Joe Rogan | Life Before Google w/Eric Weinstein

Given that I think a lot of us sort of don't believe in anything that happened before Google. Right. Imagine kids today. Imagine trying to describe to kids today what it was like to grow up without the internet. Yeah, or not being able to reach people. You have to make extensive plans. Yeah. You know, backup plans. Well, if you're not there at this time... Yeah, you used to have to yell. Open up your window and yell for your friends. I remember when I first got an answering machine. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. When I was in high school, my family got an answering machine. And I was like, this is incredible. And you would leave like stupid music like to let everybody know you were cool. Like you have some cool music. Like, hey, it's Joe. Not here right now. But if you leave a message, I'll get back to you. Probably. Then you got like old people who are... I think someone in my family still has one of these cutesy messages from like the late 80s. Really? Yeah, they're on their voicemail. But then who leaves voicemail? And the thing that gets... that marks me as an old person is that I actually call people. But that's... I like that. I've been doing that more lately. Yeah. I call a lot of people now. I just feel like it's just... it's better. The texting thing, the problem is if I... it's very interesting how we separated ourselves into this electronic communication world where I will, during the day, be in communication almost constantly with a stream of people. The only thing that stops it is a podcast. Podcast is my rest. For three hours, I'm not talking to anybody other than you. So all those texts that come through... I'll get the end of the podcast. I'll go and look at my phone. There'll be 40 texts sometimes. Like, this is madness. If I had to make 40 phone calls, it'd be impossible to manage. It would be... calls would constantly be coming in. You'd never really be able to say anything. So we're feeding into this weird loop where we just have these short form things. Like, hey, dinner tomorrow? Sure. What time? How about nine? I can do seven. Okay, let's do it. You know what I mean? It's like these weird little bursts of information. Could you ever see... remember this program, California... and what was it called? Was it Californication? That's there's no amount of heat in the moment that can compensate for the fact that she's using like verbal emojis. Well, he needs to fucking get over that. It depends on how hot she is. And it also depends on how you say it. If she's really funny, she's like, lol, you know, and she's like being silly. Like, I said, like, you know, I learned that from Jim Norton. Jim Norton will always say, lol, like, he'll say something really ridiculous and then say, lol. But he's just mocking himself. When you're over 50, it's intrinsically ironic. But, you know, in terms of this weird thing about islands of time, one of the things that we do is we have Shabbat dinner. And every Friday, no matter how atheist and militant people are against any kind of organized religion, they will leave us alone when if we say we're going into Shabbat. And so there's this thing about, like, people will pester me in all sorts of situations. But if I invoke something that is vaguely religious, even Sam Harris probably wouldn't call me during that period of time. I find that very interesting. Like, could you could you create a religion that was simply there to make sure that you had some time offline? Yeah, I know if I text Ben Shapiro, I'm not getting the text back on Saturday, it was dark. Yep. But it was dark. He texts you as soon as there are three stars in the sky that has been on Twitter. He's like, what did I miss? That's so weird. It's so weird that people buy. I mean, on one hand, I think it's probably a really good idea to just take a break from all that electronic shit and just connect with humans in a very old school type of way. I think it's probably very good for you. Or connect with yourself. I had this experience, I actually lived in Jerusalem for two years. And we landed in this Orthodox run hotel. And on Friday night, everything shut down, you know, like the textbook. And I then moved into an ultra Orthodox neighborhood, right in the on the boundary of a place where the secular and the Orthodox meant. What was really fascinating to me is I started telling people, you know, you'd never think that it's great not to be able to find a restaurant or a nightclub. But it's amazing that this is in forced downtime. And about a month in, somebody said, oh, you're in the wrong place. Of course, you can go out on Friday night, you just go to the Russian compound, and everything's hopping, and you can go dancing and drinking and all these things. After I knew that, I went dancing and drinking. And I was much less happy than believing that somehow Israel actually shut down on Friday nights. And so very weirdly, I appreciated the constraint. As soon as I knew you could break the constraint, I was less happy. And I would never actually obey it anymore. Yeah, I think having a rigid rule, even though it seems, it seems like counterintuitive. And that like it would provide you some freedom by having restrictions. But it does. It gives you some freedom like, okay, like now we don't have to think about all these other things. So now we have the freedom to just be alone. Now we have the freedom to be relaxed. Now we have the freedom to just talk to human beings. You know what, I think constraints, and it's like, do you know Jocko is Jocko willing? Totally. Everybody knows Jocko. Discipline equals freedom. Discipline equals freedom. It doesn't seem like that makes sense. Like this motherfucker is up at 4.30 in the morning, throwing heavy weights around, grunting and acting like a savage, running, goes out to the beach and he earns the sunrise every morning, goes out and takes photos, you know, takes a photo of his fucking watch at 4.30, hits the gym like a savage, and then takes a photo sometimes of the sunrise, earning the sunrise. And like, but you would think God, it's like a prison to like, force yourself into that. But no, no, he know there's freedom in that because he knows he doesn't have to make any decisions. At 4.30 knows what he's gonna do knows what he's gonna do. You just, you just go do it. And that way, I mean, you look at the guy, he's a fucking tank. Why is he a tank? Because he's always up at 4.30 fucking throwing weights around. It just doesn't, he never stops. He never, never takes, never takes self-indulgent time to lay in bed and beat off and pick his nose and, and then fucking check his text messages. He's probably listening to this right now and thinking, I do a little bit of that. I don't think he does. Really? Total discipline? Well, did you, I think I remember reading his inner dialogue about going to a birthday party and breaking down and having a scoop of ice cream or something or slice of pie. And it's like, you know, the drama of there it was, temptation. I held out for 45 minutes, but eventually I became weak. Yeah, I don't fuck with that. I just do it. If I'm gonna party, just eat that cake. You know, I mean, I just feel like I do enough. I'm all right.