We're In Verbally Abusive Relationships With Our Smartphones!

I'm glad you talk about anxiety. I'm glad you talk about it the way you do because I think you've opened it up for a lot of people. I think you've made it a subject that's okay to talk about for someone like you, who are like a cool guy, who's a smart dude, who is successful and talks openly about anxiety and about how it's affected you. I think you're doing a very big service for that. I didn't even know what anxiety was until 2010 because growing up in the environment that I grew up in, I just thought all those feelings were normal. I thought all those feelings of paranoia or being anxious all the time. I used to smoke weed, so when you smoke weed and you have a panic attack, you just blame it on the weed. I remember driving the Burger King one time with two of my homeboys, one of them is Dead Now, his name is Jarell, rest in peace, and my man Zeke. I was high as hell and my steering wheel needed steering fluid so it was shaking. So it was shaking my legs and I'm bugging out, just driving the Burger King a two mile ride. I'm like, yo, one of y'all got to drive, we're all going to die. You better take the wheel right now. Take the wheel right now, I'm going to crash this motherfucking car. I'm tripping the fuck out. They're looking at me like, yo, don't let this motherfucker smoke no more. But it had nothing to do with the weed. The weed probably accentuated though, no? Definitely did because when I found out what anxiety was in 2010 and I didn't start going to therapy until like two years ago, because back in 2010 when I got diagnosed with my first panic attack that somebody, the doctor was saying, hey, this is a panic attack. So I had just gotten fired from radio for the fourth motherfucking time. And I was back at home living with my mom at like 31 years old with a two year old daughter and collecting unemployment checks. So when I'm having this panic attack and I go to the doctor and he's like, yo, your heart is fine. You got a perfectly fine heart and you're healthy. You got an athlete's heart. He was like, yo, are you stressed about anything? I'm like, fuck yeah. So in my mind, all I got to do is give me another job, get back in position and everything will be okay. But when you get back in position and you know, you've made more money than you've ever made in your life and you got books that are selling in TV shows and all of this other shit, you still having those same panic attacks. You're like, well, what the fuck is going on with pressure? That's it. That's exactly what it is. You think you're going to lose everything. It's also you experience pressure that most people will never experience because you experience pressure at this, this public scale. It's not just pressure. It's pressure with people's eyes on you and expectations and criticisms and all these different things that the average person is not going to experience that for millions of people and you do. And it's just like it's always on. If you're one of those crazy fucks, it reads comments. Good luck. Lord have mercy. Good. Love that. That was my problem. At first I used to enjoy it because I was the guy who came up on YouTube looking at all these world star hip hop conspiracy theories about people and you'd be like, oh my God, this motherfuckers sacrifices hamsters and that's how he got successful. You know what I'm saying? You think all that shit is cool until you get older and then you start seeing things about you and you laugh at it at first until you realize like, all right, now they're really starting to say some wild shit. What was the craziest one that you heard about you? I mean, for me, you know what it is. When they tried to meet too, the fuck out of me last year. Oh yeah, they tried to get him out of here. That was the wildest one to me because I was always the person that said live your truth so nobody can use your truth against you. So it's not like they bought up anything that I hadn't spoken about numerous times before or written about in my books. They just decided to attack. Oh my God. Targeted plan attack. Oh man. It can happen. Can it? So for me, that was like, all right, this is going too far, but then it's like, you really can't do anything about it. That's the other thing. Like there's no way to fight it. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. So the only thing you could do is just either let it consume you and probably ruin you just because you took it all in. You just keep it the fuck moving. You have to be confident enough to know what's the truth and what's not the truth. Yeah. And so now you don't read any comments anymore? I don't go on Twitter at all. Twitter's too toxic. That shit is here. We're in verbally abusive relationships with our fucking smartphones. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's definitely not healthy. You know, we were talking about it yesterday, me and Duncan Trussell. We were saying that it's like your diet. If you take in junk food all the time, eat a bunch of shitty things that are unhealthy, it's not good for your body. Well, your mental diet is important too. If you're always taking in these toxic arguments and I mean, half of Twitter is just people screaming at each other and just yelling and insulting each other and trying to find ways in this person's being shitty or wrong or negative. And it's like, that's not real life. The real life that we experience and that we're designed to experience is like this, people interacting with each other. It's one of the reasons why I think people like podcasts so much, especially good podcasts where people have real conversations is because you go, oh, okay, this resonates with me. Whereas Twitter does not resonate with you. Twitter just gets you anxious and gets you upset. Conversations where people are actually being nice to each other in person. I don't do podcasts over Skype. I don't like it. I want to see you. I want you to be in the room with me. I want everyone to know we're going to be okay. When you have these conversations and people listen to them, like just one on one like this or two on one, this is kind of what we're doing now. This makes sense to people. That's one of the reasons when I'm out and about and if I'm at the airport and somebody comes up to me and talks to me, I speak to them because I feel like that interaction was supposed to happen. You know what I mean? Normal. Twitter, Instagram, I ain't supposed to be talking to you on this shit. You're not supposed to be, human beings are not wired to be that wired. Everybody should not have that kind of access to you. So it's just like we got to take back from that. You see the facade fall apart when you respond to one of their tweets. Like someone would be like, fuck you, Charlamagne. You ain't shit. And then you could be like, why? And they'd be like, I'm just playing it, bro. I'm a fan. I didn't really know what to say. There's always that. They're just trying to get a reaction. They just want a reaction.