In this episode, we talk about a conspiracy theory that involves the sun in Antarctica and the people that believe in it. We also talk about Flat Earth Theory and the Direct Energy Weapon Theory. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Riley Bray.
00:06:01.000Yeah, I was going to send this to you as well, Jamie.
00:06:03.000I'll send you one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of it on X because it's quite stunning.
00:06:09.000So apparently through the use of LIDAR, they have discovered that there are enormous structures underneath the Great Pyramid that go kilometers deep into the earth with coils.
00:06:21.000So enormous pillars and then these coils, they don't understand what it is because they're just looking at LIDAR images.
00:06:30.000But whatever this is, is a uniform structure.
00:06:35.000There's several pillars and all of this is like very, very, very weird.
00:06:41.000Yeah, 600 meters descending down those cylinders, and then there's more stuff below it, and then there's additional structures inside of it.
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00:09:04.000What has just been announced in relation to the pyramids at the Giza Plateau and the plateau itself is so incredible, so awe-inspiring and narrative.
00:09:15.000shattering that I have been sitting here for the last hour trying to wrap my head around the implications of what we were just told.
00:09:23.000So this is pretty much breaking news because the new findings were announced on the 16th of March at a press conference held by the team who were studying the Great Pyramid of Giza with a non-invasive technology that was first developed by Filippo Bionde and Corrado Malanga called Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography.
00:09:45.000the internal structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
00:09:48.000And this method leverages the analysis of micro-movements typically generated by background seismic activity to achieve a high-resolution, full 3D tomographic imagery of the pyramid's interior and subsurface components. The recent findings from deploying this technology
00:10:08.000are nothing short of mind-blowing because what's been discovered is that there are huge structures coming down from the base of the pyramid deep into the bedrock in fact over 600 meters deep which then connects to structures that extend up to two kilometers below the surface of the ground two kilometers massive internal structures connected to the base of the pyramid and extending deep Deep down.
00:12:14.000It's the least white supremacist notion of all time that this incredibly advanced ancient civilization had reached some sort of proficiency that's above and beyond what we attribute to them.
00:12:26.000I think Graham is right, and I think there's a lot of other people that are right, too, that are chasing this down.
00:12:34.000Christopher Dunn had long ago theorized and wrote a book that he believes that the Great Pyramid of Giza is a gigantic power plant.
00:12:42.000He thinks it generates power and he has a very like a working theory of why it's built the way it's built.
00:12:52.000That totally coincides with the ability to produce hydrogen, the ability to utilize the rays of space and try to find some way to generate electricity through this.
00:13:06.000Yeah. The association of other people that we don't like talked about this thing, therefore anybody else that talks about this thing is immediately attached to them, just seems like a very lazy way to sort of smear people.
00:13:28.000And it's also from academia, which is so disappointing.
00:13:31.000You know, I mean, academia has been so captured by this mind virus of leftism that it's just it's so bizarre to watch the brightest minds and the people that we lean on for rational, reasonable thinking and an objective understanding of the world.
00:13:52.000And when they're calling someone a white supremacist for talking about an advanced society that lived in Africa.
00:13:58.000There's a lot of ways that you can put your foot in it.
00:14:00.000There's this woman, Corey Clark, who sent a survey to every psychology professor in the U.S. and asked them questions like, what is more important, the truth?
00:14:17.000And a lot of professors basically said, I self-censor.
00:14:22.000I would prioritize making people feel good over necessarily telling them the truth.
00:14:26.000There are certain opinions that people should be reported for.
00:14:29.000There are certain topics that basically shouldn't be discussed.
00:14:32.000The usual suspects stuff like behavioral genetics, so heritability, evolutionary psychology, as in anything that kind of relates to sex differences.
00:14:41.000And yeah, it really is retarding the progress of everything.
00:14:47.000And you think, well, trickling down from this, what sort of educated society are you going to have in future?
00:14:54.000That's not going to be particularly good.
00:14:55.000Well, I think it's going to encourage independent education.
00:14:58.000I think you're going to encourage people like University of Austin, which is they're aiming to do just that and to kind of bypass all this nonsense and just teach people reality.
00:15:10.000And I also think that it's most likely...
00:15:15.000I mean, I don't even want to say most likely.
00:15:17.000It's most certainly influenced by other countries that want to degrade our ability to develop meaningful minds that come out of universities, like intelligent, useful people.
00:15:32.000Not just distract them, but destroy society with them.
00:15:35.000It's Yuri Bezmenov's prediction from 1984.
00:15:38.000It's like you could pass that off as a ridiculous conspiracy theory if it wasn't totally accurate.
00:15:45.000It's amazing how people don't want to believe that maybe there's been subversion and that maybe our universities have been overrun for years with...
00:15:56.000Both funding, which we know is true, particularly from China.
00:16:00.000China funds a lot of American universities.
00:16:39.000Well, he might auto-sign the legal papers.
00:16:42.000There's that question about, there's two options about life in the universe, that either we're alone or that we're not, and both are equally terrifying.
00:16:49.000Right. I feel like it's the same when it comes to Western anti-Westernism.
00:16:56.000And you say, either we're doing it to ourselves.
00:17:24.000Really weak minds and particularly bullies and mean people who want to find other people that they can hate to justify whatever virtue they believe they have above those people.
00:18:13.000We've heard a lot about extremism recently, a nastier, harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother-boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents.
00:18:23.000All right, but what we never hear about extremism is its advantages.
00:18:28.000Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies.
00:18:38.000The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.
00:18:49.000So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time.
00:19:06.000So, if you want to feel good, become an extremist.
00:19:13.000If you join the hard left, they'll give you their list of authorized enemies.
00:19:18.000Almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors, and, of course, moderates.
00:19:38.000I bet the moderates are in there again.
00:19:40.000You still get the loveliness of enemies, only they're different ones.
00:19:42.000Noisy minority groups, unions, Russia, weirdos, demonstrators, welfare sponges, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, strikers, social workers, communists, and, of course, moderates. And upstart actors.
00:20:01.000Now, once you're armed with one of these super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behaviours morally justified.
00:20:10.000So you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good.
00:20:44.000And I think that if people start pointing at outgroups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup, that's usually an indication.
00:20:53.000I'm like, I should look a little bit closer at you.
00:21:00.000Lizzo. Didn't think I was going to go there.
00:21:04.000Lizzo, talking about how she was in support of these bigger girls and she was going to help their careers and give them a platform, presumably a structurally reinforced platform.
00:21:18.000Meanwhile, behind the scenes, she's body shaming them.
00:22:01.000And he was saying, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it.
00:22:06.000Yes. And he's discussing performative empathy in this way.
00:22:10.000This sort of sense that what's most important is to protect people's feelings.
00:22:15.000And I think that this really is a point, it doesn't matter whether you're on left or right, this is a point that you should care about because you want people to have some sense of transparency, legitimacy.
00:24:11.000You could describe me as a criticism hyper-responder.
00:24:14.000I'm someone for whom it probably impacted me more than it should do, certainly more than it should do for someone who gets the level of attention that I've managed to get myself to now.
00:24:23.000And what I don't like about it is it causes people like me To be way less confident in their own positions because you think, oh, well, most people, if it was me, I would only give feedback if I was really certain and if I had this person's best interests at heart and if I wanted them to do better and if I actually knew what I was talking about, then I would tell this person what I think about them and what I think about what they're saying.
00:24:45.000And if you apply that rubric to everybody else that gives you criticism, you give undue, unfair expertise and legitimacy to people who don't have your best interests at heart.
00:24:56.000They don't understand what you're trying to do.
00:25:04.000Basically, I think that criticism killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did because people are just, I'm worried about pushing these boundaries too much.
00:25:12.000This person, all of my friends tell me the truth.
00:25:14.000Why isn't this person on the internet?
00:25:16.000There's this idea from Ethan Cross called criticism capture.
00:25:19.000So you'll have heard of audience capture, right?
00:25:21.000Where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience, becomes very predictable.
00:25:25.000Criticism capture basically says it's not the compliments, but the criticisms that are more warping.
00:25:32.000That over time, what you end up doing is changing the way that you speak.
00:26:31.000And when people are doing it and they're doing it with a very obvious...
00:26:37.000Distortion of your actual position just to label you as the worst possible, least charitable version of you that could ever be remotely considered.
00:26:50.000Do you see that all the time where people are just trying to distort a narrative?
00:26:55.000You're seeing that right now with Elon, right?
00:26:57.000You're seeing people justify violence.
00:27:23.000And it also just shows you how positions just completely flip-flop.
00:27:27.000Like the Tesla used to be the car that you drove to let everybody know that you were environmentally conscious and you were a good leftist.
00:31:38.000I think it's at the inauguration, and they both stood next to each other, and Elon's sort of fist-pumping and loving it, and Trump's son's just, like, staring off.
00:31:48.000Apparently, Trump's son went up to Biden at the inauguration and said, it's on now.
00:32:09.000But he walks up to him and goes, it's on now.
00:32:12.000Well, they need to do, you know, how football coaches have got, they put the play thing over the front of their mouth like this and they talk into it.
00:32:19.000That's how it needs to be done now for politics with lip readers everywhere.
00:33:33.000And I know that people say, oh, well, it's a luxurious position.
00:33:36.000You don't need to pay attention to politics.
00:33:38.000It's a luxurious position for you to be in.
00:33:40.000People at the bottom, they do need to pay attention to politics.
00:33:42.000It's an interesting stat, because actually the most educated, wealthiest people are the ones that spend the most time consuming news and talking about politics.
00:33:49.000It's the people at the bottom rung of the ladder that don't.
00:33:59.000Newsweek wrote an article about how one of the names of one of our podcast guests, who's a good friend of mine, Michael Costa, his name was misspelled accidentally.
00:36:41.000It seems to me like the best way that legacy media can gain traffic is to talk about independent media.
00:36:48.000How many times are we seeing headlines about Andrew Huberman or about the right-wing Manosphere pipeline and how it's getting people to do this?
00:40:42.000If you care about people, you care about the whole society, you don't want people starving when there's ways to develop government programs to make sure people have food.
00:40:51.000And I think this idea of pulling them up by their bootstraps is horseshit.
00:41:15.000I think healthcare, 100%, should be socially funded.
00:41:21.000I think that Medicare and Medicaid, having programs where people who are hurt can get An operation and it's not going to bankrupt them for the rest of their life is another thing that I think society should be a part of our agreement to take care of each other as a community.
00:41:39.000That we chip in money for what people would think of as socialist positions.
00:41:43.000And I always bring up the fire department because the fire department is one of the best examples that everybody sort of agrees.
00:42:23.000You want that guy who has a nice watch, and he lives in a nice house, and he kicks ass, and he knows how to fucking fix people really well.
00:43:24.000You know, there's room for that with the amount of money that we spend on so many things that we all agree are fucked.
00:43:31.000And maybe some of that could be freed up with some of this USAID money that they're pulling.
00:43:36.000There's nothing wrong with giving people health care.
00:43:39.000Like, if you know anybody that's been injured and was bankrupt because they didn't have insurance and then they had to get some crazy operation and now they have this enormous debt and they wind up going bankrupt or they're getting chased down for the money for the rest of their life, it's horrible.
00:43:53.000It's the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, medical debt.
00:43:56.000I mean, coming from the UK where we've got the NHS, it feels fucking barbaric.
00:44:33.000That could be essentially the beginning of the end of your life.
00:44:37.000And that really, I mean, that was six, seven years ago now, and it's still like, that was the most haunting thing about the fucking ghost tour, was him telling me about the medical debt.
00:44:47.000And then I think the reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO killing as well, for me, somebody who didn't fully understand how many of the claims are denied.
00:44:57.000I think that there was an increase by about 30% in denial of claims over only the most recent period.
00:45:02.000And I just thought, guy shoots person.
00:45:06.000Typically, the guy that shoots them is in the wrong, and the reaction on the internet just—I wasn't ready for it, and it really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has with the healthcare system.
00:45:33.000Waiting for some righteous person to come in and do retribution.
00:45:36.000But then you see the fucking revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug corporations where these people leave and then all of a sudden they have these amazing jobs at pharmaceutical drug companies and they're making millions of dollars.
00:45:51.000Like when you realize that doctors are incentivized to medicate people, they're financially incentivized to give people certain medications, whether it's vaccines, they get bonuses if they vaccinate more than 60% of their clients and they lose those bonuses if people don't get vaccinated.
00:46:11.000There's like a lot of creepy shit that's involved in medicine.
00:46:27.000If there's a shortage of a drug, compounding pharmacies are...
00:46:30.000Kind of allowed to just bypass patents in some way.
00:46:33.000It's like you can produce it and you can make it cheaper and more widely available because the supply chain is fucked or something like that.
00:46:39.000That would be a good thing for society.
00:46:41.000Well, to make more drugs more widely available for cheaper.
00:46:44.000If it's good, if it's a very important pharmaceutical drug that can save people's lives.
00:46:54.000Yeah, or can't afford it, or don't have the insurance for it.
00:46:56.000So yeah, I mean, that came into effect.
00:46:58.000I think tizepatide got popped yesterday, and then partway through April, semaglutide is going to go as well.
00:47:05.000Yeah, that's all just eliminating competition, right?
00:47:08.000Well, we need to think, you know, all of the people that are using these drugs, that are losing weight with them, whatever, we need to think about who the real sort of...
00:47:17.000People suffering from this situation are who are the stock owners of telehealth companies.
00:47:22.000If you own HIMSS or whatever, the stock's declined by a lot.
00:47:27.000But, dude, I've been thinking so much about Ozempic recently, and I think the introduction of Ozempic...
00:47:33.000Proves how much of a scam the body positivity movement was all along.
00:47:37.000You look at the Golden Globes and all of the women that were supporting their bigger sisters, as soon as there was an easy route to being able to become a skeleton, they look like this.
00:47:58.000It just shows how flimsy your principles are that it was easier for you to say, I can't win this particular game, therefore the game is rigged.
00:48:08.000If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get and then proclaim to everybody else that they should get it too.
00:48:14.000The Golden Globes, you've just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking around.
00:48:23.000Women of Hollywood are now facing the same dilemma that Dudes who go to the gym have had for decades.
00:48:38.000If you gain weight as a guy and you get jacked, really jacked, if you really discipline yourself, you know, multiple years, progressive overload, time under tension, hitting your protein goals, getting enough sleep, what your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take trend alone.
00:49:19.000Do you remember when she did that Jamaica thing?
00:49:21.000She came out and she had all of her hair done like this.
00:49:24.000Yeah. But, yeah, there's this odd, like, Pascal's wager that you have to make where you think, I can either lose weight normally or without assistance.
00:49:33.000It's going to be more difficult and people are going to accuse me of using Ozempic in any case.
00:49:37.000Or I can just take it and it'll be easier and they'll accuse me of it.
00:49:42.000Yeah. I'm in favor of Ozempic for people that are morbidly obese.
00:49:47.000I think anything that can get you on the path.
00:49:50.000And I think if you can combine that, if you can say, okay, this is what I'm doing, so I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to start an exercise program.
00:49:58.000And then you wind up losing 30, 40 pounds.
00:53:12.000Yeah, if you reflect in the odds where we're at financially at the moment.
00:53:16.000Yeah, you got a jacket in my favor while I'm willing to make a risk.
00:53:19.000Yeah. Yeah, it's a strange – I think another thing with Ozempic, I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudiced against people that use Ozempic than fat people are.
00:53:29.000So typically you would say – stay with me.
00:53:34.000So you would have imagined – and this did happen.
00:53:38.000Some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, you know, that you're losing your bigger brothers and sisters, I don't know.
00:53:51.000But they're not actually threatened in the same way as in weight people are.
00:53:56.000So I'm aware that losing weight through a Zempick is not the same as getting in shape, especially if you don't do the health and fitness regime, if you don't do the resistance exercise, you end up gone skinny fat, jowls, big cheeks, all that stuff.
00:54:08.000But the signal of being in shape… Right. Disciplined, reliable.
00:54:22.000Able to do hard things, self-motivated, consistent, stick to a routine, conscientious, industrious, all of these things.
00:54:30.000So you look at somebody who's in shape and you think, I can infer from your body a lot of things about who you are beyond just your body.
00:54:38.000I actually think that this is one of the huge benefits that most people don't realize about getting in shape if they want to attract a partner or whatever.
00:54:45.000Sure, the body looks great when you take the clothes off, but what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values?
00:58:37.000When I do my show, I speak to someone and I'm like, I want to understand the psychology of how you have arrived at this particular position.
00:58:47.000I mean, if shapeshifters were real, if there really are evil reptilian aliens and they've infiltrated our society and they've been pulling the strings forever and only a couple of people knew.
00:59:05.000But is an alien, shapeshifter, reptile person, is that any weirder than the most recent theory that our entire universe is taking place inside of a black hole that's in another universe?
00:59:21.000Yeah, there's recent calculations that are leading these...
01:00:29.000Inside that space, there's only so many ways that you can put matter together so that it creates anything.
01:00:37.000There's a limited number of ways that matter can come together with different elements, different structures, different everything like that.
01:00:42.000So Boltzmann brain suggests that across an infinite universe, there will be a brain the exact same as yours, the exact structure as yours, Comes into existence for a moment and then goes away.
01:00:55.000And the reason that you could be experiencing the world that you are now, all of your memories, your past, your history, the person that you think you are, is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just comes into existence and then goes.
01:01:07.000Why do you come into existence and then go away?
01:01:10.000Why don't you just exist somewhere else?
01:01:12.000You could exist somewhere else, but this brain appears just spontaneously because in an infinite universe, there are only so many different ways that you can piece matter together.
01:01:22.000Right. And it's the monkey's typewriter thing.
01:01:25.000It's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is constructed.
01:01:28.000It's basically like a brain in a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain it.
01:01:33.000The way it was explained to me is that if the universe is truly infinite, not only is there another version of you.
01:01:41.000But there is another version of you that did the exact same thing you have done every step of the way.
01:01:49.000Every time you sneezed, every hesitation before you spoke your mind, every time you almost went into traffic when you didn't realize their light was still red, all of those things have happened in the exact same order an infinite number of times.
01:02:38.000Like the craziest one to me was the concept that inside every galaxy, in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole.
01:02:47.000And that supermassive black hole is approximately one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
01:02:52.000If you go into that supermassive black hole, so there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, right?
01:02:57.000Inside that supermassive black hole is an entirely another universe, filled with all sorts of different galaxies that have supermassive black holes in them.
01:03:08.000You go into one of those, another universe, filled.
01:03:11.000Supermassive black holes, another universe, filled.
01:03:15.000All supermassive black holes, each one, another universe.
01:03:18.000It's just a WinZip file all the way down.
01:03:20.000Why is that weirder than the universe is infinite?
01:03:24.000I mean, just the weirdness of what it is is so fucking insane.
01:03:28.000The idea that it's infinite or that there's an infinite multiverses and infinite versions of these things inside black holes and in all sorts of ways that we haven't even really figured out yet.
01:03:42.000That's not that much weirder than what's real.
01:04:17.000Okay, so if you can study all of the matter and you study all of the forces and all the energy and all the reasons why matter coalesces or matter expands, yes, you could probably, given enough time and enough quantum computing power, figure out what's causing everything to compress down smaller than the head of a pin and then explode.
01:06:33.000Yeah. Dude, I had Matthew McConaughey on the show toward the back end of last year and we talked about Interstellar's 10th year anniversary.
01:10:18.000Dude, this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about.
01:10:23.000When you go through puberty, the way that the veins sort of form that blow heat off from your balls, they can form in a way where they just don't get rid of the heat that efficiently.
01:12:18.000It's like, because I had a gay couple that were friends that lived down the street from me, and they had a kid with a surrogate, and they shot their jizz into a cup and mixed it up.
01:12:28.000So they didn't know who's going to be the one who has the kid.
01:13:34.000Whatever anxiety they have, fear, their cortisol levels, if they have domestic abuse in their house, all that information is being transferred to the child.
01:13:46.000Pregnancy doesn't just make a kid, it also makes a mother.
01:13:57.000I know that people don't get, they don't choose to be born, but somebody chooses whether or not these two sets of DNA are going to come together.
01:14:07.000If you've just got sperm donor after sperm donor and egg donor after egg donor and artificial wombs, it gets to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing who's coming into reality that much anymore.
01:14:26.000Look at the problems that people are having with microplastics and the disruption of the endocrine system and pesticides and herbicides and all these different ubiquitous chemicals that are affecting people's sperm counts and fertility.
01:14:41.000It's a real factor, and it's plummeting.
01:14:46.000If you look at human beings from the last 60, 70 years, and you look at males in America, where their sperm count used to be and where it is now, it's rapidly decreasing.
01:14:57.000There's a lot of factors, sedentary lifestyle, processed foods, but there's also environmental factors that seem to be altering the actual way a child develops in the womb.
01:15:10.000Countdown. Yeah, which is an incredible, just...
01:15:15.000It's an incredible book, but it's just an incredible fact that the plastics that we use from microwave foods and water bottles and all that stuff is literally changing the development of children.
01:15:28.000It's changing the size of their testicles, the size of their penises, the...
01:15:36.000It's really crazy stuff, and it replicates what happens in mammals when they do these studies with rats and hamsters, and the same things happen.
01:15:45.000A third of all children globally are going to be obese by 2050.
01:15:50.000Jesus. That's the current trajectory, and one billion people worldwide are obese.
01:16:05.000If that's not a comment on problems of abundance as opposed to problems of scarcity.
01:16:10.000Yeah, it's not even abundance, though.
01:16:12.000It's the food is so calorie-rich and filled with shit, you know, that you just get so fat so quick.
01:16:20.000Like, if you're eating nothing but junk food and drinking nothing but soda, as I sit here with a large Diet Coke.
01:16:26.000Which I usually don't drink, but I do occasionally.
01:16:30.000That is, like a Diet Coke at least doesn't have the calories, but if you're having a large Coke like that, like if you have a Coke like this, what is this, a liter?
01:17:47.000And then there was that other thing about you talking about kids, that some huge percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds couldn't join the military.
01:17:54.000Yeah. Like 70% because of mental health or obesity or drug use or something.
01:18:01.000And half of them had two or more of these excuses for why you couldn't do it.
01:18:13.000And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing, even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal...
01:18:28.000This is one of the proposed explanations for the baby boom, was that a lot of men that did come back from war were signaling their eligibility, signaling how reliable they could be, and it made it easier for women to be attracted in that way.
01:18:43.000I mean, imagine a woman, you're going to get pregnant, and so you're going to be, you could work for a little while, but towards the end you're not going to be able to work.
01:18:51.000And then after the child, it's going to be very difficult to work.
01:18:53.000So you're reliant on this other person.
01:21:08.000Going to the gym is right wing and liking fast cars is right wing and all the rest of it.
01:21:12.000The number of liberal women that are struggling, I think, to find an eligible partner is going up because they just can't find a guy that will hold the door open for them, that will treat them like a lady, that will try and be the protector-provider-procreator thing.
01:21:23.000You go, you're talking about a conservative.
01:21:26.000You're talking about somebody who's more traditional in that way.
01:21:32.000I sort of talk a lot about this stuff on the show, and I get worried about not helping men.
01:21:37.000To improve in this sort of zero-sum view of empathy that if you give some attention to men and the way that they're struggling, that it takes it away from some other more deserving group.
01:21:49.000So a lot of the time, if someone's falling behind, 50 years ago, Title IX gets introduced, right, for women.
01:21:54.000It's not enough women in higher education.
01:21:56.000It's not enough women expediting them through socioeconomic status.
01:22:23.000up, you look across and there are fewer and fewer men over there.
01:22:27.000And what you think is, okay, well, typically...
01:22:30.000If a group is falling behind in society, we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
01:22:35.000We spend billions of money in taxpayer-funded charities and think tanks to try and work out what's going on and to try and bring them along for the ride.
01:23:00.000But a lot of guys, you can look at the number of CEOs, and sure, guys that outperform on the top end, yep.
01:23:06.000But that's not necessarily due to privilege.
01:23:08.000It's because putting yourself in that position to do what you need to do to get yourself to the position of being a founder, being a CEO, running a successful company is so fucking insane that most women would just choose to not go and do that.
01:24:03.000For young boys, it's really, really tough.
01:24:05.000Getting them to sit in a classroom still for six hours a day, it seems like females are just better at doing that.
01:24:12.000Young girls are more effective at a sort of brain-based economy, highlighting and planning ahead of the homework that they've got to do and the assignments and stuff like that.
01:24:36.000Like, what do you think is the reason why more men aren't succeeding and getting college degrees and more men aren't going out and making as much money in their 20s?
01:24:46.000I think that the current environment does not necessarily lend itself to the disposition that men have got.
01:24:53.000So they're less conscientious than women from a personality standpoint on average.
01:24:59.000That means that it's really difficult, comparatively, on average, for you to be able to remind yourself that you need to do this sort of homework.
01:25:05.000Men are more predisposed to addiction.
01:25:07.000They're more predisposed to using recreational drugs.
01:25:09.000They're more predisposed to being in jail, to all of the sort of gang stuff that people get drawn into.
01:25:16.000There are more routes that men can be pulled away in that sort of a manner.
01:25:21.000And on top of it, I don't think that there is a particularly inspiring vision for what...
01:25:28.000You said earlier on about fitness right wing, fast cars right wing.
01:25:32.000There was this thread on Reddit, I think, in a left-leaning forum that said, people of the left, can you give me a good example of who you think a positive male role model would be?
01:25:43.000The top voted one was Aragon from Lord of the Rings.
01:25:52.000You've had to go to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure.
01:25:58.000You know, this is one of the issues that we see on the left, which is there is no level of purity or the level of purity you need to be able to get to is so high.
01:26:17.000Why? Because if you have got a slightly fettered past, if you maybe said things in the past that didn't agree with where we are now, the right will welcome you with open arms.
01:26:31.000I think that there is a level of puritanism on the left where they are unprepared to accept people who have had positions that they don't agree with.
01:26:44.000There seems to be this odd purity spiral where they're constantly trying to point out people who are no longer agreeing with the ideology du jour of the modern world.
01:26:58.000I also think that corporate America, the whole structure of it with human resources and people working together, it's not necessarily what men want.
01:27:12.000If you want men to work in the best environment possible for men, they would work with mostly men.
01:28:39.000But what you don't want is to work in that environment.
01:28:42.000If you could choose to make the same kind of money doing things that you love to do, having fun, like if all these corporate CEOs could make as much money playing golf, I bet they would play golf.
01:28:52.000I don't think they really want to be doing that.
01:28:55.000They're doing that because it's the way in order.
01:28:58.000It's the way to succeed and the way to make money.
01:31:16.000To derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation.
01:31:20.000Yeah. That's another point, actually, about sort of men falling behind.
01:31:23.000I think it seems like young boys are more negatively impacted by fatherless homes than young girls are so any boy that grows up in an in intact and non intact household is more likely to To end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college.
01:31:44.000Yeah. Any non-intact, that's adopted, step-parent, single parent, any non-intact home, they're more likely to end up in jail or in prison than they are to complete college.
01:31:54.000Yeah. And the same statistic is not true for girls.
01:31:57.000And this, again, the zero-sumness of the, so what do you say?
01:32:02.000Are you saying that we need to hold girls?
01:32:05.000You do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up.
01:32:09.000We spent 50 years really pedestalizing and helping take the reins off of young girls so that socioeconomically they can look after themselves.
01:32:16.000They're no longer financial prisoners of their partner, which is a big deal.
01:32:20.000You look at the divorce statistics from the past and proclaim it as some amazing cultural outgrowth.
01:32:25.000And you go, how many women stayed in those relationships because they fucking couldn't afford to leave?
01:33:17.000I can tell you what the car is like that I drive.
01:33:20.000I can't tell you how much peace I have when my head hits the pillow at night.
01:33:23.000I can't tell you what the quality of the relationship between me and my wife or me and my kids is.
01:33:28.000I can't tell you how much time I got to spend in a hammock last week.
01:33:31.000These are the things I think that if you were able to metricate, if you were able to make it a game, people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it.
01:33:38.000But the money is the best game in the world.
01:33:43.000I know what your wealth is compared with that guy in Japan, compared with that dude in Russia, compared with this person that's Australian.
01:33:51.000And it's the game that so many people use to show their value.
01:33:57.000I mean, it's not just the richness of your life, the happiness that you have, the fulfilled feeling that you have when you do whatever it is that you do, where you feel like you have a sense of purpose.
01:34:36.000Most people live in this, like, dull hell.
01:34:38.000And they try to have fun while they're at work.
01:34:41.000They try to, you know, have people that they talk to at work, hopefully make some good friends at work, and you can enjoy your chitter-chatter at the water cooler.
01:34:48.000But the reality of that life is just mostly suck.
01:34:53.000There's a lot of problems, I think, that people that are driven face that don't get that much sympathy.
01:34:57.000So I had this idea that type A people have type B problems.
01:35:02.000And Type B people have Type A problems.
01:35:04.000So insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and lazy people need to learn how to work hard and be more disciplined.
01:35:12.000And, you know, most people that listen to shows like yours or mine are probably some version of Type A, like a kind of walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.
01:35:30.000Type A people realize is that if you're type A, you get very little sympathy because an outwardly successful but miserable person is way less, always appears to be in a much more preferential position than a content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy one.
01:36:25.000In history has a training montage of some guy down on his luck that gets saved by the right woman or a Japanese dude that teaches him to wash cars or whatever it is and through grit and spit and sawdust, he sorts himself out and he fixes his life.
01:36:41.000No movie explains how to log out of Slack at 6pm or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty.
01:36:49.000So yeah, I think in that sense, type A people They may objectively have better lives.
01:36:58.000But subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.
01:37:03.000They wake up every single morning feeling as if they're already trying to repay some productivity debt.
01:37:10.000And only if they dance through the day completely perfectly, nail every single task, can they go to bed not feeling like a waste man.
01:39:12.000Drive that I had and whatever thing about fighting, which was so scary to me, why was so appealing to me at the same time.
01:39:20.000And I realized that it was like a vision quest.
01:39:22.000I was on this quest to try to figure out how to harness my potential and what better way than to do something that's very difficult and very scary.
01:39:32.000And then if you could get really good at something very difficult and very scary, you could probably master life.
01:41:02.000Now I was an extreme winner and really good at it and super disciplined and driven beyond anything that I thought was possible before I'd done that.
01:41:14.000I never had that kind of focus before I got into martial arts.
01:41:19.000But martial arts demanded that kind of focus because you can't pretend.
01:41:52.000So on that, I think that's a very common pattern, especially for young people who feel a little bit helpless in their life.
01:41:59.000I find a vector that makes me feel worthy.
01:42:04.000You know, the most common story of high performers, I think, is that I needed to do something to get the world to recognize me.
01:42:10.000One of the problems, I think, as people grow up is that they internalize this belief that the only way that the world will value me is if I can continue to perform at this high level.
01:42:21.000And I think that there comes some people can imbibe a type of insecurity in that if I stop doing these things, if I stop being as impressive to the world.
01:42:32.000Yes. It's going to deny me its love, that I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy.
01:42:40.000And I think that this, talking about the high performer thing, talking about the pity of the CEO, go, how much are you running towards something that you want and how much are you running away from something that you fear?
01:43:40.000The beating that your body takes from all the training and all the competing, eventually you're not going to be able to perform at that level anymore and you're going to fall off.
01:43:51.000It's really hard with professional fighters where their whole identity is wrapped up in being a champion.
01:43:58.000Their whole identity is being the king of the hill, and then they're no longer the king of the hill, and sometimes it happens very rapidly.
01:44:05.000Sometimes it happens over the course of just one or two fights.
01:44:08.000You go from being the pound-for-pound best in the world to a guy who nobody thinks is going to win the title again.
01:44:31.000Your cortisol levels are through the roof.
01:44:34.000Your hormone levels are all fucked up.
01:44:36.000You might have a hard time losing weight.
01:44:38.000You know, you're tired and depressed because your levels are all fucked up and your hormones because you basically got your brains beat in six months ago.
01:44:46.000Your capacity to fix the very problem has been taken away from you.
01:44:49.000Yeah, and you see it sometimes with one fight.
01:45:03.000He was the guy who was like this unstoppable force that had bottomless cardio, never stopped coming after you, and was just hell-bent on destruction and beat the fuck out of everybody.
01:45:15.000Beat the fuck out of everybody for years until he fought Justin Gaethje.
01:45:26.000He went from being a favorite in the Justin Gagey fight, I think he was a slight favorite going into that fight, to after the fight was over, he got stopped in the later rounds and never recovered.
01:45:39.000You think that was a physical thing or a mental thing?
01:46:25.000There's so many things that you can't do because they are in fact performance enhancers that would help you recover.
01:46:31.000You know, if a guy like Tony Ferguson after that fight got on hormone replacement, got on testosterone, got his levels up pretty high, got to a point where he could train as hard, he probably wouldn't have had the slide that he had.
01:46:43.000I think part of the slide is that everybody has to be natural.
01:46:46.000And when you're natural and you get beat up a few times, you're...
01:49:03.000No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out these things for ourselves, for some reason, we insist.
01:49:13.000On disregarding the mountains of warnings that we have from our elders, historical catastrophes and public scandals and film and TV and we think some version of...
01:49:27.000Yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.
01:49:30.000It's the like, watch me do this mom mentality.
01:49:33.000And yeah, we decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again.
01:49:38.000And unfortunately, it always seems to be the big things.
01:49:40.000You know, it's never about how to charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party or put up a level set of shelves.
01:51:00.000It is in every single fable and story from the rest of time.
01:51:05.000And I think that one of the reasons this happens is, If you don't have a thing, looking at somebody who has that thing, they have the solution to your problem.
01:51:15.000If you don't have money, you believe that by having money, all of your problems would be fixed.
01:51:20.000If you don't have fame, you believe that fame is the thing that's going to get.
01:51:23.000If you don't have the goal, you think that getting the goal is going to do those things.
01:51:26.000And it is only by getting that and looking back and going, the issue that I thought would be fixed by getting the thing wasn't fixed.
01:51:39.000Not only do we refuse to sort of learn the lessons, if you talk about this on the internet, if you have a rich person on who says, you know what, man, I earned a couple of billion dollars and I'm still pretty miserable.
01:51:50.000You bring some actress on, she says, you know, all of the fame and stuff like that, it really didn't fix my self-worth.
01:53:54.000Yeah, it's a real interesting one, but he's got this quote where he says, it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.
01:54:03.000It's much easier for you to drive a beat-up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari.
01:54:08.000Sure. Because you've closed that loop.
01:54:30.000Keeping up with the Joneses is a hell of a fucking joke.
01:54:32.000Oh, your house is not in the best neighborhood.
01:54:35.000I was thinking about why I'm attracted to some of my friends, like why I like to spend time with some over others.
01:54:43.000And I sort of realized this interesting dynamic that I hadn't really heard get talked about much, which is we think that we want to be charismatic.
01:54:53.000Like we think we want to step into a room.
01:54:57.000Our energy, the aura, everyone's super impressed by us.
01:55:00.000I didn't actually notice that that was the sort of people that I was choosing to hang around with.
01:55:05.000There's this story about Jenny Jerome, who was Winston Churchill's mother, and she gets to dine with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister and the opponent, one night after the other.
01:55:18.000And she says, after I left the dinner with Gladstone, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in England.
01:57:03.000It feels like watching a sports game sometimes.
01:57:05.000I think the best conversations, whether they're around a table or a podcast or whatever, it feels like watching a sports match and the two teams are kind of working together to get the ball in the goal.
01:57:15.000And you get all excited and you're like, oh, he's going to do this.
01:57:55.000If I'm talking to a theoretical physicist and there's some very difficult thing to grasp and you hear Carl snoring, it becomes a little bit of an issue.
01:58:03.000If it's coming through the headphones.
01:58:54.000Yeah. Yeah, so he is out on patrol with a bunch of Finnish soldiers, small group, and they come upon a Soviet force way bigger than they are.
01:59:05.000They can't fight them, so they have to flee.
01:59:07.000As they're fleeing, they're skiing away through the snow, and the force is way bigger.
02:04:05.000Three Finnish soldiers come upon him of all of the different nationalities, of all of the different people.
02:04:09.000Three Finnish soldiers come upon him and he thinks, finally, for all of this time, after being confused, after getting lost, I'm going to be saved.
02:04:15.000They say, it's okay, we can take you back.
02:05:02.000He'd survived this entire time on meth, water that he'd melted down into a tin cup, a couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to, and a single Siberian jay that he beat to death.
02:06:16.000Least risk-averse, the most maniacal and murderous.
02:06:20.000I wonder, you know, it's kind of a debate around how much of Hitler's behavior was because of Hitler and how much was amplified, worsened by the drugs that he was on.
02:06:30.000That Theodore Morrell, that crazy kooky doctor that he had, he's injecting him with bull semen.
02:08:48.000You said before about sort of that self-authoring thing, like taking control of my own life.
02:08:54.000My friend George has got this great question where he says, you're stuck in a third world prison and you get one phone call to ring somebody to get you out.
02:11:34.000Right. And then these poor people are going to be trapped in this El Salvador prison and no one's going to believe them that they're innocent.
02:11:41.000It says it all that El Salvador has got a reputation for being so good at prison and law enforcement that they're fucking importing people over there.
02:11:51.000It's like, oh, we need to – you said before, if I've got a bad knee, I want to go to the guy that looks after the Lakers.
02:11:56.000It's like you're the Lakers PT doc of the rehabilitation world.
02:12:00.000It's not even rehabilitation, I suppose.
02:12:22.000Maybe there's an artist who happens to be an illegal or maybe they're someone who's working on a construction site and they get rounded up and they get shipped over there.
02:12:34.000When you're arresting people and prosecuting people and your goal is to arrest people and prosecute people, you do your best at that.
02:12:41.000And the question is, how many people get arrested and prosecuted that are innocent?
02:12:46.000Well, in the real world, what we know is quite a few.
02:12:50.000I mean, I do a lot of podcasts with my good friend Josh Dubin, who's spent a considerable amount of his life helping innocent people get out of jail.
02:12:59.000That's his main thing that he does, is work with unjustly prosecuted people.
02:13:06.000And you find the levels of corruption to be horrific.
02:13:10.000The prosecutors, DAs, the amount of corrupt judges, it's shocking.
02:13:16.000It's shocking when you lay the facts of these cases out, like the Ohio Four, these people that were in jail, proven that one of them could not have possibly been there when the crime was committed and still was in there for 30 years.
02:13:31.000The actual guy who was the informant came out and said that he was told to say all these things.
02:16:37.000It's something that's held by the upper classes that only impacts the lower classes.
02:16:41.000Yeah, and it's also a thing that the political establishment will use as a tool to align you with them.
02:16:49.000You know, people will say it, like Kamala Harris in 2019 was saying, I mean defund the police, we should defund the police, which is just crazy to say.
02:16:58.000You need to fund them more, train them better.
02:17:00.000You know, they need training the way military groups need training, constantly, consistently.
02:17:07.000And, you know, they're encountering horrific things.
02:17:10.000I mean, my friends who have been cops and, you know, and have served overseas, they'll tell you...
02:17:17.000Most of them will tell you that they suffered more PTSD as cops than they had even in the military.
02:17:22.000Yeah. Depending upon your service, depending on what you had to do.
02:17:25.000But a lot of them, it's just like every day you're seeing some nightmarish situation.
02:17:55.000I don't think anybody even understands what that even means unless you've shown up and seen some guy's brains blown out all over the curb for nothing, for some stupid argument about nothing.
02:18:07.000When you've seen some woman get shot in front of her kid by the husband, you have no idea.
02:18:37.000It was clearly mentally unstable, was yelling, was, you know...
02:18:41.000Telling everybody what he was gonna do they tased him that didn't work then he's charging at this cop and the cop shoots him and then the cops sobbing and Shaking and his partners telling him to breathe how to breathe and he's just Probably the first person you ever had to kill It's horrible.
02:19:00.000It's horrible and that's that's He succeeded he's he stopped a threat and he You know, it was justified.
02:19:58.000And there's people that shouldn't be cops.
02:20:04.000Shouldn't be a cop and is, you know, on their last nerve and snaps at someone or overreacts at someone or brutalizes someone totally unnecessarily.
02:20:13.000It gives you a very distorted perception of the average encounter that a person has with police officers.
02:20:19.000Because most of the interactions that people have with police officers are fine.
02:20:29.000You know, but you see the ones that go sideways and then you think, This is what cops are doing.
02:20:34.000They're out there trying to kill people.
02:20:36.000That's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way the algorithms work, that edge cases that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire.
02:20:45.000Right. And what it creates is it moves the fringe to the middle because most of what you see by design is the stuff that's the most outlandish.
02:20:53.000And then it gets used as a political tool.
02:20:55.000Correct. You mentioned about Biden and Kamala.
02:21:53.000I mean, they're also lost in that they can't control the narrative anymore.
02:21:56.000I think when they had control of Twitter and they had control of essentially all of social media and pre-Trump, they had the reins firmly held.
02:22:07.000They were in control of the public narrative.
02:22:09.000If you strayed from that, you will be kicked off social media.
02:22:30.000There was a big op-ed in the New York Times that has people up in arms, because they're like, fucking duh, you're finally, do you know where it is?
02:23:43.000Do you think you guys had a factor in that?
02:23:45.000Look. I Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count.
02:23:58.000One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, almost certainly sparked by a research mishap.
02:24:02.000Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
02:24:42.000Insisting that a virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
02:24:47.000And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a great grant, lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research that if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogenization.
02:25:03.000No fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
02:25:20.000Big part of calling the lab leak theory racist, which was really kooky.
02:25:25.000It's strange that everything is concretized on the internet for the rest of time.
02:25:29.000Yeah. I mean, people can go back and try and retrograde, remove stuff that happened, but there's always Internet Archive is fantastic for this.
02:25:37.000Yeah, for the most part, you can find it if you're inspired.
02:25:42.000How is it that so many U-turns, regardless of what it is, regardless of which side it is, the sort of permanent state of amnesia that everybody's in?
02:26:06.000And it was a single squaddy, a guy in...
02:26:10.000We're fatigued walking down a street in London and a screenshot, I think, of a text saying that someone had said that the army was going to be deployed on the streets of London to keep everybody in the house through martial law, that this was how intense that the lockdowns were going to get.
02:26:23.000And it was going to happen on this particular day.
02:26:25.000It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp.
02:26:29.000And, like, all of the people that shared that, that were adamant, that created all of these stories and theories around it, like, no one ever actually...
02:26:38.000Went to go and call those people out about what it was that they'd pushed.
02:26:41.000All of the people that were adamant, global health passports, the vaccine passport, that's going to come, that's going to happen.
02:26:48.000I mean, the unfalsifiable version of it is because we knew that it was going to happen, they weren't able to do it.
02:26:53.000So actually, we were the righteous resistance in doing the thing.
02:26:56.000And the same with whether it's lab leak theory, whether it's Joe Biden's mental decline, no matter what it is, you can put this position out there.
02:27:52.000Yeah, there were therapeutics that were available that were dismissed and that bad studies were created in order to make sure that people weren't taking these drugs because we needed the emergency use authorization.
02:28:05.000And the only way you can get that is if you have no treatment.
02:28:09.000So you had to rely on one thing, and that one thing was the vaccine.
02:28:15.000How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this sort of balance thing that he's got going on at the Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent sort of pivot with regards to fact-checking on meta platforms, how many of those do you think would have happened if there hadn't been a Trump victory in November?
02:28:34.000How much of this is blowing with the wind, do you think?
02:29:37.000And it's all because what Elon is doing with USAID and what he's doing with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency is finding a lot of inefficiency, waste, and fraud.
02:29:53.000There's a lot of money that's going in directions it shouldn't be going.
02:29:56.000And then there's stuff that's legal that probably shouldn't be legal, like non-government organizations doing the bidding of the government because they're funded by the government.
02:30:04.000There's certain things the government is not allowed to do, but a non-government organization, an NGO, can do.
02:30:17.000Going to it goes to foreign countries where we have an interest in having the people that are running that country on our side or We don't like them and we want to fund the rebels And so you can fund the people, you can fund them through all sorts of organizations where you hide and mask the money and you move it around and you have essentially blank checks.
02:30:41.000And you can just funnel billions of dollars all over the world with no accounting.
02:30:46.000Mike Benz is like the most prophetic person of all time, isn't he?
02:30:49.000I mean, he talked about it on this podcast before Doge and before USAID and everybody was like, oh, conspiracy theorists and this and that.
02:30:58.000This guy, so he used to work for the State Department.
02:31:20.000It must be an odd situation to be in, because most of the time, the level of scrutiny that you're under and the level of security threat that's likely is kind of, it goes in line with status, fame, and that also goes in line with maybe some resources too.
02:31:36.000So as people get more likely to be a target...
02:31:39.000They're also more able to perhaps be able to protect themselves with living in a nicer house, gated community.
02:31:47.000Yeah, having security and stuff like that.
02:31:49.000But this is one of those weird situations where your knowledge, your particular insight makes you so uniquely vulnerable or such a heavy target.
02:32:00.000But it hasn't come with the concordant increase in status and resources that would allow you to be able to actually protect yourself.
02:32:29.000If he ever just says, okay, I'd like to talk.
02:32:33.000Whenever. Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk to him.
02:32:35.000You know, I'd love to find the real story because the narrative and the documentary, the docudrama that was made about the Silk Road and what he did, you know, I'd like to know how much of that is bullshit.
02:32:50.000Because I think a lot of it probably was.
02:32:52.000You know, I think they were trying to set him up, for sure.
02:32:55.000And I think there's probably some things that he was accused of that aren't accurate.
02:35:34.000But this is one of the reasons, I think, why polarization has increased.
02:35:38.000Not just that edge cases get used, it pushes people further apart, they get put off into their silos, echo chambers, recursive stuff, blah, blah, blah.
02:35:46.000I think a big part of it is just the algorithms find it easier.
02:35:50.000To be able to predict you, which gives them an incentive.
02:35:52.000Now, it's not like a conscious incentive, but it gives you this incentive to be pushed out to the sides.
02:35:58.000And there's this worry about – I learned about this idea called knowingness.
02:36:01.000So polarization, everyone thinks it's a big deal, and I think it is.
02:36:23.000I know what the answer is before you've even asked me the question.
02:36:25.000And what's interesting about this epidemic of knowingness we have at the moment is if the problem is poor information, you can fix it typically with better information.
02:36:35.000I will give you a better quality of information, but if the problem is knowingness...
02:36:39.000You are insulated from ever updating your beliefs because no amount of existing new information is going to actually help you.
02:36:46.000There's this really cool quote that said, most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.
02:36:54.000And I think that explains why the culture war is so boring.
02:36:57.000Culture war is largely super boring because both sides act as if the facts are already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts.
02:37:06.000Yeah. So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's, their prejudices just get moved around until they can come up with the outcome that they already wanted before you even ask the question about the thing that you're talking about?
02:37:20.000That's the situation we end up with, and I think it explains why, I think it explains why the culture wars feel so samey, and nothing really ever seems to move.
02:37:33.000News is operating at light speed, and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at a snail's pace.
02:37:41.000How are these two things happening together?
02:38:32.000You know, if I looked at the amount of time that I spend online on a given day, and how much of it is really fascinating to me.
02:38:39.000Well, every now and then you get a story, like that story about the whole universe might be inside of a black hole, and then I'm on a rabbit hole.
02:38:45.000The pyramid, so there's this interesting insight about that.
02:38:47.000There's a few things you'll get, but I kind of feel like you will get those if you're offline, just by other people being online.
02:39:31.000And it needs that to sort of throw the absurdity into it.
02:39:34.000But then on the flip side, if you don't live with your parents, you're in a different city, you work a job that you're not that enamored by, maybe your health's good, maybe it's not so good, you're a little bit worried about stuff, you're kind of bored a lot of the time, You need to be sedated.
02:40:16.000And, you know, people were using it to promote things, and then they started using it to elevate their profile, and then people became influencers.
02:40:22.000And once people became influencers, and once people, like a regular person, get a couple of million followers, then all of a sudden you get sponsors, and that's your job now?
02:41:26.000It's very weird stuff because no one would have ever predicted that that would be something would captivate people's attention on a television, right?
02:41:33.000There was no unboxing shows on television, but yet unboxing shows on the internet are huge.
02:41:38.000People get sucked into the most mundane things.
02:43:34.000If you do not want the life that you need to get in order to get the outcome that you're looking for, you need to be very, very careful about...
02:43:58.000And that's if you've managed to break through.
02:44:00.000You're going to have to spend so long, a decade learning to play guitar.
02:44:04.000You're going to have to write songs that never see the day of light.
02:44:07.000You're going to have to do all of this stuff.
02:44:10.000And you have no idea if it's going to work.
02:44:13.000I think about the gap from where people are in a place that they don't want to be until they get to a place that they do.
02:44:21.000And I think of it like a lonely chapter.
02:44:24.000So everybody that has got from a place where they don't want to be to one where they are, there's a point where they're so different that they can't resonate with their old set of friends.
02:44:34.000Right. But they're not yet sufficiently developed that they've created their new set of friends.
02:44:40.000And there's this temptation to go back to the old patterns, the old ways of thinking.
02:44:46.000And I did this live show in London last year, my first big headline show at the Eventim Apollo in London.
02:44:54.000And this idea, I think, was one that really resonated with a lot of people because everybody's trying to grow and there is an incentive for you to stay in the same place because not that many people grow.
02:45:09.000You know, they'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or, you know, they'll switch from one company to another.
02:45:16.000But how many people do you know that have lost 50 pounds or moved to a different country or have genuinely changed the way that they see the world?
02:45:34.000You know, you're going to have to do something.
02:45:35.000If you want to go from where you are to where you want to be, you're going to have to do something that makes you more different, more weird, more easy to be mocked, especially if you come from a country like the UK where I'm from.
02:45:44.000Being different is not particularly celebrated in that way.
02:45:47.000It's the sort of thing that's quite easily mocked.
02:45:57.000So if you don't have that level of enthusiasm, there is no support around you.
02:46:01.000To tell you that the thing that you're trying to do, taking up the martial art, why are you training this Taekwondo bullshit, like, you know, fucking six nights a week?
02:46:10.000Why are you coaching all of these mums and all of these, like, old guys on how to do Tai Chi or whatever?
02:46:55.000The thing that I wish more stories talked about, If you watch it in the movies, yeah, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey of the athlete that's going to change his life around and get the goal.
02:47:08.000But his self-belief never wavers, right?
02:47:10.000He makes the decision, and it's one straight shot, typically.
02:47:14.000And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there.
02:47:56.000And this is most people, I think, most people's experience because if most people don't change, you are going to be an outlier if you're somebody who does change.
02:48:06.000I think about personal growth kind of like a rocket ship taking off.
02:48:11.000And as you take off, you've got a particular velocity that you're moving at.
02:48:15.000And what you want is to find other people moving at the same velocity as you.
02:48:19.000But the quicker that you move, the fewer people are going to be like you.
02:48:47.000You're encountering the same sorts of challenges, whether it's in terms of your self-worth or your wealth or your relationship status or all of these things.
02:48:55.000And one of the, I guess, difficult realizations of people who want to change their life is that if you do it well, you might have to go through a period where you let go of all of your friends.
02:49:08.000But the really bad realization is if you do it really well, you might have to do that multiple times throughout your life.
02:49:28.000I just thought that I'd found my group and I've got to do it again.
02:49:32.000This lonely chapter thing is a big deal and I think that it explains why so few people make big changes.
02:49:39.000Because the temptation is always going to be to just go back to what's normal, go back to what I know.
02:49:44.000And it's why, you know, America, for all that it's a horrible, cis, hetero, patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everybody down, it's an enthusiastic and sort of excitable country.
02:49:59.000And you guys have kind of got permanent first-line cocaine energy about everything.
02:50:43.000And when you get to the stage where you're faced with some personal growth decision, you're always going to have to make this value exchange of, do I want to move forward on my own?
02:50:53.000Or do I want to go back with my friends?