Best of the Week - September 1, 2019 - Joe Rogan Experience

I don't want to do it anymore. And even saying that sounded crazy to me. She was just real quiet. I'm thinking, why is she not saying nothing? I was like, I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. And she said something she had never said previously. Typically, she's like, babe, look, it's not time. Come on, you got to get up. I know you feel this way. I know you're back, but come on. I feel like you still got time in the sport. First time she ever agreed with me, she was like, I think the decision is already made, Dre. I was like, what? She said, I think the decision is already made. She said, I've been looking at you throughout this whole day and some of the stuff you've been saying, and I've never really seen you like this. She said, I think it's already made. I took that out, bro. Started making phone calls. I called my lawyer, who's one of my good friends, Josh Dubin. I said, hey, bro, I think that may be it for me. And he had been wanting me to be done. He was like, if you feel that way, bro, I'm going to support you. I called my manager the next morning, and it took us. So I went that weekend and called the fight. We held off on the announcement, and my lawyer just told HBO, like, look, he's going through some things. We're good. Give us a couple of days. So I got through that weekend, and he said, do you still feel like that come Monday morning? I was like, bro, I think I'm done. Long story short, we ended up announcing it September 21st. It was like a two-week period. We were trying to keep it under wraps, but I was undoing all the stuff. I was letting the necessary people know, Roc Nation, HBO, everybody know. And the night before I announced it, me and my good friend, who's a director, he's also directing my doc, Deontay Thompson. He, we put together this video. It was like a legacy video where I had my young son, my middle son, and my oldest son. And those were like, you know, that was me at that point in time in my career. And we did this whole video that I was going to announce my retirement with. And I actually have the doc that I'm working on right now is about this. Like, why did the best fighter of the world at that time walk away from the sport on top? Shot that video out, man. The day of my retirement, bro. And the response was just overwhelming. You know, it was overwhelming. Like, I just couldn't believe the amount of people that were reaching out. And it was like good and bad. Like, it was good because I was getting support, but it felt like somebody died. Like, I felt like I died, bro. I'm looking at these rest in peace. Like, not literal rest in peace, but like the comments were like, rest in peace. Like, bro, are you... I couldn't believe... Man, I'm... What? Like, Ward, not you. Man, oh my God, man. And it was just... It was like just this huge reaction. And it was overwhelming. And in the two years that followed, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, harder than I thought it was going to be. One of the hardest, if not the hardest thing I've ever tried... I had to do and still like I still have to do. Like, it's a daily decision to be like, I'm not doing it no more. But one of the most rewarding, man. And it was a necessary evil. And I hope that one day, man, the young guys can look up one day and say, man, I'm going to do the Andre Ward. I'm done. No, I mean, so I've proposed in my previous book that we each have an anxiety set point. That, you know, let's say you're worried about something and all of a sudden that gets resolved. That just makes room for the next thing to work with. So, you know, we each kind of fill that void because our brain is, you know, we've developed a brain that has a certain kind of set point for everything it's doing. And that just makes room for, you know, to fill that up. If you're an anxious person, you probably will always be somewhat anxious. So there's no magic bullet that's going to take that out. What you have to do is attack the process from knowledge of how it all works. And that requires that we have a more sophisticated understanding than is possible from simply observing behavior because behavior does not tell you necessarily what's on the mind. Behavior tells you how the brain has responded. But, you know, just to go back to the fear threat example, when, let's say I bring you into the laboratory, show you a picture of something like a blue square. My colleague Liz Phelps, who used to be at NYU, who is now at Harvard, did experiments like this. And every time the blue square would come on, the person would get a mild shock to their finger. And so then she would present the blue square subliminally. That means, you know, really quickly with, you know, something that follows it, that kind of masks it. And that prevents the information from getting into the conscious mind. And so the person, so I didn't see anything. But if you put the person in an imaging machine, fMRI, and image what's happening, that stimulus, that threat, the blue square gets to the amygdala, turns it on, the heart begins to race, palms are sweating. But the person has no fear. The person doesn't know it's there and doesn't experience fear. The amygdala is not about fear. It's about detecting and responding to danger. In order to be afraid, that has to reach your conscious mind so that you can experience it as a state of this otenoetic consciousness that we're talking about, a self-involved consciousness. That's hard for people to separate. Yeah. The idea that there's a physical response, but that your mind's unaware of it. That's right. But when you understand that, that's why you become to understand that's why the medications are not working. They're targeted to work on these underlying systems in rats or mice. But that's not where we are experiencing our anxiety. And then he just starts pointing at his face and then all his friends around him are pointing at him. And the whole place was just staring and waiting and watching and wondering what the hell is going to happen. So like Aikdom, we filmed it before, this is pre-Instagram, put it up on YouTube. I was like, I got to do this every show. This is incredible. And then six months later, people started coming out with cake me signs. Six years later. Look at this. Okay, here we go. So six years later, I think I've caked over 15,000 people now. Oh my God. Jeez, look at her go crazy. You hit it right in the mug too, dude. Perfect shot. Well, I'll tell you, I mean, it's just practice makes perfect. Yeah, you've thrown 15,000 cakes. I get you get a feel for it. Look at her. She's dancing. Yeah. Wiping it up. Let me see one more time. This is like, that was ultra. Oh my goodness. We have a cake writer. We have very specific cakes at our, you know, at our show. You have a, it's like a special aoki cake. What is in it? The strange thing is there's like not as much cake as you would think. It's just like frosting. It's just so it just explodes everywhere. So it's less bread. Yes. So like less carbs, more sugar. Well, you're diabetic. Just get out of the front row, please. What a crazy thing for people to enjoy too. Yeah. Caked in the face. Yeah. He was having a good fucking time. That's okay. That's the most important thing at the end of the day is like my shows. Take me with a bullseye. Okay. This is very normal for me to see, you know, like in some cases there's like 50, 50 people with signs up. Oh, that's so crazy. Look at that cake face. One of the upper row. Oh, why can't you get my face? Yeah. I mean, it's just a, it's a signature part of the show. It's fun. It's exciting. They closed it off to the public. Yeah. And it got 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. They then opened it to the public and it got 99%. Of course. If that doesn't show a crazy disparity between, first of all, the idea that you're going to suppress it, like you're going to say it's 0%. So no one's going to watch it and we're going to shut Dave Chappelle down. He's canceled. Fuck him. But people love him. You can't cancel someone who doesn't care, man. Well, you can't cancel Dave Chappelle. No, you can't. But on top of that, like how would they not understand that someone is going to know that you're not opening it up to the public and that once it does get open to the public, you're going to get a massive whiplash, a backlash where people are going to come. And even if they didn't want to vote on it, now they do. And now they're going to give it 100% or 99%. I knew I had to watch it when I saw how all the media channels, many of the media channels that I really dislike and do not respect were coming so hard at it and saying, oh, no, you don't need to watch it. And all this, I was like, oh, this means I absolutely have to watch it. The Guardian in the UK gave it one star. And then I saw Vice saying, like, don't watch it. Vox saying, don't watch it. I was like, okay, this is, this means that I have to watch this. This is going to be good. And I wasn't disappointed. The influence of a small group of, a relatively small group of human beings that are in charge of these media conglomerates is, it's really astounding. And that they, it's not just opinion, right? It's like they're, they're trying to get people to behave and think the way they do. Activism. Yes, it is activism. And it's also, it's undisguised activism. It's very transparent activism. It's, in opposed to journalism, I really wish there was a place where we could go where we can get 100% unbiased information and news. Yeah. And we can get an honest perspective of both sides. This side believes this and this is why they believe that, but this side believes that, and this is why they believe that. It's very hard to do. And if you have a podcast, one of the things that's really interesting is if you even talk to someone who has an opposing point of view of yours or who is right wing or who maybe has some questionable ideas, you are somehow platforming them and supporting their idea and then supporting some alt-right ideology and. Because this is not a representation of reality. Oh, okay. Anything that deviates from reality is reality that has filtered through your senses. And I think art at its highest is exactly that. If this was an exact depiction of reality, it would be a photograph and I don't need the artist. Mm, okay. So even photographs that take you to a slightly other kind of dimension as you gaze upon them, it's more than what was actually going on at the time. And that's art taken to the craft of photography. That's why you like it? That's why it's one of the reasons why. Plus, I think it was the very first painting where its title is the background. Think about that. This could have been called, you know, in the full painting, obviously this is a snippet. A town. Yeah, so there's a town there, there's a cypress tree, there's a church steeple. It could have been called cypress tree. It could have been called sleepy village. It could have been called rolling hills. But no, it's called starry night. And everything in front of it, everything in front of it is just in the way. And how often do you paint something where the title is the background? That's my point. And in this particular case, the background is the universe. And so for me, this was a pivot point in art. And it's 1889, which is recent, given the history of paintings and, you know, that go all the way back. So, yeah, there it is. Is that your favorite painting ever? I have to say yes. It has to be. You have a vest and a phone cover. If it's not, what are you doing? Yeah, I have four or five ties that have this painting on them in different ways. Yeah, so I'm all in, I'm all in. What's interesting is that the town is... Wait, wait, have you seen starry night in bacon? Somebody did it. Look, dig it up on the screen. Somebody did it in bacon. It was just crazy. Oh, God, how weird. Yeah, so... That's weird. Yeah. How weird. Go back to the original one, please. What's interesting about the original one is that the town is realistically depicted. The trees are recognizable as trees. If you ever saw a sky that looked like that, the end would be here. Yeah, exactly. Plus that swirling is not wind, and it's not clouds, because if it was clouds, you wouldn't see the stars. Right. What is it? The stars... It's how he felt. That's all I can tell you. By the way, that is a real evening, so that's... Sorry, it's not even the evening. It's early morning. The crescent moon, when it's that orientation, means this is before sunrise, and that white object lower on the horizon, that sort of glowy, that's very likely Venus, and that enables us to trace what's... over what set of weeks this painting was actually painted.