Best of the Week - July 5, 2020 - Joe Rogan Experience

How often do you come across people that will fight you tooth and nail to the death to hold on to those preconceived emotions? A lot, man. It's a real problem. A simple one I came across was even involved with this COVID stuff, was trying to talk to people about how the mainstream media has had bad narratives from the get. You know, be it they were given bad information, but they fucking double down on it all the time. Or if it's the WHO and they're running interference for China, whatever, right? There's all this manipulation going on around something that is not, that is, it's not subjective. Viruses aren't subjective. You just can't play this game with that kind of thing. And people would fight me tooth and fucking nail to defend the mainstream media over it. And I go, look, here's example one, two, three, four, five. Look at how they're all fucking wrong. They're fucked up. They're doing this. They're politicizing and they're doing all these different things for different reasons. But none of it is really for your own betterment of understanding and to be safer and healthier. And or even just to say we still don't know yet because we just don't have the data. And people fight tooth and nail over this ship because there's so many people that use the current media apparatus as their mainstream sensemaking apparatus. And if you tear that away from them, now they have to sit back and go, what do I really know? Right. What is the reality of what I think truth is? What is the metric upon understanding now that you've just shown me that? And of course, even at its best, of course, media is going to be faulty at times because it's just made up of people, right? We're always going to be imperfect. We're always going to make mistakes. But there is no admitting of mistakes anymore. There's no saying I was wrong. We were wrong. There's also a problem with mainstream media. And it's the same problem that we have with the police. You're giving people an inordinate amount of power. And when you give people that amount of power, they don't want to ever let it go. And they don't ever want to say they're wrong and they don't ever want to admit fault and they don't ever want to open the door to nuance. Correct. And that's what you see with whether it's CNN or Fox News or any of these motherfuckers. They have this idea that they've been selling you, whether it's this idea about Russia, whether it's the idea about Covid, what's the idea about Trump, what's the idea about Biden. I mean, they're selling you some shit. And it's it's very, very difficult to get an unbiased perspective on the world. They came after you for no reason. You know, they would write all this kind of completely disingenuous, just narrative driven bullshit around you. A person who brings people on and has conversations and tries to tries to flourish that idea of the the marketplace of ideas, like having conversations and trying to earnestly and sincerely explore things. I got to tell you the story. So I went to Peru to research this book because I wanted to talk with. Like as close as I could get to pre agricultural hunter gatherers. Right. And I can't get you can't get too close. But there are there are people called the Matzegenka, the Matzegenka in the rainforest that I got to talk to. And I got to ask them about, you know, their relationship with technology and all that stuff. I'm never going to forget. I go up to this this guy and I ask him, they've just had solar lights installed like in the main sort of area of their village. And I go up to this guy and I was like, how do you feel about having these artificial lights installed? And he and I'm thinking to myself, you know, it's this pollution, right? Isn't it better to just have, you know, the stars in the sky and the moon? And he looks at me and he goes, he goes, this is good. We can see it now. It's just like he was talking to just a fucking idiot. You know, like, of course I'm happy. Right. Or this. And then there was this old lady. I was like, they'd had, you know, they had they had a pump like running water installed, basically in water. Right. So you could wash your dishes and your clothes. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, this is ripping them away from the natural way of life. And I asked this lady, I'm like, how do you feel about the water? And she's like, it's we don't we don't get bacterial. I mean, she didn't say bacterial infection. She was like, we don't get sick anymore from the water that we're drinking from the river. I was like, oh, and she's just looking at me like, like, why why is he asking me this? Right. And meanwhile, I'm coming from this place where everyone wants to get closer to nature. Right. Because we have been alienated from it. And I'm asking from the perspective of someone who thinks it just must be paradise living so close to nature. And she's like, no, we want that. We want to go to wash our clothes and have the fucking lights on at night. Yeah. You know, and I was like, right. There was a shaman. I'm talking to the shaman in the village, Don Alberto. Right. And he's talking. He's like, you know, it's true that technology is messing up the world. We've got climate change. We've got, you know, all these species are going extinct. And he goes on and on. Right. He's very close to nature. Very, very wise man. He's got a cell phone also. Right. And I'm like, well, so is technology bad? And he's like, he's like, yes. Well, yes. Yes. And no, he's on Tinder. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's what he's really doing. He didn't tell me. But that's and that's I want people. I just want people to understand that there just aren't any easy categories you can use to divide up the world into good and bad. And now that people now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right? You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat. You don't go to your priest to find out how to cure your disease. Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority. And so they're like, OK, I can't go to my priest. But if I'm walking through the store, what sort of criteria can I use to divide the world up easily into good and evil, clean and unclean? Oh, the king makes mistress lie at his feet and make her is what does it say? As he makes her his. What does it say there from the song? But his official that was when she was the official concubine attended by his wife. They were a wife in all capitals. But then he demoted her. This is this is when she became the official concubine. And by the way, I think that was the first time anybody had an official concubine like 100 years. That's that's the that's this is the flashiest version of I don't let it hold. I don't let it hold. I love you. Look, I'll shame that bitch in front of everybody. Look, she had to lie down at his feet. They look. Fuck you. It's weird. Like the king's the only ball. You see us. You see, that's Baka. He's the only baller. The only ball like everyone else is just kind of normal there. Is it marrying his wife here? She's the same thing. Oh, the wife had to do the same shit. Wow. And she's pouring tea on her head. What is that? What are the people laying down at a cleaning? Very odd. Good for him. They seem to love him. She used to be the. That's used to. I see the former. She was a soldier bodyguard, former bodyguard. OK, you take that weird hat off and come live with me. That's a microphone cover. Take that. That's this. That's this. Take that hat off. Stop chatting that stuff. Let's go have some tea. I did enjoy Thailand, though. I enjoyed it a lot. It's a good time. Yeah. I went back last year. Did you the same thing? Who's that guy? Just for a little bit. Not the what's going on there. Crop top. What is this? The monarch even threatened to sue Facebook over the startling shots taken in 2016 by a passerby who recognized the king. Oh, that's the king? Yoga class. Wait a minute. So psycho. Well, she she has to wear the crazy hat. And he's going to wear a sports bra. Oh, he's kicking it. OK. Yeah, the laws over there. So people I saw something about someone got put in jail for liking a post, making fun of the king's dog. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, just is the next picture I saw. So that's just how he likes to rock it. He likes tank tops that show his belly button. That's cool. It's cultural. The king. Yeah, that's. I'm the king. Yeah, he's the king. I was the king of Thailand. I dress like that, too. Fuck you going to do, bitch? There's actually two things about 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I had this really weird experience. I was in San Francisco with a lot of breathwork, yoga stuff going on there. And I kept getting pneumonia. I surf a lot at Ocean Beach and I thought that that was the reason. So I kept getting bronchitis, pneumonia year after year. It just kept happening. So a doctor friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help. I didn't know much about this, but went down, signed up and was sitting in the corner of this studio, cold room, legs crossed, breathing in this rhythmic pattern, nothing crazy. Just and then really slow. And I sweated through my T-shirt, through my socks. My hair was sopping wet, sweat all over my face. So I went back to her and I said, what happened? Like you're a doctor, you should know this. And she said, oh, you must have had a fever or the room must have been too hot. So she had no idea, but I didn't know what to do with that story. So I just kind of filed it away, forgot about it for a number of years until I met some freedivers. These are people who have through the power of will enabled themselves to hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time and dive to depths far below what any scientists thought possible. So I thought, wow, there's something in breathing here that I don't know about. And I figured other people might not know about as well. That's that's that's really interesting. You know, I've known a bunch of freedivers and I've known a bunch of jiu-jitsu people that got really into yoga, primarily because of Hicks and Gracie. Hicks and Gracie. Do you know who he is? Yeah, famous, probably the most famous of the of the like the classic jiu-jitsu people. He's known as being the very best. He was like one of the original real pioneers of jiu-jitsu in America as well. And there's this documentary on him called Choke. Have you seen it? I have not. No. It's really fascinating. This documentary, he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff, the yogi stuff, you know, because he's he's really into yoga as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things. And he was probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jiu-jitsu as well. But him and his son, who's also a world champion in jiu-jitsu, just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath and that breathing is it's everything and it's everything for jiu-jitsu. It's everything for martial arts. It's everything for your mindset. You're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports. I think a lot of that has been forgotten. I know that coaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a big mouth full of water, run around the track, and then they'd have to spit out that same amount of water into a cup to force them to breathe through their nose, to force them to move their diaphragms up and down a little more because breathing is so essential to the recovery, their endurance and their performance.