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[Music] nice to meet you man yeah good happy birthday thank you how old are you i'm 35. wow do you feel 35 uh i feel like after like late 20s i just kind of like well i have to check in every year to be like wait how old am i again you know so i not really i guess it's a strange time 35 why because you're kind of middle aged yes but you're young well i was like successful pretty early in my life so like i was always like the kid you know like i dropped out of college at 19 and so and i worked in hollywood and so i was always like the youngest person in the room by far and so like that's it's not been part of my identity but i like felt it you know what did you do in hollywood well i dropped out of college i worked at a desk in a talent agency and then uh then i started signing new media clients and then very quickly it didn't work out but uh you want to know sure so i uh i was working for one of the reasons it didn't work it didn't work out because it was horrible life and i don't know why anyone would want to have it but i was working at this desk i was insistent and i was also a research assistant for robert greene uh 40 odds power guys sure um by the way i brought you the new one from him oh great we signed it for you oh that's awesome yeah robert's great guy he's my favorite human being in the whole world all right um damn i want to be your favorite let's see well no so i i was working for robert and uh i had the 48 laws of power on my desk because i was working on it and one of the partners became like convinced that i was like up to [ __ ] what yeah yeah like uh he was like he just he got in his head that i was like not a threat but i was like someone to be suspicious of and uh because you had the laws of power on your yeah desk yeah yeah it was the weirdest too ambitious like yes yeah it was wow and i remember one time uh the partner i worked for he like never uh like he was always gone uh and he never liked to be on call so he had me on some call for him and i was supposed to like be like feeding him
info you know like when you're on the conference call i supposed to like type him stuff and uh you know like you log into the call and uh it's like you're the seventh caller but there's only supposed to be like six people on the call and so the partner's like someone else is on the call like who was on the call and i was like am i supposed to say something cause like i'm not supposed to be on the call and i kind of froze it's only like 20. and uh i froze and and he kept he kept you know who's on the call who's in the car and it was like too late to say anything right uh it's funny i'm like feeling it uh like the nervousness nerves really well no because it was so stressful this is like you know this is like an article type right right and then all of a sudden i hear like footsteps down the hall and it's like his assistant and the assistant is like looking through the door and can see i'm like oh [ __ ] i hang up the phone and then you know it makes the noise and then and then i hear like stomping down the hall and uh he like bursts into the into the thing it's like what the [ __ ] are you doing i knew you were up to something like i saw you reading that book you know it's like this whole he's just like screaming at me and uh and then like he could tell that i was like not scared enough and so he i'll never forget he grabbed the door and he slammed it and then opened it again and then slammed it and then opened it again like just pure like physical intimidation like a chimp banging sticks yes exactly and so i just got up and left and then i never went back oh my god it was crazy i dated a girl uh when i was like 27 and she was an assistant for an agent and she would wake up in the middle of the night terrified that she [ __ ] something up she would just have these like fearful moments she worked 16 17 hours a day for nothing i mean she she got paid garbage money and the whole idea was that like you're kind of interning slash working there and you were eventually going to get a career as an agent so she worked for this guy who
was just a complete [ __ ] just a [ __ ] [ __ ] to everybody who worked under him it's the dumbest system in the entire world because like the person who is good at being an assistant and i was so bad at it and would put up with it for like five or six years is not the person that anyone would then want to be their age it's like filtering out for like pencil pushers and like nerds yeah and like like you know it's the craziest system uh and that's why most agents are horrible is because they most people would get up and quit or just not be interested in it at all it encourages abuse too because then you abuse if you ever get to that position where you're an agent you get an assistant you're just going to abuse them because you were abused when you were an assistant that's just it's a hazing ritual yes and people who were hazed are very un you'd think you'd be sympathetic to people who were vulnerable but it actually hardens you because you're like well i went through it you have to go through it how weird it's awful well it's a it's a weird abusive system period from top down from producers and directors to tarantino's on the podcast he was telling me about this famous producer who kept a bedroom in his office where he would take the starlets and he would he would bang all the starlets that power corrupts man yeah but i think back then it was unchecked you know now it's like it's those same guys are like terrified now yes like all those stories are resurfacing like that would that was the way women got roles like you had to sleep your way to the top like you literally had to do that it doesn't seem that hard to not be a piece of [ __ ] though but does it in a world where everyone's a piece of [ __ ] like depending upon what like there's different cultures of different you know businesses and when you have a business like that where you know there's like one of the weirdest things about hollywood is that there's
literally people that just decide to pick you and if they pick you your life becomes your wildest dreams you're on the cover of vogue magazine you're starring in an action movie right next to the [ __ ] the biggest a-list celebrities in the world you [ __ ] made it you're at the oscars accepting the award and thanking that person who points at you in the front row if they chose if they choose you if they don't choose you you're [ __ ] is not a meritocracy it's just not you could see by like someone like amber hurts not a good actress but if you get into the right spot and you do the right thing and you [ __ ] make the right noises you can become famous and successful well i think any industry that has gatekeepers is inherently susceptible to being corrupted because those people have a certain unearned power and they probably deep down know that they don't really do anything and that they're just like guessing you know and uh it's prob there's probably something in that too where you're aware of the inherent bankruptcy like we don't make anything we don't do anything yeah uh and it probably goes to your head and you need distractions and stuff well i think that's this is an interesting jump off point to talk about your work and your your fascination with stoicism because what you're talking about there is like a truth like you're talking about like there's there's a reality to that job is that these people who are the gatekeepers like there's a lot of people that work in hollywood that work as executives that are really not talented people and i've known them forever and i've seen them fail upwards like i've known them since i've been there so it was like 20 30 years ago and they're still around and they were [ __ ] then and they're stupid now that's like they're the same person it's like there's there's a reality to that and one of the things that i think you're really um that you highlight very well
is the importance of reality of of uh dealing with things and of finding positives in any sort of uh you know the the title of your book the obstacles the way it's a great title because obstacles are very important and although they don't seem like they are when you know you're there they don't seem like they're beneficial they seem like it's just like the end of the world and this is going to be horrible but there's some great benefit in difficult times and difficult things well yeah even when i was in hollywood right so i i had to walk out on this job i'm like [ __ ] this is what i dropped out of college to do like this is not good my entire life would have been different had that not happened to me what did you want to do uh i wanted to be a writer but i got this really good advice uh from a writer and he said writers live interesting lives so you have to like go do stuff you have to be around people or in a sp you have to go get you have to go earn having a point of view you can't just like look you can't just get good at the craft of doing the thing obviously that's super important and that's why i learned from robert as a research assistant like here's how books come together here's the art of doing the thing but like if you don't have anything to say uh right you know uh and so i i was just i was like okay i had this thing the chance to do this and then i went from there i worked it i was the director of marketing at american apparel so i did like weird [ __ ] and i was around crazy crazy people but all that ultimately informed you know what i talk about uh but i knew i knew i didn't want to be a person who's just like taking a percentage of what other people do i wanted to make stuff like i wanted to actually produce and create things so i knew i wanted to be a writer and when i first read the stoix i was just like [ __ ] this is it like when i read meditations for the first
time i was 19 i was sitting in my college apartment and i was just like not only have i never read anything like this i've never even heard of anything like this because you have the most powerful man in the world writing notes to himself that he never thinks are going to be published like pretty much every other book ever written was like a writer writing to an audience yeah and meditations is was never intended to be published she'd probably be mortified that we even have it and so it was just a kind of philosophy and a way of thinking that i hadn't heard in any school you know in any class from any adult in my life and i was like i want to tell people about this marcus aurelius one of the more interesting things about this stuff that he writes is how relevant it is today like when when you read it you wouldn't imagine that this is being written by a man like how many years ago was that 1900 2000 years ago he's writing in like the mid 150s 160s a.d it's very relevant like the way he writes the the it's the language is incredibly familiar it's the same you know it's one of the things about um you know we would always make fun of the way people talked a long time ago you know where far now there's a way of talking that we don't communicate like today but when marcus aurelius writes and you like if you read meditations it seems very current well it does depend on the translation right because like if you were reading uh and people do this they'll recommend marcus rules and they'll just get what's free on the internet or whatever um if you're reading a translation from the 1850s or the 1600s it's going to be in shakespearean english because oh interesting right because they're
translating it into their particular yeah and so the the right translation is key do you remember which one you read i don't uh i like that there's a gregory hayes translation for the modern library which i think is the most like lyrical and beautiful of all of them that's the one that i randomly bought on amazon and had no idea that it was going to be the one that would hit me so were the original ones in latin so this is what's crazy about marcus so marcus lives in rome the romans speak latin but the philosophical language at that time was greek so marcus was writing to himself in greek so it gives it like when you read those passages or you listen to them and you're just like that is one of the most beautiful things i've ever heard like there's this one passage where he's like he talks about like this a stalk of grain bending low under its own weight the way olive uh you know falls to the ground he talks about the way that when you put bread in the oven it breaks open on top and we don't know why that happens it's just this like beautiful inadvertent act of nature he's just like writing like a poet like a great writer and again he's writing in his non-native tongue to himself never expecting anyone would see it how [ __ ] talent it'd be like finding out that's like a comedian is like funny in their diary you're just like wow you're just naturally that you're not turning it on or off right it's just like intuitively part of you um yeah but i think your point about how it feels timeless that actually does feel like a thing i've heard comedians say which is that like uh the the specific is universal i don't think he was trying to talk to the audience i think he was trying he was so unflinchingly honest with himself that he was touching something universally human and that's why because like we should not be able to relate to his experience at all right i mean he's literally there is literally a cult of the emperor that worshipped the emperor and their spouse as living deities
and he controlled the largest army in the world he had unlimited wealth he could kill uh or murder or torture or exile anyone he wanted um people cheered him as he walked in the streets there's no way we should be able to be like this passage was talking about struggling to get out of bed in the morning and you want to huddle under the warm covers like how how because i guess people are people no matter where you get in life people are people and not everyone gives in to the temptations of being in that position and in his case i think it made him more more apt to reflect upon his thoughts and find the source of why he believed what he believed and why he thought what he thought yeah he says in in meditations he says be careful not to be caesarified don't be dyed purple because the emperor wore a purple cloak and purple purple if now we're just like the colored purple to get purple it was this complicated process of different merchants actually the founder of stoicism was a merchant in tyrian purple but like these slaves would smash up sea slugs or sea snails dry them on rocks and this dust would eventually become like the source of purple wow so and he's like don't be stained purple so he was acting like when he becomes emperor he's like this will change you if you're not careful and you have to actively work to make sure that doesn't happen so he was aware of that that was that was the character and gladiator right he wasn't that marcus aurelius was it based on him roughly loosely well it's a it's i think one of the great movies of all time but great movie peter o'toole yes he's the one that joaquin phoenix's character kills at the beginning um and then a lot of the sort of things that uh maximus says are sort of very stoic inspired the irony of that movie uh is that joaquin phoenix probably underplays how bad marcus realized his son was in real life really he really did get killed by a gladiator he was a
psychopath uh immediately destroys all of marcus's work it's one of the tragedies of marcus that he has a like a pos son i've always wondered like how that that seemed like it's joffrey from game of thrones like that is a very common thing yeah why why is that like it's an archetype it is uh there's another great eastern emperor cyrus the great and he has a shitty son too um you know it doesn't look like queen elizabeth's kids are that great but i what's interesting about marcus is like it's weird that he's such this great man and then most people know nothing about him but like marcus's father was not emperor so there's there's what they call the five good emperors so basically in all of roman history there's like five good emperors and they happen in a row and they happen in a row because each one does not have a male heir so they don't have sons so in the roman tradition it was much more common to if you didn't have a son you would adopt a son and so the emperor hadrian is old probably gay does not have any children and he adopts uh he he sees something in marcus they're very marcus is young but he sort of starts mentoring this boy they actually go like hunting together like he sees something special in this kid marcus's nickname was verismus or the truthful one but he's like just a kid and hadrian realizes he's too young to name him emperor so he selects a man named antoninus pius who's the like the great politician of the time and makes him emperor on condition that he adopt marcus aurelius so marcus and then the thinking was antoninus pius would live for like five years and then marcus would be king and
in fact he lives for like 19 years so marcus has like a 20-year apprenticeship in being the emperor under a man who like could have killed him who could have been corrupted by power but is this incredible example and that's why at the beginning of meditations marcus has like a two-page thank you letter to antoninus his adopted stepfather oh wow it's [ __ ] crazy and his son what was the the deal with the wife uh marcus's wife yes so marcus's wife faustina is i guess it would be faustina is antoninus daughter so they're not related but that's they marry the family together marcus loves her they're married a very long time there are rumors that she's unfaithful but as far as we know marcus pays you know no attention to this does not believe them um but the tragedy of their marriage is marcus loses like seven children before they reach adulthood can you imagine that well that was very common back then though wasn't it sevens a lot though it is a lot but isn't that that's uh one of the reasons why the um general age that people lived to was so low back then people think that people died the your age of expected death it wasn't that it's just like you died in childbirth you died you know when you were young you died from infection it wasn't that people didn't live as long yes like uh there's lots of old people in rome it's just like getting getting like if you made it to 40 maybe you can make it to 80 right but like chances are you weren't going to make it to 20. yeah that's makes sense because they're all sword fighting and [ __ ] that's also true i mean just imagine you could cut your hand and die of an infection yeah real and obviously they're [ __ ] in the streets and this [ __ ] so that's one of the sort of not rationalizations but if you're like how does it go so wrong that this great man leaves the empire to his son yeah well he does have a male heir that's a problem uh unlike all his predecessors but
it's it's that every one of the sons that he wanted to succeed him died and that there there's some speculation that marcus's plan so this is the other crazy thing about marx if i'm nerding out you can no please go so uh marcus um has a stepbrother through this crazy adoption process he has a stepbrother and so that he inherits through hadrian it's this complicated thing but let's he has a stepbrother and so like we know what kings do to their rivals like you have to kill them right the first emperor of rome octavian is julius caesar's nephew julius caesar has a half son with cleopatra or he has a half brother or whatever he has a son with cleopatra a son out of wedlock and octavian has two stoic teachers who instruct him to murder his rival which he promptly does uh or have murdered so the precedent was like you can't have too many caesars like you can't have more than one yeah uh viable heir um and marcus when he he's antonine is his favorite anthonitis preps him he ascends to the throne the first thing marcus does is he names his brother lucius ferris co-emperor which is not only never happened basically before or since it is a nod to how the republic was the republic of rome before it becomes a monarchy is led by two consuls like two elected presidents who serve together as a check against power so marcus by naming he can't put it back to a republic which is the plot of gladiator he can name himself a co-emperor and the i'd the thinking is that's what he was planning to do with his sons but they all died so in the movie joaquin phoenix kind of kills the dad it kills the dad because marcus does not no in in the movie not in real life marcus realized he knows his son cannot be king
but in real life he passes it to him so and how did marcus aurelius die of the plague oh wow so that's the other crazy but again timeless marcus was writing in what we now call the antonine plague like they named it after him uh um but it's like a global pandemic it starts in the east it overwhelms rome five ten million people die they have no way of stopping it uh so marcus leads through all of that and then the the suspicion is that he catches it at the end uh realizes he has it has to send his son away so he doesn't give it to his son sets in motion like a series of advisers who should lead his son uh and then his son promptly like gets rid of all of them and goes bad so how does a man like that who's so introspective and so thoughtful particularly for the times how does a man like that have a son that's such a piece of [ __ ] i don't know i don't know i mean one argument is he's a psychopath and there's sort of nothing you can do like there's no blame whatsoever the other argument the more likely one is like most great men and we're talking about history so it's mostly great men but again queen elizabeth has crappy kids uh most great men are shitty fathers gandhi was a bad father winston churchill was not a good father why is that i think they're busy [Laughter] wow i mean do you have a theory um i i think it's a power thing i think growing up in that with that amount of wealth and that amount of power that your your mind develops in this privileged position where you never have to struggle you never have to develop character and you always feel entitled to everything you know if you like imagine being a prince imagine being the son of an emperor you have the most ultimate power you could have people killed he probably did he probably
killed people if he got an argument with a boy you know what they were playing he would probably stab him you could get away with that and if you did that many many many times you would develop this ultimate sense that you're superior to all mortals like you would think of yourself as a god king you would think of yourself as someone who's not a normal human being and i don't think you could ever get that out of a person if you if you grew up it's like childhood stars are the most broken people that we have on exhibit if you want to really examine human beings in terms if you want to do like a psychological study like what it you know what is the average architect like what is the average singer like you know what is the average child star like well they're almost all drug addicts they're almost all completely wrecked their personalities never fully develop they develop under this weird position where everyone loves them from the time they're little and they get exorbitant amounts of attention that are completely unearned then they never have to develop character under adversity they never have to prove themselves you cannot prove yourself in fact sure you never have the opportunity and so what do they do they get their faces tattooed they get hooked on drugs they're [ __ ] up man they're just falling apart and it's almost universal yes there's the exceptions but the exceptions prove the rule the exceptions are so rare yeah and even the exceptions usually are [ __ ] up i heard this quote it was actually about uh marcus uh no no it was about a different flight it was it was in a book about monsters anyways the guy said the worst thing that a son or that's again male the but the worst thing a kid can say to their parents is like i was never a boy or i was never a girl like you never had a childhood right so i imagine that's part of it too it's like from day same with child stars but also like the person who grows up knowing they're gonna you're never a normal regular kid right getting your ass kicked where you're confused
yeah where where you're struggling to both fit in and like earn your place you're just like you know from the moment you're born you're special and that's maybe why there's five good emperors in a row is that each one of those emperors did not grow up thinking that um that makes sense yeah i i don't know if it's possible for someone to i mean i think it's the same as being famous right i mean essentially he's the son of the emperor he is famous i think it's the same thing i've met dozens of people that were child stars and i've met some of them that were very nice like demi lovato's very nice miley cyrus very nice um i've met a bunch of them but they're all [ __ ] they're all [ __ ] in one way or another they're all like i'm sober now or i'm gonna do this now i'm gonna do that there's never like like this sense of calm and discipline and being centered and there's always like this state of change and improvement like they're all they're always like in this weird place where they don't feel fully centered or they they're always like falling over to the left or falling over to the right the structure's not there yes yeah i mean do you think about that like how do you i've i've tried to make decisions in my life like one of the reasons i live where i live is that like i wanted my kids to be normal like i want you know what i mean like to have us obviously they can't be that like my life is never going to be super normal because i don't have a job that i go to every day and you know i don't have to think about certain things that a quote-unquote normal person would but like there are definitely cities or neighborhoods or lifestyles you could live that are inherently less normal for your kids and i would like i would like to have normal kids yeah normal is an interesting term right because uh i've met people that grew up in la
and their parents are in show business and they're normal yeah yeah it's possible they probably had to create kind of a bubble right i don't know i mean i think it's all about what kind of activities you get your child involved in um i get my kids involved my kids are involved a lot of athletics because i think people have this faulty position on athletics that don't participate in them and they think of athletics as being something that is for the body it's not a smart pursuit it's a dumb pursuit it's like a physical thing it's not a mental thing but they're not right they're incorrect there's a giant amount of success in athletics that are about not just mental states but about discipline which is also uh it that discipline is a part of the mind right we all we all agree to that but so is the ability to perform under pressure so is the ability to deal with a loss and sort of re-establish yourself and come back feeling better the the feeling that you get of the shame of loss is very valuable and that's a mental thing and there's mental sort of challenges that you [Music] acquire from sports that i don't think are available in any other way i don't think i think you get different mental challenges and there's there's different lessons that can be learned from academic pursuits but there's mental challenges that you only get from athletic pursuits you only get when you have to force your body to keep going even though your mind is exhausted your body is exhausted and your will is leaving you and there's parts of you that are telling you to quit and you have to learn how to manage that and that is a mental thing but it's a mental thing in a different way than calculus is it's a mental thing in a different way than learning languages but it's equally as difficult i think one of the things i think a lot about and that i dislike like if i was like describe a philosopher he'd be like
university professor turtleneck like tweed you know uh jacket with pads on it or whatever like you'd think of a weakling and in the ancient world like philosophers were people who did [ __ ] right like there were warriors they were warriors they were king like mark surrealist hunts uh there's an early stoke who's a distance runner one who's a boxer like and what i love when you really read the stoic text is like that the their metaphors are all sport it's wrestling and fighting and running and hunting because they did those things those things are difficult yes and difficult things are good for you and they're good for your mind that's what people don't understand that don't pursue them there's in america unfortunately there's this sort of um intellectual elitism there's this this mindset that some very smart people have because they're they're very good at certain intellectual pursuits and they look down upon pursuits that are physical in nature because because of this sort of prejudice they have this idea and it's like i think it's also like a fear of encountering something that you're not good at or something that's going to humiliate you and something's going to make you feel bad it's like they maybe came from gym class maybe came from you know being forced to participate in sports when they were younger and they didn't enjoy it so they have this thing in their head that there's no value there yeah seneca says we treat the body rigorously so that it will not be disobedient to the mind ooh i like that that's good that's good like like uh when i when i crank the knob to cold in the shower or i push myself when i'm running or lifting weights or swimming or whatever i i feel like part of what that is is an assertion about who's in charge yes that's what my friend john joseph says john joseph is the lead singer the crowmags but he's also done like a [ __ ] ton of iron mans he has got this great saying about doing an iron man he goes he goes that's when your mind has to tell your body who the [ __ ] in charge yeah
it's like and you're here with his heavy new york accent it's beautiful but that's what it is it's like you you're you have to be able to endure you have to be able to tell your body that this is what we do and the more you do it the easier it is man i made a video about it today when i was doing the cold plunge because it's like it's uh it's so much easier than it used to be but it's still hard but it's just easy because i'm accustomed to the grind of it because i do it every day so i just get in there or almost every day but it's like there's there's something to that that's so valuable that doesn't get emphasized enough in our modern day conversations and it doesn't get emphasized in in media it doesn't get talked about it's like you have to search for that you have to search for this idea that struggle is difficult or you know like the title of your book the obstacle is the way like getting through things is how you you build a stronger foundation it's how you develop character it's how the mind understands how to manage difficult situations well i think it's a transferable skill so like yes you're doing it in the cold plunge or running or fighting or whatever and then when you're like when i'm working on a book and books are hard you know and they're like halfway through i'm like this isn't coming together this sucks should i stop i'm like i know this feeling very well and i know that you don't listen to this feeling so like [ __ ] off yeah right like you have to build that familia because because you're going to go through hard things in life and you want to have cultivated a sense of like not quitting yeah things are hard yes um i have a very good friend his name's cameron haynes and he's a hunter ultra yeah he's also ultra marathon runner does a lot of and one of the reasons why he's such a good bow hunter i believe is because of all the exercise he does
because i think there's i i used to think that it was just him building endurance for the mountains i think there is some of that too but i think more than that it's his ability to maintain calmness because he's always torturing himself so he's always running like 15 miles in the morning before he goes to work he's always torturing himself so he has this ability to just stay in this like steady state so when he's at the top of a mountain and there's a giant bugling bull that's like 50 yards away he can center his pin right on that bull's vitals and release a perfect arrow every time because he's so good at managing uncomfortable states he can stay relaxed under fire the stoic word for that is stillness anorexia is the greek word but it's sort of like freedom from disturbances like even if it's crazy outside or even if you're going through something internally like how do you how do you slow things down marx realist talks about he says be like the rock or the cliff that the waves crash over and eventually fall still around i think you cult you you you've been when you've been in crazy stuff or you've exposed yourself or you've endured things you're you you just realize that i gotta slow this down i gotta center myself and that being excited is not is not a positive contributor to this situation right yeah there's there's a thing that happens when you do a difficult thing is that you develop more of an ability to do difficult things and one i mean and it's also like trans it's a daily thing it's not as simple as like oh i used to do difficult things so now i can do this difficult things like i don't think so i think you you are better off than someone who has never encountered something difficult but i think there's a reason why fighters take warm-up fights and fighters when they're active when they fight all the time they fight better when i was competing i would be at my best if i just fought like a week ago
like if i fought a week ago i was like i know this experience i know this feeling i've been here before i was just there yeah but if i was like like i got injured once and i i couldn't compete for like four or five months it was weird coming back was weird it was a totally foreign experience it felt very nerve-wracking and i think there's something to like forcing the brain forcing the mind into these difficult positions into these difficult situations and so that the mind gets accustomed to that feeling and then you can maintain calm and then you could keep yourself in the midst of all the chaos you can keep who you are yeah well i try to design my life around like cultivating slash protecting that feeling so like i like i know people they're like they get up and then the first thing they do in the morning is they're just like sucked into social media or the phone right and then like they're already riled up from like before they've their feet have even touched the floor they're like can you believe so and so said this or like i heard this or like i was talking to a friend of mine and he was like actually i was talking to peter atiyah and he was saying the problem is uh he'll he scans his email in the morning to check for fires like not literal fires but like stuff going on and i'm like so you're you're starting the day looking for things that are disturbing for like you're looking for but it's the defense he is a physician yeah of course he's a man who has a bunch of clients and if a client emails him hey my foot's numb and i can't see it on my left eye there's this [ __ ] he's got to put out that fire yeah yeah that's different than you or i yes definitely and there are obviously professions where you have to be more on call but you can and what we were talking about and he was like he's happiest though when he like gives himself 30 minutes to an hour in the morning which means waking up early right that like you're not sucked into that yeah and so i i tried that's what my rule is like i don't use the phone for an hour in the morning i broke my phone once on a trip in hawaii yeah i was uh bow hunting in lanai and i dropped my phone yeah and um i dropped my phone and it started just
randomly calling people it would just it was wild like i would hold it up and it would call people and i'd hang up and it would just call somebody else i showed my wife i go look at this watch this and it's just doing this wild thing where just kept calm i shut it off turned it back on it was doing the same thing so i'm like okay i got gotta get a new phone but there's no apple store in lanai there's only three thousand people yeah yeah on lanai yeah so i'm all owned by one person yeah larry ellison the oracle guy ballin ballin out of control son yeah he owns a [ __ ] island so uh it's a beautiful place too and so anyway i had to order a new phone well it took like three days to get there and in those three days i didn't have any phone and i felt wonderful it was weird man like i had a weird relaxation come over me like uh like an alleviation of stress and concern and it wasn't even that anything was going on in my life where like people were mad at me or i was in trouble or anything like that it was simply that i wasn't checking in on the opinions of so many people and i was allowing myself to just think about life clearly also i'm in paradise so that helps a lot and i'm just with my family so there's no concern about other people i'm with my family right the most important people and i'm with two of my very best friends and we're having a great time together with no phone but there was a feeling that i had where i was like wow i feel lighter i feel like there's an alleviation but then as soon as i got that phone i went right back into it as soon as i got that phone i'm a check on my instagram oh my god look at all these messages i'm checking my email oh god i gotta answer all this and i i fell right back into this bizarre steady feeling of like a buzz of subtle anxiety everywhere just it can't be good for you terrible for you yeah terrible but is it like all this other stuff we're talking about like hard working out like doing difficult things like endurance work and sauna work and all that stuff is it also a resilience does it build up your ability to
tolerate massive amounts of information coming your way because would you be worse at it if you hadn't experienced it because me personally like i have something like 15 million instagram followers and nine million twitter [ __ ] it's a lot of people and if i absorb all their opinions it's unmanageable yeah but i'm so accustomed to people talking [ __ ] about me i'm so accustomed to that i can read someone being really mean about me and i just go like it doesn't get me anymore but it could it used to get me like when like maybe like if you go back to like the beginning of social media if someone would say something mean to me i'd be like what is this this is awful because i thought it was a real person as opposed to like some thing on the screen well it's in you thought it was a real person but it's also you cannot respond there's no one there so you feel helpless it's like you're swinging at ghosts it's like if no one would say to your face unless they were a really dangerous person a lot of things that people say on twitter they would i mean for someone to say that to your face they're trying to instigate a literal physical violent encounter most people would never do that but they can say something and just throw it out there and it reaches you and it's like causes emotional pain to people and they know it does but they feel disconnected from it and so it takes a long time for someone to understand what that is and how this is a negative thing that you really probably shouldn't have in your life so don't go looking for it don't go reading that stuff because it's just not good for you but if you aren't accustomed to it when it does get through and slip into you it can [ __ ] really bother you and i know some people that never learn this skill and i will see something happen to them and then i'll see them two three days later and it looks like they haven't slept because they're just [ __ ] from people being mad at them and i think that there's a certain amount of resilience you can build
from social media it's just like snake venom yeah take a little bit of it you develop a tolerance but if you get too much of it it's gonna [ __ ] kill you yeah it's like if this is the way of the world and this is how things are to totally step back from it pretend it doesn't exist live in a fantasy world there's kind of a fragility to that where you have to keep it's like you're you haven't been exposed to germs so your immune system is now like more vulnerable yes like i found like i used to love new york i lived there when i wrote obstacle actually and then when i moved to texas uh and then when i moved to the country in texas like now when i go to new york i hate new york like it physically hurts me it's too loud like i can feel the noise like my heart is just like yeah because i'm not the noise pollution is so radically different than my life right it's it's it's not healthy like i think one it tells me that the day-to-day life of a new yorker is actually like much worse than they want to admit they're just they're just built up a tolerance to it but like my withdrawal from that makes me vulnerable to it when i'm in it and i like i just can't handle it too much yeah i think that's exactly right i think uh i think you're exactly right my friends that love new york that i'm close with they're the most unhealthy people i know it's and one of them who i love dearly he's always saying it's the energy of the city i love the energy of the city i'm like don't you have your own [ __ ] energy like i don't need to hear people yelling at each other and honking horns we were there at three o'clock in the morning getting falafels and i heard gunshots i was like this is great this is great bang bang bang like what the [ __ ] are we doing man let's get out of here i hear plenty of gunshots where i live someone decided to play with their ar at like six in the morning but or kill a pig yes yes the the one that i dislike the most is like when the tr like a dump truck or something goes through an intersection in new york and the back kind of lifts up and then it boom yeah that i can feel that like in my chest
oh i scandal yeah it's just i don't think human beings are designed to be stacked up on top of each other either there's a this weird like there's a lack of appreciation for other human beings because they're a burden instead of being a benefit like a community like a small village everybody has a role and everybody's welcome and you need everybody in new york city there's too many people so the the value of people diminishes to the point where people become a liability instead of being an asset it like turned it turns down your ability to empathize yes because if you did empathize you would be paralyzed you'd have to think about how horrible it is to be like a korean bike deliver food delivery guy or to a homeless person or yeah or to commute three hours from some borough to make eleven dollars in that like it would be horrible and so but you the city wouldn't function if you thought about it and so it you have to turn off that part of your brain i think that's also a problem with social media you know i've discussed this many times that i just don't think we're supposed to absorb the problems of seven point whatever billion people it's too much and if you just set out every day looking for all the problems in the world you will have a very distorted idea of what life is yeah because that is not your life that is all the lives and we cannot manage all the lives it's just not possible it's not remotely possible for you to take in all of the violent and sad moments that happen all throughout the day in the whole planet earth it's just too much well you think like we as a normal person probably get more information than like a president got like even just a couple decades ago oh yeah even marcus ruiz is the emperor of a empire 50 million people he knew nothing about them he didn't know what they looked like maybe he read someone wrote a letter and then you know they would have been essentially non-existent to him yeah but we're flooded with more information than a human than even the most connected humans
on the planet just not that long ago it can't possibly be healthy no it's not and i think it's changing the way um our brain is mapped i really do i think it's it's this is a very recent thing right social media has only existed for the last 13 or 14 years as we know it and i think we're going to get to a point where the mind has to adapt to deal with the the volume of information that comes in and the way we receive it and i think along the way there's going to be some sort of a technological intervention and it's probably going to be something like neurolink and we're going to accept it because it makes the management of all this data more easy yeah i don't know anything about that neurolink is an idea that elon has that is initially going to be used for people that have spinal cord injuries and it's going to change the way your brain communicates with all your muscle tissue so you're going to be able to move your body even with spinal cord issues so people that have it's going to be fantastic for people that have been paralyzed they'll have they'll regain use of their body because instead of the spine the spinal cord being the conduit for all the information and all the signals that you're sending there's going to be an electronic interface and this electronic interface will i think it will initially initially mimic what the mind does with the the spinal column and then ultimately be far superior and then one of his things that he said that always freaks me out he said we're going to be able to talk without words oh man i think there's going to be an information a transfer of information hopefully that surpasses language meaning that there'll be some way of universally expressing information where you don't have to like you know you don't have to write it in greek you don't have to write in latin it'll it'll come out as intent interesting yeah i wonder i know having moved here
one of the really beneficial things was that like i don't know i know but i don't see that regularly people who do what i do so it turns off kind of like a competitive part of my brain where like i just get to be me and do what i want to do and focus on like what i think is cool and what i want to create there's not that like keeping up with the joneses part of that can be a powerful driver of your career but also a source of unhappiness did you feel that in new york i felt it in new york i felt it when i lived in l.a like how did you feel in like what way did you compare yourself to like other people yeah just like why are they doing better than me do you see that person's house you know that that sort of yeah comparison is the thief of joy as though yes i i didn't know that quote when i lived in la uh when i first got there but i was on this sitcom we were on a sitcom right incredible yeah oh my god i'm on television this is amazing and the people that i was with who were great people they were they were all reading the hollywood reporter and they would read this and they'd get upset oh why is she getting this oh why is this happening why are they on thursday night at eight o'clock why and i'll go hey i go that's the devil's rag i go what are you reading that's what i would call it the devil's rag and i go guys last time i checked i'm on [ __ ] tv yeah okay i'm on television you're on tv we're on a tv show and you're complaining that other people are on better tv shows or on tv shows that have better ratings this is crazy yeah like you're looking for reasons why your life sucks when you're in one of the best positions that a person could ever be in in your line of work you're literally on a successful television show this is so crazy and they're reading variety to find all the people that are doing better them oh look at this oh they're in a movie now i want to be in film and it was wild to watch yeah that's one of the things that stokes say is like you would be gel if you if you didn't have what you had and someone else did you would be jealous of that person oh yeah but all you're doing is comparing what you have to what someone
else has instead of the gratitude of holy [ __ ] look how lucky i am 100 that is sucking your happiness but i think it's also if if good work comes from being present it's preventing your ability from like actually being great on the television show that you're on because you're you're you're spending energy out in the world on stuff that doesn't matter instead of being like i'm gonna be the best that i can be in the thing that i am 100 100 if you are constantly dwelling on other people's opinions if you're constantly dwelling on other people's success it will 100 diminish your capability of doing good work yeah there's no just no if ends or buts about it because the mind has a certain amount of bandwidth and the way i always just express this when i talk to people about it i go look at it like a number if you had a hundred bandwidth like if your bandwidth was 100 and then someone said something mean to you on twitter and you read that and responded and you're going back and forth now how much do you have i bet you got about 30 is gone 30 percent is just dedicated to this thing it might be 40 you might have four and now what happens now now whatever work you're actually trying to do is greatly diminished because you don't have the focus well think of the arrogance too of being like i'm so good i can be on this show or in my like i can i can deliver this book in an environment where so many people would kill like to to be able to do what i'm doing so many people are doing it and we're competing for a finite you know amounts whatever i can do it with only 60 of my capacity yeah it's it's horrendously arrogant and stupid like i don't think it's arrogant though because i think it's ignorant i don't think people are really aware when they're doing this i think they're j it's just so instinctive it's so instinctual it's such a normal thing to do to you know read some mean quote that someone said about you or read uh an article that someone wrote that pisses you off or you know i know friends i have friends
i'm not close with but i'm close enough to them that i pay attention to them and they their career is a disaster but when i go onto their twitter page they're so deeply involved in politics like massively where they're quoting spending bills that i don't even know and they're talking about what the problem these bills i'm like if you spent a fraction of your life paying attention to your own career and doing what you actually love doing instead of focusing on this you're focusing on this because you feel like this is something that you can get involved with mentally where the burden of performance is not on you yeah well there's a zen there's a zen story like the zen master was told he was criticized by another zen master and he said oh how lucky for him to have arrived at perfection and to have the time to do such a thing he's like me i'm not there yet and so what i'm saying it's arrogant i just i don't i i know what you're saying the humble way is like dude i can spare zero yeah i'm so uh holding i'm so on the razor's edge of this i cannot possibly afford to waste even one energy point on this thing that's not up to me which is what the stoics say they said epictetus is the chief task in life is separating things that are in your control from what's outside your control and all that stuff is outside of your control and you're spending the energy points that could be on what is in your control on the stuff that's outside your control so it makes you doubly worse it does but unfortunately this is not taught i mean you're teaching it there's marcus aurelia's books there's there's there's many books that are available if you want to go seek it but this is not something that's being beaten into the head of people on a daily basis and it should be it should be something that television shows that you know that are supposed to be these intellectual exercises and examining the world around us one of the most important things is how are you looking at the world around us how are you thinking about things and through what lens and have you done the work on your own self because if you
have not you're going to look for these struggles in other places because you're uncomfortable dealing with your own personal struggles and you're avoiding those so you'll find them in other places you'll start fires because you haven't dealt with your own [ __ ] yeah and this is also what they teach in like uh 12-step groups right it's like the acceptance of a higher powers to say like you're not the center of the universe right this is why they do the serenity prayer it's i you're realizing it's like the source of your unhappiness and just self-destructive life is your focus on things you don't control is your you know you're handing over that power to this thing that you're hooked on and so 12 steps are really like a way to teach someone how to be a person again like from from rock bottom and we don't you're right we don't do that we just assume well the problem is even people who study philosophy they they think about interesting but abstract questions right how do we know we're not living in a computer simulation right which is fascinating but like first we should probably focus on like what is in our control and what is not in our control once you've mastered that think about all the big questions you want right and how does the mind handle adversity how does the mind handle difficult situations and the knowledge that if you force difficult situations into your life that you can control like rigorous exercise like meditation like sauna and cold plunge there's many different things you can do like writing like sitting down and forcing yourself to do work that will it will free your mind in so many ways and allow you to have a philosophy or at least a philosophical perspective that's based on how you actually think not based on overcompensating for deficits not based on trying to you know pile dirt on the problems that you've created yeah it forces you to wrestle with yourself and your [ __ ] yeah first and foremost first and foremost which is i mean social media is designed to like focus on other people's [ __ ] yeah what are you thinking about this what's your opinion about this as if the thing cares you know i'm going i'm in the
middle of another book um i think it's called a muse to death oh by neil postman yes yeah i was listening to that was it um neil brennan recommended it yes he did and that's amusing ourselves to death books it's great incredible and what's fascinating about it neil brennan recommended it i think when he was on my podcast right yeah um one of the things that's fascinating about it is that it's from the 1980s and they talk about television the same way we talk about social media today and he compares television to the way they talked about the printing press yeah when the printing press was first made available a lot of people thought it was a disaster and that really the written word on on a piece of paper in a book like a written book was the way to go yeah and this printing press was some cheap easy cop-out that was going to make people stupid isn't that fascinating well i love amusing marcellus to death there's another book called um the image by daniel borsten which is written in the 60s and he was talking about this thing called pseudoevents like a press conference is a pseudo event he's like it exists for no other reason but to get media attention that's why that's why they do a weigh-in in a fight right like uh so cameras will be there maybe something will happen and then we'll get more attention right like how so he's talking about how much of what we respond to even then was not real but things that were made for the media to suck our attention away and then you go back even further there's another book called the brass check which was written in i don't know 1910 1912 1930 anyways upton sinclair who wrote the jungle you know the jungle the expose of the meat packing industry yeah he wrote an expose of the media industry in like the 1910s about how almost all the same things that were happening then or have like it this has always been a problem it's just different mediums uh ex like what postman is saying is that when television is the dominant medium the world conforms around that medium
and before that it was radio and then before that it was newspapers and now it's social media and uh you know video and these other and so like our world conforms around what the medium wants right like what the medium is good at well if we make it too easy then people get soft and lazy and i think that's what he's talking about with when it comes to television and he's comparing it to the way lincoln's debates were oh yeah they're like seven hours people went home for lunch yeah they told people to go home for dinner and come back for four more hours and so they would make these agreements like this man would speak for an hour and a half and then he would have a rebuttal for a half an hour and then he had his own speech for an hour and then the other guy would rebut and it's like they had these attention spans that it was based possibly on that there was no tick tock there was no distractions no no real like the kind of media that we have available at the touch of our fingertips just did not exist back then it was not a thing so you had to get all of your entertainment from literature that was the only if you saw a live performance that was it or literature and that's it there was no recordings so you and even you can go before that before written word everything was oral yeah it was all oral traditions so you had to learn these oral traditions they were passed on from generation to generation and you had to learn them they were a very important part of your upbringing so you had to have a grasp of language in a sense that you had to be able to communicate things in an eloquent and sophisticated way because it was part of being a fully formed grown adult well the thing is we don't always think of things as technology because when you think of technology we think of tech right we don't think like a book is a piece of technology it's a great piece of technology right like it's uh and the incentives in it are pretty good like an author has to work on a book for
a number of years then it's edited multiple times lots of people look at it it takes a while to publish so it has to be somewhat timeless then the the reader is paying for it right you contrast that with like a blog post the blog post could take an hour to do it's designed to only be relevant today it's designed to be shared a lot by other people so it's focused on the valence of emotion that it provokes from the person when they see it it's not supposed to challenge them it's not supposed to be complicated right so it's good medium versus bad medium and uh the only like recent medium that i think is somewhat positive it's not totally but podcasting is a medium that i think generally extends out right like it's not short right it's a conversation pieces of it don't really spread it's like a whole thing you consume in a block it's usually you know two people talking like podcasting i think is better than most of the other sort of online tech focused mediums but i think what postman's point is is you have to think about the incentives or the language that a medium is built around and then you have to ask yourself does that make people smarter or dumber and a lot of these mediums inherently make us dumber or at least they make it harder to get to truth and it's interesting with podcasting how one of the things that happens is that you take social media which is inherently a short attention span platform and then people will take out of context clips of podcasts and then insert them into their world of outrage farming yeah and they'll instead of like looking at a conversation in terms of the entire three plus hour conversation they'll find a sentence from someone may have misspoken or a disagreement that someone might have had and they'll force it into their world and then attack it with also short attention span non-sequitur short little 140 280 word sentences or letter sentences well i think twitter broke a lot of people's brains you think about like what a journalist was like 20 years ago they were someone who thought
long form so a couple thousand words they thought like not the day's news cycle usually but they might be working on an investigation or a piece over a sort of a somewhat long period of time uh it would be edited it would be fact checked etc it was it was supposed to be objective so you had to consider multiple perspectives now you contrast that with twitter which is like driven primarily by journalists right um and they're like throw all that out and think about the world in 240 characters yeah the world is [ __ ] complicated 240 characters is nothing but you can have like twitter threads where you can have one thing and then you have a second comment on a third and fourth and people do that and they do get coherent points out but nothing is the most viral is a singular tweet right that's right and you're not like hey it's pretty complicated there's a little bit of this and a little bit of that you're like screw this person or this is evil or this is the worst thing i've ever seen right yeah it inherently and i got postman i think talks about this really it's it is inherently driven by the demands of that medium yes yeah it is in in many many ways and it's also so alien to the way we are designed to communicate we're designed to communicate looking at each other eye to eye and i think that's one of the great benefits of podcasting is that podcasting is at its core it's communication in its purest form it's like that's how people are designed to communicate like what we're having right now communicating for all of other than the microphones yes what this is is the one of the most basic human things that there are and ironically enough the microphones enhance it because what's going on is you wear headphones i wear headphones so i hear your voice in my ear at the same level i hear my own voice so everything is together so any overtalk is painful and clunky sure yeah and that's why like if you ever heard a podcast where
there's like five guys sitting around drinking and there's no headphones i've done those before they're [ __ ] disasters because if you don't have headphones on everyone's just talking over everybody and i have friends who do podcast that way and i'm telling them like you can't do this like this is this shit's unlistenable but one on one with headphones is actually better you like you don't hear the rest of the world that's right it enhances sensory deprivation yes yes yes well i wrote about this in my first book i wrote this book about media manipulation in 2012 which i was like if we don't get this out right now it's going to be late you know and it was like you were 25. i was 25. you're a little baby and you wrote a book i know people were not pleased with that book they were very angry about because i was i was talking about media manipulation and i was saying the primary manipulators of media are not just bad people like dictators or marketers or whatever journalists themselves are inherently manipulative right like um think about it this way you would never want a reporter to write a story about a company they own stock in right because that would be a conflict of interest potentially right like or if they were shorting the stock that would make them write negatively if they were long positive um but what happens when the journalist is compensated or at least evaluated based on the number of views that that piece gets that is also a conflict of interest yes it's like they're working on commission and you wouldn't want a shoe salesman to be working on commission because it would they would pressure you into doing something that maybe you wouldn't actually want and you couldn't trust their uh their judgment yeah and that is the drive this and that was a metric of journalism that was invented by gawker like in 2008 like not a long time ago like all journalism forever was not monetized in that fashion until like our lifetime well the convenience of digital news was so much more efficient than getting an actual
newspaper and unfolding it and reading it and so people stop buying newspapers i would like to see let's see if we can find this the difference i don't know how you'd google this the difference between the circulation of printed newspapers pre-social media to now i mean it has to be a [ __ ] massive hemorrhaging yeah of course and not just the subscriber base but like there were thousands of daily newspapers yeah new york city at one point like in the 20s or 30s had like 50 daily newspapers for one city wow and so all that goes away all that goes away and then you're incentivized with click-bait journalism so people have deceptive headlines they have salacious stories that they cover even though it's not even interesting not real it's just [ __ ] but that [ __ ] is going to get people to click on it total estimated circulation of us daily newspapers there is a [ __ ] giant drop-off right at the invention of social media and what if you tr if you had somehow charted population growth along that right you see how many yeah that would be crazy look at that number like look where 2007 is go to 2007 it's right there so it was dropping off before i guess it was probably the internet that made it drop off even before social media because stu i mean generally wasn't 2007 is that the creation of twitter i was in austin at south by when they launched it i was like that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard that won't be a thing and i could not have been more incorrect i feel that way about nfts i might be wrong um so it seems like the drop-off started happening around like 94. go to 94. the peak here it was like 91. which i don't know that's weird well one of the big things that people don't talk about craigslist just guts the newspaper industry because classifieds subsidized their you know baghdad bureau and like all that stuff oh that's right that's right i didn't even think about it which is also a tech invention that destroys you know a thing yeah and then there's also um people advertised online they started advertising for things online so they didn't need to take ads
out in the newspaper which was always a thing yeah like ads in the newspaper was a big thing yeah and so that was where we got our objective information if you go back and you read a new york times story from like 1983 it's a different world i mean the way they wrote was different the way they covered critical issues was very different well the reason that fundamentally was and upton's leclair was talking about this in the 1910s whenever that was uh he was saying that okay um when the news boys are selling the paper like at the street corner it's a similar competition right so when we think of yellow journalism it was you know extra extra read all about it that so you had let's say there's 50 newspapers in new york city and you get off a train at grand central and there's news boys for all of them they have to have the most salacious headline or or breaking story that day to get you to buy it but then as the 20s uh as we got in the 30s 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s the the newspaper stopped being sold one-off at newsstands for the most part and most people subscribed or you know we'd say i i take the new york times or i take the washington post yeah you would subscribe to a newspaper and so like when you look at the breaking of the pentagon papers it's the headline is beyond boring it's like a long ass headline because the new york times didn't need to sell you the paper the new york times knew we are delivering this story to 20 million 30 million homes today that's the so there's a and i think what a podcast does like when you you're not thinking like i want to have this guest on to grow the show to get attention you're thinking how many subscribers do i have of the show am i honoring or disappointing them right you're thinking i know you don't really think about the audience too much but your point is you have a fan base that you are making stuff for as opposed to a thing you were trying to sell and shout over everyone else to like dominate the news cycle that day that's an interesting point because that was
one of the things that actually came up when i first came over to spotify the first week of spotify shows they're like who's the guest going to be like who are you going like hey hey hey hey hey yeah i'm not doing that i'm like that's not what i do i put on people that i think are interesting i'm gonna continue to do it only that way and when i'm not doing it that way anymore it won't be the same show and i'm gonna quit it's not gonna be the same like i have to just have people on that i think are interesting that that's the only criteria i have i look at all the requests that come in i look at all the different people that i'm interested in either i reach out to people i'm interested in like you like i reached out to you i can't believe you do it yourself i do it myself yeah or well i have a guy too i have my friend matt i have him contact people but um it's all scheduled on my phone everything's on my phone so i i just say like i go through the requests like i get emails and there's like hundreds of them so i'm like no no no where where'd he go what's he what like charlie walker who's on the other day like what four years he bicycled through [ __ ] asia and africa holy [ __ ] get that guy he just got out of a russian jail holy [ __ ] he wound up in russia because he was uh he was in uh the arctic in siberia during the time where russia invaded ukraine just coincidentally and then they thought he was a spy so they arrested him and he's in jail in russia for a month like crazy i'm like let me talk to that guy so it's that kind of a deal that's the or you know snoop dogg wants to come on [ __ ] yeah i want to talk to snoop it's that kind of a deal it's like it's not like this is gonna be huge like i don't think that way at all and that's i the only reason why i think it works i think if i stop thinking that way i don't think it would work i think if there was a if there was a [ __ ] hint of disingenuous behavior if there was a hint of [ __ ] i think people wouldn't trust me anymore if there was if they thought that i was only doing this to get attention i mean i'm sure some people that don't know me think that that's what i'm doing but that's not i
only i don't have to i it works i and i did it from the beginning where i didn't think i was ever going to make any money doing it so i only did it for fun yeah and then once i started making money i said well i'm doing it this way anyway and this is how i want to do it so i'll just keep doing it this way i never would have thought you could become the number one podcast in the world by just talking to people you want to talk to i thought you'd probably have to promote it everywhere you'd have to like go way out of your way and take ads out and pump a bunch of i've done none of that yeah i've literally i've done no i don't even talk about it i just do it and through word of mouth it's become what it is it's really like the most organic thing i've ever done well that's what i like i like sub stacks that way the idea that you're writing for an audience and ideally that audience is paying you so you're not like doing this sort of virally thing i think the only downside the only risk can be it do you get in a place where i'm not saying you are but some people are where you're like if i tell these people what they don't want to hear that costs me money i think the big risk today is someone like sub stack decides to disempower you and to take away your platform and that's a real issue yeah i mean i know people that have been banned from paypal i know people that have they can't use paypal anymore i know people that have been kicked off of you know youtube i i know a lot of people that have where things have happened where someone has decided that they're going to censor this person's positions on things yeah but they call this audience capture though like where you're you're because these people are paying you because that's your audience you're not necessarily thinking about what's true you're thinking about what they want to hear right yes i've seen that too that's dangerous it's very dangerous for comedians you see comedians they find an audience uh like maybe they get a certain amount of tension from attacking people that's a big one and then they really lean into
it and that becomes their thing they just go after people because that's where they find success and you find like they lose who they are they lose who they are and they become captive yeah like a caricature of yours yeah you also see that with people that uh switch political affiliations you know like they get lured in to the other side and they get a lot of attention from this transition and so they make this transition and everybody loves them and so then they go all in you know it's generally speaking i see it from people that used to be left-wing and become right-wing yeah and they go all in and and it becomes an identity yeah you want to like it's you want to be a free agent is what you want to be like you this is what i think about this this is what i think about this and i don't really think about what other people think like sometimes i'll write something that's political and people will get upset and i go like i didn't build an audience to not say what i think like right i want to own the audience not the audience own me yeah i mean you don't even own the audience you own yourself right you're going to have an audience because your ideas are interesting but if you decide that you're only going to speak from a right-wing perspective there's a lot of people that do that there's a lot of people that do that already and they do that because there's a business in that it's it's it's very valuable like you can talk from a pure left-wing progressive perspective and attack everyone as being far right or nazis and you can get a lot of money that way it's it's a good business model yeah but it's not smart it's not it's not good for you either it's not good for you intellectually because you're not going to be examining things from a purely objective perspective you're not going to look at your own flaws in your own thinking and the way you formulate ideas and go why do i think like that you're not going to do that if you're captured by you know the progressives are captured by the republicans the people that get locked into that it's like man and when they transition like if someone transitions it's very similar the word transition
has been captured right by transgender today but it's kind of similar because if you go male to female you're most likely not going back sure right and so if you go left wing to right wing you're not going to come back to the progressives you're not going to go you know what i just decided the right wings are racist and they're evil and they they support white supremacy and [ __ ] the military industrial complex i'm going back to the left like no one's going to take you they're not going to take you back isn't that kind of what happens it's always like one issue they talk about one issue and then that issue gets so much attention and then it's like like magic they suddenly also have the same right wing opinion yes on all the other issues and you're like yeah because you're not going to be the one guy who has one out of step opinion and then stay in this group you you stepped out in the middle into no man's land and now these people don't want you anymore so you're like i might as well go over here well that's and it but it's only if you choose to align yourself with a very specific ideology if you don't do that you can have opinions like i mean i have a lot of opinions that are on both sides and i think most people do i think most people have conservative as well as like i'm very socially liberal like about as socially liberal as you get but more and more as i get older i start looking at things from a perspective of being a pragmatist and i start looking at things in instead of looking at what do i hope people will do if you give them free money and if you you know give them free education if you give them free this and free that and take care of them i start going well what is that what does that do to the psyche yeah and does does that force laziness like if everyone in this country look let's imagine a world where everyone in this country gets 50 000 a year yeah everyone how much less productive would we be it would probably be horrific now i want to live in a world where this is universal basic income yeah yeah i mean i want to live in a world where no one has to worry about how to feed
themselves no one has to worry about how to put a roof over their head all you have to worry about is what what do you want to do what would best serve your interests and also how could you provide a service or whether it's art or something that other people are going to enjoy and appreciate and that could elevate you past the middle class past making fifty thousand dollars a year into becoming you know affluent wouldn't that be nice if you didn't have to struggle and and spend your resources thinking about how am i gonna feed myself and instead let me write the best book i can write instead let me create the best film let me make can you get paid on top of the 50 000 yes okay yeah that's the idea but i don't think it would work i think we would lose a lot of great people because i think there's a lot of people that are motivated by desperation they're motivated by this this kick in the ass where you have like i have friends that uh had children and once they had children they became [ __ ] hyper ambitious because they realized oh my god i have to pay for this little baby and then they realize like it does turn you into an adult yeah because you're like these people are i'm responsible for these people yes it's a completely different kind of feeling but i wonder but i look i don't want people to live in poverty poverty sucks it's a terrible place to be to be desperate and and that's causes a lot of crime it causes a lot of violence there's a lot that's attached to poverty that's horrific however it is an incredible motivator to get people to to get moving and to do something and desperation much like loss and humiliation are great motivators to make you work harder to be better at whatever thing you were attempting to do that failed there's something about being poor that forces people into this feeling this this hunger that causes
greatness in so many human beings so many artists so many great musicians so many great comedians and so many great people that have accomplished amazing things came out of nothing and there's this inherent hunger and this desire to be someone to be something that creates greatness that gets recognized by so many people and enriches so many people's lives if you think about how many hip-hop artists who are so poor became so rich and inspired so many people with their music how many comedians did the same how many people who wrote books have come out of utter poverty and through the struggle and pain of their existence it gave life to their words in a way that you're just not gonna get sleeping on silk sheets yeah but are you sleeping on silk sheets making 50 grand a year no so there's no number like right yeah there's like a subsistence number but you don't but but then again i was like how much encourages people to just exist like that subsistence number how many people would just get that kickstart rum from poverty and leads them in to success and this is just this is not encouraging poverty i don't think poverty is gonna [ __ ] i was poor when i was a kid i hated it it's a horrible feeling but that feeling it it is a motivator that is unlike anything else that the pain and the the the discomfort of poverty and of feeling like a failure or feeling like a nothing is is an insane vehicle for your your human potential like it can it can push you if you get on it and ride it but it can also destroy your life i mean it causes so many people to become drug addicts and so many people to become criminals because they're they're desperate and they're poor and they feel like the world has abandoned them you know that quote like um if you aren't liberal when you're young you have no heart and then if you're not a conservative when you're older you have no brain yeah there's probably a truth to that but i also really hate
that expression because it's it sort of means like you're supposed to care less about people or think less with your heart as you get older which strikes me as kind of one of the problems in the world yeah yeah i agree with you i mean i don't think it's real i think people give in to that because it's so nuanced and complex the reality of human life and civilization is so nuanced and so complex you know i was i was watching this horrible video the other day it was really bad it was um these two guys in brooklyn they robbed this kid um they walked up to him and sucker punched him and he fell back and hit his head off the street and he died five days later and they stole 20 from him i mean that's all he had on him yeah they punched this guy in the head and took 20 out of his pocket now he's dead and i was thinking so many different things first of all i was thinking like imagine being that kid's parents and finding out that that's how your child died and then i was thinking imagine being those kids that did that to that guy and your life has gone so far off the rails that you're essentially a parasite on society you can't find a better way to make twenty dollars you don't your development is so [ __ ] like your morals your ethics someone's failed you society's failed you and that's what i really feel like i feel like one one of the things that conservative thinking leaves out is that not everybody starts at the same yeah the same position you don't start at the same starting line it's different and if you don't accept that if you don't look at the just pull yourself up very bootstraps they don't have boots man yeah okay there's people out there that don't have anything and you i don't even think most these people saying that like you just gotta put your nose to the grindstone and get to work you don't even understand where these people are starting from and if you're these kids living in brooklyn walk around sucker punching people on the street and stealing money from them like your morality is so [ __ ] it would take so many mushrooms and so many psychedelic
trips and so much therapy and so just to try to realign you with good and love yeah so this is like the liberal part of me the the liberal part of me feels terrible for the guy who got killed but also feels terrible for these boys that sucker punched this guy because in my mind i think like if i lived their life i would be them if i was in that situation of dire poverty and probably a lot of emotional and physical abuse but if you're accustomed to just walking up to someone and punching them you've probably been punched you've probably been abused you've probably seen it all and you probably have like deep anger towards society and civilization and you probably been conditioned to think that you you deserve this and that you got to go get what's yours it's a horrible failure on all of our parts so even though like i might have some conservative ideas most of my ideas are very liberal and in that regard like my feeling is we need to pump insane amounts of money and time and effort into inner cities we need to fix the the imbalance there is there's obviously an income inequality problem in this country right sure but there's also an effort inequality problem in this country both things are true and poverty like extreme poverty has a gravity that is so difficult to escape you're like a 500 pound man who's trying to do box jumps like it is so god damn and we got to teach that 500 pound man how to lose some weight and that's how i look at the general state of the horrific poverty that exists in these inner cities it's gravity is inescapable so many people have been trapped in it for so long and there's been decades upon decades of these places there's multiple ones in this country that have been completely ignored by this country that supposedly wants everything to work out better well if you want something to work out better you got to look at the people that are in the very worst starting position
that's available in the united states of america and change that elevate that have you um did you watch the movie nomad land no or there's a really good book and i i read it not that long ago and it's basically about people who like because the financial crisis and other stuff it's like old people who they lost their houses and so now they live in vans or campers and they just drive around the country working at different like theme parks or amazon seasonal warehouses uh like these companies recruit those those people because they're like old people work hard they don't have anywhere to go they pay them like next to nothing they get like a couple hundred bucks a month in social security these are people living right on the edge they live in a van and i as i was reading it there was this voice inside me that was trying to think like how bad do you have to screw it like what choices do you make in your life where you end up this way like my first thought was like basically like how is it this person's fault right right and i realized that i was doing that because if it was their fault then it wouldn't have to make me sad and i wouldn't have to do anything or change any of my habits or viewpoints do you know what i mean yeah and then you're like no the system failed these people like these these these people have worked their whole lives maybe they messed up once they got addicted to alcohol or they went through a divorce or you know they got fired from one and this the system failed them in some way because you shouldn't if you work your whole life you shouldn't end up in a van down by the river right like these aren't these aren't like people addicted to crack on the side of the street these are like these are people who if you saw on the street you wouldn't know that they live in a camper right and it was it i think the idea that the system has failed huge amounts of people and that you can't individually hold someone responsible for something that is a collective failing they're a symptom
of a huge problem and many of these people have not had access to anybody who thinks outside of the box the their the access that they have to other people are the people that live in their small community that are also troubled by the same problems that they are yeah and you know in many of these places in the country today it's pills i mean there's a great documentary that um was put out by mariana van zeller like it was we had her on talking about this i want to say it was like eight or nine years ago and it was called the oxycontin express did you ever watch that no but it's all about the the horrible situation that used to be in florida where they had these pain management centers yeah yeah and you go to the pain management center it's really just a pill fill a pill mill rather and so you would go into this place they would have a doctor on one side they would say what's wrong ryan oh my back hurts oh well you need oxycontin yeah and then you go right next door and they would give you the pills and there was no database so you could go to jamie and jamie could prescribe you the pills and you can come to my office and i would prescribe you the pills and people would do that and they would go to 10 15 different doctors and they had it set up that way specifically to make the maximum amount of profit yeah so they knew they were doing this and then these people would take these pills they'd have a trunk full of them and they'd drive them up through kentucky and that's the oxycontin express yeah and then we're like that person lives in a in a camper park because they were a drug addict as if they weren't exploited and uh that basically like their humanity extracted out of them by these doctors and these multi-billion dollar conglomerates that they're doing fine well you know the people that are running it just so it's a side effect these [ __ ] people if they weren't hooked on drugs they'd be hooked on something else if it wasn't that it'd be gambling if it wasn't that it would be cocaine if it wasn't that it would be you know whatever cigarettes they're
gonna they're gonna find a way to ruin their lives because they're idiots and these people can justify things like that and you don't realize like some of these people are four okay and if you're four and you're living in that trailer and your mom's on oxycontin like you're [ __ ] yeah but if that same four-year-old grew up with like a really healthy person who lives in an upper middle class suburb and spends time going over the homework with the kids and takes them to practice and gets them involved in sports and you know maybe exposes them to some activity that will eventually be their career that person can be a functioning thriving member of society and be a benefit to everybody it's really in where you [ __ ] start from and this is why the whole if you are young and you're not a liberal then you have no soul but if you're old and you're not a conservative you have no mind doesn't work with me because i'm forced to look at the reality of the situation i didn't have the best childhood but i had food i had parents who cared about me i had stuff i didn't have a bad childhood i went to high school in a pretty nice area it was not bad like there's bad it was enough bad to make me motivated but it ain't [ __ ] compared to what someone who lives in appalachia who lives in a [ __ ] trailer park whose whole family's a bunch of drug addicts and criminals there's there's people in this this world that are [ __ ] their starting block is miles from yours and it's all uphill to get to you i think i think about that even with the student loan thing which i'm a dropout so i don't have any student debt so i don't i don't have super strong opinions on whether it should be forgiven or not but you think about how exploitative and extractive that system is where colleges were like oh you're 18 um you can't even legally drink but sign this contract to pay 70 000 a year for your you know insert obscure degree uh that has no viable job prospects oh you can't afford that just take out a loan we won't you don't just don't even look at it by the way this is the only unforgivable debt in the entire world yes and uh you know when you graduate you'll be
four hundred thousand dollars in the hole and you'll figure it out and so when i look at my friends and they're like you know in their they're my age and they're just starting to get it together the reason they didn't buy a house like i did when i was in my mid-20s is because they have a house that they're carrying around on a in a bank balance yeah and it's getting bigger every year every year and then we wonder why they don't become t like it it totally changes the jobs they do like why do they go get a job on wall street or whatever it's because they have to pay back this obscene debt meanwhile the college is just hiring more and more bureaucrats and administratives administrators and putting in a [ __ ] lazy river and you know all this nonsense and this is coming off the backs of a generation of people who were misled or outright conned into a thing that you know is totally unjustifiable totally unjustifiable and the way you know it is in the fact that what you said it is the only debt that's not forgivable yeah it doesn't matter what happens i read a story about the the the prevalence of people who are getting their social security checks docked because they owe student loans oh can you imagine carrying that your whole life and you have you have a piece of paper to show for it and you're at the end of your life and this is your subsistence income your subsistence income is reduced because of a debt that you can never get rid of that didn't serve you obviously yeah because you don't have any money if someone sells you a house that you know you pay too much for sold termites or whatever you get a bad deal on a house you can just walk away you'll take a bath on it but you'll you can just walk away yeah if you got conned into some for-profit school or some you know they over-promised uh that hey this is what you'll make if you become a physical therapist you get your masters in this or whatever you can't you have no recourse and those people in their middle class houses or or bigger the people that that profited from that money like i think so people sometimes say this about me they're like oh you're
profiting from philosophy because i sell my books and you know stuff that i'm profiting from it and i go you think this college professor who has job security for life paid for by the u.s government you know subsidized by the us government meanwhile is charging students 50 60 000 a year for the for the courses for this piece of paper like he's not he or she isn't also uh profiting from i can sleep at night i know i charged seventeen dollars for a book that took me two years to write you made someone take out unforgivable debt to attend your university class at obscene amounts of you know what it is true but gross you know there's no need to have a what about with that what about that guy what about this guy just you're not getting paid for philosophy you're getting paid for your work you're getting paid for work and if you put together a good book that is your effort sure and you will profit from that because people enjoy it it is a meritocracy selling books is a meritocracy because if people don't enjoy your books you don't get money yeah it's really very simple so anybody says oh you're getting paid from philosophy no no getting paid for work in philosophy that's like getting paid for serving food uh you know are you getting paid for serving you're getting paid for work sure it's work yeah no i don't feel bad about it it's just value i'm just saying we don't we don't think of the college professors or the university present we think of them as good people and i'm sure they mean well some of them but the system is inherently exploitative and extractive against people at their absolute and not their most vulnerable but vulnerable people who don't understand that they're signing away their financial freedom or the choices they can make as far as their careers goes for their entire life because you'll never be able to get out of this yeah in the thing is too that information is available it's like that scene in goodwill hunting where he talks about going to the library like you could learn all this from the library you don't have to spend
all this money on education that that didn't really used to be true but it's true now you can get a full-blown 100 education without ever stepping into a classroom you could have a varied nuanced education about a myriad of subjects and you can get that all from books you can get it from online there's online courses you can take for free i mean you can become incredibly well educated now would you be able to do an internship with like uh you know some scientist that's working on genetic engineering no you probably would have to have some sort of a degree to qualify you for something like that but for just general education in terms of elevating your intelligence or elevating the information that you possess that's readily available when you think about probably what harvard cost when that movie came out versus what it is now i bet it's like doubled or tripled like i remember when my son was born someone told us that there's a thing in texas where if you want to send them to ut you can pre-pay for their education now so like you can be like so in eight but the bet there is that let's say it's 200 grand that 200 grand compounded in the stock market for 18 years will be less oh yeah yes will be less than just the natural increase in tuition over 18 years which is absolutely they're inherently they are they are implying that they plan to beat the stock market compounded every year with their tuition increases for a state run institution well i think it depends on who's playing the stock market because if it's nancy pelosi i'll give her the 200 grand and i'm betting on nancy because i think she knows [ __ ] harvard college tuition fees room and board 2017 tuition was 43 000 service fees 1 000 plus student service fees 2 000 plus room 9000 board six so the total is 63 000 but that's 2017 so yeah five years later it's probably quite a bit higher oh man yeah it's pretty wild but if you go back to goodwill hunting which was what was that like 96 yeah so it was only 27 000. so it's half less than half you talk to people
they're like oh yeah i went to i went to berkeley and it was 46 a semester and then and then they judge people who are my age and they're like these kids you know it's like are you [ __ ] kidding me but then there's a thought if education was free you would take it for granted and you wouldn't work harder it's like the same perspective about hard work and poverty you know like if you're if you're poor it motivates you to work hard i mean there's there's there's a lot of examples of that it's like fighters almost all the best fighters come from poverty almost all of them it's it's very rare that a rich kid becomes a super successful fighter isn't that like the history of boxing is like whatever the most marginalized group was in that generation that's who the boxers were yep used to be jews he used to be uh like slapsy maxi rosenbloom it was like a lot of uh jewish boxers and then it was italians it was italians for a long time uh it was african-americans it's still african-americans predominantly but it's a lot of russian immigrants irish for a while yeah a lot of irish a lot of irish it's like whoever the the poor immigrants are that are scratching clawing yeah those are the people that have the most hunger and the most anger and unfortunately they're they've probably experienced the most physical abuse which is a significant factor in your ability to dish out punishment yeah because like if you if they're your kids and you could choose you want them to play like lacrosse or something where they're you know knock where they have the most upside but the least downside yeah my my i would way more like my kids to fight than to play football football to me is the scariest one because i you know i don't follow football but i watch it occasionally and when i watch those giant super athletes just running full clip and slamming into each other that is just car accident after car accident and then you got to take into account all the ones that happened in high school all the ones that happened in college and then they all by the time
they get to the nfl they probably are already like severely mentally compromised they probably like there's a number see if you can find this um they they did a study on chronic traumatic encephalopathy that's the yeah cte and they did it from they measured from children playing pop warner football all the way up into the nfl and they found an astounding number of people at every step of the way exhibited symptoms of cte wow it's a it's a sport with you i know fighters that don't have like visible cte and they're really good fighters the journal of american medical association found cte in 99 of brains obtained from the national football league players as well as 91 of college football players and 21 percent of high school football players that is [ __ ] crazy the data suggests that there is very likely a relationship between exposure to football and the risk of developing the disease uh duh 99 what the [ __ ] man and it's a degenerative brain disease and it comes from a repeated head trauma it's uh it's a terrifying disease and i you know look in many ways i'm i'm kind of morally compromised because i am a commentator for professional mixed martial arts it's a big part of what i do i'm a giant fan of the sport um you know i've been a martial artist my whole life i used to compete it's a it's a big part of who i am and i know it's bad for you and it's not just bad for you it's bad for you in one of the worst ways possible and then it compromises your ability to think yeah which one of the reasons why i stopped and i stopped when i was young when i was like
in my early 20s because i knew that i was compromising my ability to think i knew that what was coming i saw it in other people and i'm like i gotta get out of this and when i see it now in friends and i see it in people that i care about and i've seen all they've gone through and i know what's ahead of them i get terrified for them and i try to sound the alarms and when anybody's thinking like man i don't know how much longer i'm gonna be able to do this get out now yeah like get out now pretend you can't do it think of your next fight as a death sentence get out just get out if you're thinking you don't want to do this anymore don't do it because somewhere out there there's a guy's not thinking about that at all and he's just trying to be a destroyer that's mike tyson when he was 21 and he wants to separate you from your consciousness and you got to get away from that guy don't do that anymore stop doing it because you don't get those brain cells back you don't get them back you don't cte doesn't reverse itself i mean there might be some therapies that come along in the future but right now from what i'm aware of i don't know of anything that makes me comfortable saying like you're going to be fine it's going to heal up you're going to be fine so how do you separate those feelings from your enjoyment of the thing because i love football and it's been cool my books have sort of made their way through the nfl i love it i love watching them talking to players but yeah how do you how do you square that i look at it the same way i look at life period life is finite you have a finite lifespan you're not going to live forever you only have so much time if you choose to spend a good portion of your life living the wildest most dangerous and extreme way outside of war and law enforcement firefighting and you know being an emt or something like that like being a professional fighter is one of the craziest [ __ ] things
you could do with your brain and your body yeah you're literally playing a game of i'm trying to steal your health like you're trying to steal health yeah you kick someone in the liver you're stealing their health you're you're shutting their body down and you can only do that so many times to a person before their body deteriorates and it's a choice if as long as you're aware of what that choice is and the exhilaration of victory is worth it to you and you can go through the pain and the the horrible feelings of loss and the punishment of training if you're willing to do that and that is exciting to you because ultimately you know that the end product is so entertaining if you watch an incredible incredible fight it is so entertaining that the joy that you bring to people when those guys like if michael chandler's sitting on top of the octagon cage with his arms up in the air and the whole arena is like yeah and then millions of people around the world are watching that and they're feeling the same like wow you're providing a drug you're literally providing an endorphin rush to millions of people and you're doing so at the cost of your own health you're doing so where you're you're compromising your lifestyle to dedicate yourself to the spartan existence where all you're doing is training and eating clean and resting right and going through all of the recovery modalities you could choose to do that and i i am all about people choosing i'm all about people like if you want to [ __ ] flip dirt bikes over the grand canyon i'm not going to stop you i don't want my kids to do it i wouldn't want anybody to love to do it but the argument about the argument the structural argument or the your point about like universal basic income is like did they actually have a choice like it was it was between that and what for a fighter yeah well it depends you know like we i use the example of michael chandler i don't really know
about michael's background in terms of like how he grew up but i knew he was a very high level wrestler in college and generally that means he's got an education and they he chose he's a competitor so he chose to fight sure um a lot of people just come from like conor mcgregor conor mcgregor who's a great fighter came from poverty um you know there's there's other guys that have come from you know various levels of struggle but ultimately were compelled by the challenge of this insanely difficult pursuit and the glory of victory and so in that sense yeah they have a choice like a lot of these guys went to college no no there's definitely ones that have a choice but i'm just saying when you look at some of these athletes or fighters or whatever where they were like the alternative was like jail drugs like nobody so they they chose it but they didn't have a lot of choices to choose from and so is there something inherently exploitative then in like being like well it's horrible but they chose it but they didn't really choose it because nobody actually gave them any option like life did not give them options i don't buy that i don't buy that for most mixed martial arts fighters and that's most i do buy that for some boxers there's there's some boxers that didn't go to college and grew up in abject poverty and that was the only way out box some of them are like more scalable and an early and like groomed into it right like tyson you know does it seek out even muhammad ali is like someone's like you're going to be a boxer there's something to that sure but at a certain point in time mike tyson could have retired yeah the amount of money that he generated by the time he was 20 years old he could have probably lived off if he lived well for the rest of his life if he decided to it's just the glory of it and the excitement of it and the thrill of victory you know it's the old sports the sports uh thing abc wobbler sports the thrill of victory the agony of defeat remember that yeah that's uh that's what it is you know you you certainly can make an argument that is exploitive because you exploit people's desire for
victory and their desire to conquer and the desire for wealth beyond what they can imagine you know if you're the average fighter that becomes a world champion you're going to make millions of dollars the average person doesn't make millions of dollars like you're you you have a path that is an incredibly lucrative path if you can get to the tippy top but how many people get there how many people become a camaro usman you know how many people become a charles oliveira how many people there's not that many people it's really hard to become a champion and those are the ones that make the money the the regular folks you know it's just a hard scrabble existence well i've heard similar arguments for like women who become prostitutes or women who enter porn it's like these are consenting adults but it's like it's more complicated than that because there's other factors you know weighing on this person yeah and you can't just be like uh you chose this sorry i think competitive athleticism is there's a there's a dif see the thing about porn and in many in prostitution is like there's probably sexual abuse involved there it's there's not always but there's a large percentage that have been abused by relatives or by you know it's horrific [ __ ] and then there's a lot of like fighters that were beaten up when they were young they're bullied or they're abused by someone close to them and they they got good at lashing out and they got good at dishing out punishment on other people because they know how horrible it feels when it's dished out on them with a positive argument and they might also make this about porn is that this is an empowering way to recover from that trauma to take this thing where you were small and little and vulnerable and turn it into a strength of yours that you can channel that energy and that rage into something positive you know that you're really good at like clearly i think when i think about like why did i become a writer clearly there was some desire to be seen or heard that went fundamentally unfulfilled as a kid because why would you develop the skill to sit at your computer and just you
know if i just get it perfect they'll understand me and it'll be it'll matter you know there's maybe in a non-fiction context but in a fiction contest don't context don't you think there's a lot of people that just have ideas and it's kind of very satisfying to write out those ideas and have other people enjoy them like ooh this is a good story but it could be the same thing maybe their circumstances were dire and awful and unpleasant and it drove them to pursue a world that they could control and make you know and explore and have agency over and you know what i mean like you could imagine the fantasy author being drawn to fantasy for a reason yes well you know the story of robert e howard no robert e howard's the guy i wrote conan the barbarian and um what does that got vincent d'onofrio played him in a film a few years back that i never watched which is really odd because i'm a giant robert e howard fan can i have one of those yeah yeah yeah yeah what do you want a minute yeah neural mints for the win dude i actually really like it i love them yeah i love the gum more than anything but um robert e howard uh was like a really [ __ ] up depressed guy who lived with his mom you know and his life is kind of a disaster and he wrote the greatest fantasy novels the world has ever known i mean his character to this day is like i don't know how many millions of copies of the conan books but i read them all when i was a kid and um they're [ __ ] good man and it's about this character that is the opposite of who robert e howard was roberty howard wound up taking his own life i think he was like 30 something years old he shot himself but before he did that he wrote about this unstoppable unconquerable man who was a giant amongst men who slayed everyone before him and fought demons and dragons and he carried you through this these incredible adventures that conan would go through with like it was so impassioned it was so the the words were so vibrant and exciting meanwhile this guy's life was dog [ __ ] yeah it was terrible but he wrote about
someone who he wishes he would be i think also like if your life sucks or you're struggling with something or you don't feel good you don't feel your parents are proud of you or whatever there's something inherently satisfying and rewarding about just mastering something because you have power over it it operates the way that you want so whether you're mastering writing fantasy or archery or fighting or you know any of the or trading stocks there's something about like i go into this place and in that place it doesn't feel quite like real life feels like you're a superhero or you know what i mean there's something inherently human and wonderful though about mastery and mastering something well i think it's we have an a desire that is probably genetic it's probably the result of thousands and thousands of years of evolution where figuring things out is very rewarding figuring out how to flint map and make stone tools fingering figuring out how to play the wind and sneak up on a deer when you need food for your family like all of those things they're incredibly rewarding for us because that's how you survived yeah and figuring out how to conquer your enemies figuring out how to convince this woman to mate with you all those different things yes the puzzles of life they're and they transfer to chess right and the the the feeling of winning at chess like i'm a big fan of pool i play a lot of pool it's a stupid game who gives a [ __ ] if that ball goes in the hole it means nothing yeah but it's hard to make that ball go in the hole and you have to concentrate and in that concentration of getting that ball to go in and getting positioned on the next ball and all those things the reward when you knock that final ball in is like wow you get this this exciting feeling and when you miss you like oh it's the same feeling it's like missing an animal your your family's not gonna eat or not figuring out how to make a
tool that's vital for your survival or not figuring out a way to start fire if you're a person in the village and you were the guy who knew how to start fire go to ryan he knows how to start a fire and ryan could teach you like there's a there's a there's a value in figuring these things out and i think that is inside of our minds and we activate those human reward systems we activate them whether it's through creating literature or whether it's through music or whether it's through getting better at things there's like this pathway that's ingrained into us that's incredibly human that we get rewarded for getting better at things yeah you go back to the first cave paintings like what's motivating a person to do that right and then you look at like where they were and where we are now and this sort of un broken passing of torches from like these rudimentary buffalo or horses or whatever yeah so like the sistine chapel you're like yes wow that is a chain of masters yes yeah that's a perfect example too that is a great analogy like the difference between the cave paintings and like uh saint peter's basilica yeah which uh when i went to when i was in rome a few years back i couldn't believe how big it was yeah like when you look at that you're like how long did this take because you see it in a photograph and it's it's pretty beautiful and it's it's gorgeous but when you're there in person and you're walking around you're just like holy [ __ ] this is insane the amount of effort is so undeniable yeah or like some of these like uh cathedrals where it's like they don't even know the person who did it right because it wasn't one person it took 200 years yeah and they're just like collectively that is such a human thing we're just like we're coming together to build this burial mound or we're coming together to build this yeah uh this cathedral and it's just a process and we all just plug into the process there's something that the stoics kind of believe that we're all this like giant organism that's working together and there is just something crazy about that that just happened that's what humans do like in the way you look at like ants they just do stuff yeah weed
or beavers they just that's what i'm a beaver this is what i do that's what humans do that homo faber is one of the names for the human species like man the maker hmm we make stuff we do stuff yeah i've always said that if you were something from another planet and you came to observe us you'd be like what's going on here oh there's this one creature that can manipulate in its environment in a very sophisticated way and all it does is make better and better stuff yeah and that's what we do we just do it collectively you might think you're just working on your poetry and you but you're basically plugging in to this human need to improve upon things you might think that you're just practicing the saxophone but you're practicing getting better at it yeah that's what you're doing because everybody gets a reward out of getting better at things but ultimately the collective reward is better and better technology well and then maybe randomly you are a saxophone player who moves the ball forward yeah right so it's like and and it's funny though the marks really talks about this you think it's kind of weird like only recently like could you get up and look down on human beings right like you can maybe climb a mountain but like you couldn't get in a hot air balloon you couldn't get an airplane right we only saw the earth from space in 1970 something right like you know the blue marble photo the famous photo like that was just 50 years ago yeah but like that's what bees do that's what uh beavers do that's what ants do there are other things that do we just think we're special because we're us but like empires are that and whole civilizations and whole eras like we're just all part of this giant collective thing that's just going on and we all think we're so important we're so integral but we're really just one part of a process that randomly produces progress for the most part sometimes produces the opposite of products but randomly produces these sort of evolutionary improvements and then that's how you go from there to here but it's this timeless enormous
thing that you're just a minuscule part of and there's certain instincts that we have that we think are detrimental like the instincts and inclination towards materialism well why does that exist because well that ensures that you keep buying the latest and greatest stuff which ensures that we keep making the latest and greatest stuff so innovation keeps pushing forward if everybody was wise and you know and didn't need anything it was pragmatic and was relaxed and wanted to just live in a log cabin we would stay static and nothing would improve but there's these design and then when something comes along like some horrible situation like where things go badly like war like the nazis like hitler well what happens well the reaction to that is so intense that it forces people into action and it forces them to go out and stop that and then you look at the innovation that happens after world war ii and it changes culture all around the world like this horrible event takes place and through this horrible event we realize oh my god this can happen this and now we got through that and there's v-day where they're kissing in the street and everybody's celebrating and and then civilization moves forward in like this beautiful way for a while well there's a beautiful kind of symmetry to it it's like horrible thing reaction to the horrible thing and like so you know if you look at world events up close right you're like russia invades ukraine it's this horrendous violent awful thing it's also though you zoom out you look at it on a 100-year timeline a 200-year timeline it's humanity staggering towards some sort of global balance of power then it gets out of balance and it has to rebalance and so we take these things personally when in fact they're just they just are what they are and it's always been happening just like waves have always been crashing on the beach and trees have been growing and falling down this is what it is and it's always been that way it always will be that way until eventually it's not that way but it just and that's why i think so fascinating
about meditations is like marcus is the most powerful man in the world and he's like who remembers the emperor six emperors ago you know he's like he'll go like the name vespasian you know like how odd that feels now and that was like just a couple before him and he's like think about all the people that worked in vespasian's court they were so powerful where are they now yeah and and he's like the same thing's going to be happening to you and that this is this thing that just happens and there's a beauty and a horror to it but you got to choose the view you're going to take i think it's interesting because the uh elite minds of the day for lack of a better term like marcus aurelius like there's no other form of there's no other form of discourse there's no other form of entertainment there's no form of distraction you have life and you have writing you have literature you have reading other people's writing and you have making your own writing and then you have this comprehension and understanding of the world around you where you're trying to express it in in his case to himself and the the valuable lessons that he learned like one of the things that was really fascinating was the value that he placed on forgiveness yeah well so he famously is betrayed by his best friend uh who declared he thinks marcus is sick and near death and so this guy named evidius cassius goes like i'm the emperor now but marcus wasn't dead and so it puts him in this horrible position of like obviously you can't allow this but he doesn't want to fight a war over and he basically says this is the final chapter in the obstacles away the idea that like even this is an opportunity and he says like i want to show history how civil strife can be dealt with and so he he tries to give cassius a chance to come to his senses eventually he has to take the roman army out in battle to deal with it and then he weeps when someone kills cassius because it deprives him of the opportunity of
forgiving him of like giving him clemency wow and and he orders the senate he says do not execute a single person for this he says do not let my name be stained in blood which is pr maybe impractical maybe too philosophical but there is a beauty to that that you know he talks about forgiveness in meditations but then he has to like actually apply it in his life yeah at the highest level well that happens in history right when there's truces and people have to sort of they have to deal with whatever just happened yeah like that was a real issue the civil war in the united states for a long time there was a lot of murder that happened where people were punishing people for their participation in one side or the other and they would go back and forth and kill people like this like a long history went on for decades and decades of people murdering people who were responsible for killing their relatives in the civil war yeah i mean the horrible part of the civil war the genius of lincoln is he's both lincoln and grant are like just let him go home right just let him go home he says turn their swords into plowshares according the bible and and they think it's going to work and it is gene if there's a genius element to it a sort of almost a christ-likeness to it uh but then the horror is that the south doesn't like they're not like immediately like yeah this slavery is bad why did we fight this war over they go home and they're like we still hate black people we still don't want them here and now that we can't own them now they're a problem for us and some of the worst massacres in american history are basically confederate sort of paramilitary soldiers is what the clan is originally is this terrorist organization that just goes around and murders black people cut sometimes hundreds at a time there's other sort of almost battles of the civil war
and the us really struggles with how do you pacify after a war like that the argument is we kind of learn this lesson in the second world war we go and there's a process of denotification in germany which we which we don't manage to do after the u.s civil war cause lincoln is assassinated which you could argue is why he was assassinated but we never fully sort of get rid not get rid of but but change the hearts and minds of the people who went to war for like the worst possible cause you can think of for going to war for next to the nazis um and so like there's a confederate statue in the little town that i'm in and like why is that there that's there as a giant middle finger to the federal government yeah many of them were actually put up during the civil rights era this one is here's a crazy thing this one went up in 1910 right and so that's 50 60 years after the civil war um i met a guy when i lived in east austin uh down the street this guy his name was richard overton and when he died he was the oldest man in the world he died at 112. he was born before the statue went up wow so you and he he's black he lived in the the segregated part of what is now east austin but you like we think these things are so old but they were put up for very specific reasons to send a very specific message it's not that long ago that's what's really terrifying about it and when i was a child when i was 11 years old my family moved from san francisco to florida yeah and that was the first time i'd heard the expression yankee i got called a yankee and i mean this was this doesn't happen in florida anymore this is what's interesting it's like what happened from the civil war to 2022 is like it takes generations to escape the hatred of the past but when i was a kid so this was like this was the 1970s um because i was i was 14 in high school which was 81 that was my first year of high school so this is before that so it's like 79ish somewhere right now and they were calling people yankees yeah like it was a thing like you're a
[ __ ] yankee i was like what am i yeah i'm a what yeah like what are you in a cartoon i'm a yankee like this is real like so he had to have heard that from his family so he probably heard it from his parents or his grandparents so they had an attitude about people from the north like they didn't think of us as all being one population i don't think people experience maybe in some pockets of the world they experience some pockets of the country rather they experience that today but i think for the most part people think of america's america you know they think of red and blue like the red states and the blue states and we're separated conveniently line up with the same states as how it broke in the civil war like the mason-dixon line is there is that um for red and blue though isn't aren't there a lot of red states that are northern states there are of course but i'm just saying all the reds all the red states were confederate states or all we can sorry all the confederate states are now red states almost interesting i see what we're saying yes yes yes so the states that used to be confederate are now read but there's also some red states that were not confederated i see what you're saying yeah that's true um it takes generations we're we're [ __ ] dumb and slow to learn it takes it takes a long time for people to figure that out and i think what we were talking about before and this is something i taught discuss ad nauseam this the lack of attention to the worst spots in this country like i've always said that if you want to make the world a better place make less losers how do you make less losers give people a better starting position give people more support don't i don't think you should hand things to people necessarily but i think there's a real value in making communities safer and more conducive to people advancing and getting ahead and showing people more examples of it then you have a better more robust civilization because you've got you have more competition you have it filled with more people that are doing exciting things and doing things
that are fulfilling and i think you probably have less finger pointing because you'd have a better perspective of what our society actually is our society is a society that lifts people up our america america is a great place because we treat people not just equally but we look at people who don't have an equal shot and we want to give him a head start and give him a hand up and i think some people have criticisms of that in terms of like uh aspects of it like some people have criticisms of um affirmative action because they think that affirmative action rewards people that are less qualified simply because they came from another place i think there's a way to do that where we don't feel like that work get them young and train them better and educate them better and also protect them give them environments give them community centers give them give them places where they feel like they're a part of a great group of other human beings that are also striving so the environment that they're around is an environment of information education they're learning how to think and behave and rewarded for progress rewarded for improvement rewarded for succeeding and overcomer and overcoming bad situations and also rewarding themselves for discipline and and then also learning that loss and learning that failure and humiliation are valuable teachers and you don't have to be defined by your worst moments those worse moments can actually enable you to produce a better result in the future and show other people that have done that and help them lead the way this is all possible man this all can be done it would have a radical effect on the way this country behaves but i think a lot of people want to pretend this is all a really long time ago right like what's going on right now like no no but i mean like ruby bridges you know from the famous like photo she integrates that school she's the little girl the all the parents are yelling horrible things at her right she's like 63. wow you know you you want to think she's
like 90 or 190 yeah yeah but no it's not that long ago not that long ago and like think about the effect that that think about what her parents went through and the effect that that had on her and think about like the age of her children now like they're they're like maybe my age right um yeah because she's like she i remember yeah she's like a year older than my mother-in-law and you're just like wow okay so this could like my grandmother uh went to uh uh arkansas uh little rock high school the the famous one that was integrated like two years before it was integrated um and so you think about the environment that she grew up in in the privilege you know the privilege of the fact that like a good chunk of the population was not allowed to go to school with her no and then what what those people the school they had to go to and like it's not any part of like my family's history that we benefited from this you know we think it's a long time ago like but it obviously shaped my dad it shaped the the the life that we live like there's a legacy of that and you have to figure out how to address it but we know the reason we haven't figured out to address it is i think a good chunk of us just don't want to think that it's true i think there's that it's inconvenient for people to concentrate on things that have happened in the past when they can say well hey i had nothing to do with that i'm i'm just living my life and i'm doing the best that i can but i also think that it's like you were talking about before with the negative things that happen and then through those there's this kind of yin and yang effect right i think one of the things that we're going through today is just that it's just like we're in the middle of it so we can't recognize that progress is being done it's just there's so much work to do and it's one
of the reasons why greedy politicians are so disgusting when we find out that politicians are making hundreds of millions of dollars off illegal insider stock well i guess it is legal insider stock trades and that's really what they're concentrating on they're not really concentrate on their constituents they don't give a [ __ ] if people get ahead that's nonsense it's all lip service when you hear the white house press secretary talk about you know the economy is in a better place than it's ever been before like you know that's horseshit and it makes everyone angry and that anger is there to encourage people to act it's encourage people to take steps to do better to to force politicians to be more upfront to force honesty and also to get people that are maybe qualified to be better leaders but are reluctant to get involved in that it may motivate them to get to get going i even think like i'm very critical of like woke ideology because i think it's essentially a religion but i think the overwhelming thing about work woke ideology that gives me comfort is that all of it is encouraging people to be more inclusive kinder more accepting even if it's wrong like even if you're like even if you're in in doing so and forcing this ideology you're really victimizing other people which is possibly the case in some some ways the overwhelming direction that things are going is to make it so that everything's okay yeah sometimes when they make everything okay they make people that are not guilty guilty and they make they make victims out of people that were innocent but the oh the direction that it's going is supposedly in kindness now they're being vicious and mean and enforcing their kindness but this is sort of a a natural aspect of human ideology anyway like when people have an ideology that's rigid they enforce it and they enforce it the same way they enforce a religion now that's a good way to think about at least virtue signaling is pointed towards virtue as opposed to like open cynicism or nihilism right or evil yeah yeah i mean if you were you know growing up in nazi germany and you know you were
openly a nazi like it's that that's an ideology that's an ideology that you you signal to all the other nazis that you are on board in your cruelty to jews and your deci your decision to enforce genocide you're you're signaling to your tribe that you're doing so that that's humanity in a terrible direction this is humanity in a good direction but it's been hijacked by terrible people and generally by people that are failures that don't have good character or will and don't have the ability to objectively assess their own thoughts and their own actions and try to figure out why they're motivated to do what they do instead they just do what gets them attention because this is part of what people do they try and strive to rise to the top they try and strive the economics of the internet are pulling them in that direction yes yes which is why you know twitter is essentially a a mental health compromised market have you seen the we are the bad or are we the baddies sketch yes that's like my favorite like wait the people we have the skulls and you know like yeah are we the bad guys what who who made that i don't know some uk thing yeah i think it's because i mean we don't say baddies right right it's definitely a uk thing yeah we should find that we should find that because i haven't seen that in a while that mitchell on the web can you put it up yeah um how long is it three minutes yeah let's play it i think this is the whole thing give him some props you got it yeah here we go very well they're coming now we'll see how these russians deal with a crack ss division uh hands have courage my friend so these guys are wearing nazi costumes folks they're just listening hans i've just noticed something these communists are all cowards have you looked at our caps recently our caps the badges on our caps have you looked at them what no a bit
they've got skulls on them have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them i don't so hands are we the baddies [Laughter] we should be able to hold them at this point here at least for a few hours and why scowls them why scowls well maybe they're the skulls of our enemies maybe but is that how it comes across i mean it doesn't say next to the skull you know yeah we killed him but trust us this guy was hurried no i mean what does skulls make you think of death cannibals beheading um pirates pirates of fun i didn't say we weren't fun but fun or not pirates are still the baddies i just can't think of anything good about a skull what about pure aryan skull shape even that is more usually depicted with the skin still on is the ally oh you haven't been listening to ally propaganda of course they're gonna say we're the bad guys but they didn't get to design our uniforms and their symbols are all you know quite nice stars stripes lions sickles what's so good about a sickle well nothing and obviously if there's one thing we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat is that russian agriculture is in dire need of mechanization but you've gotta say it's better than a skull i mean i really can't think of anything worse as a symbol than a skull uh rats anus yeah and if we were fighting an army marching under the banner of a rat's anus i'd probably be a lot less worried hands let's go skull ashtray drinking i have a skull cup this guy's needing a skull okay so [Music] that's funny very funny that's the best it's a great sketch
yeah nobody ever has that realization though they just they're in the middle of it and they just keep doing what they're doing and i think it's also uh the culture that they're involved people imitate their atmosphere right i think if going back to politicians one of the things that um got uh revealed when this whole nancy pelosi thing happened when they started looking at the insane amount of money that she's made from insider trading they started looking at all of congress and it's across the board yeah i mean republican democrat they are all dipping their toes into those waters a bunch of them sold stocks like right before the pandemic yeah yeah yeah they know they knew a lot of what was going on like in terms of like the adoption of electric vehicles by the entire united states you know the the government they were adopting evs and so before that bill gets into play they dump a shitload of money into tesla stock and then we look how much money we made like they knew these bills are going to be passed there's a lot of that going on but that's the culture that these people are involved in that's are we the baddies well or to go back to the hollywood thing it's like it's not that hard to not be a piece of [ __ ] but if everyone's doing it you're like why not yeah they there's people that i knew there were agents that thought they had to act like that they thought they had to be like get my [ __ ] cup of coffee let's go here they they wanted to be ari gold like ari gold is a that's a real human yeah i mean there really are people like that yeah yeah there's a there's this great book called what makes sammy run and it's about this like uh jewish agent like hollywood agent in like the 20s or 30s like endlessly ambitious and we're talking about boxers like because he's from the disenfranchised group then he comes from the slums becomes the most powerful man in hollywood sort of a cautionary tale but the irony is as the book as society evolved like all the things that it doesn't age that well because you read it now and you're like yeah that's what you do to get successful you
stab people in the back right like ari gold is the hero of entourage right not a garbage horrible boss right right yeah well he's also like what people aspire to be yeah that's the baller that's the guy with the expensive watch who drives the mercedes he's killing it yeah he's out there killing it you know you gotta crack eggs to make an omelet yeah it's um i mean that obviously we we have to look to that when we look at horrific moments in history like um like world war ii or like genghis khan or like like any of these horrific moments where things are so hard to imagine years later like when we're looking back uh on the inquisition and looking back on the horrific methods of torture that they used on people that were infidels like who the [ __ ] are these people and how could they have done this yeah like i was someone sent me this i'm gonna send you this jamie because this is really fascinating this is from i forgot what year this is but um yeah i'll send you this jamie um this was a uh he was a judge uh that took a bribe in court um his name is uh systemness oh i saw this on reddit yeah look at this it was from reddit yeah read it today i learned uh he was a judge that took a bribe in court and passed an unfair sentence he was skinned alive and his leather was used to make a chair that his son had to sit in as his son was appointed the next judge there was a later painting made depicting him being skinned alive and then there's the painting that shows they're just stripping his skin off while he's alive look how stoic he looks he just cut me open we don't give ourselves enough credit for the progress that we've made collectively as a society away from cruelty yeah right like at the founding obviously the founders were horrible hypocrites you know owning slaves but the idea that like cruel and unusual punishment should not be a thing yeah um that that that was an advancement like not that long ago not that long ago
and even the ones they they said were not cruel were still super cruel that we've made a lot of like i mean they in world war ii they still executed shoulders by firing squad and just like how horrendous or heinous that you would just make a bunch of your troops just murder another one of your members of for doing something wrong you know what i mean and that the progress away from cruelty is a huge improvement and so when we watch something like george floyd or or the video of armad aubry and you're just it you're just like that's the worst thing i've ever seen that does say something about the progress we've made as a society because not that long ago people would have seen that many many times yeah and even though horrific things still do exist it doesn't minimize them by recognizing that the trend is towards people being kinder and better to each other if you like what you're patient like stephen pinker is a great example like his work has been like roundly criticized by woke people because they're saying you're you're spending too much time concentrating on how much better things are instead of how much better we need to get yeah that are so but he's like that's i'm i study trends yeah i'm studying the progress of the human race and over time things have gotten far safer and you know people are far kinder and they're far more educated than ever before well the problem is if you just look at the trend you're like this is just happening you're missing the point like you know there's that quote like uh the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice that's because people are pulling it that way yes like martin luther king pulls it that way frederick douglass pulls it that way abraham lincoln pulls it that way the harvey milk right like the activists that were by the way widely hated in their own time criticized often assassinated etc like they they were pulling it that way it could have just kept going in the horrible direction that it was things also can get worse um but the in you have to accept that you
as the individual or we collectively at a moment in time have the ability to change the direction yes yeah and we collectively have an ability to communicate these ideas that is unprecedented we've there's never been a time in history where we could communicate these ideas better and there's going to get a lot of fog and a lot of noise and a lot of the background noise and a lot of people trying to take advantage of this opportunity because of the fact that there's unprecedented models of communication but overall the ability to change things for the better has never been it's we've never had a situation that is is this positive that we have i mean yeah the economy sucks yeah gas is too high yeah there's potential for a nuclear war with russia but just our understanding of the inequalities of life our understanding of what could be possible understanding of the positive aspects of being a good person they've never been more highlighted well yeah and it's kind of weird like we so focus on misinformation like all this bad information is spreading out in the world and it's true like there is misinformation but it's also equally true that these same tools the tools are neutral yeah right let's say they have biases but the tools are are are the tools well you know what a great example that is the early books the early books were mostly about witchcraft and how to spot witches i didn't know that until like a few years ago like not even a few months ago i should say somebody was explaining to me that the early books that were first printed the vast majority of them were it wasn't like you know how to learn french it was like how to spot a witch the first self-help book was published in the 1870s really like just think about how many so it's like the printing press is the 1400s right 14 1500 so let's say 500 years ish uh or wait no 400 years and someone was like what if we use this
book to help people get better as a person and it doesn't have to be because god said so like i wonder how many charlatans there were out there back then how many fake help guys fake self-help guys napoleon hill who wrote that book think and grow rich he was a literal con man really yeah it's crazy no kidding there's a huge daily beast article about it's nuts i have a friend of mine who's a jiu jitsu black belt who reads that [ __ ] before he does anything it's a lot of people's favorite book but they sort of i mean i'm not saying the book doesn't have value if it made you better as a person by all means but there's a dark story there so who wrote the article about him being a comment i think it's the daily beast or it might have been it was a different site what was his deal uh you pull it up i don't have it memorized but it's like when you read it you're just like whenever someone's like that's my favorite book i'm like read this piece [Laughter] but maybe people would say that about me i mean my first book was about media manipulation but uh you know people change wow write them out but you're a young man you know it's uh the the self-help genre is a very troubled genre because there's a lot of people engaged in self-help that really haven't done [ __ ] that's true and also it's like do you want to tell people what they need to hear or what they want to hear they want to hear you just have to manifest it into reality just think about it right i mean think and grow rich right like that's what i think that's his genius is he's like yeah i'll just tell people just it's just a matter of your thinking yeah i've had to explain that to many people that want to talk about the secret they want to talk about the law of attraction like hey hey you're only hearing from the people that are successful like there's a lot involved if you want to talk to a successful person how did you make it well i visualized it and i kept working okay yes they they but the second part is the most important they kept working but it's also the visualization is an aspect
of success you can't just succeed and make it to the point where you're running some gigantic business without some sort of a vision but it doesn't mean that vision created it there's so many people out there that try to manifest something and it never takes place yeah well i know you quoted this once but marcus realized this thing about how your life is died by the color of your thoughts it's true if you think it's impossible it's impossible for you yes right if you think you're not capable of it if you think it's unfair it that that is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that sense but it doesn't mean that if you think it's possible it's going to happen like if you visualize yourself beating mike tyson he's still going to [ __ ] you up yeah but yes but if you visualize that you're capable of making a better life for yourself and then you [ __ ] work at it every day chances are barring some insane unforeseen unfair circumstances you will likely get there you will likely get there and it is a thing that other people have done and you can model yourself based on what they've accomplished and if you put in the kind of effort that they've done and the kind of thinking that they've put in you can accomplish great things it is possible for almost everyone to achieve something beyond your imagination you you can get there in incremental steps and each incremental step will open and broaden your possibilities well and it also if you allow a long enough timeline it becomes a near certainty yeah right so like when the obstacles away came out it did okay i didn't hit any bestseller list the publisher was sort of like you know and they'd offered me like half what i'd gotten for my first book and because i didn't think an obscure school of ancient philosophy like that's not going to work but you know six years later in number one you know now it sold like you know almost a million and a half copies like wow now but that's because you know that's like a hundred thousand copies a year a little more you know what i mean like over time steadily it works you know well it works because it's effective yeah like if you read the book the what's interesting to me about the
book is it's clearly you have absorbed yourself into the writing of the stoics and you relay it in a manner that's very absorbable and applicable and that's why it's so effective and when i put it up on instagram my god i got so many messages from friends i'd say i [ __ ] love that book the book's incredible has helped me so much so if you know through this fascination that you have with this philosophy i mean you've generated a lot of really positive thoughts for people and you've really got people moving and in generally a good direction because you give them these quotes in this book you know all these the different philosophers that you quote and all the different scenarios and where you apply these these thoughts those things they they stay with you and they're like little sparks that you have in your head that you can blow on those embers and start a fire with yeah yeah that's a good way to think about it the funny thing so i got offered to write a book about stoic philosophy because i'd written an article about it that was popular online in like 2008 2009 and i went to robert and i was like this is my dream this is what i want to do should i do it and he was like i don't think you're ready yet and that was like the hardest thing in the world to hear but he was totally right i turned it down and i waited like almost five more years and then i think i mean i if i wrote it today i'd be more ready but like there's always a point of over preparation what did robert want you to do what did he what was his uh i think he was like look you're getting better every day as a writer so you're going to only write this book one time so you should every day that you wait you'll be more prepared you'll be better for it and he's like also like he was like the difference between like 21 and 27 is a transformative amount of life experience it's still pretty young to have written that book but like i i went through some [ __ ] in that period right and so that the book is more relatable because of my experiences you know like if i just was i would have just been speculating about the ideas if i wrote it when i was 21 i think well luckily
we're talking about stoicism and you literally are preaching the philosophy in your books that any sort of negative happenstance or any you know anything that sets you back will probably ultimately be to your benefit yes so you had to practice what you preached totally totally and then you know when it came out and it sold enough copies to hit the list and it wasn't there you're like oh is this something i control or not like am i proud of the book or not do i think it's going to work or not and then you should i mean oh it happens all the time like you you can sell enough copies objectively to qualify for like the new york times list and then you're just not there they it's an editorial list it's really yeah of course and there's so but wait a minute so when they say new york times best seller so that's not necessarily the best sellers that they can they can eliminate you from the list like if they don't like what you're we're talking about for sure and one one to eliminate outright fraud like what if a billionaire just bought a hundred thousand copies of their own book like no one would think that should be included i actually know a guy who did that it's there's a company that helps you do it um but like if you look at the fine print in the new york times list and i know this now that because i have a bookstore and so we report to the list right you have to send a report each week and you have to flag like whether there's bulk copies or other things but like the list every week would be like in advice how to miscellaneous the bible would be the best-selling book every every week right right so they or harry potter would be the top of the fiction like they they decide uh they decide to filter stuff out they even explicitly i wrote a book about this a couple years ago but they explicitly filter out what they call perennial sellers which are books that sell every year a [ __ ] ton of copies because like schools buy them or you know so so there's a certain amount of filtering but the big one for the best seller list
is like you know how many your copies were sold on amazon how many of your copies were sold uh independent bookstores was it all in new york and la and san francisco or did you sell a lot of books in cincinnati right like they they're trying to it's not that they're putting their thumb on the scale but they are trying well they are putting their summons there's certain books that don't appear for suspicious reasons people allege but like they are trying to create a a more robust definition of what best seller is not just objectively who sold the most because that could be [Music] unfair well it's okay because of those reasonable examples that you use but not because of the ones where they just decide that your subject matter is problematic so do you think that they decided that stoicism is problematic no i just think like i think it was like maybe borderline or they just weren't even thinking about it they weren't tracking it or you know because my first book was about media and the corruption of media i imagine there was some reticence to recognize me did it ever make it onto the list uh i don't know if it's ever made the new york times it's hit number one on wall street journal which is a d which is a different set of criteria the first time i did 10 books before i hit the new york times list and it was at number one so that's unlikely that i never qualified for any other spot for any of my books until suddenly in 2019 which book uh stillness is the key so that one hit number one that one debuted at number one so they decided uh [ __ ] it i think i think it was an overwhelm like it the the number of copies was overwhelming that it would have been like egregious to not be included interesting that's interesting yeah how gross well and the decision of what list you're on so are you advice how to miscellaneous or are you non-fiction general non-fiction like the general non-fiction list like maybe the 10 spot is like 5 000 books
but the 10 spot on the advice how to miscellaneous because you're competing against the guinness book of world records and blah blah blah is uh you know could be 15 000 copies like malcolm gladwell because he's sort of part who i love uh is a super awesome guy and i think one of the greatest in the world at what he does his books are considered non-fiction but that's i think because he's a new yorker writer right and he's part of that establishment yes and so that's an incredible gift to him in the sense that he's ranked in a category that is less competitive a good example that is cameron haynes yeah he does book and door should have been in non-fiction it would have been number one but instead they put it in how-to and it was highly ranked but it wasn't number one yeah they basically anything that isn't sort of a fancy like new yorky style thing is going to be relegated to advice how to miscellaneous the crazy thing is for advice how to like that's not what he's doing he's telling his life story it's not how to at all it is a non-fiction book about his life story yeah i mean i did a book called lives of the stokes which is like a set of biographies of all of the main stoics it's there's not any how-to it or advice in it and it was put on that list instead of the non-fiction list yeah that's so weird but you can't it's like all the games are rigged you know what i mean the nobel prize is [ __ ] [ __ ] like all of these like all of these organizations these gatekeeping organizations are inherently about keeping people some people out and keeping some people in and so marcus says uh in meditations that ambition is tying your well-being to what other people say or do insanity is tying it to your own actions so you have to get to a place where you're like i'm good in any of the recognition or respect or ranking is extra yeah i think that has to be the case when it comes to selling books right because the most important thing
you have achieved is that your books resonate with the people who read them and they enrich people's lives and that's what she meant set out to do he didn't set out to i don't know how many people are involved in curating the new york times bestseller list but he didn't set out to please those people you don't even know who those [ __ ] are but some people that is all they care about yeah but well that's on them no no and it's it's just it's the wrong thing to do it's the wrong thing it's the wrong game to play yeah yeah for sure but like seeking recognition is always the wrong thing yeah it's just especially when it comes to awards you know like that those are you know this podcast is one a gang of awards um and i just leave them places like my kid found the i heart radio award and she's like you [ __ ] won this she didn't say [ __ ] she was 10. and i go yeah yeah just put that over there like i don't that doesn't mean anything to me it's just what means to think things to me is did it did the podcast provide enjoyment to the people that listen to it that's all i'm trying to do right and if people an award doesn't mean anything it's just that's a small group of people there's there can people people that decide it's the worst podcast that's ever existed does that mean it is no it just means some people don't like it there's people that don't like things i like i don't i can't take into consideration what other people like i can take into consideration did i do my best and put something out there that resonated with a certain amount of people that's all i'm trying to do there's a story about jimmy carter who was not the best president obviously but he was being interviewed by admiral rickover who was the head of america's nuclear navy and jimmy carter like people don't see him this way because maybe we think about him as this old man but he was like he went uh to the naval academy he was ambitious successful uh like he was driven to be like great from a very early age and so he's being interviewed he just graduated from the naval academy it's like 48 49 and he wants to get on a nuclear sub that's but that way to do it is this guy admiral rickover decides who's one of
the unsung heroes of american history that very few people know about um immigrant went through ellis island a jewish guy his family flees persecution helps us win the second world war and then the cold war but anyways he's he's interviewing jimmy carter it's like a three-hour interview like this they were kind of these like big long discussions and you know jimmy carter is like going on and on about all his accomplishments you know like here's what i did i got this grade this grade and then um rickover goes like how'd you finish in their class at the naval academy and he was like i was 56 out of 800. and and uh carter thought he'd be like oh wow that's great like you just beaming with pride about it and uh rickover just looks at him and goes did you always do your best and then jimmy carter was going to be like of course you know that's what you say and then he thought about it he's like you know i kind of coasted through this class like i didn't always study this like you know just and he was like i'm going to be honest he's like no i didn't always do my best and then rickover looked at him and he said why not and then he got up and left the room and that quit like what you control is whether you did your best you don't control how you rank in the class you don't control whether you won this award or the scholarship or bestsellers you don't control any of that you don't even really control people like what you do right you only control if you did your best and if you were proud of it that's a great metric yeah did you leave anything on the table on the table yeah hold anything back right yeah yeah that's the thing that haunts athletes right when they they examine their legacy because that's the one thing unless you're involved in organized practice like certain sports where you you're and even then there's off season yeah what are you doing during the off season yeah yeah certain
athletes are notorious for working incredibly hard during the off season and coming back better than ever whereas other guys get fat and you know people think it's funny that they're laying around waiting to come back isn't that life though like like for for sports like you have let's say 10 years in your professional prime but like we think we're so different like because we have a longer amount of time yeah but you don't like and it's only in the light of the cancer scare or you know the cova diagon only the thing that shakes you out of that entitlement do you go like oh no it could end at any moment and to take it for granted or to waste it or leave something on the table is the rejection of a credible gift and an opportunity yeah absolutely that's a great way to end this all right um i write some books by the way fantastic thank you very much these are all yours uh no no no these are books different i know because i know you love uh empire the summer moon yes so i tried to pick some books that i think i got i went through my story this morning i was like these are books i don't think i haven't heard you talk about that i think people [ __ ] love okay all right uh genghis khan in the making of the modern world i know you don't like him very much but i think it's a different life no i i think you will see him in a different way okay uh the tiger this book will rip your [ __ ] face off what's this this book is about a guy in siberia sent to hunt down a man-eating tiger oh and it's literally i know it's one of the best non-fiction books i've ever been because i've heard from so many people about it and then have you read shadow divers no it's about these guys diving he's like christmas this is this is my life man they're diving a sunk german u-boat off the coast of new jersey that they discover oh wow and it's like all about the thrill of like diving and discovering something and the mastery of this thing that could kill
you at any moment have you read the black count no okay this is you know the you know the count of monte cristo yeah the famous story okay alexander dumas his father was one of napoleon's generals but he's black oh wow and his real life story is [ __ ] incredible this one the pulitzer prize speaking of prizes it definitely deserved to it's amazing wow all right river of doubt you read this no i can't believe how many books you brought i i figure you're going to get them all on audio but i'll give them to you okay so after theodore roosevelt is president he goes to africa he kills bunch of animals the greatest hunting trip of all time but this book is about he explores like a 500-mile river in the amazon the first time a human being has ever done this and he almost dies he takes his son his son with him he almost dies actually if you look up if you look up theodore roosevelt epictetus he brings a copy of epictetus with him on this journey and you did you ever go to his birthplace in new york city no next time you go you can go to the house that he grew up in you can see he maintain it yeah it's still there how big is it it's just like a townhouse in new york city oh wow and you can see the gym where he worked out his asthma and became like the dude that he became but if you if you look up uh you can see he took a copy of epictetus with him that he wrote as he was near death he's one of the main reasons why we have public land in this country yeah we have our wildlife preservation system that we have in place he also saves uh professional football he gets them to wear helmets people would die playing football at harvard and he loved sports and he comes together forms the ncaa and institutes safety wow uh this is a book about yeah so if you click on see the word sign this is like the engraved copy that he takes with him oh wow but that book's amazing what happened there jimmy
[Laughter] zoom's just automatic wicked river the mississippi when it last ran wild the mississippi is [ __ ] crazy i have more i have even more can i keep going okay all right uh i know your daughters are into sports so this is a book i give to every college coach that i talk to it's about this she's one of the great cross-country runners of her generation she commits suicide she runs off a parking garage and so it's about mental health and pressure and the i think it's any person who has a kid who is good at sports and wants to make something of it and kate fagan's an incredible writer uh should read that book it's like a cautionary sort of warning and about what social media does to kids uh actually i did this book with chris bosh he lives here he might like that and then all right last i have two two more this is the best history of texas it's [ __ ] epic the best history of texas you have if if you if you i would listen to it you could listen to that one but seriously it is also incredible okay and then all right last one this is my favorite translation of meditations i don't know if this is the one you read but i would read this and then i know you like uh steven pressfield this is the first edition of the war of art dude that he signed wow all right that i read that book every time i start a project it's a great book dude it's one of the great the resistance it it's so perfectly outlined that's what that's what it is that's what you're at war with in every thing thank you very much ryan question great to meet you i really appreciate your work appreciate everything and i really enjoyed this conversation thank you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]