you said maybe it's like 1% with each conversation or 1% with each profound conversation.
02:20:01.000I always use the analogy it's like you're making a mountain with layers of paint like every day paint another layer and it's like it's slowly but surely over time and for me it's somewhere around I mean it's like 1800 episodes but there's also a bunch of other ones that are like MMA episodes and there's doing other people's podcasts and through these conversations you do develop a better sense of what what's authentic and I think what you're really selling is What you in particular
02:20:34.000These are genuinely things you're interested in and you've found some things that you thought you were supposed to be interested in, but they ultimately proved to be hollow and not satisfying.
02:20:45.000And one of the things about pursuing status, like look at the car he's driving and look at the watch he's wearing and look at the girl he's with, That's unattainable to many people, so it seems like it's valuable.
02:21:02.000But then you attained it and then you realize, oh, this is not valuable.
02:21:26.000It's hard to be worthy of having a great relationship.
02:21:28.000It's hard to be worthy of having a great friend.
02:21:30.000And to be a great friend is very valuable.
02:21:33.000And to be friends with people that are intellectually stimulating is so valuable.
02:21:38.000The people that are around you, the people that you can have conversations with you that ignite a curiosity and change your perspective and a person whose point of view and ideas are enriching to you.
02:21:52.000They literally are fuel for your own curiosity and fuel for your own perspective and you can admire that person's thoughts and Take some of what they've said and apply it to your own life.
02:22:09.000And we're doing that through conversations that affect who knows how many people out there.
02:22:14.000Who knows how many people have listened to your conversations with people and developed a newfound perspective, developed a different way of looking at their own life that is now serving them and helping them get out of whatever We're good to go.
02:22:46.000You had all those things, all the trappings of fame and success.
02:22:50.000What people look at, because it's so hard to be wealthy.
02:22:55.000It's so hard to drive a very nice car.
02:22:59.000So when people see a person who's done it, they say, oh, I want to be like him.
02:23:04.000And you can either be that guy that flaunts that all the time and has that all over Instagram with a bunch of girls in bikinis hanging on you.
02:23:11.000Or you can be the guy who says, you know what, I did that and it wasn't anything special.
02:23:16.000And now I realize that this was all just a flaw in my own way of living and thinking and I'm much more in line with what seems to be natural and healthy and I'm growing and learning and I'm more successful in that way than I ever would be just like showing diamond jewelry and big houses and all that stupid shit.
02:23:39.000Dude, I love the insight that it's not valuable, it's just difficult to attain.
02:23:43.000And the difficulty in attaining it is a proxy.
02:24:22.000So there's an element of, not futility, but I feel like a lot of people still need to learn this firsthand.
02:24:32.000Had you consumed the right amount of stuff online, I could have front-loaded a lot of the lessons and mistakes that I needed to make and not needed to do them myself.
02:24:41.000Yeah, you need to figure it out yourself.
02:24:44.000It can help your journey by learning from other people's mistakes, just like we were talking about learning from alcoholics and never being an alcoholic.
02:24:52.000But there's a certain amount of mistakes that you have to make.
02:24:56.000There's a certain amount of really stupid decisions that you have to feel the pain of those failures.
02:25:07.000So that when someone else comes along and they start on the path maybe that you were on and then they run into you having conversations about the shallowness of these pursuits and then they realize in their own life maybe without having to go all the way to the top.
02:25:31.000And I understand the reason that culture and wisdom previously existed was that you would take on what other people said was valuable because for the most part, it was something that was valuable, right?
02:25:43.000Cultural mimetic evolution meant that the stuff that stuck about, like, don't put your hand in that fire, don't go to that cave over the far side, like, that was useful information.
02:25:52.000But now, because we've got so much luxury to lop our way through the world in comfort and convenience, people are being told to value things that genuinely aren't that valuable.
02:26:04.000And yeah, there's a big part of it that young people need to learn.
02:26:08.000You do not need to chase down the things that your local area is telling you that you need to.
02:26:12.000This is what I think you create online.
02:26:14.000You know, the people that you consume, the people that you read, the people that you listen to, they become your new community.
02:26:21.000They become the new good influence that you always wanted.
02:26:24.000And this is why people have such an affinity with the stuff that they consume.
02:26:28.000And this is why the fans and the audience is so compelled and so bought in Because it very much is like a friendship between you and the person that you're consuming.
02:26:49.000But you also can get stuck in the wrong way.
02:26:53.000You know, the things that you consume online can lead you into these echo chambers.
02:26:58.000And the path that you travel, you could run into a bunch of people that are also stuck, and you feed off of each other.
02:27:07.000And if you have negative friends, and if you have negative interactions online...
02:27:12.000And one of the problems with social media in general is that you're absorbing, like, what...
02:27:19.000You would call like a very condensed version like Avi Levinovitz calls it.
02:27:24.000It calls it processed information like your processed food is bad for you.
02:27:29.000Processed information is bad for you as well.
02:27:31.000And this sort of constant interaction with people in a shallow way online and also antagonistic interactions with people which is a large part of what the algorithms of both Twitter and Facebook and a lot of these places Unfortunately,
02:27:52.000Because it's not really the algorithms.
02:27:54.000The algorithms just support what you're interested in.
02:27:57.000And if you're interested in arguing about abortion, you can argue all day long because it'll direct those things towards you because those are the things you seek to interact with.
02:28:07.000But if you're just interested in sports cars and watches and fucking, you know, watching rugby, that will be your algorithm.
02:28:46.000Get into these fucking these groups online and they they find conflict in that and they avoid the problems that they need to resolve in their real life and just try to resolve these sort of external situations in these weird Twitter gangs.
02:29:04.000It gives you a simulacrum of a community, right?
02:29:07.000But I mean, I guess so does every online community.
02:29:10.000The difference is, is this one genuinely valuable to you?
02:29:12.000Is this something that's actually making your life better?
02:29:15.000And that's the problem, that the distinction between the two is very, very difficult to work out.
02:29:20.000Because you have all of the trappings, right?
02:29:47.000So men trying to work out what to do online.
02:29:49.000And I resonate with this because I was somebody that got to the end of his 20s and was fucking clueless.
02:29:54.000I mean, I still might be a man-child now at 34, but my point being that I'm less of an idiot than I was back then.
02:29:59.000So there's a whole bunch of different groups.
02:30:02.000Red Pill, Black Pill, MGTOW, Incels, all of this stuff.
02:30:06.000And what they're trying to do is they're all different flavors of people trying to work out how the world works.
02:30:11.000And men going their own way are people that have been scorned by women usually or having difficulty with women and have now renounced them entirely.
02:30:41.000But some of these areas, especially the black pill forums for guys, can be a pretty bad place to be in.
02:30:47.000They discouraged something called ascending, which is going from where they are to now being something more, to actually getting into a relationship with a girl.
02:30:56.000That would be seen as betraying, basically, the ideology of the group.
02:31:01.000And I understand as a guy that was looking for conversations, it's fortunate that I fell upon...
02:31:06.000School of Life and Jordan Peterson conversations with you as opposed to that community because both of them would have given me the same sort of influence, the same kind of satisfaction, but long-term would have given me incredibly different outcomes.
02:31:23.000Yeah, whenever someone's discouraging people from loving relationships or engaging in happy, loving relationships or the idea that that's impossible or that you should stick with us and you shouldn't go off on your own and find a woman that you're compatible with and that you enjoy being with,
02:32:40.000So there's this concept called the inner citadel by Isaiah Berlin.
02:32:43.000And what he says is, when the world outside of us has denied that which we truly want, we retreat into ourselves, into a kind of walled off garden to protect ourselves from the fearful ills of the world.
02:32:53.000My buddy gave a great example of this where he said, you can imagine that you've injured your leg, right?
02:32:57.000And you can try to treat the leg, but if you can't, then you chop the leg off and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued.
02:33:06.000How many people do you know that have got into a polyamorous relationship and said that monogamy isn't ancestrally compatible...
02:33:13.000Fundamentally because they struggle to hold down a relationship that works well.
02:33:17.000Or you see this with the body positivity movement saying that weight has no genuine bearing on health and that we need to be much more accepting.
02:33:25.000Basically being fat is just as healthy as being normal-sized, good BMI, and that the world needs to change to your views because they struggle to lose weight.
02:33:32.000Or criminals that have turned to a life of crime and say that jobs are for suckers because they struggle to hold down a job.
02:33:41.000They're constantly retreating Basically, if you can't win at a game then you change the rules and announce that you never wanted to win in any case.
02:33:50.000If you cannot get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get.
02:35:10.000But how is it that the person that's overweight and is an inspiration to people is an inspiration for as long as they stay that way, but losing the weight isn't even more inspirational?
02:35:39.000So black pill is men who consider themselves...
02:35:44.000Evolutionarily, and with regards to women, basically lost causes.
02:35:47.000They would say that they are never going to have a relationship with a woman, and they bond together over their mutual despondency at this fact.
02:35:55.000And the problem that you have with the black pill community is that it's this ascending thing, which would be moving from that to a functioning man that may have interactions with women.
02:36:04.000I had this lady, Nama Cates, on the show, and she did a ton of research into incel culture and stuff.
02:36:08.000And within these forums, if any of the guys were to say, she told me if any of the guys were to hint at ascending that they would be pushed out of the group.
02:36:17.000And I went, oh, so if they got a girl's phone number, for instance, or something like that.
02:36:20.000She says, whoa, whoa, whoa, way less than that.
02:36:22.000If they went into the Starbucks and the cashier was female and her eyes lingered on them for more than they thought that they should have done and they posted that in the group, they would be pushed out.
02:36:33.000And it's for the same reason that Adele is a bad example.
02:36:50.000No one else within the particular community has ascended and found that they're able to get in a relationship with a woman or be attractive to a woman or have a conversation with a woman.
02:37:14.000It's like this understanding that you fucked up and that you've committed to this ideology, committed to this lifestyle, these choices that you make, this rigid pattern of behavior that is ultimately not serving you, and you realize the flaw in it, that you could have been something greater.
02:37:30.000And then you see someone who has done it, who's gotten better and is healthier.
02:37:35.000And you realize like, oh no, what have I done?
02:37:38.000There's two types of responses to that, right?
02:37:40.000One of the responses would be, I want that.
02:38:29.000But you're also highlighting two options.
02:38:32.000There's one option that makes you feel terrible for your own choices and you feel angry and you don't want to associate with that person who has changed and grown.
02:38:43.000And then the other option is for you to be inspired and to do that and become like that person and look at that as a motivation.
02:38:54.000But you also can realize that just because you fucked up and you've made this bad choice, you've run into the person that you could have been.
02:39:04.000It doesn't mean you can't change paths.
02:39:08.000It doesn't mean you can't course correct.
02:39:10.000The problem is people don't like course correcting because it requires them to admit that they've been on a bad path.
02:39:23.000It's very valuable to be able to understand that, oh my god, even though I've lived 12 years as a Mormon and I've committed to polyamorous marriages and all this, that's not good.
02:39:44.000But you just have to admit that they were bad decisions.
02:39:47.000You have to admit that they're not self-serving, they're not beneficial, and that ultimately there is other ways to go about living your life that would probably be better.
02:39:58.000This loops in with the importance of how people attach themselves to their opinions that we were talking about earlier on.
02:40:05.000So, the fact that A big bunch of people on the internet and in the real world feel terrified to admit that they're wrong.
02:40:14.000If we are judged by our opinions, not our deeds, then admitting the fact that you have a wrong opinion is tantamount to destruction, right?
02:40:23.000People that can't admit that they're wrong are at the biggest competitive disadvantage in the modern world of anybody else, as far as I can see.
02:40:29.000You need to be able to admit that you're wrong.
02:40:32.000One of the problems of playing a persona, which I was doing for a very long time, this big name on campus guy, front of a club, like, hi mate, bye mate, how are you mate, blah blah blah.
02:40:58.000I had a sequence of roles, like a bunch of different algorithms or scripts that I'd run, like a chatbot or something, and I'd be like, okay, if this, then all of the people I've spoken to are kind of similar to Joe, therefore I will come out with this answer, and maybe that'll have the response that I want.
02:41:13.000But I wouldn't admit, I struggled to admit that I was wrong because that would be admitting that all of the models that I'd created were ineffective somehow.
02:41:23.000Whereas the version where you're much more humble and you realize, look, I'm a flawed, terrible creature that is constantly still trying to get things right and I am open to, in fact, I'm seeking being wrong as much as possible.
02:41:34.000The more that I can be wrong, the more that I'm going to identify all of the different pitfalls that are going to go across.
02:41:40.000That's what you need to be looking for.
02:41:41.000And if you can't admit that you're wrong, If you can't get used to the discomfort of holding an opinion, feeling someone push up against it, you notice it arise inside of yourself, right?
02:41:52.000You go, oh shit, that sounds compelling.
02:41:57.000That sounds like I might have had a blind spot here.
02:42:01.000And if you're not able to accept that to come through, you are at a huge disadvantage.
02:42:08.000And it's also this idea that your thoughts are you, right?
02:42:13.000So when you keep saying, I was wrong, you're wrong, but really the ideas are wrong.
02:42:20.000Like, adopting ideas as a part of you, like saying, these are my opinions and I will defend them to the death, is the most ridiculous thing.
02:42:28.000Because ideas You can have a thought that is incorrect and you're still the exact same person.
02:42:38.000You just got to be able to understand that that was an incorrect thought and then you have to back engineer it and figure like why Did I have that thought?
02:43:15.000And you have various opinions and various thoughts that bounce around your head all throughout the day.
02:43:20.000But if you don't base them on absolute reality and truth and honesty, you're fucked.
02:43:27.000Because then you're never going to be able to grow.
02:43:30.000You're going to defend things that are untenable.
02:43:33.000You're going to defend ridiculous ideas because you think you're supposed to do that, because other people do that, and they never admit they're wrong.
02:44:22.000And what your business is, and my business as well, that's so valuable.
02:44:26.000If you're one of those people that can't admit you're wrong, or can't address a problem that you have created in your mind, adhering to a very specific thought process, when it proves to be inaccurate,
02:44:43.000ineffective, unproductive, You're gonna you're gonna project that to all these other people and then they're not gonna listen to you anymore They're not gonna want to hear you because they know that you're full of shit They know that you or you or you have a weak structure in terms of the way you address things Some people are very very good at playing that persona though Some people have buried the person so deep down that they've been subsumed by the persona itself Now there are people online that I think are playing roles People that have made entire careers out of playing
02:45:39.000And the only way that you can exhibit it is through clear conversation, like real thoughts expressed in an honest and articulate way, where you're saying these things and you're consistent with it.
02:45:55.000So people go, oh, this is really how Chris thinks.
02:46:03.000This is beneficial to me because I also seek truth and I'm also seeking to try to figure out what's right and what's wrong and what serves me and what serves other people and how I can sort of like live life in a more compatible and cohesive and satisfying way.
02:46:17.000This is one of the problems, I think, of a lot of people not having someone that they can have a genuine deep conversation with on a regular basis.
02:46:23.000I try and prescribe to as many people as possible to do a fake podcast.
02:46:27.000So to just put your phone down with a friend once a week.
02:46:30.000It can be the same friend or a different friend.
02:46:32.000And just press record simply because it means that there's an external record of what was said.
02:46:46.000What I loved about having conversations where I was going to be held to a rigorous standard is that if there were any breaks in my thinking over time, that would be called out.
02:48:09.000I'm going to have to amp up my evolutionary psychology understanding or my Jungian archetypes or whatever the fuck it is that I'm talking about today.
02:48:17.000But even just on a small scale with somebody else, I think having that half hour conversation is really, really valuable.
02:48:23.000I think that's great advice, and I think that I have inadvertently found that out through doing podcasts, because when I first started doing podcasts, it was just me fucking around with my friends and having conversations and just for fun.
02:48:38.000And then along the way, I started interviewing people and having conversations with people like You know, Graham Hancock and talking about ancient civilizations and Randall Carlson talking about astroidal impacts and the effect on society and whether or not there's been a restart of civilization.
02:48:54.000And then you talk to people that are experts in evolution and rocketry and genetic engineering.
02:49:01.000Through that process, you develop this understanding of the world that I don't think you'd get any other way.
02:49:12.000You're never going to have an environment in today's day and age where you sit for three hours with no phones and just look at each other and have a conversation.
02:49:20.000And that's what we do on a daily basis.
02:49:23.000And I think that's an incredible opportunity to grow and learn and also to address your own thoughts.
02:49:44.000And It's not something that is traditionally valued or taught as a form of education, of a form of being able to understand how you think about things by recording them and then releasing them to the world so that the scrutiny of 100,000 people comes down on whatever shit idea you have.
02:50:08.000Yes, and how stupid and how ignorant you were and how there was inconsistencies beforehand.
02:50:13.000Yeah, but I mean, you can create a community of people around you in that way by curating the content that you consume, right?
02:50:22.000This is one of the things, a lot of the time, audiences, especially at the stage that I'm at now, which is still getting feedback from the audience and it's not so unbelievably massive that I can't get any sort of kickback, The audience has a role,
02:50:38.000I think, with helping creators to create the sort of content that is good and to also encourage them to think better in a more rigorous way.
02:50:46.000A lot of the time, the audience may have something genuinely valuable to contribute to what someone's thinking or saying, but the way that they put it across is just in this reactionary...
02:50:59.000If I get an email or a DM from somebody or whatever that's really well thought out and they say, hey man, I listened to such and such an episode with this person on DNA and you said this.
02:51:09.000Here's a couple of things I think you should really check out.
02:51:12.000Here's an article or a news story and this is where I think that you're a little bit off the mark.
02:52:05.000There's certainly a particular type of personality that is always being selected for in that.
02:52:10.000So if you want to separate yourself out from that, you actually need to do something that shows that you've taken more time, more care, more consideration.
02:52:18.000You can think about it that way, but the way I think about it is that each individual person that's commenting is on a different stage of their own journey.
02:52:26.000And if you're at the stage of your own journey where something you disagree with, you have to insult that person, ad hominems, and swears, and fuck you, and you fucking idiot, and you're at a very early stage of this idea of exchanging information.
02:52:40.000And you don't have to communicate that way.
02:52:42.000And some people, when they see someone's idea they disagree with, they just want to insult that person and diminish that person and demean that person.
02:52:50.000And it's a very ineffective way of getting your ideas across.
02:52:54.000You might think that you're damaging that person and then in so doing you're propping up your own ideas.
02:53:00.000But what you're really doing is you're exposing this bitter, angry, unhappy version of yourself.
02:53:08.000There are many people that I disagree with, but the way I try to engage with those people is by saying, I don't think that's correct, and I don't feel the same way because of this, and this is why.
02:53:25.000Unless they're so fucking preposterous I think that it's necessary to get a little bit out there like CNN anchors and shit like that because they're propagandists and I think that ultimately they're doing some danger in the way they communicate in some ways.
02:53:37.000But most of the time when I talk about things I try to talk about things in a way where I look at their side.
02:55:12.000The Brighton Hotel attack, I think it was 1983 or 1987. So Margaret Thatcher, right, is going to a hotel for a Conservative Party conference.
02:55:20.000And this is when the IRA, Ireland's terrorist group, they had a big problem with what was going on in the UK. So they set a long time-delayed bomb to go off in this hotel.
02:55:39.000She actually ends up being in the bathroom when it goes off.
02:55:44.000Had she been in her main room, there would have been shards of glass everywhere, but she probably wouldn't have been killed, but would have definitely at least been damaged, right?
02:55:51.000And afterward, she puts a statement out saying, we will not be deterred, we are not to be pushed around, and blah, blah, blah.
02:55:58.000The IRA puts a statement out and they say, Mrs. Thatcher, today you were lucky.
02:56:04.000The thing is, you have to be lucky every day.
02:56:35.000And I think that realizing just how easy it is to change.
02:56:41.000How easy it is to change the things that you think, the way that you behave, the norms that you follow.
02:56:46.000This quote from Aristotle, he says, if a man knows not where he goes, no wind is favorable.
02:56:51.000If you haven't considered what it is that you want to want in life, Basically, you're just the cleverest rat in the room, right?
02:57:00.000Your desires are determined by the confused chemical signals of your body and the way you've dealt with past trauma and social norms and paths of least resistance, all of these things.
02:57:12.000That's what's determining your behavior right now.
02:57:55.000It's scary work to admit that you're wrong.
02:57:57.000It's scary work to look at assessing why I do the things that I do.
02:58:02.000There's also the burden of having to make a living, right?
02:58:06.000And that requires so much of your day.
02:58:09.000Think about the amount of time that if we were talking about before that most people who are living, there's a large percentage of people that are listening to this right now that are living their life doing something for a living that they don't want to do and it's not enjoyable and it's burdensome.
02:58:25.000Well, that's eight hours a day plus commuting.
02:58:29.000So most of your day is spent in an undesirable way.
02:58:32.000So because of that, it leaves very little time to course correct.
02:58:37.000The more you develop responsibilities, whether it's a family that you have to support, or whether it's a mortgage you have to pay off, or a car loan, or whatever it is, the more of those things you accumulate, the more difficult it is to course correct.
02:58:50.000And that's very, very important for people to understand, is that the further you go down this path, like you might have this job and it might suck, but then the boss pulls you into the office and goes, hey, Mike, we're going to give you a new responsibility, a new raise, but we're going to require more hours.
02:59:05.000You know, it's a 10% bump in pay, but I want you to understand that, you know, this is, you're going to have to do a lot of overtime, you have to do a lot, and you start thinking, well, I'm moving up, but you're not.
02:59:17.000That's so important to understand, is that the amount of time, like the amount of focus, the amount of hours your mind is spent doing something you don't want to do, that's not going to fucking change unless you make it change.
02:59:33.000You're going to have to do something about that.
02:59:35.000And the more you commit to that and the more time spent doing that, the harder it's going to be to make those changes.
02:59:44.000That's where these kind of conversations are so valuable, because you have done some things you don't want to do anymore, and you used to do them, and I have been the same way, and most people are that way.
03:00:21.000I love the fact that it's still there.
03:00:22.000But another thing to consider is the fact that if people are succeeding, even slightly, in a job that they hate...
03:00:29.000Think about how good you could be if it was something that you really, really cared about.
03:00:33.000Think about how amazing you could be if you pursued something that you genuinely had existential simpatico with as opposed to something that you detest or just not that fussed about.
03:00:46.000If you're in the chasm of comfortable complacency.
03:00:50.000Just how good could you be if this was something that you loved?
03:00:56.000It's just so hard for people to course correct.
03:00:58.000And it's so hard for people to have like sort of a top-down objective view of where they're going and what they're doing and how they're thinking and whether or not they like it.
03:01:06.000Most of the time people need some sort of a catastrophic event, some sort of a near-death experience or a life-changing event or a breakup or being fired or a psychedelic experience, like something that just blows the paradigm completely into a million pieces and you're forced to look at it again.
03:01:23.000That's falling out of the bottom of the region beta paradox, right?
03:01:26.000You go through the bottom and you bounce out of there, right?
03:01:45.000That would have been, you know, past the time when you're supposed to have responsibilities.
03:01:49.000Now, yeah, I didn't have any restrictions or whatever to be able to come out here in terms of family and kids and stuff like that.
03:01:56.000But still, moving to a new country on your own at 33 is something that most people would have been – that's a little bit of an odd decision to make perhaps.
03:02:05.000There are opportunities and there are people that reach out that have made huge changes in their lives.
03:02:20.000That's just a sad fact that if you're able to nip something in the bud Before it becomes too entrenched, before you have too many responsibilities that make it harder because you've got to keep on grinding at the shitty job that you don't like, while you've got to side hustle, while you've got to raise the kids,
03:02:36.000while you've got to pay the mortgage, while you've got to do all of the rest of the things and the adulting.
03:03:52.000So, okay, so does that mean that you're in control of your thoughts?
03:03:54.000Well, you kind of are, but you're also kind of not.
03:03:57.000And if there was somebody that was walking down the street saying things, and you couldn't predict what they were going to say next, would you trust what that person says?
03:04:23.000But you do develop momentum from thinking in a specific way, whether it's good momentum or bad momentum.
03:04:31.000You can get good momentum by choosing...
03:04:35.000Good paths in life by course correcting, by adding beneficial and healthy activities to your life, and you grow and change because of that.
03:04:46.000You know, I've talked to so many people that have started doing yoga, and they're like, oh my god, it's changed my life.
03:04:52.000It changed the way I think about things, changed the way I interact with people.
03:04:56.000But by forcing yourself to do a thing, you now develop momentum, and that can be applied to all sorts of different aspects of your life.
03:05:04.000And also by finding something that you deeply enjoy and that becomes satisfying to you, you enrich your overall experience on Earth.
03:05:14.000And that, in turn, enriches the way you communicate with others.
03:06:22.000And then he used to throw himself down the stairs as a child because he was a masochist.
03:06:26.000He used to enjoy the pain of being thrown down stairs.
03:06:29.000He once got locked in a deep-sea diving suit while he was giving a talk, and he had to be wrenched out of it mid-talk because he was suffocating.
03:06:36.000Do you know about what he did with his wife?
03:06:38.000No, I don't know anything about Salvador Dali.
03:07:16.000So he used to send a formal request to go and see her.
03:07:19.000His wife, in the castle that he bought her, he used to treat her like royalty and she would have to accept it like by royal decree or something.
03:07:26.000My point being that Salvador Dali was an incredibly odd human.
03:07:30.000And as brilliant as he was, Michelangelo didn't do Dali.
03:07:46.000Had he have tried to be his version of Leonardo da Vinci or his version of Michelangelo, the world would have been robbed of Dali's work.
03:07:54.000So you are this very unique combination of genetics and experience and past traumas and social norms and your funny lisp and the fact that one foot's slightly bigger than the other, all of that combined together.
03:08:06.000Gives you the opportunity to have a very unique offering to the world.
03:08:10.000And it is incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's being themselves.
03:08:14.000How am I going to be a better Joe Rogan than Joe Rogan is?
03:08:17.000The best that I can hope for is being the second best Joe Rogan in the world if I decide to do that.
03:08:23.000So if you decide to lean into the thing that only you can do, that is where your competitive advantage lies.
03:08:30.000And that doesn't mean that you can't progress forward.
03:08:33.000That doesn't mean that you can't enhance yourself and develop new skills.
03:08:36.000But I do think that there's something to do with embracing the uniqueness that you have.
03:08:43.000That will allow you to direct yourself towards something that is more fulfilling, that's more in line with you, that is competitively more effective.
03:08:52.000Socially, people are going to resonate with you.
03:08:53.000We don't love people for how much they like other people, right?
03:08:57.000No one's ever fallen in love with someone and said, you know what it is?
03:09:00.000I just love the fact that I can accurately predict all of their opinions without having heard their thought on something beforehand.
03:09:38.000The thing is what you're saying by leaning into yourself and saying, what is it about you that is unique that only you can offer the world?
03:09:47.000Some people don't feel like there's anything that is unique about them that they can offer the world because they haven't done anything that shows them that.
03:10:13.000And by going through these things, you'd gain more confidence and more of an understanding of your thought process and where you error and where you do well and what lessons that you can take from that and be a little bit better next time.
03:10:31.000And the accumulation of all this data is it makes you understand what is unique about you and who you are.
03:10:39.000But That's why I think difficult pursuits are so important for humans.
03:10:47.000I think we live in this shell of a body that has this ancient primate DNA that is all about problem solving and survival.
03:10:59.000It's about figuring out where the threats are.
03:11:04.000It's about accumulating resources and food and about your DNA carrying on.
03:11:10.000Well, most of those problems have kind of been solved by civilized society.
03:11:17.000So in order to examine your own unique human potential, you have to have a pursuit, whatever that pursuit is.
03:11:25.000Whether it's golf like Tiger Woods, whatever, it's basketball like Michael Jordan, whatever it is, you've got to find a thing.
03:11:33.000And through that thing, you learn about yourself.
03:11:35.000Whether it's yoga, whether it's writing, there's a way that you can interface with Difficult, complex problems that you will gain insight into how you operate and how your mind plays tricks on you and how accomplishing things is deeply rewarding and how learning how to be a more empathetic and kind friend is also rewarding and about when you recognize that in other people,
03:12:05.000All those things, you've got to get through something in life to acquire them.
03:12:12.000And it bleeds into those other areas, right?
03:12:14.000The single pursuit becomes the vector that everything else comes from, right?
03:12:18.000It's a gateway drug or the pebble at the top of an avalanche.
03:12:21.000The first step is the hardest one, though, and I think that that was what I was stuck at for a very long time.
03:12:26.000You know, I knew that there was something wrong.
03:12:30.000I didn't know what, and I didn't really know how to fix it either.
03:12:34.000And that's the first step being the most difficult in terms of starting that momentum.
03:12:40.000You know, you look at it takes 10 years to become an overnight success.
03:12:44.000All of the people that you admire are just the end result of hundreds of thousands of tiny little interactions and iterations on doing a lot of different things.
03:12:55.000The way that they show up for their friends, the fact that they turn up on time.
03:12:59.000All of that stuff, the tiny, tiny, tiny little things.
03:13:02.000And then that is how you look at somebody that's incredibly impressive.
03:13:06.000But trying to reverse engineer the impressiveness without thinking that, okay, what is the thing that I can do today, the tiny little action that I can take that will move me slightly closer toward my goal, even if I don't know what the goal is.
03:13:19.000So a lot of the time, I think people have a problem that Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control, right?
03:13:27.000So they decide, I'm not going to do a thing until I know exactly the direction I'm going to go in.
03:13:34.000And that means that no step is useful until I know the end goal that I'm going to get to.
03:13:40.000But what they don't understand is that any commitment that you make is a step in the right direction.
03:13:48.000Anything that you decide that you're going to commit yourself to...
03:13:50.000Peterson's got one of these rules where he says, commit yourself to one thing as hard as you can and see what happens.
03:14:03.000Even if blogging turns out you suck at it and you hate it and it doesn't end up getting any traction and it gives you no sense of joy or whatever, what you've learned there is that you can do a thing every single day for two months.
03:14:15.000That is a really fucking valuable lesson.
03:14:17.000It's a vehicle for developing your human potential.
03:14:40.000But one of the problems you've got is that people can be anything that they want, but they can't be everything that they want.
03:14:47.000You have to pick a small, narrow window of stuff that you're going to compete on, right?
03:14:52.000You can't be the leanest person in the gym whilst starting a new business, whilst going out every single night and socializing, trying to find your partner, whilst starting a podcast and a blog and a bunch of other things.
03:15:09.000You have to pick what is the highest point of contribution that I can go to.
03:15:12.000And then over time, you gradually, gradually refine those down.
03:15:17.000Now sometimes you can find things that are kind of mutually beneficial.
03:15:21.000So let's say that you end up being good at podcasting, which is conversation.
03:15:26.000You also end up, like, commentary's kind of conversation, and comedy's kind of conversation.
03:15:32.000Okay, so these things kind of intermingle, and the audience, and selling shows, and blah, blah, blah.
03:15:38.000So sometimes stuff overlaps, but more often than not, it diverges.
03:15:43.000If you want to be a great businessman and make as much money as possible, you're going to have to sacrifice time with your kids.
03:15:49.000If you want to be the best dad that you can, you're probably not going to be able to earn as much money quite as much as you could do usually.
03:15:54.000So these things are mutually exclusive.
03:15:56.000It's an idea Oliver Berkman has where he says, decide in advance what you want to suck at.
03:16:02.000Because a lot of the time, we believe that we can do anything that we want to do, be anything that we want to be, and as soon as we start to commit to one thing, we feel the pain of the stuff that we've started to let fall away.
03:16:15.000I used to be in condition, now that I'm focused on my family, I've noticed that I'm getting a little bit out of shape.
03:16:21.000Even though I train, I know that I'm still doing stuff as much as I can, but I can't go to the gym as much as I could when I was 25 and had no girlfriend and no family.
03:16:29.000But if you've committed in advance to wanting to be the best father that you can be, you know downstream from that, okay, what are the things that I'm going to have to suck at in advance?
03:16:40.000My body condition is probably going to take a little bit of a hit.
03:16:43.000Maybe I'm not going to be able to see the boys on a weekend quite so much.
03:17:08.000A lot of the things that I do, I've always presumed they're going to last forever.
03:17:12.000So if I'm going to be into training in the gym now, I forget that it's just periodization.
03:17:18.000I can focus on training for the next six months, and then after that, once I've locked in a good routine or I've built up this particular thing, after that it's going to be something else, and after that it's going to be something else.
03:17:27.000I always presume that what I did, that what's happening now is just going to continue to stretch out into the future forever.
03:17:33.000And this means that good things feel like they're going to last forever and then inevitably they end up disappointing you because they're not going to.
03:17:39.000And bad things feel like they're going to last forever, which makes you despondent.
03:17:43.000But realizing that whatever it is that you're doing now is only going to last for a little while, right?
03:17:47.000You're going to have this particular training style.
03:17:49.000You're going to have this little project.
03:17:50.000And then what else are you going to add in after that?
03:17:53.000But not just feeling like the now is everything that there is and that things are going to change over time and that you're going to iterate, I think that's quite an important realization.
03:18:04.000I try to just enjoy what I'm doing while I'm doing it.
03:18:10.000And I don't think too much about whether or not I'm going to be able to do something forever.
03:19:04.000Things to do, things to learn from, things, pursuits.
03:19:08.000And I think that if you could find things that resonate with your particular personality, just enjoy them and treat them as what they are.
03:19:18.000What they are is they're sort of a replacement For all the things that gave you human rewards, the human reward systems that are built into our primate DNA. You need those.
03:19:33.000You can't just go through life just showing up, eating, sleeping, and going to sleep.
03:19:59.000Like, you have to face discomfort for you to appreciate happiness.
03:20:03.000If you live in Southern California, one of the things you realize is, like, the sun doesn't feel good anymore.
03:20:09.000You know, it's there every fucking day.
03:20:12.000I went on a hunting trip once with my friend Brian and my friend Steve who went to Alaska and we were in Prince Edward Island and it's like the rainiest place in all of North America.
03:20:24.000It rained every fucking day we were there.
03:21:13.000Some of the most depressed people I've ever met live in L.A. And they're in the sun every fucking day.
03:21:18.000And the people that live in places where it rains all the time, when the sun comes out, they're in ecstasy, they're having fun, they're laughing, they're at the park.
03:21:51.000And they've proven that physical exercise, in particular cardiovascular exercise, is just as effective as SSRIs, if not more effective on most people.
03:21:59.000Dude, it's so strange thinking back to my 20s because I always thought that I was a depressive person.
03:22:16.000Laid on top of the fact that I was sad and didn't want people that I was...
03:22:20.000We had 500 people that worked for us at this events company and we were supposed to be the party guys and we were supposed to be the ones on the front door that was G-ing everyone up and we've got this DJ and we've got these cool people and this is the night.
03:22:30.000Aspirational, inspirational, like outgoing, gregarious, extroverted people.
03:22:37.000I was like, holy fuck, how embarrassing is it that I, the person that's supposed to be in charge of this, can't bring himself to go to the kitchen to get himself a glass of water?
03:23:00.000The first time I ever went to bed and woke up at the same time consistently since the age of 18 when I lived at home with my parents was COVID. How much better did you feel?
03:23:42.000The difference is so profound that I can't put words on it.
03:23:46.000And that's what you see, that's that 1%.
03:23:48.000Each conversation, each day, each little time that you do something, each interaction, the fact that you turn up early, the fact that you tell the truth as opposed to telling a lie.
03:23:57.000Every single one of those are mountain built and layers of paint.