Want to Think Clearly? Ignore Politics! | Joe Rogan and Naval Ravikant

There's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political battlegrounds, when you're dealing with right versus left and one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take. Like gun control is a great example of that, right? There's no room for what about mental health? What about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medication? Right. Why is that not being discussed? We're running one of the greatest mental health experiments in history when we're doping everybody up on SSRIs. And maybe if you give 30 million people SSRIs, maybe like 29.9 million are a lot happier, and then you have a fraction that commits suicide or detonate. You're basically trading the mean for the variance. You have blow up risk. Yeah, there's no room for nuance, which is why I stay out of politics largely. Do they drag you in though sometimes? They always try. Even this conversation is going to force you to get dragged in. I'm sure there's going to be some people there. Here's the thing about politics. We have a first pass the post system. What that means is that whoever wins 51% of the vote in this country gets a lot of the power, right? It's not like proportional representation where the Greens have 10% and the Libertarians have 3% or whatever. It's just like you're all Democrat in power now, all Republican. Because of that, to win, you have to pick one of these two sides, right? You have to choose. You can't just basically say, I'm going to be nuanced about it. You can't vote for a third party that's throwing away your vote, right? I have a friend who's trying to fix that. He's starting this thing called a good party where you kickstart your vote. You combine all your votes, you hold them in reserve, and then when you have enough to win, then you vote that person in power, right? So you don't throw away your vote. But outside of those hacks, we're never going to get a third party elected. So because of that, all of your beliefs have to neatly fit into the Democrat bundle or the Republican bundle. And so when you get into that tribe, if you signal outside of that bundle, you get attacked. So it's literally making you into an unclear thinker. It's making you into a muddled thinker. If all of your beliefs line up into one political party, you're not a clear thinker. If all your beliefs are the same as your neighbors and your friends, you're not a clear thinker. You're literally just, your beliefs are socialized. They're taken from other people. So if you want to be a clear thinker, you cannot pay attention to politics. It will destroy your ability to think. What dread? Most of modern life, all our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity, right? Old times I may have starved. You know, old times if I got sugar, that was a wonderful thing. I should have eaten all the sugar to get my hands on. If I got in a piece of news or gossip, that was interesting data that would have helped my life and moved me forward. If I'd gotten some brief amount of entertainment, whether through video games or magazines or whatever, that would have been good. Now it's all diseases of abundance. We are overexposed to everything. So the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic. It is to retreat from society. There's too much society everywhere you go, society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears. You're being socialized right now by listening to this podcast. We're socializing you. We're programming you. Everyone's trying to program everybody. The only solution is to turn it off. The only solution is to turn it off and concentrate on your breathing.