Leo D.M.J. Aurini


Soy, Nutrition, and Literature


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Summary

In this episode, I talk about soy, nutrition, and literature. I also answer a question from a listener about Skinner Boxes and the best use of time in the modern world. I hope you enjoy it!


Transcript

00:00:00.000 So this is another requested video, but it's a very open-ended request. I'm eventually going to
00:00:11.400 post the question on my website because it was actually quite well written and said quite a bit
00:00:17.800 on its own. But for now, I think I'm going to do two videos responding to it. And this is the first
00:00:25.940 video. And like I said, it's going to be very free-form. So, yeah, soy, nutrition, and literature.
00:00:38.380 A funny thing happened to me the other day. I'd been derelict in my shopping duties,
00:00:45.560 and I was rummaging through the kitchen looking for something to eat that night. You know,
00:00:51.440 obviously nothing too amazing or too healthy, just something that, you know, met the bear
00:00:56.300 requirements. And I pull out a box of Kraft dinner. And I kind of shrugged my shoulders and says,
00:01:03.360 you know, this is what you get for not, you know, being on top of things. But as I'm boiling the
00:01:08.580 water, I decide to read the ingredients on the box. And wouldn't you know it? First of all,
00:01:16.060 it's fortified with iron. It's, uh, you add butter to it. And, you know, the, that fake cheese powder
00:01:24.200 is mostly milled, made out of milk and other actual things. You know, the only real fake
00:01:30.540 ingredient in Kraft dinner is the food coloring.
00:01:37.840 Say what you will, Kraft dinner is pretty damn close to real food, isn't it? At least by today's
00:01:45.640 standards. See, when I was growing up, Kraft dinner is, that's what we ate because we were
00:01:53.920 poor. But, you know, I go to the grocery store these days and everything, absolutely everything
00:02:04.720 is full of fake calories. I mean, I checked Campbell's Soup recently. They've started putting
00:02:13.220 soy in Campbell's Soup. So, you know, that's now off my list of things that I purchase.
00:02:21.880 Soy, canola oil, also known as rapeseed oil. It's, yeah, it's terrible for you folks.
00:02:30.300 Sugar in absolute everything. Uh, there's, there's a great comic by, by Stone Toss recently
00:02:36.240 where the dad, the, the kid's about to eat some ice cream and the dad says,
00:02:40.260 hey, Timmy, no dessert for breakfast. Meanwhile, he's having Eggo waffles and a sugary bowl of
00:02:47.320 cereal and he's eating a donut and you name it. It's absolutely amazing what incredible garbage
00:02:58.180 the modern diet is. And I look at some of these people out there, especially the ones that are
00:03:15.040 sickly or overweight. And I just wonder, have you ever had a real diet? Have you ever had real
00:03:23.640 nutrition go into you? Because you sure as hell don't look like you have? And I'll bet that,
00:03:31.700 good Lord, my, let's go back to the Kraft dinner. You know what? You want to make it even better?
00:03:36.720 Grate some cheddar. Put that on top of it. And there you go. It's pretty damn close to real food.
00:03:42.740 And you made it for two bucks. Not the best thing to live off of, but it's a hell of a lot better
00:03:50.820 than soy and sugar and refined carbs every single day for every single meal.
00:03:58.920 The stuff I eat is so much more satisfying. It's so much healthier. It's so much tastier
00:04:04.960 than the stuff everybody else eats. And yet they continue to eat it.
00:04:12.840 Now the question was about Skinner boxes.
00:04:17.520 And right here we're into the exact same territory.
00:04:20.880 So the Skinner box, I'm sure most of you know what it is. Basically you put a rad in the box
00:04:25.380 and it has a choice. It can hit the electrode to get a little stimulation of pleasure in its brain.
00:04:30.300 Or it can hit the thing to get a food pellet. It usually changes, chooses the electrode.
00:04:36.220 Right? It becomes obsessive.
00:04:38.100 The behavior that it's pursuing is disconnected from the supposed reward.
00:04:44.680 Okay? It's like somebody that spends hours at the slot machine.
00:04:49.980 Right? And it's like, you know, buddy, if you'd worked for all those hours,
00:04:52.980 like you came away with 20 bucks.
00:04:54.900 If you'd worked those hours, you would have had 60 bucks.
00:04:57.480 So, was that really the best use of your time?
00:05:01.780 Was it that enjoyable?
00:05:07.580 You know, it's like when you've got a can of Pringles.
00:05:12.420 Right? How many of you have ever eaten half a can of Pringles?
00:05:16.300 How many of you have ever had three and then stopped?
00:05:18.800 Right? You don't even want any more of the damn things.
00:05:20.920 They taste disgusting at this point, but you're just compelled to keep finishing the bottle.
00:05:24.780 Video games are turning into that.
00:05:32.700 You know, I've got Fallout 4 on my computer. I still haven't completed it.
00:05:37.540 Right? I kind of want to. I want to know what the story is.
00:05:40.380 And yeah, I hear it's disappointing. Don't ruin it for me.
00:05:42.740 But I go into that game and like every step of the way, it's a Skinner box.
00:05:49.440 It's just another go to this location, you know, hit X button here, and then come back for the second part.
00:05:56.960 And you get more XP and you get some caps and you get whatever.
00:06:01.180 Right? It just increasingly disconnects me from the game.
00:06:05.480 I'm seeing the seams.
00:06:07.800 Okay? I'm seeing the seams in the background decoration.
00:06:12.200 I'm realizing that, oh, it's not the Star Trek Enterprise. It's just a set.
00:06:23.620 And yet people play these video games.
00:06:26.120 Right? I swear to God, the video games from 10, 20 years ago.
00:06:30.180 Star Control 2, the original Fallouts.
00:06:32.560 Those were interesting games.
00:06:35.120 Baldur's Gate 2, Max Payne.
00:06:37.420 These were fun. These were interesting.
00:06:41.260 And you enjoyed them. You played them.
00:06:43.320 And then you finished them.
00:06:44.840 And then maybe 5, 10 years later, you come back and you play them again.
00:06:48.940 These new ones are just this endless distraction.
00:06:52.320 They are so full of material.
00:06:54.420 But the material is nothing but cheap cards.
00:06:56.920 It's so repetitive.
00:06:58.120 Go collect 5 rat pelts.
00:07:02.560 Oh, now collect 5 dire rat pelts.
00:07:13.020 And same thing goes for narrative as well.
00:07:18.000 You know, increasingly the narratives of our civilization.
00:07:21.100 Guys, you want to do the number one thing you can for your mental hygiene?
00:07:24.700 Read old books.
00:07:26.320 You know, like, here.
00:07:29.200 Pick up.
00:07:31.700 Salust.
00:07:32.740 Right here.
00:07:34.080 By Quintus Curtius.
00:07:36.460 Great read.
00:07:38.240 Very well translated.
00:07:39.740 Very relevant to the modern day.
00:07:41.740 And you're learning something about your ancestors when you read that.
00:07:45.360 Go read old books.
00:07:46.780 Don't read this modern pablum.
00:07:48.460 Don't go to see the latest Marvel vs. DC movie.
00:07:54.860 Read old books.
00:07:56.380 Those are the cure to this.
00:07:58.260 Eat old food.
00:07:59.660 Play old video games.
00:08:01.480 Read old books.
00:08:08.360 You know, a chess of...
00:08:09.800 A game of chess with your friend doesn't have all the blinking lights of a video game.
00:08:15.120 But it is so much more fun.
00:08:18.560 It is so much more fun to play chess or even poker than most of these endless, never-ending ciphers of nothing, which are your typical video games.
00:08:33.840 There's the occasional good one that comes out.
00:08:36.240 But for the most part, you're just distracting yourself from the fact that your life sucks.
00:08:40.180 See, this thing, Salus right here, this is going to inspire you.
00:08:45.680 This is going to inspire you to be better.
00:08:49.120 You are going to walk away from that and have a bunch of pithy quotes in your head.
00:08:57.700 Jeez, every so often I go back and re-read the Narnia Chronicles.
00:09:01.520 I mean, most of these people are reading Harry Potter, which is the most simplistic garbage in the world.
00:09:06.440 The Narnia Chronicles, every single time I re-read them, I pick up something new in there.
00:09:11.800 Some brilliant observation on the nature of the sexes or how exhaustion kind of leads us to act like cunts.
00:09:21.180 I love how the protagonists in those stories are not perfect human beings.
00:09:26.200 They're all flawed.
00:09:27.200 I love that.
00:09:28.920 And he manages to do it with children and writing for children at the same time.
00:09:33.220 Or the rest of these people, they're just living on empty calories.
00:09:43.140 They are physically malnourished.
00:09:47.640 They are psychically malnourished.
00:09:50.760 They are spiritually malnourished.
00:09:55.140 You know, SIPP-5 likes to toss this thing up where there's the three different modern systems.
00:10:12.360 There's communism, fascism, and there's freedom.
00:10:17.100 Freedom.
00:10:20.580 I'm not saying the other two systems were particularly good.
00:10:26.460 But freedom is all about commodifying and packaging and putting a label on it and selling a lunchbox.
00:10:34.100 You know, we put God in a lunchbox.
00:10:36.280 Go buy your God.
00:10:37.500 Walk around and carry that God and you're fine.
00:10:41.480 Right?
00:10:41.740 There's your spirituality.
00:10:43.060 Comes in a lunchbox.
00:10:44.600 Right?
00:10:44.760 Same with your culture.
00:10:46.160 You know, you can watch Ant-Man or you can watch Iron Man.
00:10:49.340 We've got something for everybody.
00:10:56.180 Psychically, oh, you know what?
00:10:57.500 Just go read one of those pop books recommended by the New York Times.
00:11:01.520 Yeah, that's sure as hell going to teach you something.
00:11:09.680 We are so incredibly malnourished.
00:11:13.180 And now the interesting thing about fat people is that fat people, they're not fat because they eat a lot.
00:11:23.860 They eat a lot because they're fat.
00:11:26.960 Because what happens when you are overweight, when you eat too much sugar, when you get type 2 diabetes, it used to be adult onset diabetes, but now kids are getting it, so it's type 2.
00:11:38.960 What happens is that the insulin response in your fat cells no longer responds accordingly.
00:11:45.040 What this boils down to is that your fat cells are supposed to suck up the sugar when you eat and then slowly release it as the day goes on.
00:11:54.580 But when you damage your system by having too much sugar, by having too many refined carbs, that insulin mechanism no longer works.
00:12:06.220 And so these fat people, you know, if you're in shape, you have a big meal, you're okay for several hours.
00:12:15.580 The fat person, they could have the exact same meal within half an hour they're starving because their fat cells won't put any of that energy back into their bloodstream.
00:12:25.420 And so these days, I strongly suspect, I have no evidence of this, but I strongly suspect that we spend way more time watching movies, reading books, playing video games than our ancestors did.
00:12:46.840 Okay, we, yeah, you could say, yeah, well, we're atomized, we're lonely, okay, maybe that's part of it.
00:12:54.640 But people will avoid hanging out with their friends to go play video games.
00:12:59.780 They will prioritize the video game.
00:13:02.640 And I think it's like that response in the obese person, where you are so nutritionally deprived.
00:13:13.560 Like, you, you really want a good story.
00:13:17.980 You want it so bad.
00:13:18.860 And the more bad stories you read, the more you want a good story.
00:13:23.080 But what happens is it drives you to reading more and more and more and more bad stories.
00:13:28.320 More simplistic narratives.
00:13:29.760 More garbage narratives.
00:13:30.980 More narcissism enhancing and justifying narratives.
00:13:37.060 The way you cure diabetes is you wean yourself off the sugar and you train your body to operate the way it's supposed to again.
00:13:55.300 The way you cure yourself from this narcissistic toxic culture is you read old books.
00:14:07.060 So, guys, read some old books.
00:14:20.280 Play a game of chess.
00:14:22.840 Have a conversation with a real human being.
00:14:29.060 Put down the Skinner boxes.
00:14:32.180 And if you fill your mind full of modern, toxic garbage, you will behave like a modern, toxic person.
00:14:48.720 So, fill your mind with healthy calories.
00:14:56.660 Deus Volt.
00:15:00.600 This is Rini.
00:15:01.840 Out.