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Chris Williamson is the host of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast. https://chriswillx.com/modernwisdom
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Hunter S. Thompson, Books by Hunter S. Thompson
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Ronnie O’Sullivan, Unbreakable
Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
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3 months ago
I feel a bit less shit about myself, just stave off death.
Well, doesn't it do something for your mind?
Doesn't it help you?
Yeah, of course it does, but when you compare it with life and death, there's a
little bit
of a difference.
Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, there's definitely a difference, but just for mental health, that's the
main reason
to do it for me, it's mental health.
It's such a difference between not doing it and doing it.
Two different, totally different people.
You got notes on that thing or something?
Always.
You got to get one of these babies, little kickstand jammies.
Those are the shit.
Oh, sexy.
Look at that.
Sexy, sexy.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
It encourages you to waste your time watching YouTube videos.
Yeah, without having to hold it.
Because it props up, yeah.
Beautiful.
You feel like a fool sitting there staring at your camera, holding it in your
hand.
I always said, like, if there was a drug that made people stare at their hand
for six hours
a day, everybody would be like, oh my God, was this really a problem in this
country?
People were just staring at their hands.
Well, we looked at that last time that we were on.
We had the photo of that guy, that artist that had taken images of people
looking at their
phones.
Yes.
With no phone in there.
And then remove the phones.
It's such a crazy thing we're doing.
And now, of course, there's AR glasses that are eventually going to put
whatever TikTok feed
in, like, one eye where you're watching someone in the other eye.
Have you ever tried those?
I've messed around with them a little bit.
Zuck was here.
And he let me try the new ones that haven't been released yet.
They were really interesting.
And you move a cursor around with your eyeballs.
And you can do things with your fingers.
You can pinch and spread things and stuff with your fingers.
And play games with your fingers.
You can, like, it's not quite as responsive as you'd like it to be.
But it's very beta.
You know.
Fuck.
It's pretty cool.
It is pretty cool.
But also, we're losing humanity.
We're going to be taken in.
We're going to incorporate with the machine.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I think a lot of people feel like that would be a better version of the life
that they
have.
And that's the saddest thing.
But people of older generations look at young guys and girls and how much time
they spend
online.
And they think, this is ridiculous.
Why are they caring so much about what is occurring on the internet?
But they don't realize people spend more time on screens than they do asleep.
So the digital world is the real world for these people.
Like, the digital world is more real than the real world is.
Ooh.
I didn't think of it that way.
There are a lot of people that do spend more time on screens than they do
asleep.
That's really common.
Yeah.
I like to balance that out.
I like to spend half as much time on my phone as I do asleep.
Well, that would be a good way to enforce it, right?
You have to, you log how much sleep time you've had.
Yeah.
So I'm going to start sleeping 12 hours a day.
So I get my solid six hours wasting.
It's quite a resource, if you think about it, like a lack of an appreciation of
your resource.
Because the resource of your time and your attention, it's very valuable.
And you can convert it into all sorts of amazing skills and information and
knowledge and change
your whole life, or you can just stare at stupid shit all day long.
It's so compelling, though, dude.
It's been designed by the most profitable companies on the planet with the
smartest behavioral scientists
in history.
Like, it's an unfair fight.
It really is an unfair fight.
And that's why...
Sort of.
You could not do it, though.
Oh, you need to lean in.
But it's like, oh, there is way more willpower you need to use in order to be
able to not
than, like, just whatever the course of natural human history is or natural
human behavior.
Yeah.
Like, it's so easy to...
Or, alternatively, you could dye the Venice River green.
That's what happens when you don't have enough phone battery.
I sent that to Chris today.
Greta Thunberg, she dyed the Venice canals green to protest what, a lack of
action and climate change?
Yeah, pull back...
A call to pull back carbon fuel in Europe.
And they didn't just do it in Venice.
They did it in 10 cities around Italy.
But Venice has obviously got this gorgeous waterway.
It's an entire city built on water.
Bro.
Yeah, that's hard to see.
How ugly it is.
Jamie, I could send you a video of it, because I sent Chris a video.
It's, you know, it's just like, how much attention do you need, lady?
Okay?
Stop.
Sky News Australia refers to her as a Swedish doom goblin.
Sky News is the one that's weirdly pro-Republican American politics.
Super right wing.
It's like, who's funding that?
There's no way that there's that much of an appetite in Australia for American
politics.
Oh, yeah, dude.
So that's what it looks like.
That's disgusting.
I was there this summer.
It's fucking beautiful.
It's so...
Venice is so gorgeous and so ancient and so interesting.
And to have this self-important twat pour a bunch of green dye into that water,
you should go to jail for that.
Like, you're ruining this experience for thousands and thousands of people who
don't...
Not just the ones who live in that amazing place, but the ones who get to visit.
I mean, someone figured out a way to make a whole city by shoving pylons into
the ground.
And they did it a long time ago.
It's all wood.
The whole city is stacked up on wood.
They take these wood poles.
They shove them into the ground.
It's a specific type of wood that doesn't rot when it gets wet and waterlogged.
It actually hardens.
I forget what kind of wood it is.
I watched this whole thing on it.
But, I mean, it's very stable.
I mean, sometimes they get some flooding.
Like, one time we were there and, like, the lobby of this place was flooded.
It does flood.
But it's also so fucking beautiful.
And the architecture is so amazing.
It's such a gorgeous place.
And it just relaxes you, like, instantly when you're there.
You're like, wow, I just want to have an espresso and eat some pasta and just
chill out.
It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.
And this fucking dummy decides to just pour green dye.
And how much green dye did you put in there?
And what kind of an effect is that going to have on life?
So they claimed that it was environmentally safe, rah, rah.
I don't know how environmentally safe anything of that green color can be.
But, yeah, what was it?
48-hour ban and a $170 fine.
That's it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
You should go to jail for a night.
I think about this a lot, man.
In some ways, I understand why the rhetoric gets more and more inflammatory.
So if you care about an issue, if you really, really think that this issue is
important and
people don't listen, you start to shout a bit louder.
Right.
And then you shout a bit louder.
And then you shout a bit louder.
The British are coming.
The British are coming.
You know who first said that?
Wasn't Paul Revere.
Bonnie Blue.
Who's that?
She is the lady that slept with 1,057 men in a day.
Oh, that poor lady.
Yeah.
So people don't listen.
Do you ever see Don't Look Up, that movie on Netflix?
That's very funny, by the way.
I missed that joke because I didn't know who that was.
Jamie got it.
Jamie got it from over there, even with a toothache.
I'm kind of proud that I can't recognize her name, though, honestly.
I'll take that.
It's probably a good sign.
So Don't Look Up, that film with Leonardo DiCaprio a couple of years ago.
You remember it was like an asteroid coming in?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a funny movie, right?
Half funny, but kind of it's supposed to be a comment on the impending doom of
climate change
and nobody's listening, right?
Yeah.
They're not correct.
That's the problem.
Who are those two gentlemen that we had in recently, Jamie?
The guy from MIT and the other guy from Yale or Stanford?
Where was he from?
Anyway, these two brilliant scientists who have analyzed the data,
and one of them was going over the actual understanding,
the equations that you would need to understand
in order to really be able to calculate what is having an effect on the climate
and how many different factors there are,
and all of them working synergistically in some weird, unexplainable way.
And then the cold, hard reality of climate data over the past X amount of
millions of years
where it's always done this glaciation and then the glaciers, they recede,
and then you get higher ocean levels.
It's like constant.
Every 12,500 plus years, it goes up and down and up and down,
and it never stays static ever.
It's never static.
And the real fear is not global warming.
The real fear is global cooling.
Why?
Global cooling kills everything.
And we got that close at one point in history to having such a low oxygen level
on this planet and such a low carbon dioxide level because there was no plant
food, right,
that these fucking plants almost died.
We almost lost all life on this planet.
We've gone like a few degrees from that happening.
This is, glaciers are fucking scary.
Ice ages are scary.
When it gets warm, you just move.
And I know that sucks if you're living in a city of 20 million people,
but it hasn't happened yet.
And they've been talking about it forever.
That fucking stupid movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was wrong about everything.
He should have to give back every fucking penny he made from that movie.
You were wrong about everything.
You scared the shit out of everybody, and you were 100% wrong.
One of the problems I think people have is if you really care about something
and you're
convinced, whether your conviction is incorrect or not, you're convinced by it.
So what you do, you say a thing, people don't listen.
Right.
Say it a bit louder, people still don't listen.
Right.
Say it a bit louder again, people still aren't listening.
And the problem is it's a misunderstanding about what compels and convinces
other humans.
What we think is if people aren't listening, if I shout louder, they're going
to pay
attention, what we don't realize is that actually turns everybody off.
Because if you just see someone throwing soup over a Van Gogh painting, turning
the canals
of Venice green, gluing themselves to the M25 in London and stopping people
from being
able to get to work, it gets attention.
But you're not looking for attention.
You're looking for conviction.
You're trying to compel people to believe the thing that you believe.
And I think that it does the opposite.
And I understand why it's so seductive, because you think making it's cool to
your own side
to do something flaming sword wielding truth teller, I'm going to charge
through and look
at how cool it is.
But making somebody feel stupid or embarrassed or inconvenienced or upset is a
really bad way
to change minds.
So I think if people really care about changing minds, they need to realize,
and assuming that
they think that they're correct, they need to realize that intellectual chasm
from where
they are and where other people are.
And you go, OK, I'm going to take you one step at a time.
So even if you were to accept that the science and all of the stuff that the
climate change
people believe in is accurate, I still think that the strategies that they're
using aren't
going to be effective because I think it turns more people off.
And they're scolding, they're shrieking, scolding, and they're not the type of
people that
you want to talk to.
So you avoid them.
Ho, ho.
Looking down from on home.
Looking down from on home.
Yeah, it's my British heritage.
It doesn't cause you to feel inclined to support them.
The opposite.
It causes you to want to burn tires.
I want to buy spray paint and fucking hairspray and just blow it by my car.
Have you heard of the Cassandra complex?
Do you know what this is?
No.
Fucking brilliant, dude.
So in ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra is given the gift of being able to see
the
future by Apollo.
And then she rejects his advances.
So he curses her and he says that for the rest of time, you're still going to
be able to
see the future, but people aren't going to believe you.
So she foresees the downfall of Troy.
She warns everybody, people don't listen.
Troy burns anyway.
And it's basically being right, but early.
So Rachel Carson, she wrote that book, Silent Spring, 1962.
It's about DDT, environmental epidemics.
She gets mocked by scientists, castigated by everybody.
But her work led to the banning of DDT.
What year was this?
1962.
Interesting.
Ignis Sammelweis, like 1840s, he realizes that doctors are transmitting childbed
fever
from corpses to mothers because they're not washing their hands.
So he begs his colleagues to start adopting handwashing and he gets mocked by
academia.
He dies in an asylum.
He dies in an asylum.
That's how badly he's treated.
Germ theory of disease gets, a couple of decades later, gets proven.
Edward Snowden, who you've spoken to, like some people saw him as a traitor.
Some people saw him as a truth teller.
But I think everybody had a bit of, really?
Is that what's going on?
A few years later, it turns out, yep, the government is spying on you.
Yeah, 100%.
And this Cassandra complex, so if somebody ever says, I'm a Cassandra, I'm
feeling like Cassandra
today.
I foresee this thing.
You don't.
You're not listening to me.
It's a big deal.
And the problem is, the difference between somebody being a righteous Cassandra
with the ability
to see the future and just being a crazy person who's being convinced by bad
data or like perverse
incentives, it's very hard to work out which one you are.
Perverse incentives is the real word because here's the thing, folks.
We do have a horrible impact on the environment.
It's factual.
It's measurable.
You can go see it.
There's many third world countries that have rivers that are completely clogged
with garbage
and plastic.
That's real.
If you're not trying to stop that, but you're railing about carbon, well,
carbon is a weird
thing because carbon is essential to plant life.
There's more green on Earth today than there was 100 years ago, and that's
because of our
carbon emissions.
That is an inconvenient truth.
All right?
Fuck Al Gore.
That's an inconvenient truth.
So carbon is a part of the equation.
Is it good that we're burning stuff and putting it in the atmosphere?
No, I do not think it is.
No.
I'm not arguing that.
I'm saying that our impact on the environment that is tangible and disgusting
is pollution.
That's the impact on the environment.
And if you're really thinking about our carbon footprint and carbon taxes and
carbon incentives,
you've got to follow the money.
Like, what is happening here?
Well, there's a bunch of green initiatives, and those green initiatives get
funding, and
they get funding to the tune of billions and billions of dollars.
And if you know anything about any sort of nonprofit, like someone just pulled
up some
– there's a nonprofit about animals, and they just released what a fucking
scam it
is.
There's so many of these nonprofits where the vast majority of the money is
going to
salaries.
Like, most of the money is going to salaries.
And there's a tiny fraction of that money that gets allocated to whatever that
cause is.
Which is why it justifies people who work for the organization to sustain the
organization's
existence.
100%.
That's the –
100%.
Interesting.
But there's no data.
Here's the thing.
All of their predictions, all of the climate change predictions are totally
inaccurate.
Every single one by all the doomsayers.
So you would think they would course correct.
You would think they would say, okay, no one's arguing that the particulates
that get emitted
into the atmosphere by coal plants are not terrible for everyone.
No one's arguing that glyphosate is good for you.
No one's arguing that the poisons we're putting in rivers and streams, no one's
arguing that's
good for you.
The stuff that gets into groundwater, no one says that's good.
That's our real problem.
Our real problem is pollution.
It's fucking terrible.
There's a real problem with waste.
There's a real problem with landfills.
All that's real.
This carbon thing is a weird one.
It's a weird one to concentrate on solely because it seems to have an effect on
the atmosphere.
It has an effect on the temperature of earth, but not what they're saying.
Can you think of a perverse incentive other than people just want to keep their
jobs?
Is there something else?
It's people keeping their jobs.
It's righteousness.
It's virtue signaling.
And it's also the extraordinary amount of money that gets put into green
initiatives.
It also helps people campaign.
When you're campaigning, if you say, climate change is real, we will follow the
science.
Oh, thank God you get my vote.
That's what happens, and these fucking dumbasses just fall for it every time.
It's not that it's a real impending doom scenario.
That's not real.
It's not real.
It's not real.
But what is real is humans' impact on earth.
So you've got to figure out why is this one thing, why are they concentrating
so much on carbon
when it's not a measurable thing?
It's not a thing where you're seeing this hugely detrimental effect by this one
action that we have.
Well, because someone's trying to make money.
It's it.
No one's doing it for your own good.
There's not a fucking single person on earth that's involved in any of these
big causes
that's really concerned about us.
No, they're all making money.
And they're all making, even if they're not making money other than their
salary.
If your salary is a million dollars a year to run a charity, maybe that charity
is fucking
horse shit.
You know?
Because if you make a million dollars a year, you're rich as fuck.
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What the argument would be in order to get somebody of the standard that you
need to run this charity
at the level that it needs to be run at, you need to give a competitive salary.
What an amazing job they're doing worth 95% of the money goes to overhead.
What an amazing job you've done in having zero progress.
Please show me your efficiency plans, the blueprint.
Zero progress in any of your air quotes science that you're pointing to that's
showing these prediction models.
All their prediction models are wrong.
And they always quote things that are wrong, like storms are stronger, they're
more common.
No, you're just looking at a strong storm.
If you look overall, there's always been strong storms.
They're totally unpredictable.
Have you had Alex Epstein on?
Do you know him?
No, I don't know.
Have we had him on?
The moral case for fossil fuels.
Oh, okay.
Interesting dude.
He has, like, one of the most interesting stats that I learned from him was
climate-related
deaths have decreased by 98% over the last century.
So one of the things that people don't consider when they look at the cost of
energy and energy
production is that you need to be able to protect, more people are killed from
heat than
are killed from cold, and you need to protect from heat by using energy.
And if you're going to produce cheap energy, some byproducts are going to be
spat out into
the atmosphere.
But the impact of the creation of the energy is way more effective at
increasing human longevity
than the side effect of the energy being made.
Does that make sense?
Totally rational.
Yeah.
It seems like that would make sense.
Dude, I've had Richard Betts, director of the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate
Change on the show, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data.
Like, I've really tried to get a good balance on all of this stuff.
But Alex's position in that area, which is, it's a very luxury belief to hold,
to talk about
how green we must be in the West when you have access to unlimited energy.
I think a billion people worldwide don't have access to reliable electricity.
Like, half a billion people are still using wood and dung in order to be able
to produce
their electricity.
That was the data that he showed me the last time we spoke.
That means that if you've got a baby that's on a ventilator, a newborn baby
that needs to
be put on, like, that baby dies.
That baby dies because that particular country does not have access to clean,
to cheap and reliable
energy, cleanness does not matter for these people.
Yeah, I've heard that argument that the best result worldwide would be to
increase the power
supply to all these third world countries.
And then you would have this ability to start manufacturing, doing a bunch of
different things
that we associate with the negative aspects of the West.
You know, the negative aspects of the West that cause pollution, that cause all
these different
things.
The problem is electricity is a real bastard to try and move.
I think the entire grid has got eight minutes of battery backup, 10 minutes of
battery backup.
It's so little and it's so cumbersome and you lose it as you transport it
further.
And dude, I get it.
Like, I really believe that existential risks, climate change included, are
things that humans
should pay attention to.
But if you were to rank, Toby Ord wrote this great book called The Precipice.
And he is from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
He wrote the best researchers in the world.
He got them to rank what are the most dangerous existential risks to humans.
And it's a one in 10,000 chance over the next century coming from climate
change.
It's one in six from AI or one in 10 from AI, one in 10 from engineered pandemics,
like
one in 30 from natural pandemics.
There's so many other huge issues that are really pressing.
I'm not saying that climate change isn't a priority.
I'm saying that if you were to rank the priorities, it actually starts to move
pretty far down.
And when you think if people are worried about the future of the world, they
have a worried
about the future of the world budget to spend.
Almost all of that is going on climate change.
Jamie, can you try and get up?
It's a chart by Toby Ord.
It's just called, if you search like the precipice chart, Toby Ord can bring it
up.
And you just think, how much attention is being paid to all of these other
things?
How much attention is being paid?
Nuclear war, I guess, gets a little bit of attention, but slightly less so now.
But natural pandemics, engineered pandemics, AGI, these are big deals.
And I worry that a lot of attention has been focused onto one actually
relatively inconsequential,
at least in the immediate term.
No, go back.
Do a Google search for me.
Top left.
Yep, that's it.
So nuclear war, one in 1,000.
Climate change, one in 1,000.
Other environmental damage, one in 1,000.
Engineered pandemics, one in 30.
Unaligned artificial intelligence, one in 10.
The total risk is one in six.
But climate change is one in 1,000 over the next hundred years.
A stellar explosion, there you go.
One in, what's that, a billion?
That's what we need.
Ooh, I don't like that one.
That one scares the shit out of me.
I remember a documentary I watched back in the day that was about hypernovas.
And when they first started measuring these gamma bursts in space,
they thought that maybe alien races were at war with each other
because there's this enormous burst of energy
and they realized it's stars going hypernova
and how many of them do it all over the universe
because the universe is so big.
And there's just a single beam of like a death ray that gets sent out across
the universe.
Just unimaginable power.
And it happens all the time.
It's happening all the time in the sky.
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
And if it happens anywhere near you, it just takes out the whole solar system,
takes out everything.
You're gone.
If it happens in neighboring solar systems, it takes us out, takes out
everything.
Yeah, you're fucked.
Wow.
If that's not a justification for just living your life and getting the fuck on
with it and not coloring the Venice Canal green, I don't know what it is.
Well, it's the thing that gets you attention, unfortunately.
That's really what all this is about.
Send her back to Israel.
They'll give her attention.
They gave her some great attention.
I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of toxic compassion, which I think is what
you're talking about.
Yeah.
So the prioritization of short-term emotional comfort over everything else.
And I remember Elon was talking a couple of years ago.
Someone had accused him of contributing to climate change, so on and so forth.
And he says, I think I've done more to reduce climate change than any other
human on the planet.
That if you look at the EV revolution being started by Tesla plus everything
else from a technology perspective that we're doing,
I think that there's an argument to be made that I've had a more positive
impact on the future of the climate than any other human.
He said, what I'm interested in is the reality of doing good, not appearing
good, and not appearing to do good while doing bad.
And the opportunity people have to be able to look like they're doing good
while not doing it is exactly where this toxic compassion thing leaks in.
So, for instance, people will proclaim that body weight has no impact on health
over a long duration,
even if this causes overweight individuals to not take their health as
seriously and literally die sooner.
But we're here.
Joe, you don't understand.
We're trying to be inclusive here.
We're trying to be understanding of what's going on with these people.
If someone was to say that a male athlete has no advantage in a sporting
competition, because, Joe, we're trying to be inclusive.
We're trying to be empathetic.
We care about these people.
Well, even if that's done at the exclusion of female athletes, right?
People are prepared to show.
They're prepared to do whatever is needed to appear good.
And the alternative, which makes complete sense, who wants to do good while
looking bad?
Right.
That's the thing you're saying is so important.
They will sacrifice everything to appear that they're doing good.
Because that's really what they're worried about.
And that is all stemming, at least in part, I should say not stemming,
but certainly accentuated by the social media world that we're living in now.
Because everyone has this opportunity to appear like there's something other
than they are.
They're using filters.
They're standing in front of a leased car.
There's all of the above.
They're doing things.
They're wearing cheap fake jewelry.
They're trying to look like something they're not.
And there's a culture of that.
And there's also a culture of that that gets, well, I'm not one of those
because I don't care about material goods,
but I'm really interested in climate change.
And so then, you know, you join up with whatever fucking climate change group
that's yelling and shouting,
and you carry a sign, and you do all these things you're supposed to do, and
you get free water.
The whole thing is just, it's a psychological game that people are playing with
themselves.
They try to appear that they're special and to be in competition or in battle
with the other side.
You know, but if you're in battle with people that are saying, hey, none of
these models are correct.
Hey, none of these predictions have come to bear.
Zero.
Not a single one.
Where they say, the sea level's going to rise.
There's going to be no more Miami.
Nothing.
Not a fucking thing has happened.
Like, you're wrong.
Okay?
So we need to figure out what's right.
If we can all agree that if we're doing something bad to the planet and it's
somehow or another avoidable, let's work towards that.
But if you're telling me we're doing something bad to the planet, and then when
I say, well, show me, and you can't.
Well, what about all these predictions?
Well, they're wrong.
Well, what about that movie that ever got everybody?
Well, it was totally inaccurate.
Okay, well, you can't use that on your side anymore.
I never saw that movie.
Ah, it was so bad.
What were the claims?
An inconvenience.
Oh, let's find out.
Put into perplexity what the incorrect.
I was already asking, what did it get right and what did it get wrong?
Yeah.
What did it say?
That's typing it up right now.
I would get fucking, I guarantee you they didn't get nothing wrong or they didn't
get nothing right.
Which one do you want to start with, right or wrong?
What are the predictions for catastrophic events?
What did it get wrong about the predictions for catastrophic events?
Predictions that were incorrect.
Rapid sea level rise.
20 feet.
The film depicted a potential sea level rise of up to 20 feet, 6 meters in the
near future from the collapse of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets.
While this extreme scenario is considered possible over centuries or millennia,
scientific consensus does not support this happening.
Imminently, current rates are much slower, even with acceleration reaching 20
feet would take many centuries.
Another one.
Mount Kilimanjaro glacier melt caused by global warming.
Goal attributed the shrinking of Kilimanjaro's glaciers mainly to global
warming, but later research points to other major causes like sublimation and
reduced snowfall unrelated primarily to temperature.
Impression of imminent chaos.
The film often implies that catastrophic outcomes like rapid ice sheet collapse
and dramatic sea level rise might occur within decades when in reality such
processes are expected to take much longer, often centuries or more.
And then legal findings.
The UK court found nine errors of exaggerations in the film, mostly involving a
lack of clarity on timescales or oversimplified attributions like Kilimanjaro.
Overall, climate scientists judged an inconvenient truth as mostly accurate
with its projections, particularly in broad trends, but criticized its
presentation for occasionally exaggerating the speed and certainty of some
changes.
Well, I think this is...
Yeah, well, this is the thing.
It's most...
It's climate scientists judged it.
I'd like to keep this climate hustle going on.
So, well, they were mostly accurate.
We do have a sincere problem.
Stop putting a British accent on when you do that.
Leave it to me.
Stop putting a British accent on when you do that.
That's not even British.
That's like a fake British guy.
That's like a posh shithead from Connecticut.
Okay, okay, okay.
But no, you're right.
The lack of scrutiny that people have of their behavior, the distance between
our opinions and our deeds.
Yeah.
Never been greater.
That's the internet.
Right.
And what it means is you're allowed to do good while appearing bad and do bad
while appearing good.
And it's way easier to do bad or to just not research or...
And it's significantly harder if you're like, I'm going to go out, try and
invent something, try and push against an idea or an ideology or a campaign for
a movement that I think is really, really important.
And people are going to say that I'm doing something mean or people are going
to call me names for doing it.
There's no incentive to do it.
Why would someone go...
Why would somebody do that?
And I think that's what Elon's point is, right?
What I'm interested in is doing good, not the appearance of it.
And I see a lot of people who are doing bad while appearing good.
Well, you know, I think it's through no fault of their own, young people are
indoctrinated into this world when they start going to college that you have to
be active.
And to be an activist is to be a good person.
To be involved in these campus activities is a good thing.
And there's also, there's a tribal aspect to it.
You know, you're on a tribe of people that are, the people that are on the
right side of history.
These are the people that are kind and compassionate, unless you disagree with
them.
And these are the people that are, they trust the science unless it's
inconvenient.
And these are the people that, you know, you want to be in the educated
minority.
You want to be deep, the people that get it.
And you want to, it's very important that you use your voice, you know.
And so they think they're being good people.
And I get that and I understand that.
But it's being weaponized against you.
And it's probably not even funded by legitimate people.
It's most likely there's at least some funding by some foreign entities that
are just trying to sow discord and make sure that everybody hates everybody.
That'd be a wonderful way to take down any country, right?
To make it feel as if it was coming from inside.
Yeah, sure.
There's a lot of that going on.
That's been absolutely proven.
There was a thing recently with ChatGPT where they found out that these
entities in China were using ChatGPT to argue about USA shutdown to, like, they
were just, they ran all these social media accounts.
Did you see the Twitter account thing where you can see where the accounts are
based?
Yes.
I know.
Bro.
One of the ones that is, like, a fan account of the JRE.
People thought it was me forever.
And I was like, I didn't correct it.
It says, I made it say parody accounts.
It says either commentary account or parody account or whatever.
Fan run account.
Just so you don't think it's me because people do think it's me.
It's in Asia.
Someone in Asia is doing that.
Allegedly.
Unless he's got a VPN.
I mean, you could.
Hard-working Asian supporting the Joe Rogan podcast.
Well, you could, right?
That's the question.
Like, how do they know where you're from if you sign up with a VPN and you say,
I'm in the South Pacific?
Like, how do they know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I certainly know that assuming that you're on the right side of history,
especially if you're in a big group, is often a bit of a dangerous position to
be in.
So that Cassandra complex thing that I was talking about before, sometimes
people might say, it's your duty, if you believe in a thing, to stand firm.
Right?
You should make your case known.
You know.
You're Ignace Sammelweis.
You know about the germ theory of disease.
You're Rachel Carson.
You know about the impact of DDT.
You're Edward Snowden.
You know about the surveillance that's going on.
There's a really wonderful example, the comparison between Copernicus and
Galileo.
So Copernicus in the 1500s, he begins to realize that the Earth might not be
the center of the solar system, let alone the universe.
And he has enough evidence to justify it, but he waits until his deathbed to
actually sort of whisper out his great work, which is De Revolutionibus, this
work that he made.
And he does it on his deathbed, presumably to avoid the wrath of the church.
Now, some sort of hardline freedom fighting, you should do it, don't listen to
the man, don't back down, like just stand on your principles, people would say,
well, that's a cowardly thing to do.
You knew what the truth was and you didn't stand by it.
A hundred years later, Galileo comes along.
He sees the moons of Jupiter, sees the phases of Venus, sees the pockmarks on
the surface of the moon.
And he realizes that the heliocentric model, this like Copernican revolution,
is true, proclaims it from the rooftops.
What happens to him?
House arrest.
He gets put under house arrest.
He gets forced to recant under the threat of torture and spends the rest of his
life under house arrest.
So what you have here, and I fucking love this example so much, I think it's so
cool, it's two guys, a hundred years apart, with the same realization.
And the justification for the first one not saying what he didn't say loudly is
the treatment of the second.
I think it's like just this perfect explanation of irony.
You know what I mean?
Like it's so perfect.
And you go, well, the main issue that I have with like, basically being right
and early often feels a lot like being wrong.
And if you make an example of somebody in that way, it is basically you saying,
if you step out of line too far, this is what's going to happen to you.
And it causes people who are trying to move conceptual inertia forward, we're
trying to do research, I'm trying to assess whether or not this is actually the
way that the world should be.
It causes them to be more Copernicus, not more Galileo.
And I think that's, that is not what you would want in a civilization that's
trying to continue to make progress.
You would want to be accepting of new ideas and you would want to encourage
them as opposed to castigating people.
Do you think that social media and the influence of other people's opinions, it
makes someone more likely to be able to think for themselves or less likely?
Like more likely to be able to examine preconceived notions, recognize like, oh
my God, maybe I'm biased or maybe it's just like a group bias that I've
accepted because of all the people around me.
So, I think this is wrong and I think this is what I think is really going on.
Or do you think it encourages that kind of thinking or discourages it?
I think it certainly encourages groupthink, very much so.
But both, right?
It would open up the opportunity for some people with a very unique
psychological profile to be able to step back against it.
Black helicopters.
Yeah, there's a few guys out there I can think of.
But I think on average what you're seeing is basically this huge big swath of
people.
For the first time ever, you're able to aggregate just how much support or
criticism something has.
Yeah.
You know, this is what like to dislike ratios are.
This is what upvote to downvotes are on Reddit.
And I think that that causes people, most people don't want to have to do the
thinking of coming up with an original opinion.
I'm sure that most of mine aren't original.
But given the fact that doing the original thinking is hard, most of the
culture war is actually two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful
of actual thinkers.
Most people are just being brought along and pushed along by people who came up
with an idea.
And they're assuming, well, we know this for a fact.
Well, it's interesting because both sides know for a fact the thing that the
other side says is a lie.
So that can't be true.
See, I get the sense that it causes people to adhere to the crowd more, more
than they would have done previously.
And you also have to think that if you're spending that much time on it, like
six hours a day, it's one of the primary influences of your life, probably more
so than any other media in the past.
Because it was very rare as a child that you would listen to six hours of the
news.
You wouldn't really be indoctrinated into six hours of whatever the latest
cultural dilemma was or the latest social issue was.
You wouldn't get that much of it.
You'd get people talking about it like normal people do during the day or maybe
you'd be talking about a newspaper article you read.
But you're not getting six hours of it all day long.
But now we are, at least six hours.
I mean, what is the – let's find that out.
What's the average number of hours an 18-year-old kid is on social media?
I would guess it's at least – social media, maybe four.
Or their phone.
Let's just say their phone, screen time.
Screen time, at least six, probably more.
Yeah.
At least six, probably more.
And the mad thing to consider here is your parasocial relationships.
People – think about this.
People will listen to your show and listen to my show more than they see their
parents.
Oh, yeah.
By a huge margin.
Huge margin.
Yeah, if you saw your parents that much, it would be kind of creepy.
The average screen time for 18-year-olds, seven to eight hours.
There you go.
Of total screen time per day is common, though it varies a lot by person and
country.
Okay, what country has the least amount of screen usage?
Would you want to discount school time, too?
Because aren't they on screens, technically, in school?
You're asking phone time, I guess, right?
Yeah, I think it's personal phones they're talking about.
Are they on screens?
I've noticed it's counting my laptop open in my screen time because I'm
connected to the same iOS system.
So I'm getting, like, 18 hours a day.
But I'm like, I'm not on my phone 18 hours a day.
Interesting.
So let's guess, like, what countries?
Well, you'd have to have first-world countries for it to count.
You know, like, if you're in the Congo, you probably don't get as much screen
time.
No, you're busy mining the fucking raw materials.
Exactly.
You're making the phones, not using them.
Which is the craziest thing of all, that the thing that people virtue signal on
the most at the end of the line is someone pulling it out.
Lowest global average.
Interesting.
Three hours and 56 minutes is still a lot of time.
That's kind of crazy.
But they're probably a little healthier with it.
How is nine hours and 24 minutes less than 10 hours and 56 minutes?
Like, how is that the highest global average if 10 hours is the...
That's weird.
I don't understand.
Yeah, close contender is more than the highest global average.
I don't know.
I don't get it.
But either way, the Philippines, they're killing the game.
10 hours and 56 minutes.
Dude, there was a 2023 mental health report.
The UK came in second most depressed country in the world.
Second?
Second most depressed country in the world.
UK.
UK, yeah.
What's number one?
Uzbekistan.
So it's just above Uzbekistan.
And just below South Africa.
Did the UK used to rank higher?
Yes.
It's tracked down over time.
But it's never been superbly.
I mean, we're a...
Misery is our...
Like, melancholy is sort of our personality.
It's our national sport, right?
Being a bit more melancholic.
But yet, the Ukraine, who are just about to go into their fourth year of war,
came in higher.
And Yemen, who apparently are going through, like, one of the worst
humanitarian crises in human history, also ranked higher than the UK.
So, yeah, second most depressed country in the world.
That's crazy.
That's a wild number, man.
That can't just be the weather.
It has to be, like, a...
Weather might contribute a little bit.
A little bit.
Like, Seattle does.
Like, people in Seattle are depressed as fuck.
Maybe it's the online safety bill.
Could be.
That would get me depressed.
I would be so depressed if I lived in England right now.
I'd be like, I'm fucked.
Like, legitimately fucked.
Like, imagine if I was running this podcast the exact same way out of England.
Not for long.
Yeah.
Not for long you wouldn't be.
I'd get arrested.
I'd get arrested.
I saw they arrested a teacher because he refused to refer to one of his
students as a they.
And this is, like, his second infraction.
And so they arrested him.
For failure to recognize a singular plural.
Look, I really don't like...
I don't like shitting on the UK because it feels like I'm pulling the ladder up
after I've just got out of it.
But it's just...
I don't know how many more ways you can faceplant over and over again.
And there's this bit...
There's a strange kind of romanticization of the past of the UK where we are
English common law
and we stop the transatlantic slave trade and we use the Navy and so on and so
forth.
But, like, we're really living on borrowed time now as the UK.
It's been a good while since the UK sort of contributed in that sort of a way.
There was a...
You know Alan Turing?
The Turing effect?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he was the guy that decoded the Enigma machine.
The Turing test.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he was gay and he was chemically castrated by the British, despite the fact
that he was
literally our equivalent of the atomic bomb, right?
He was a very British version as well.
So he decodes the machine that the Germans are using to send their secret
messages.
This means that we're able to detect exactly where the U-boats are going to be
and it results
in some really awkward situations, like, if we, before we're going to use all
of our force
to try and take Germany down, if we avoid all of their planned bombings, they're
going
to guess that we might have the keys to some of their communication.
So they had to start making decisions about which boats needed to be let
attacked and
which boats needed to be saved.
Oh my God.
They knew all of the different attacks that were coming, but if they got rid of
all of
them, if they were safe from all of them, the Germans would start to catch on.
So they had this really...
Oh God.
So this guy, this guy is, is our equivalent of the atomic bomb, right?
He's our Oppenheimer.
He gets chemically castrated just after World War II.
That's in the 50s, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he kills himself.
He takes his own life.
He puts cyanide in an apple.
Oscar Wilde in the 1800s, one of the greatest writers of all time, he's jailed
and then dies
in exile as a peasant in France because he was gay.
And then 70 years after Turing, Gordon Brown, it's like 2008, 2009, publicly
apologizes.
They bring out this thing called the Turing Act, which gets rid of the criminal
records of
all of these people from all of these people from history, like posthumous.
And some of them are probably still alive, actually, like some of these people
that had
been, whatever it was, convicted of indecent behavior, improper behavior at the
time.
And then they put Turing on the 50-pound note.
So Britain has, for all that it's fantastic and I love it and it's the country
that I came
from, like it does have a history of fucking persecuting people for what's
deemed improper
behavior at the time and then apologizing for it a couple of decades later.
And I think with the online safety bill thing, just, I think it's going to be
the sort of
thing that you look back on and go, that was not, in no one's world was that a
smart move.
I don't think that it's a, I don't think that it's helping anybody at all.
Well, it just appears that they want total, complete control of what people say
over there and that
they don't want criticism of the government and criticism about immigration and
criticism
about, you know, fill in the blank.
They don't want it.
And the best way to stop that is to keep everybody scared, make everybody self-censor.
What's the best way to make everybody self-censor?
Put a bunch of fucking people in jail.
So last year, what was it?
12,000, 12,000 people got arrested for social media posts.
Supposedly more than Russia.
Although the Russian, the Russian stats might not be, uh, they didn't arrest
him.
They just shot him in the face.
They don't count that.
Gulag for you.
Yeah.
They just kill folks over there.
But yeah, it's really bad.
It's really bad.
And it just doesn't seem very progressive.
It doesn't seem like you're moving towards the future.
It's not progress like this.
We figured out a long time ago that free speech is very important to figure out
what's right
and what's wrong.
And when you suppress people's speech, you can get away with a lot of fucking
horrible things
because you stop people from being able to protest it.
You know, in a small part, we saw a lot of that during the pandemic.
And, you know, and you see what the consequences of that are.
You can't trust people that want power.
You just can't.
What do you mean?
Anybody that wants any kind of control over a group of people, if you want to
control what
they say, if you want to control where they go, you want to put them in 15-minute
cities,
like you can't trust that because the natural inclination when someone has
power is to never
let it go and to ramp it up.
They're in the power business.
If you're in the power business, you don't want to keep making the same amount
of money
every year.
You don't want to have the same power every year.
That's boring, right?
Like if you're an insurance salesman, you want to be the fucking employee of
the month.
You want to make more money next year.
You got your eyes on a new Lexus.
You're trying to make more.
You're not trying to stay maintained.
That's not the game you're in.
And if you're in the power game and if you're in the game of enacting new laws
in order to
have, we need safety.
Safety.
Under the guise of safety, you can get so much evil shit done.
And if you start doing that, you're not going to say, you know what, guys, we
were that
safety bill.
We were really wrong.
And what's really important is discourse.
What's really important is that maybe I wonder why you think the way you think.
And, you know, maybe part of this polarization process is not enabling us to
see valid points
the other side has.
Let's all come together and talk about this as reasonable human beings.
No, that's not what they're going to do.
They're going to come up with more fucking reasons to put you in a cage.
They want you to shut the fuck up because they want to make more.
They want to have more.
They want to get more power.
They want to be the best leader.
They want to be the most powerful leader.
Isn't that a ruthless part of human nature that trajectory is more important
than position?
Jimmy Carr taught me this.
So your industry, imagine that you're the 250th best comedian in the world.
Let's imagine there's a ranking.
And last year you were the 300th.
You were in a more psychologically preferable position than somebody who's
number two in the
world.
But last year I was number one.
This sense that humans have of where am I now compared to where I was
previously.
I spoke to Dan Bilzerian about this forever ago.
And I was like, dude, you've kind of climbed the peak of the mountain of hedonism.
Did you ever think that you kind of front loaded it too much and that it's
going to be really,
really difficult for you to do a hedonic reset?
How do you go from the most amount of girls and the cars and all the dopamine
that the world has to offer?
Where do you go from there?
And he basically said, yeah, he was like, I'm going to try.
I would consider shaving my head and my beard and going and working in an
Amazon warehouse for six months to see if I can do like a hard reset.
But you always know that you've got to get out of jail free card.
So it's not going to be the same.
And just the idea, as you're saying, somebody has power.
They want more power.
Right.
They want more power.
They want more control.
That sense.
That's the sport they're playing.
Bingo.
Scoring.
They're scoring.
You have to keep score.
Greta Thunberg.
The same thing.
We need more eyeballs.
We need a bigger, bigger.
Because where do you go after you've made the rivers of Venice green?
Yeah.
Well, you need to do something bigger, something more.
I need more likes.
That didn't get me enough likes.
I need more likes.
I need to go viral.
It's a ruthless.
I'm being shadow banned.
No, you're not.
Your content just sucks.
No one.
Some people get shadow banned.
But most people that are shadow banned, they just suck.
Yeah.
Most people just don't understand that they're not interesting.
But there's definitely real shadow banning going on.
One of the things that was interesting is that once Elon purchased Twitter, I
gained like five million followers over the course of a couple of months.
I was like, what's going on?
It's because I was somehow or another, they had locked my followers down.
I'm not complaining about this.
I'm just observing.
I know I have a lot of followers.
It's ridiculous.
But I started, I think I had seven million.
And I used to go up pretty steady.
And then somewhere during the woke days, during the dark days of woke, when it
all started happening, which is around, I think, 2014, 15, 16, it started
really ramping up.
And then it seems like from 16 on, real censorship started really kicking into
high gear because then they had a reason for it.
Donald Trump is our president.
We have to make sure this never happens again.
In fact, there was a meeting, I believe, I don't want to say the tech company
because I might be incorrect.
But one of the people, one of the main people at this tech company specifically
said at the meeting, we have to make sure this doesn't happen again.
As in Trump being president.
They did a fucking horrendous job there, didn't they?
Well, they fucked up.
But the point being, imagine you are in control of an enormous platform, an
enormous media platform that controls the discourse of untold billions of
people in the world.
And you have a very specific mandate that you've given to the people that work
for you.
We have to make sure that we control who the king is.
Because that's what you're saying.
Are you saying we got to make sure this doesn't happen again?
Well, how do you do that?
How do you do that if 50% of the people don't agree?
By force.
There's only one way.
You have to do it by force.
Or if you control the narrative, then you just hide information, accelerate
information that's incorrect.
You just ban people from communicating.
You kick people out.
Well, I mean, some people would say that getting to choose who's king is what
you do if you then buy that social media platform.
Sure.
There's an argument for that, like what Elon did.
There's a real argument for that.
But there's also an argument for don't you think it's a good idea if we have at
least one of these motherfuckers that's huge that you can go wild, wild west on
and say whatever you want?
I think that's very important.
You don't have to agree with them.
There's all these tools you can use.
One of them is the mute button.
You can mute people.
Bye-bye.
I don't want to hear you anymore.
You're annoying.
Or you can ban them.
I don't even want you looking at my page.
Get out of here.
Those things exist.
Like you can curate who you're communicating and interacting with.
But if you don't have one of these groups that's resistant to intelligence
agencies shutting down legitimate voices, including during the COVID times.
It was guys like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, guys from MIT, because they
were saying something that didn't jive with what the agenda that Fauci was
pushing through.
Where do you think we're at now?
If you were to sort of predict what the trajectory of the speech stuff is
online.
Talk about America.
The UK, I think, is just a lost cause.
Do you think that we're going to continue on this general path, which seems to
be a little bit more sanity from the peak?
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I think people realize from the peak and most importantly realize from Elon's
purchase of Twitter.
When Elon purchased Twitter, and I don't say this lightly, I think he changed
the course of civilization.
I really do.
I think we were on our way to this weird dystopian censorship complex that was
already moving.
We had already had intelligence agencies that were contacting Twitter.
We know this through the Twitter files.
And they were banning certain people that weren't saying incorrect things, but
they were saying things that were inconvenient.
And they turned out to all be accurate.
All the things that they were warning about, all the things that they're saying,
all turned out to be accurate.
They stopped the distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York
Post.
The New York Post, the second oldest newspaper in America.
It's a fucking huge newspaper.
To stop that from being able to be distributed on Twitter, which turned out to
be a totally accurate story.
And to stop that accurate story is wild.
That is scary stuff.
That, if Elon didn't purchase Twitter, we would have just had to deal with that
kind of stuff.
That would be, and it would accelerate.
It wouldn't stay where it is.
It would ramp up.
It would get more, they were starting to use the term malinformation.
So there's misinformation, disinformation, and then malinformation.
Malinformation is factual information that might cause harm.
Can you give me an example of malinformation?
Children don't need a COVID vaccine.
That's malinformation.
Because it is true.
Statistically speaking, like especially healthy kids, they kick it off like it's
nothing.
They don't need a vaccine for that.
But that might cause people to not get vaccinated and that might kill your
grandmother.
So that's malinformation.
Can you think of an example of malinformation where it's justified in doing
that?
Yes.
I would say, like, if you had some information and you were releasing it online,
that was an accurate depiction of some things that the federal government is
involved with that would compromise national security to a huge extent.
That would get people killed, start conflicts.
Here's another one that I've just thought of.
You know those desktop DNA printers?
This is how to put smallpox together.
Right.
Right.
Something like that.
Something which is true but would be dangerous.
And the devil's in the fucking details.
A hundred percent.
With stuff like this.
It's never binary.
It's never incorrect or correct.
Sometimes it's binary.
Sometimes.
I shouldn't say never.
Some things are binary.
Sure.
Like whether or not you should win a fucking world's woman strong lifting
strong man power woman competition.
That just happened.
I thought we were done with that.
It just happened.
Would you know why it was able to happen?
It's because that person lied.
That person lied about their sex.
Oh, interesting.
Jamie, can you try and pull up an image of the current 2025 world's strongest
woman winner, please?
Just for clarity, Mitchell Hooper, that is the world's strongest man, Canadian
dude, he's 6'3", 330.
The person who won woman's strongest man is 6'4", 400 pounds.
She makes the current world's strongest man look like an infant.
Oh, world's strongest woman winner stripped of title after organizer discovered
she was born a man.
That was an hour ago, dude.
Okay, so an hour ago they stripped her.
Is that the person?
Yep.
Jamie Booker.
Disqualified.
That's a man?
Are you sure?
It appears the athlete who is biologically male and now identifies as female
competed in the women's open category.
They were unaware of this fact ahead of the competition and have been urgently
investigating.
I want to know what urgent investigation is.
They went on Twitter.
So that's a biological male.
That's interesting.
Correct.
It looks like just a big lady.
Had we been aware or had this been declared at any point before or during the
competition,
this athlete would not have been permitted to compete in the women's open
category.
The move comes after runner-up Andrea Thompson, British, hey, was filmed storming
off the podium
as she raged about the bullshit decision toward the title.
So the other competitors evidently knew.
Okay, so Thompson is now the winner.
So the UK gets the gold.
I think about this so much when it comes to sporting competitions.
And it's not just with the trans thing, although this is a huge deal.
And I did think that we kind of got past it.
How horrible is it to be the person who won, but had that moment, the podium
moment stolen
from you by somebody?
I think there's a weightlifting Olympics, weightlifting championship final
where currently like the
11th place finisher is now first because each person has progressively got
popped for PEDs.
Number one did then number two did then number three did.
It's like 11 people have been popped for PEDs now.
Well, that's the Tour de France.
You know, when they took away Lance Armstrong's titles, the Tour de France,
what they didn't
tell you that if you want to go and remove all of the people that have tested
positive for
something, you got to go down to like 18th place for real, for real.
Like all those guys were doing something.
They were all blood doping.
They were all taking EPO.
They were all, they were putting motors in their fucking bikes.
I've seen a video of that.
Yeah, they were, these guys tried for fucking every edge humanly possible.
So, you know, he was just a scapegoat.
But what he was doing was he was suing people that were saying that he did PEDs.
It's a smart way to silence them.
But yeah, I mean, thinking about, I would be really interested to see what the
reaction
is.
That's hot, the fucking wet clay stuff, right?
Hot off the press a couple of hours ago that it's been rescinded.
I think we would be more outraged if they accepted this transgender person as a
female and then
say, oh, a trans woman's a woman.
Let her compete.
It seems like this person lied.
And so that's different.
But still identify.
So I agree that it's reassuring to see what the world's strongest person
organization decided
that they were going to do in a sort of repercussion to it.
But you can already predict.
Both of us can already predict what's going to happen online, that this person
shouldn't
have been stripped of their title.
Maybe they lied, but they shouldn't be competing inside of this.
The side of the aisle that always agrees with this, do you not think that they're
going
to be pro?
I think that is slowly but surely losing traction and support.
I really believe that.
I believe that's where the rubber meets the road because you're going to lose
most women
that have ever done a sport.
You know, if you are a sedentary woman that has no interest whatsoever in
athletic competition
and you think it's more than a good price to pay to let biological males who
identify as
women because we want them to be exclusive, it's more important to recognize
and affirm their
identity than it is to be fair.
You haven't done any sports.
So you're going to lose not just most of the men.
You're going to lose a lot of, you're going to lose anyone right of center,
like libertarian,
anyone, anyone.
You're going to not just lose all of the right.
You're going to lose a giant chunk of the center because I think the center in
this country is
probably the most rational of all groups.
Those are the people that recognize kind of a little bit of everything here,
you know,
and right of center or left of center.
You're going to lose all those people and you're going to lose most women.
You're going to lose most women that have gone to, most women that have
daughters, you're
going to lose them.
The only ones you're not going to lose are the fucking kooks, the SSRI, filled
up, anti-anxiety
medication, transitioning happy kooks.
Those fucking kooks that, you know, think that you, you have a hierarchy of who's
oppressed
the most and trans people are people, trans women are women, and they want to
scream it
out and yell it.
They're just crazy.
You're going to have those people that are going to be with it no matter what.
Get into the boxing ring with that trans woman who's a woman.
I thought the one that was a man that lied, that the Olympic champion, that
they just took
away his gold medal.
I saw that flip-flop.
That story flip-flop back and forth like 10 times.
It was like a Christopher Nolan movie.
Well, because that person was threatening to sue a bunch of people, right?
They were threatening to sue a bunch of people that called them a male.
They made a statement, rescinded it, made a statement.
Let's put this through perplexity or something where we can figure out what...
Don't sing a pattern.
I want to know what the number is.
I want to know what's true.
Because what I think is there was another organization that did a chromosome
analysis and found out this
person had an XY chromosome.
So this is a specific type of disease or genetic abnormality where your testicles
don't drop.
Fucking edge cases again, dude.
Edge cases.
It's so strange.
Are you going to ask it?
Ask it, did that person get their gold medal taken away and why?
Well, yes, they did.
Right.
And why?
Just see what...
I know.
But let's see what it says in terms of why.
Why?
Because they're a man.
And how did they find out?
Find out how they found out.
Because I think the narrative is that there was another boxing organization
that had already
suspected something was up.
Did some testing.
Did some testing.
Found out this person has an XY chromosome.
Used that.
So, won the Golden Women's 66-kilogram boxing event strip.
Now, a de-recognized International Boxing Association previously disqualified
Khalif from the 2023 Women's
World Championships after she failed eligibility tests under its own rules.
Later claimed those tests showed she was ineligible for women's competition
because of these tests.
Some IBA officials, some media, and advocacy groups have publicly demanded the
IOC strip or reclaim her gold medal,
arguing that she could not have been allowed in the women's...
Should not have been allowed in the women's category.
Like, they're still saying she.
Despite those demands, IOC has defended allowing Khalif to compete in Paris,
describing the IBA's disqualification decision as arbitrary and saying she met
the IOC's eligibility criteria at the time.
So, what is the IOC's credit...
What is their eligibility criteria?
I mean, dude, boxing must be a fucking nightmare for this because of all of the
different organizations that exist.
And each one is going to have its own different set...
We have a coordination problem here.
Here's an even more...
Here's a bigger nightmare.
Prisons.
Prisons have a self-identity thing.
In order to be eligible for female prisons, there's a lot of prisons, including,
I believe, New Jersey, California.
California has 47 biological males that are housed in women's prisons.
Okay.
At least.
Are they...
So, who runs a prison?
Is it the state?
Is it an independent organization?
Well, some of them are independent.
Some of them are privately owned.
Right.
Chromosome test results were kept confidential by the IBA,
but were leaked after and widely reported.
The IOC nonetheless rejected IBA's findings as arbitrary, even with the
chromosome test.
That's really standing your ground.
Oh, boy.
You silly gooses.
Well, see, this was only...
This was only 2024.
So, to say that...
Maybe this is the landmark case.
Maybe it wasn't Leah Thomas as a swimmer.
Maybe it was somebody in a physical sport.
But, I mean, when we're talking about the strong woman competition,
dude, if you're 6'4", I think the next tallest woman was 5'8", or 5'7",
think about what you're doing.
You're, like, wrapping your arms around...
You can...
It always gets slippery, right?
Because it's like, well, there's not very many of them.
So, why are we making such a big deal out of it?
And it's like, hey, if there's one rapist in the local community,
you don't go, well, there's only one of them.
Like, what's the chances that you run into it?
It's like, no, no, no.
We try and, you know, treat this problem.
So, first off, there's not many of them.
Then, well, you know, look at what happens when you take these...
Oestrogen, you downregulate your testosterone,
it's below this particular level, therapeutic, da-da-da-da-da.
And you go, well, yeah, but it's like being on a heavy course of steroids
up until you stopped doing that.
And then how much of that does carry over?
That gets a bit slippery.
But just the size, the size of the hands of a person who's 6'4 and 400 pounds
compared with a woman who's probably, like, 220 and 5'8,
like, grip strength, being able to do, like,
that's pretty important in the sport of strong women.
All of it is ridiculous.
Wrapping your arms around an atlas stone.
Yeah, you could do this forever.
It's all ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
It's not the same, you know?
It doesn't mean that someone shouldn't be able to change their name
and identify as a woman.
It's just like you can't dominate women's sports.
You can't dominate women's spaces.
You can't.
You can't.
You're not a woman.
You know, we'll call you one if we want to be nice.
But the reality is there's biological sex is a real thing.
And when it comes to competition, physical competition,
there's a reason we have Title IX in America.
There's a reason why we recognize women's sports.
There's a reason why you have it set up that women will compete against each
other
because it's fair.
It's not fair to make women.
Or else you just have a unisex category.
Yes.
And it would be dominated by men.
Dominated by men.
And then girls wouldn't have this amazing opportunity to get scholarships,
which they're being denied because biological males are winning in their
category
because they allow them to compete.
And there's a thing called – this is what people don't want to believe,
but it's true.
It always has existed.
No, they're doing this because they really are a woman.
There's a thing called sandbagging.
Okay, and sandbagging has always existed.
Sandbagging is – let's say that you're going to enter into a jiu-jitsu
tournament
and you're going into the purple belt division.
But you've been a purple belt for eight years and you're supposed to be a brown
belt.
And they – you know, for whatever reason you – or you could even – here's
a worse one.
Maybe you're a black belt in judo, like an elite black belt,
and you enter into a jiu-jitsu tournament in the white belt division.
And you're in there with some fucking dork who's a plumber who's just started
taking classes.
I think it would be fun to compete.
And you fucking flip him on his head and break his arm in an arm bar in like 15
seconds.
Like that's sandbagging because you're an elite athlete.
You're like a world-class judo guy that just thought it would be fun to put a
white belt on
and enter into a jiu-jitsu tournament.
There's people that do that because they just want to win.
That's why people cheat at video games.
That's why people cheat at golf, right?
People cheat because they want to win.
They just want to get that W.
And there's people that will pretend they're a woman to beat up women.
And if you don't think that's the case, you haven't met enough psychos.
Because are there people that are in the wrong body?
I don't know.
I'll give them that respect.
I'll give them that dignity.
Are there also people that are out of their fucking mind and want an excuse to
beat up women
and pretend they're a woman if you tell them
they could wear a dress and they could just run past all the ladies and
dominate them on the field?
Yeah, they're going to do that too.
That's a real type of human being.
And if you don't have an accurate test for that, if you don't have a thing you
make them lick,
oh, you're a fucking psycho.
If you don't have that, then you have to judge each individual situation based
entirely on why would someone do this?
How much crossover would there be if somebody was a black belt in judo?
How much crossover is there to...
An immense amount.
Yeah.
An immense.
An immense, immense, immense, immense, immense amount.
Especially if it's a gi tournament.
Oh my God.
You're virtually helpless.
Helpless.
Even though judo is primarily done on the feet?
It is, but they do arm bars.
They do.
So look at Ronda Rousey.
She has one of the best arm bars in the history of the sport.
Look at Kayla Harrison.
Look at all these...
Look at Carl Parisian.
There's elite judo people that were wizards at arm bars.
Wizards at chokes and leg locks.
Of course, they're submitting each other as well.
It's not exactly the same.
And if they went like gi to gi with some prime, Leo Vieira, black belt, gi
master, you likely would give the jiu-jitsu person a giant advantage because
they'd spend way more time submitting people.
They would spend way more time working on submissions.
So judo to jiu-jitsu in a tournament, I would say, black belt to black belt,
they probably have a disadvantage in judo.
But a huge advantage over a white belt.
What do you think about Jake Paul Anthony Joshua?
Boy.
Well, realistically, it's one of the craziest propositions of all time.
You take a guy who just had a boxing match that looks like a sparring match
with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson.
And then you're going to fight one of the absolute scariest knockout artists in
the heavyweight division.
Maybe we should watch the Francis Ngannou fight.
So you could see...
Let's watch that real quick.
Just so you could see what Anthony Joshua is capable if he's fighting someone
that's not in his league.
Okay, look.
Usyk beat him, and he beat him twice.
And Andy Ruiz caught him in the first fight and dropped him and stopped him.
It was spectacular.
Andy Ruiz is super fucking talented.
Usyk is perhaps the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.
Maybe one of the greatest of all time in any weight class.
Usyk.
You know, and Usyk beat him.
And he beat him twice.
But Francis Ngannou is coming off of this fight with...
Like, go a little bit before that so we can see this happen.
Watch this.
I can't watch the whole fight.
So he drops him with a right hand early.
And this is like two minutes into the first round.
And Francis gets up.
He survives.
And then Joshua...
Check out this...
This combination he hits him with.
I mean, dude.
The speed that he hits him with this...
He's so dangerous, man.
It's like you're dealing with a guy who's an Olympic gold medalist.
And he's enormous.
And he's got vicious knockout power.
And he's got immense amount of experience at world-class levels.
Just think about what we said earlier.
Fought Usyk twice.
Fought Andy Ruiz twice.
Oh, man.
Bro.
The timing in that right hand.
Just spectacular.
That's a stepping-in as well.
Over the top.
I mean, that was a full-force shot to the temple.
I mean, he's fucksville right now.
So, they wipe off his gloves.
But you look at him like he's really feeling it right now.
I mean, he probably has no idea where he is.
And Anthony Joshua...
Oh, my God.
Absolutely folded in half.
Watch.
Back that up again.
Watch this.
I mean, just steps into it with every ounce of his body.
Perfect right hand.
So, the fact that Jake Paul wants to fight that guy.
Hey, I'll watch.
I'm going to watch.
I'm definitely going to watch.
So, you got me there.
And if you want to show you're legit by taking on one of the scariest fucking
heavyweights alive...
Can you get the tail of the tape of Paul and Joshua?
I was going to say, he has to...
They got him in a way of a greater 245.
That's only like seven pounds less.
Yeah, that's nothing.
And there's some sort of a rehydration clause.
Listen, kids.
It ain't going to matter.
You know, there's not a chance that Anthony Joshua is not going to just lose
the weight beforehand.
He's not going to come in drained.
What he's going to do is just do extra cardio.
And that's just going to make him more dangerous.
He's going to be terrifying.
And he's going to have a lot to prove.
He's going to be very angry that Jake Paul wants to fight him.
Very upset that this YouTuber who's fought Tommy Fury, who's a legit boxer, and,
you know, a couple other guys that were legit boxers.
That's it.
Like, everyone else he's fought.
He's fought Ben Askren, who was really a wrestler.
You know, he fought Tyron Woodley, who was an elite MMA fighter, but, you know,
not an elite boxer.
He fought Nate Robinson, who was a basketball player.
He fought Anderson Silva, and he dropped Anderson Silva, and Anderson Silva's a
really good striker.
But also in his 40s, you know, different time.
It's, you know, not the same guy he used to be.
This is a 34-year-old Anthony Joshua.
This is a terrifying human being.
Terrifying.
Again, a guy who survived Usyk twice.
You know, you saw what Usyk did to Dubois?
You see Usyk take out Dubois?
Did you see that?
I mean, that's the Usyk you're talking about.
It was an Usyk that rocked Tyson Fury, who's fucking 6'9".
So, Jake Paul's 6'1".
Yeah.
This is 6'6", Anthony Joshua.
Jake weighed in for the Tyson fight at 199.
Yeah.
Joshua, against Ingano, it was 252.
6'6".
Just not just 6'6", but 6'6", and knows how to use every fucking inch of it.
Knows how to keep that stick in your face.
He was keep that jab in his face and that right hand.
If it hits you, you're fucked.
And he's not worried about you the way he's worried about Usyk.
You can't move like Usyk.
You can't constantly be frustrating and overloading his nervous system.
Usyk is overloading every aspect of your senses at every moment.
He's constantly moving, and then punches are coming, and he loops punches
around your guard,
and he's constantly shifting his feet, and you think he's going to be there,
and he's over here.
And it's like this overload of thinking.
It's not a casual, relaxed fight where you can kind of move around and get your
groove,
and he's going to stay on the outside, and you're going to—no, it's just
constant.
He survived that guy twice.
He survived, in my opinion, the most skillful heavyweight of all time, twice.
And you're going to go boxing?
And the toughest guy you fought before was 40 years old Anderson Silva?
That was the toughest guy so far you fought?
You've lost to Tommy Fury, who's a very good boxer, but this is a giant Olympic
gold medalist heavyweight.
I mean, Anthony Joshua is fucking terrifying.
He is the thing that nightmares are made of.
And he's got that one-punch nuclear power.
One punch.
And he's fast.
It's an explosion.
There's certain guys that, like, in kickboxing couldn't translate over to MMA
because they didn't have the kind of speed.
Like, Peter Ertz is a good example.
He was a world-class kickboxer, one of the best of all time,
but didn't have the style that would allow him to—
But then there was Mirko Krokop.
Mirko Krokop, who was violently explosive,
would perfectly transition to MMA
because you've got to be able to hit people quick.
It was like a big part of it is speed.
Anthony Joshua has that kind of speed.
That is the kind of thing like—
With 252 pounds behind him.
If you don't have the skill to get away from that kind of power,
what happens is Francis Ngato and Anthony Joshua.
You have to be a very—
You can't judge that guy based on Dubois, who's a fucking murderer.
Daniel Dubois is a tank, and he took out Joshua.
But that guy's fucking terrifying.
You're staring in front of that guy, but Usyk didn't stand in front of him.
Usyk moved all over the place.
Joshua's—and he's going to have a lot to prove.
He's going to be very angry.
Do you think they'll let everybody take the brakes off?
Because there's all rumors about Tyson versus Jake,
that both of them were sort of pulling punches and not fully letting it go.
I think that's a different deal, you know?
Do you think there was something probably just below the table?
I do not know.
I do not know if it was said.
I do not know if it was understood.
I do not know.
In your professional opinion, based on what you saw,
do you think that the people were holding back?
It definitely looked like sparring.
But it could be that he didn't want to hurt Mike Tyson
because Mike Tyson's 58 years old.
Or it could be that Mike Tyson didn't want to hurt him because he likes him.
I don't fucking know.
But it wasn't what I was tuning in for.
It was not for me.
I was there.
I went to it live.
I was tuning in for Mike Tyson coming full 1988 Mike Tyson, full chaos.
That's what I was hoping for.
We walked out like that.
It looked like it, yeah.
But that's what everybody signed up for.
So they got us.
Whatever.
And do you think that...
This is different.
I don't think this is that.
I don't think this is that at all.
First of all, it can't be that.
Because Joshua is still competitive in the heavyweight division.
And he's only doing this for money.
He's still set up for world title fights.
After he knocked out Ngannou, you could still set him up.
Like Joseph Parker just lost.
You could set him up with Joseph Parker.
You could have...
Until a year ago, you could fight Deontay Wilder.
You're saying that the lineage and the trajectory that Anthony Joshua is on,
if he happens to go a little bit too gentle and lose by decision to Jake Paul,
it doesn't exactly look great for his future heavyweight chance.
It fucks up all of his marketing opportunities.
Wow.
So that's a really...
So what we were saying before...
Ngannou fight is a godsend to him, right?
The Ngannou fight is like, hey, boxing's back.
This guy knocked down Tyson Fury.
This is how it was supposed to go.
Anthony Joshua, you carried the torch for the boxing community.
Because I know a lot of straight-up boxers, they absolutely felt that way.
This is what needed to happen.
These guys can't come over from MMA and think they can box the best.
Yeah.
You need to put them in their place.
What's great there, and it loops back to what we were talking about before,
is incentives, incentives, align the incentives.
Yeah.
Like, if you've got Joshua's...
I mean, this is...
However, I should...
I should...
Caveat.
Yeah.
Here's the caveat.
This might earn him $200 million.
So if it earns him so much money...
Joshua or Jake Paul?
Joshua.
Like, either one.
How much money is involved?
$200 million?
Oh, dude.
This is a Saudi organization, right?
This is Riyadh season.
Isn't this...
That was putting this on?
Probably.
They seem to own everything.
I think they own me now.
And you and Jamie.
It's Netflix, right?
Right, yeah.
This is going to be on Netflix.
Okay, so I don't know.
Maybe it's not...
Maybe Riyadh season's not involved.
But the money they threw Canelo Alvarez to get him to fight Terrence Crawford,
this is...
Like, they're throwing insane money at people.
Infinity money.
They're throwing nutty sums of cash at people to make amazing fights happen.
Like, this has always been the hiccup in boxing,
is that people don't want to fight certain people because they want to protect
their record.
The Saudis are like, how much?
Everybody's got a price.
Yeah, everyone's got a price.
And we've got the bank account to pay it.
So here it is.
The reported total prize purse for Jake Paul versus Anthony Joshua is $184
million,
with an even split expected, meaning each fight will earn approximately $92
million.
Some reports initially suggest a different figure.
$184 is the most frequently cited total from sources like Daily Mail and
Wikipedia.
Okay, that doesn't mean anything.
Some have also mentioned Jake Paul's cryptic $267 million tweet, which may have
fueled rumors.
Listen, it really depends on who's setting it up.
Netflix doesn't have to tell you how much they're paying.
But the thing about Anthony Joshua, if he loses this, so let's say he's only
getting the $92 million, which I bet he's getting more.
Let's say he's getting $92 million.
If he loses this fight, he misses out on that Saudi money.
Because they could set up a Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua fight, and each one of
them gets $200 million.
You could do a fight like that.
The Saudis can do a fight like that.
They can do a fight.
They have enough resources to throw at boxing where they could change the
entire landscape of boxing.
If you're the guy that stands in between 6'6", 250-pound Anthony Joshua and $200
million, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I don't think he's going to lose to you on purpose.
I don't want to be that guy.
But I'm not saying that anybody lost to anybody on purpose.
I don't think that's happened.
But what I do think is that people take it easier on people if they like them,
and it looked like they were taking it easier on each other than you would
expect.
I'll just say that.
It's just my personal opinion.
I don't think that's going to happen with this fight.
I don't think there's any chance in the world.
Knowing what Anthony Joshua is a specialist at, he's a specialist at putting knuckles
through your fucking brain.
And that's what he's going to try to do to Jake Paul.
And anything other than that from a 34-year-old Anthony Joshua will make us all
think it's a fixed fight.
Whether or not he can do it, whether or not Jake Paul shocks the world and
shows us that he really does know how to box really well
and moves really good and uses his jab and blows us all away with a strategy
and a lot of footwork and movement and brings Usyk into his camp.
Or Lomachenko's dad, even better, who's the guy who trained Usyk.
He trained Usyk as well.
Lomachenko's father.
That's why they both are the best moving fighters in this generation, by far.
By far.
They're in a group of the greatest of all time, like Willie Pepp and Pernell
Whitaker.
There's like a group of defensive wizards that exist today that they're in that
group.
And two of them that exist in that group are trained by the same guy.
Lomachenko and Usyk.
I don't want to be Jake Paul.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, fuck that.
I know that I do not want to be.
But what better way to show the world you're legit?
Go get knocked out by Olympic gold medalist, former world heavyweight champion,
6'6", 250 pounds.
Yeah.
I mean, it's wonderful.
Show the world you're ready to win it.
You're definitely not fucking about.
I had this guy on my podcast, Bugsy Malone.
So he's a British grime artist.
And he had this home.
What's a grime artist?
Like drill, rap.
Like British rap.
Oh, okay.
Did you know what that means?
You did?
Damn.
Keep up with the times.
I can't.
It's too late.
I missed it.
I missed everything.
He grows up in the north of the UK in gangs, Manchester.
And he's in juvenile detention.
He's a teenager.
He gets stabbed with a screwdriver.
Like rough stuff.
Rough, rough northern stuff.
But some part of his upbringing just sort of really compels him to try and
bring himself
out of this situation.
Starts making music.
Gets super successful.
Does this fire in the booth with Charlie Sloth that gets like 35 million plays.
And he starts boxing.
Boxing is like one of his salvages.
It's one of his safe havens.
And it's the thing, one of the things that's kept him very disciplined
throughout his whole
life.
So he starts accumulating some money.
And he buys a nice house in Manchester.
Very, very nice house.
And the local kids nearby sort of starting to take a little bit of notice.
Maybe they know who he is as an artist.
And word starts to get around that he's living there.
And there'd been some concerns, some security concerns for a little while.
And he gets a phone call from his girlfriend at the time.
She says, there's some men here.
They're trying to break in.
And they're in a van.
And as she's on the phone, he hears the glass shatter of this house.
His mom's in the house.
And his girlfriend at the time is in the house.
He's driving around.
He's got his sister in the car.
So he drives back in the car.
This is a guy who's like world famous as a rapper.
Right?
This would be like happening to like the British 50 Cent or the British Jay-Z
or P. Diddy or something like that.
Drives back, getting down the driveway toward this house.
There's a blockade.
There's boulders that have been laid out in front.
So he knows that there's going to be an ambush of some kind.
And he sees this guy in the bushes on the right with a brick.
This guy's hiding in the bushes waiting.
And he thinks he's going to throw it through the window.
But he doesn't.
He wants to hit him with the brick.
So Bugsy stops the car, opens the door.
And immediately, he's massively into Jordan Peterson, personal development,
self-growth.
It's like an odd blend of rough upbringing, self-discipline, and sort of
transcendent personal growth.
And he gets out of the car and points at the guy.
And he goes, no way is that you.
Is that a blue T-shirt?
And the guy's like, what?
And as he's doing it, because he's been training so much, he's coming toward
him, distracting him.
The same way as I go, what's on that T-shirt there?
Immediately, you go.
And before he knew it, Bugsy's hit him, spun him around.
Brick's fallen out of his hand because this guy hasn't set his feet in time.
It's a problem of having a big weapon.
Bugsy said, like, you need to set yourself and you need to be able to throw it.
Like, it's good because it can hurt someone, but it's slow and it's cumbersome
and you can't move as fast.
And he's training every day, every single day, no matter whether he's rapping,
he's on tour,
he's training and he's boxing and he's fighting and he's sharp.
He knows his distance.
Hits this guy.
They have a scrap.
Bugsy wins.
Moves the stuff out of the way.
Gets back in the car.
Drives in.
Jamie, can you just CCTV search?
Search Bugsy Malone CCTV.
So there's footage from his house of when he pulls up in the Mercedes.
And so go back, back, back a little bit.
Yeah, just to the start.
So this is him pulling in, in his car, having just beaten someone up.
This is a van filled with guys, gets out of the car, pulls his top off and then
sprints
to go and get the rest of the guys that are waiting outside.
That is not the behavior of a dude who gives a single fuck.
This is the British Jay-Z ripping his top off and then sprinting out to try and
chase people
away.
And the real kicker of it, there was like tons of guys, not in that van, but in
some other
van behind.
The real kicker was the dudes that he fought, they pressed charges.
They pressed charges against him.
Because he's rich.
They pressed charges because he fucked them up.
And then at, at the...
Oh, they pressed charges.
They pressed charges against him.
Did they actually wind up going to court over this?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No.
Yep, went to court.
And this is, it was so brilliant.
He told this story to me and he said, uh, it was the middle of COVID.
And people weren't sure whether venues were going to be open.
And he had this tour.
This tour was going on, but it wasn't selling as well.
No tours were selling as well as he would have liked.
So he spoke to his lawyer before his lawyer went to go and do the not guilty
verdict.
And they had two statements that were ready.
And he came out.
He said, very pleased to say that Aaron Davies has been acquitted today.
He's not been found guilty.
He is now getting back to preparing for his upcoming tour and tickets are
available now.
He used, he used his, his lawyer did a mid-roll ad read for his tour as part of
his not guilty
verdict, having just beaten up like a van filled with blokes, one of whom
looked like
a plumber.
It was your plumber comment that got me thinking about it.
Like just some white belt that decided, you know, some guy that thinks he's a
bit hard,
like he's had a little bit of a throw and this guy's training every single day,
sharpening
his skills.
And he's been doing it since he was a kid.
That's hilarious.
And he's dangerous and he's nasty.
It's wonderful when a story like that works out.
In America, people have guns.
It's a different, different sport.
Have you looked at appropriate force in the UK?
Do you know what that is?
The use of appropriate force?
There's a lot of that in America as well.
Okay.
Depending state, state by state.
They have different, there's different standards that different states impose.
Like Florida has to stand your ground.
Florida, you just get away with killing people.
California, it's very different.
They were actually trying to pass a thing in California saying it's your
obligation to
leave your house if someone breaks into it.
I don't know if that got through.
It's that house now.
It's your obligation to not shoot them, that you can't harm them because they're
just trying
to steal something.
They're not trying to harm you.
Like the assumption should be that they're not trying to harm you.
Exactly.
I've had this conversation with people on the podcast, actually with Tommy
Chong.
It was a mind-numbing conversation that, you know, you should not think of this
person
as trying to attack you, that their life is not less valuable than yours.
It's just as valuable as your life.
You shouldn't take their life.
Despite the fact that they're on your property.
Despite the fact that, I can't talk.
Despite the fact, rather, that historically a lot of people have broken into
people's houses
and killed them.
It's happened over and over and over again.
You're just assuming that this time is going to be different because they just
want your
watch or whatever.
Like, fuck off.
Like, this is, that's a dumb way to live.
Like, you have to be able to protect yourself.
There's crazy people.
That's a real thing.
Yeah.
I think the appropriate force thing becomes interesting in the UK where you don't
have
as many guns because there's more levels of weapon in between nothing, just
hands.
Baseball bat and samurai sword.
Yeah, this guy's got a brick, so you're allowed a brick, but if you bring a gun
to a knife
fight, that's not appropriate force.
Oh.
You know what I mean?
You only had a knife.
Yes.
You cheated.
Yeah.
It's like, I don't know, it's very gentlemanly.
Oh, God.
So stupid.
Well, the UK's got, like, some odd archaic laws.
Like, the distance between the front benches in the House of Commons is the
same as two broadswords
held out at arm's length.
Which is just so funny.
Well, that's also why you guys drive on the other side of the road, right?
Why?
I think you drive on the left side of the road so you can use your right arm to
slash each
other.
No way.
With a sword.
Yeah, I believe that's what it is.
What, in case you were jousting in a vehicle?
In case someone, if you're on a horse or if you're in a car, you want to be
able to get
them on that side.
That's the strong side.
Someone told me that when I was over there.
I hope I'm not incorrect.
I like it as a story.
Whether it's right or wrong, I don't care.
There's a reason that women's shirts button from the left and not the right.
Have you ever accidentally put your wife's hoodie on instead?
It goes in the...
Middle Ages, you knew you were going to meet when traveling on horseback.
Most people are right-handed.
So if a stranger passes to the right of you, your right hand would be free to
use your sword
if required.
Yeah.
That's why you guys do it with your cars.
Well, this is the problem.
If you don't have a medieval country like ours, you end up driving on the other
side
of the road.
But yeah, so women's shirts, if you've ever accidentally put your wife's hoodie
on or something, zipped
it up.
Women's shirts button from the other side.
They button from the left, not the right.
The reason for that is that when buttons were first introduced in the 1700s,
they were mostly
for the aristocracy and the aristocratic women were dressed by mostly right-handed
servants.
Whoa.
So they dressed them this way.
So the women's shirts, button from...
If you put a...
Still to this day?
Same thing.
Dude, I promise you now.
Anybody that's watching, any guy that's watching, go and put your wife's shirt
on.
This is how it begins.
Go and put your wife's shirt on and see.
It doesn't fold that way.
Right.
It folds the other way.
That's crazy.
And you have to push the buttons through with your left hand.
How fucking cool is that?
That's crazy.
And it's the same with hoodies.
You know, we zip our hoodies with our right hand.
Girls zip their hoodies with their left hand.
Oh, wow.
So fucking cool.
Weird.
One other element is the gentleman of the days, they would have a sword on the
left hip
drawn by the right hand.
The way that our shirts are put together at the moment, it can't get caught in
the folds
because the left fold is over the top of the right.
So as you draw it, there's no chance that the hilt would get caught.
So if you're a left-handed person, you have to wear women's clothes.
That might actually explain more than you think.
Probably.
So this is an example of path dependency.
So what you're talking about, like some shit from the past that influences the
future.
QWERTY keyboards.
Right.
Same thing.
Yeah.
I know that one.
Typewriters.
Yeah.
So it was made to be inefficient to slow people down.
And if you take a normal typer from a QWERTY keyboard and put them on some
other formulation
that's allowed, they're like 50 to 70% faster.
So we're still using a designed to be inefficient keyboard because if you type
too quickly on a
typewriter and you use letters that are close together, the typewriter jams.
The letters that were used most frequently were put out onto the edges and it
was less often
that you were going to put two next to each other so that they wouldn't jam.
I don't know a single person who switched to a different type of keyboard.
Do you?
No.
No one.
But they do make them.
Lex Friedman's got some like weird super nerd things.
Oh, but his is just separated.
He's just got to separate it.
It's still QWERTY.
Is it like this?
Yeah.
Oh.
It's almost like a...
Yeah, that's kind of interesting, but that's not the point.
The point is the layout of the keys in a regular keyboard.
There's other layouts.
So it's not just QWERTY.
It's not available.
You could actually buy keyboards that have the most efficient layout.
I forget what the name of it is.
I think it might be the Dactyl thing.
Yes.
Hot Swap Dactyl.
I think that's it.
At the very top.
I think that's it.
I think.
Up and right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hot Swap Dactyl.
That's just for sale though.
What is it?
It's still a QWERTY keyboard.
It's still QWERTY.
I can't get away from it.
So there's...
Other layouts.
If you could search what styles of key...
What is the most efficient layout of keys for typing speed?
That's what I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I ask.
That's what's coming up.
This shit is way faster than typing.
Okay.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
But that's a different thing.
It's fastest keyboard for typing.
Wow.
You can type...
Hold on.
Let's look at that for a second.
You haven't seen this before?
No.
Yeah.
It's like the directions they...
I'll show you on a demo.
Wow.
Caracorder.
This is crazy.
And each one of those is a letter?
And some of them...
You can like make words real fast.
Oh.
So this is a...
What we're talking about right here is a totally different device than a
keyboard.
But what I mean is like there's another keyboard layout that super nerds use.
Like a tiny amount.
Like the kind of people that have like...
They have those Google phones that don't connect to the servers.
You know?
Didn't Eric Prince make those?
No.
That's a different one.
He's got his own.
Yeah.
I...
Just that path dependency thing.
Like shit from the past that's still influencing us now.
Yeah.
While your shirt is going in the other direction.
That's pretty crazy.
Okay.
So here it is.
This is a new class of peripheral device that allows ordinary people to type at
the speed
of thought.
Whoa.
Breathing your keyboard can and much more.
Whether you're coding, gaming, designing, or just typing.
Whatever you do, do it at the speed of thought.
Hmm.
I wonder how much of a learning curve there is to figuring out how to type with
that thing.
Because it looks pretty dope.
Ooh, they have different ones.
Scroll up to that image at the top.
That's a different one.
I think it's the same.
It's just a...
But it's shaped different.
Yeah.
Just like made out of metal.
Right.
But it's a different shape.
You probably put your hand...
Well, maybe.
Put your hands on it the same way.
It's very different.
The other one was curved.
The problem that you have is like...
Is this the new one?
The forge.
The master forge.
Let me see what you got here.
It's not showing anybody to use it.
That's how I was trying to find a good way to use it to show you how they type
words really
fast.
I think it's a matter of time before you're typing with your brain anyway.
I think this is like learning to code.
Yeah.
Well, I think about this with prompt engineering.
Like if AI gets progressively better and better, the idea of being a prompt
engineer, I understand
how to get the AI to do what I want, is a job that only shortly after it
becomes a job
might be made completely obsolete.
100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not going to work.
That's like opening up a Blockbuster video in 1999.
It's like...
It's too...
You don't...
They've so little time.
Well, the problem that you have with the QWERTY keyboard thing is it's a
coordination
problem.
Like if you want to borrow your friend's laptop, unless everybody decides, we're
going to switch
to the better type of keyboard and we're going to do it now.
There you go.
Finally.
Oh, here he goes.
He's moving it.
He's typing it right there.
He's typing these words as he's looking at the screen.
Holy shit.
How's he doing that?
That guy's a fucking genius.
It's up to like 300 words a minute.
I think people can get to.
And...
But here's the question.
Like how do you learn?
Do you have to play a game?
Do you ever do that?
Like Mavis Bacon's typing?
Do you ever do that?
No.
What was that?
It's fun.
It's a game you play.
It teaches you how to type.
Yeah, you like type things that they tell you to type.
They time you like a race.
It's like fun.
So he's like hitting all these letters at once, I think, with his fingers.
You can see them popping up and then it creates the word.
I think it's a little bit of a mixture of like, remember the T9 typing you
could do on your phone?
Yeah.
And you could like, you could hit four numbers and you'd know what word it
would be.
And if it wasn't that word, you'd hit next like three times.
You could get really good at that.
I think it's a little, I think it's a mixture.
Like predictive.
Could you rewind that again so I could see him doing that?
Is that, can you give me some volume so I can hear what he's saying?
There's no question that typing sentences at over 200 words per minute is
extremely satisfying,
but does typing fast actually transfer to productivity in the real world?
That's the question we'll be answering together in today's video.
Does typing speed really matter?
That's nuts.
Wow.
He just did that.
Wow.
And he made but large.
Yeah.
Like he, he made it all caps.
Like how.
I suppose this is kind of.
I need to know if that dude's Rain Man.
You know what I'm saying?
I need, I need to ask him some questions about math.
Yeah.
I, uh, it's mad to think how quickly we can think and how slowly we can
communicate that
to other people, even with speech.
Right.
Can you just please search, is there a more efficient key layout than QWERTY?
Because that's what I'm looking for.
Because I know there is.
Because I, I remember I, I went down a rabbit hole with this and I was really
thinking about
trying it.
And then I was like, God, what are you doing?
You'd have to change your phone.
Yeah.
And it wasn't phone days.
This was way before phone days.
This was the days of just typing more efficient keyboard layout than QWERTY.
That's it.
Dvorak.
That's it.
Puts about 60 to, uh, 65 to 70 cent of keystrokes in the home row versus, uh,
roughly 30 on QWERTY.
So fingers move much less.
So, uh, now that we know that, can you, uh, search for images of Dvorak
keyboard?
So that's what the keys look like right there.
Oh, that's it right there.
See how different that is?
Wow.
Yeah.
Very different.
How long do you reckon it would take you to write out a short email?
It would take forever.
My stupid fingers would go right back to where they always go.
You know, that was one of the things that I learned really early on, um, from
teaching
martial arts.
I was, I way would rather, I would way rather teach someone who didn't know
anything than
teach someone who learned things wrong.
Because someone who learned things wrong, it's very difficult to correct their
technique.
They, they have a mode in their mind that they shift to when they're panicky or
when they're
being pressured, they always go back to the bad technique.
Always.
It's very hard to get someone to learn technique correctly when they know it
incorrectly.
You got to re-teach them everything.
You see it with every, you see it with pool.
There's a certain tendencies that people have with their arm being out that a
lot of people
just accept the bad relationship between your elbow and your, as long as it's
consistent.
Even though it's more inefficient, it's going to add extra English to the ball
and spin
and all these different things and probably make you less accurate.
Maybe better that than try to like make your arm drop down and hang 90% because
it'll feel
so alien.
But that's way less than in martial arts.
In martial arts, like God, if you learn how to throw a sidekick with your knee
down versus
your knee up, it's so hard to, to do it the other way.
When you're being pressured, you're always going to do it the wrong way and you're
not going
to have the correct amount of power.
And those tendencies that are burned into you, I've been typing for 30 fucking
years.
Like they are, I don't have to look at a keyboard.
I can just talk to you and I can type and I'm not really good, but I'm good
enough.
You know, I'm, I don't look at the keys.
Like I don't have to pick.
Like I used to go, just drive me crazy watching videos of Hunter Thompson who
never learned
how to type.
He would type like this.
He would type with like one finger at a time, poke and peck.
I'm like, dude, it would take so little time for you to just put your fucking
fingers there
and learn how to do that.
Right.
He never did.
He poked and pecked his way to some of the greatest fucking books ever.
Maybe that was a performance enhancer, but yeah, I, uh, well, he was poking and
pecking
when he was on Coke.
That's true.
Yeah.
It's probably for the best that you didn't type more quickly.
Imagine the crazy shit that would have come out of him now.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
You ever seen him type?
It's so frustrating.
No.
Can we see?
Is it videos?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Find Hunter Thompson typing.
Yeah.
You'll, you'll see it.
It's pokey, pecky.
And Johnny Depp actually mimicked it really accurately in Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas.
When he was sitting in front of the thing, like pecking, yeah, like doing his
Hunter Thompson
impression.
And his Jack Sparrow thing.
Pecking and poking.
Yeah.
Well, your brain can think at about 4,000 words a minute.
And that's the same rate of fire as an M134 machine gun.
Wow.
Uh, so anything, even, and it's your point of very soon, I think that keyboards
are going
to be obsolete.
When you think about how much fucking fidelity and speed is lost with you going
from brain
to thumb.
Yeah.
Like, I wonder what another type of keyboard is.
Yeah.
And you've got to think, okay, what, how do I convert this into words?
Where am I going to go?
Right.
Can the app type that?
Oh, crap, man.
Fucking keyboard, keyboard, keyboard.
Yeah.
But it is so slow.
Yeah.
Compared with when we just get neural linked up to each other.
Yeah.
And I'm sure you've seen that demonstration where the two guys are sitting
across from each
other and they have the headsets on.
They're asking each other a question and answering the questions without using
words.
No, I've not seen that.
You haven't seen that?
No.
All right.
We'll show you that next.
Show you that next.
What were we just looking up now?
I can't, I find pictures of him typing, but not video of him typing.
Oh, God.
I don't see that.
Let me get to the bathroom.
Let me get to the bathroom.
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
It's time to pee.
Where were we?
Somebody typing like a grandma.
Yeah.
The Hunter Thompson thing.
He couldn't really find it.
You got Johnny Depp doing it?
Okay.
This is how he typed.
This is a completely accurate.
This is a great video, by the way.
You should listen to this.
It's really, it's an amazing piece.
You got to cut it out?
It's never coming again.
It's not a good YouTube thing.
Okay.
We'll cut it out.
But that's it.
That's how he, that's how he poked.
He poked and pecked like that.
So that's how Hunter Thompson used to type.
Out of his fucking bird.
Just poking.
Telepathic video, too.
Oh, you found that?
Okay.
I'm not going to look it up.
Okay.
This is the crazy one.
The telepathic thing is nuts because they have these headsets on.
These guys are laughing because they're asking each other questions and they're
answering
the questions and they hear the answer in their heads.
They hear the, the other person hears the question and then they hear the
answer.
So it's a new, I think, I don't know if it's a product or what, but it's called
Alter Ego.
This is the same guy who developed that device where he could look things up
without opening
his mouth or talking and just sort of like mimicking the words in his.
We all have moments when it's sort of doing the same thing.
I'll sort of skip past it.
So he's talking, he's showing it on his own here.
The cool part is when he brings in someone else to talk to.
And this guy also has it.
So they're communicating.
Where do you want to get lunch after this?
He's saying, he said, for the demo, they hooked it up to audio so that the
video could hear it.
So they're laughing because their words are being...
It doesn't matter where Arnav and I are.
It could be a noisy environment...
So would they hear this?
Yeah.
It could be a noisy environment or a quiet office.
Having a direct conversation is possible without saying a word.
The signals Alter Ego detects aren't affected by environmental noise.
So even if you're walking past a wind tunnel or a construction zone, what you
want to say will always get across.
It's like having infinite noise cancellations.
Exactly what people say happens when they encounter aliens.
It's exactly, exactly.
Someone's talking in your head and you hear it.
So imagine this technology scaled out a thousand years and they probably don't
need the other person to have a headset anymore.
And they just...
Would make for an interesting podcast.
Yeah, I guess.
And you could just tune in and nobody needs to actually listen to anything.
So where's the sound?
Are they hearing the sound in a set of headphones?
It's hard.
Not headphones.
No.
They're...
It's...
They know it.
Right?
They're not hearing it.
I honestly...
I understand how...
I don't understand, but I get it.
Because if it was really loud, then you wouldn't be able to hear it.
So yeah, for the demo we just watched, they have hooked up to a speaker so we
can hear what they're hearing.
But I think, if anything, it's got to be some sort of jaw induction.
But I don't know that for sure.
Well, there's weird earphones that you could put on that don't go in your ear.
They go behind your ear and they send the sound into your dome.
People use that for running, right?
So they can still hear the sound that's going around.
Yeah.
So they can hear the creeps hiding in the bushes.
So they can hear the creeps so they can get ready for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know Cam Haynes, right?
My buddy Cam?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
His brother almost got killed by a mountain lion.
Crazy story.
He put it on his Instagram.
Um, the day, the next day, like he talked about the story, what happened.
He was running and there was a mountain lion in the bushes.
And at first he thought it was a coyote.
He just saw the eyes.
He yelled and then stood up and he realized it was a cat.
And it started running after him.
And he's running at night.
It was in California.
And he kicked rocks at it.
He screamed at it.
And, uh, ultimately there's some dogs barking.
And he thinks maybe the dogs barking scared the mountain lion off him.
But he said it was like, I couldn't have used, this is his quote.
He said, I couldn't have used bear spray even if I had it because it would have
got on me.
That's how close it was.
So it was right there.
Like right on him.
So it was the most scared he's ever been in his life.
I've seen that video of the guy tracking backward.
Oh, yeah.
As it's coming toward him.
It's aah!
It's coming swinging.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!
The only thing that gives me comfort about that video, if I was there, is like,
that thing just wants to scare me.
It's not trying to kill me.
It wants to scare me.
That's a mother that's trying to get you away from the cubs.
Because the way it's doing it, it's throwing its arms in the air in a very
intimidating way.
If an animal was trying to kill you, it wouldn't do that.
It'd be running full clip at you and just dive on your neck.
That's the difference between a cat that wants to kill you and something that's
trying to scare you off.
So the problem is you're backing up, right?
And the instincts of these predators, like if you throw a ball of yarn by a
kitten, they dive on that ball of yarn.
They can't help themselves.
And that's the thing about you backing up or even you running.
It's like you're exciting their prey drive.
Yeah, they're going to keep tracking you.
Right.
So they tell you to stand tall and be loud and make a lot of noise.
But there's a fine line between you being a threat and then them being scared
off.
Like you being something they have to deal with, depending upon the distance
between each other.
Oh, that makes so much sense.
Yeah.
Have you ever had any run-ins?
I have never had like an encounter like that.
But I did in the wild see an enormous mountain lion once.
But fortunately, it was from inside of a truck.
Yeah.
Me and my friend Colton, we were in Utah.
We were taking this turn and it was at dusk.
So the sun was setting and he stops the truck and he goes, look at that cat.
And I go, where?
And we'll look over and I see the glowing eyes from the setting sun.
The glowing eyes are reflecting underneath this tree.
And it's got this pumpkin head, this big fucking, these mandible muscles that
just crush things.
And these massive forearms.
And it's just sitting, it's a big cat, man.
Like I've seen two other mountain lions before, but they were small.
They were like a dog sized.
This thing was fucking big.
Do you reckon you'd be able to take a dog sized mountain lion or are you still
dead?
No, you're dead.
Yeah.
I mean, a cat sized cat might fuck you up.
A house cat might fuck you up.
A bobcat might fuck you up.
A mountain lion will kill you.
You'd have to be an extraordinary person with weapons to survive a mountain
lion hand to hand fight.
You'd have to be an extraordinary person who's really fighting to survive.
And you won't, you don't like, you don't panic at all.
You have to be willing to stay calm.
This thing's going to tear your arms apart.
It might tear your face apart.
What are the basic, I mean, you must, you hunt all the time.
And you do, was it like end of September?
You went and did another big one last year.
Yeah, elk hunting.
You must have been given whatever the safety briefing that you have at the
start of an aircraft taking off is of, hey man, if you see a this, if you see a
this, or if you see a this, these are the ways that you're supposed to behave.
No, we don't get any safety briefings.
But you must have learned it in the past as a part of, I'm going to go out
fucking.
Safety briefing.
Carry a gun.
Bring a gun with you.
Point at a big scary thing.
Even if you're bow hunting, carry a pistol, especially if you're in bear
country.
If you're in bear country, you can't, you can't depend on this, this mist
making their eyes hurt, keeping them off of you because it might not work.
Or just run through it.
Yeah, there was a recent case in BC where a bear mauled 11 people and they used
bear spray on it.
It didn't work.
It's real.
I think it was a teacher protecting his students.
So shout out to that teacher.
He got fucked up.
But they tried bear spray.
Bear spray is not effective.
My friend John, who lives up in Alberta, he used bear spray on a grizzly once.
He said it walked right through it like it was nothing.
Is bear spray basically like hardcore pepper spray?
Yeah.
It's like vicious pepper spray.
But you're just going to get a mad bear, you know?
Why don't they make more hardcore bear spray then?
It's as hardcore as it gets without killing you.
Right.
You know, if it gets on you.
If it's that noxious, noxious, yeah.
It's just supposed to be a deterrent.
And sometimes it can work.
Like sometimes maybe they're just curious.
And you spray them and they're like, fuck this guy.
And they get out of there.
But maybe sometimes no.
You know, because it's like tasing a guy.
You ever see a guy get tased and they just fucking run through it?
There's guys who get tased and they just go stiff and they fall down.
And I've seen other guys get tased where they rip it right out of their arm.
Four people, including children, were hospitalized.
A teacher on crutches, a second adult with bear spray, and a third person who
punched and kicked a grizzly despite serious injuries are being praised for
their actions.
Four people, including children, were hospitalized Thursday after a bear attack
on students and teachers in the Nux Walk First Nation while out on a school
trip near the...
Boy, I'm going to fuck this up.
Aqualta School east of the remote community.
Oh, so it was a very remote place.
Yeah.
Bear spray didn't do anything, man.
It said, look, nothing phased it.
Didn't do anything to the bear.
Two cans of spray in the eyes of the animal.
Look at that.
It said, the teacher unloaded two cans of bear spray into the eyes of the
animal and it didn't do anything.
It blows my mind that people who have been through something that scary.
When the kids were getting attacked, one of my cousins who had his skull ripped
ran towards the bear and jumped on it with his bare hands.
Holy shit.
It's pretty hardcore.
That's hard.
Well, that's primal life.
That's survival in a real situation where your language goes away.
Another lady, a teacher with crutches, was whacking it, hitting it in the eyes,
the face, the head for minutes.
And then the bear finally...
Imagine being on crutches.
Oh, my God.
Well, you're just...
It's just survival.
It's so reptilian.
It's like a savage, savage moment.
That's what blows my mind about these situations where emotions are running so
high, how people are able to come back with any kind of memory at all.
Right.
Because that amount of adrenaline just completely warps people's memories.
I was learning about this case from Australia in the 70s.
This lady gets attacked inside of her home.
So a guy breaks into the house and assaults her inside of her home.
And she identifies this TV psychologist, this guy called Donald Thompson, says
this was the person who assaulted me.
The TV psychologist?
TV psychologist.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So she knew this guy from the TV.
He was the guy that assaulted me.
That night, the police go and they arrest Donald Thompson, take him in.
The next day, there's a lineup.
And the woman positively identifies him.
And Donald Thompson's like, that couldn't have been me.
Because I was actually on television in front of a live audience at the time.
The arresting officer scoffs at him and basically says, you might as well have
Jesus and the Queen of England as your alibis as well.
Like, this is ridiculous.
We know that she's been assaulted.
We've got photographic evidence of the marks on her.
We've done a DNA test, which is going to come back soon.
She's positively identified you from the lineup.
And she called you out before you were in the lineup as well.
Like, you're bang to rights.
But there was a wrinkle that when they actually looked at the timing, he was on
TV at the time that this was happening.
And what had occurred was the woman had had that television program on while
the attacker broke in and sexually assaulted her.
Whoa.
And it imprinted that guy's face in her memory.
Bingo.
Wow.
Blended the attacker's identity with what she was seeing on TV while it
happened.
Wow.
And the kicker, Donald Thompson, was on TV to discuss an area of psychological
speciality that he had, which was the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
Whoa.
Dude.
Whoa.
Did you see that, um, there's, someone sent me this video.
Give me, pause this for a second.
Darren Brown, the sidekick.
Have you seen the one?
British dude.
Yes.
Poor Bob.
Have you seen the one where he, he got a guy to assassinate Stephen Fry?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fuck.
Yeah, like got, like MKUltra'd a guy to take out an assassin.
What are called, like, the jump or something, or the push?
Yeah.
The push, was it the push?
I don't remember, but I watched a clip of it the other day.
I'm like, this is, this is so crazy that you can actually do this to someone.
And it just, and the, the point of the article that I was reading on, or the,
the post on X was, you're, you're telling me that MKUltra has not figured out a
way to do this?
Mm-hmm.
But the, you, you, you can get a guy to do it with cameras, to do it on Stephen
Fry, the comedian.
And it, obviously, they, he didn't really kill him, but.
I had a, oh.
Yeah, here it is.
This is a show.
Yeah.
So, the assassin with Stephen Fry.
So, he, somehow or another, gets this guy to do it.
Um, I guess we can't play it.
Yeah.
But, the point is.
Did he use a gun?
Fake gun?
Um, I don't remember what he did.
Yep.
Oh, shit.
They acted it all out, too.
That is so crazy.
That's crazy.
That's so crazy.
So, that guy really thought he killed Stephen Fry.
Imagine being in the crowd.
How about those people next to him who didn't even flinch?
I'd be like, what kind of psychos am I next to them?
She's the one whispering to watch.
She whispers.
She's like, good job.
I think she's the one who set him off.
Oh.
She's in on it.
Now, here's the question.
Is this, can anybody.
She took the gun.
Yeah.
Can anybody fall into that kind of a hypnosis?
Is that only certain people that are suggestible?
There's high, medium, and low suggestibility people, and there's a couple of
tests.
Dr. David Spiegel from Stanford, he's like one of the world leaders in hypnosis,
and he
explained some people are more susceptible to hypnosis than others.
I have to assume that Darren will have done a profile, and this guy is like
really, really
susceptible.
Okay.
What's that about?
Why is that around?
Susceptibility to hypnosis?
Yeah.
So I think that dopamine plays a big part of it, and if you process dopamine
more quickly,
you are more susceptible.
I process dopamine really slowly.
I know that from doing some genetic tests.
So I know that my susceptibility to hypnosis would be lower.
There's some personality traits that make you more or less likely as well.
I think agreeableness versus disagreeableness is one of them.
I think there'll be a sex difference too.
I don't know why it's there.
It's kind of the same as saying like why are some people taller than others?
Like they just are, and there's like a byproduct that comes along for the ride.
But it's a weird thing to be able to manipulate a person's mind and to have it
so clearly.
I mean, this is the clearest example of it you're ever going to see.
He just shot a famous person in a room full of people.
It does feel like a weird backdoor.
Yeah.
That's what I'm getting at.
Like it's like those voting systems that can be hacked.
Or like those cell phone towers they buy from China that turn out to be
transmitted.
Just sending everything back to China.
I think.
Why does it exist?
That David Spiegel guy taught me that 25% of people that do a single session
intervention
for smoking cessation quit for life.
From hypnosis?
One session, 25%.
Get this.
And I think if you do a couple of sessions, that number starts to go up and go
up.
So hypnosis is this really weird backdoor into the human psyche.
But yeah, the memory thing is fucking crazy when you think about what do I
actually know?
Like how do I know that this thing happened in the past?
So most people understand there's like two types of memory failure.
One is I can't remember that thing.
And the other is I remember it, but I remember it incorrectly.
Right.
That's broadly two categories.
And I think people are really happy with the first one because there's tons of
shit that
has happened to you.
And you go, yeah, I forget my memory or whatever, whatever.
But your experience of your own memory is your only experience of your own
memory.
So for you to be able to say my recollection is wrong, what does that mean?
That's like saying this dimension that I'm in is wrong.
So a lot of the time, I think people struggle to understand how often their
memory of a thing
is present but inaccurate.
So for instance, there's only 17 colors that we remember on average.
We don't remember.
Like if I asked you what colors are tomato?
Well, I would say red, but really it's not.
If it's heirloom.
Typically red, but it's like a reddy orange sort of color.
Sure.
But those are the bullshit tomatoes, like a real heirloom tomato because all
kinds of
different purple-ish sort of tomato politics.
That's a real tomato, though.
That's what a tomato really looks like.
Sorry.
I know.
Supermarket tomato.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kind of reddish, orange.
Reddish, reddish, orange-ish.
But most people would default to the red thing.
Right, but not really.
Yeah, but it's not.
And we sort of, we adjust.
So if you're the guy.
Like, we're white people.
Uh-huh.
But we're not really white.
Well, I mean, you were a bit flush.
Yeah, but we're not white.
You know what I'm saying?
Comparatively white.
My friend Jamie, not this one, but another one.
He's from England, and he's white like paper.
And when my daughter first met him, that's what she said, she goes,
Mommy, he's so white.
And she goes, yeah, he's white.
And she goes, no, no, no, he's white like paper.
Well, if you live in England, you will be referred to as white like paper.
Yeah.
If you've got, I mean, this must be the same with fighters.
Even if you forget the TBI, head trauma-y stuff, just the dump of adrenaline
from going through.
I mean, you must have done this when you've done your biggest shows.
And you go out on stage.
Yeah, you don't remember much.
You come back and you're like, I've worked my whole life to get to the stage
where I can achieve this thing.
And in the achievement of this thing, I kind of wasn't really there.
Well, I was there for it, but in retrospect, I can't really recall where I was.
And it's this odd duality that you want to be in a flow state.
Yeah.
Because it's very fulfilling.
It's where you're at your best.
This word's just coming out of you perfectly.
And when you look back, you're like, I don't know if I was there fully.
I feel like I was kind of absent.
Well, it's not that you're absent, but that you're empty.
You empty out all your expectations and you're on it for the ride.
You're not really piloting it as much as you're just like making sure it doesn't
hit the rocks.
You're there for the ride.
The thing takes over.
And I think that's the case with everything.
That's the case when you're in the flow state of anything you're doing.
When you're really – like you're – the more you think about you being there,
which is what you have to do if you're there, you're thinking about you.
So it's like wasted resources.
You're better off being empty and just like being a vessel and just like taking
this thing.
Like you've done the work already.
Like take it along for the ride.
Just go for the ride.
That's what it is.
And so the problem with that is if you don't record your set, sometimes you'll
say things that you don't remember, like that were really funny.
And you're like, oh, I had a totally different point that I went off and it
really worked, but I don't remember what it was.
If you don't record it, you're fucked.
The only way you can get it back is you have to get back to that exact spot and
hope it's still there for the next show.
Sometimes it will be.
Sometimes it will be.
It's waiting for you as a little gift.
Sometimes that angle pops up again.
You're like, oh, yeah, but why are we doing this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you're like, whew, I almost forgot it.
That must be a nightmare or must have been a nightmare before you could record
sets.
Yeah, but you've always been able to record sets.
That's one of the things I learned like really early on from this guy Mike Donovan.
It was one of like the big comics in Boston.
He goes, always record your sets because you never know when you're going to
say something.
And it will be lost forever if you don't have a recording.
There was a Scotty Scheffler, a golfer.
He won.
Jamie, you'll have seen this video.
I won golfer.
Yeah, can we get the – there's a New York sports video like cut.
He does this.
It's such a fucking cool explanation of what somebody who's got to the peak of
their sport,
the absolute pinnacle, like in the moments of winning.
And he just breaks the fourth wall open about kind of the hollowness of what
this is.
Really?
Yeah.
It's really fascinating.
What's the point, that thing?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's just such a fucking great explainer because we always assume – here
we go.
Let me hear this.
He might have just won the U.S. Open here too, by the way, which is like the
biggest event of the year.
It's fulfilling from a sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a
sense of like the deepest, you know, places of your heart.
You know, I think it's kind of funny.
I think, you know, I think I said something after the Byron this year about
like it feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament
for like a few minutes.
It only lasts a few minutes, that kind of euphoric feeling.
And like to win the Byron Nelson Championship at home, I literally worked my
entire life to become good at golf, to have an opportunity to win that
tournament.
And you win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister's there.
It's such an amazing moment.
And then it's like, okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner?
You know, life goes on.
Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have
in the game of golf yet?
I mean, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about because it's literally
worked my entire life to become good at the sport.
And to have that kind of sense of accomplishment I think is a pretty cool
feeling, you know, to get to live out your dreams is very special.
But at the end of the day, it's like I'm not out here to inspire the next
generation of golfers.
I'm not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world
because what's the point?
You know, this is not a fulfilling life.
It's fulfilling from a sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a
sense of like the deepest, you know, places of your heart.
You know, there's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going
to fulfill them in life.
And then you get there and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world
and then they're like, what's the point?
And, you know, I really do believe that because, you know, what is the point?
You're like, why do I want to win this tournament so bad?
That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis.
It's like showing up at the Masters every year.
It's like, why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly?
Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly?
I don't know because if I win, it's going to be awesome for about two minutes.
And then we're going to get to the next week and it's going to be like, hey,
you won two majors this year.
How important is it for you to win the FedEx Cup playoffs?
And it's just like, we're back here again, you know?
So we really do.
We work so hard for such little moments.
And, you know, I'm kind of a sicko.
I love putting in the work.
I love being able to practice.
I love getting out to live out my dreams.
But at the end of the day, sometimes I just don't understand the point.
That's honest.
That's what that is.
I love that video so much.
That's why he's so good.
I love that video so much.
I guarantee you that's why he's so good.
Because I guarantee you that guy has to be that honest with himself about
everything.
Otherwise, you'd never fix the hitch in your swing, you know?
You have to be honest about every single thing.
You have to be aware of all of it.
Every little weird fucking thing you do.
Why am I doing this?
Like, what is the point of this?
And then when you're done, like, yeah, I did it.
And then it's going to creep right back in.
Creep right back in.
Nike did a commercial after that.
And it's him with his son sort of kneeling down on the green.
And it says, you've already won.
And then I think the next slide is, but let's get another one.
And it's so fucking cool, dude.
There it is.
You've already won.
But another major never hurt.
That was a, bro.
Fucking unbelievable.
So I think I kind of become obsessed with people sacrificing what they want,
which is happiness, for the thing that's supposed to get it, which is success.
So they sacrifice the thing that they want, being happy in the moment.
They make themselves miserable in order to be able to achieve a thing so that
when they finally have sufficient success, they will allow themselves to be
happy.
It's like a very strange trade.
Imagine if you had some simultaneous equation and you just crossed off success
from both sides.
You would sort of be left with happiness.
I think that's unrealistic, right?
Because we need social validation from people.
And we want to be recognized.
We want to do stuff.
And we've got to put food on the table and social creatures and all the rest of
it.
But I think videos like that are really important for people to see when they
look up to someone about how much there is there at the end of the rainbow.
Like Elon was on Lex's show a couple of years ago and I think Lex asked him
some question like, how are you doing?
He replied and he said, people think they want to be me.
They do not want to be me.
They don't know.
They don't understand.
My mind is a storm.
I'm like, that's the price you need to pay to be Elon Musk.
I think that was on this podcast.
Was it this one?
Yeah, because I asked him, like, what is it like to be you?
Like, he's like, you wouldn't want to do it.
You wouldn't want to be me.
And you could tell, like, when you're in his eyes, like, there's, it's not a
normal thought process.
It's like this chaotic tornado of ideas that's running around in his head.
You know, and sometimes he spits them out on Twitter and they're not good.
Well, it's a problem when you're on the platform, right?
It's kind of like, I can say what I want.
It's my own house.
Well, he can, though.
But he's like that all the time.
He's fun.
He's like what I would want to see from a guy who's a super genius.
Like, a playful guy who wants to go to Mars, who's making, like, Jamie and I
went on a tour of Starship, Starbase.
What is it?
SpaceX?
Starbase?
Whatever the fuck it is.
We saw the launch.
We went to the SpaceX launch.
And so we got a tour of the rocket factory, which is fucking insane.
It's so much more insane than I thought it was going to be.
It's, I mean, I can't really, I don't know how much we could even say, but it
is nuts.
It's nuts.
And the sheer quantity of rockets that they're making is mind-blowing.
Like, you're like, I had no, I thought they had a couple rockets, you know,
just a couple rockets laying around.
They're just making rockets.
I'm pretty sure they've put more stuff into space, just that one company, than,
like, the entirety of the load that's being transported into space globally up
until now.
They put stuff in space for their competitors.
Yeah, they use their space rockets to put stuff in space for people that they're
in competition with.
Yeah, they take the money.
Show me the color of your money.
Yeah, we know how to do it.
We're better at it than you, so we'll do it.
Fucking unbelievable, dude.
It's kind of nuts.
I think about that, like, the sort of person you need to be to drive that,
though.
It's a different kind of person, right?
Like, that's what he wants to do, and that's what he desires to do.
And, you know, this gentleman talking about golf, like, this is a different,
that's a totally different thing, because he's in a competition all the time,
you know?
And it's really hard to just enjoy the process when you're in this competition,
where, especially if your livelihood depends upon a very specific result.
Like, you have to be better at this thing than everybody else.
Not just do the best yourself, but better than the other people that are also
doing their best.
So you're in this constant, just never escaping this pressure.
Fighters feel that, I think, more than anybody, because it's like an actual
physical person coming to harm you all the time.
And you're very outcome-focused.
Yeah.
And so it's all well and good, him saying, I love the process, I'm a bit of a
sicko, I like my training, so on and so forth.
And it's very different saying, I enjoy the process of training when you've
just won, than I enjoy the process of training when you've just come second or
fifth or 20th.
Right.
And especially if you're laid out flat on the canvas.
Yeah, especially that.
If that's you, the humiliation.
There's also the damage that was just done to you, where you might not, really
might not be the same again.
And there's certain fighters that you could point to one fight, and they never
recovered from it.
Melchick Taylor versus Julio Cesar Chavez is my personal one that I always
point to, because Julio Cesar Chavez knocked him out with, like, I think it was
a couple seconds left in the last round.
Stopped him.
And it was a fight that Melchick Taylor was winning a decision, but Julio Cesar
Chavez was wearing him down.
He was one of the greatest of all time, just ripping the body, constantly
attacking him, and eventually broke him down, had him in a corner, boom,
dropped him with a right hand.
And he got up, and the referee called the fight with, like, a couple of seconds
to go.
And it was a hugely controversial call.
But then when Melchick Taylor returned, he was never the same again.
He started slurring his words really badly.
So it's a physical issue, you think?
He's getting knocked out easily.
He's getting dropped easily.
He was just, it was gone.
It was all gone.
That fight just took it all out of him.
You see that.
So there's that, too.
It's not just you're going to lose a golf tournament.
Like, you might get your brains punched in.
Physical repercussions.
Huge physical repercussions.
For a vicious knockout, huge.
Some guys are never the same again and much more likely to get knocked out
again once they get knocked out really badly.
Who do you think of all of the people that you know has got the right balance
of is successful and is also having fun at the same time?
Because it seems like that's a trade that a lot of people can make where they
are successful but they sacrifice their happiness or they're kind of happy but
they're not pursuing external successes in the same way.
I would say comedians.
I would say Chappelle.
Chappelle is probably the most successful guy that's genuinely happy.
I mean, he certainly has a lot of moments and deep thought but when you're
hanging around with him, he's a lovely person.
He's a happy, lovely guy.
He's so sweet and so smart and so self-deprecating and interesting and so great
at what he does but when you're hanging out with him, it's just a hang.
He's just having fun, laughing a lot, got a great crew.
He always, you know, stays, keeps his circle tight with cool people and just
has a great time.
Have you deconstructed what that is?
Like what the contributing elements are?
I think he just, he's doing it.
Well, he's a very unusual person, right?
So you're talking about Dave Chappelle when Chappelle's show was the number one
comedy in the country.
It was the greatest sketch show.
I think it was the greatest sketch show of all time.
And it was only two seasons, right?
And then they offered him an enormous amount of money.
I think it was $50 million.
And they wanted to change a bunch of stuff.
They wanted him to stop saying certain words.
They wanted him to stop doing this, stop doing that.
And he didn't like it and he said, I quit.
And he went to Africa and just fucking hung out in Africa and then came back.
When he came back, he stopped doing stand-up.
He would do stand-up.
I remember one time he did stand-up in a park in Seattle.
So he showed up.
He had little speakers with him and a microphone and just did stand-up for free
to these people.
Just hung out in Seattle.
Just did stand-up.
And he would do stuff like that.
Show up places and just do stand-up occasionally.
I mean, for 10 fucking years.
He was like a monk on a walkabout.
How did he stay sharp?
Well, I don't think he ever stopped thinking about things the same way.
And he wasn't as sharp when he came back.
There's one famous video from him in Hartford, Connecticut, where he bombed.
But I always tell people stay out of Connecticut.
But just that's not the point.
It's like, you know, you think England's depressed?
But the point was then eventually he started touring regularly, got it all back,
plus then some, and then is now widely regarded as, if not the greatest of all
time, he's in the consideration.
There's like Pryor, him, Murphy, Kinison, Lenny Bruce, Carlin for some.
There's like a bunch of different people that you put into, like, the greatest
of all time.
And Dave is certainly in that group.
But he's very happy.
He's a happy guy.
I mean, certainly there's cultural issues that trouble him and life issues that
everybody goes through that trouble him.
But genuinely a pretty balanced guy for someone who's ultra successful.
But he's not stepping outside of his lane either.
What he's really concentrating on and almost exclusively concentrating on is
doing stand-up comedy.
And he will travel.
He will get in a jet and fly to New York unannounced and just show up at clubs
and start doing stand-up.
And he's done this forever.
One time I was in Colorado.
And I've known Dave forever.
I met Dave when he was like 19.
And I was like, I guess I was like 23 or 24.
We were both very young.
And even back then I was like, this kid is so talented.
It was remarkable how poised he was on stage as a 19-year-old kid.
He will just show up places.
I was in Colorado doing stand-up.
I was at the Comedy Works.
I get off stage.
It was on a Friday night.
I go into the green room.
And Dave's there.
He doesn't live in Colorado.
He just flew to Colorado because he knew I was going to be there and he wanted
to do comedy.
And so I go, do you want to do a set?
He goes, should I?
I go, yes.
I go, hold on.
So I went back on stage.
The show was over.
I go, everybody, yell at the people that are on the stairs to come back.
Dave Chappelle is here.
And half the crowd had already got up and left.
They all come back.
Everyone.
Everyone tells everyone.
They're yelling it up the stairs.
Dave Chappelle's here.
Come back.
I bring him on stage.
Everybody goes crazy.
And he does like 45 minutes.
Just fucking around.
It was back in the grab him by the pussy days.
So he had this whole, like, he said, grab him by the pussy.
This whole bit, like, it just happened that week.
And he had this, like, giant.
And he just wanted to just go places and do comedy.
So he's not doing it for money, right?
He's not getting paid to do this show.
He would show up in New York.
He's not getting paid to do the stand or wherever these clubs that he just
shows up in.
He's just working.
He's just working on the craft of comedy.
So his mindset is not try to make the most amount of money with stand-up.
Because if he was doing that, he would do an arena every night, right?
But he could do an arena every night of the week all over the world and make
way more money.
But that's not what he's doing.
What he's doing is working on the craft of comedy.
He has plenty of money, right?
He has all this money from all these Netflix specials.
They pay him an exorbitant amount of money.
And he makes all this money when he does do the big show.
So he's got plenty of money.
So it's not money.
It's just the craft.
It's just the art, the new set, the new bits, the new thing.
He has a guy who films all of his sets.
So he's got like a guy there filming every one of his sets and then they break
them down.
Like this rant, that rant.
Because he'll like ask questions to people in the audience.
He'll do like an hour and a half on stage just fucking around with a small
crowd somewhere.
But there's a gem in there somewhere.
And then they take that gem and then it expands upon it.
He'll go over it and break it down.
So his process is all just about the art.
And I think because of that, the love of the art is what keeps him happy.
I think if it's just the love of the money and you're constantly keeping score,
who's the number one touring act?
And you're looking at the fucking ticket master.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Kevin Hart's got me beat.
Son of a bitch.
I got to do two shows a night now.
Yeah, let's matinate.
Yeah, people get nutty.
They get nutty.
And they really do get themselves.
You see it in the podcast world as well.
People really get obsessed with the number of the rankings and like who's
making more and who's doing this.
Just do what you do.
Well, the problem that you're going to come up against there is you are going
to try and trade the outcome that you're looking for for the fuel that gets you
there.
The fuel that gets you there is how much you love what you're doing.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I've been thinking that's what gets you to the dance.
Correct.
I've been thinking so much about the shame of simple pleasures.
So there's this quote from a guy called Visekan Barasimi that says, I have not
yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.
And I just love the idea of it that most of us are kind of terrible accountants
of our own joy.
Yes.
That we only accept deposits when the transaction is large enough, right?
The day that we get married or the night that we play the main stage at Glastonbury
or sell out the arena, anything less than that.
Yeah.
And it doesn't even make the ledger.
So we treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency.
And we think like we have a kind of not disgust, but rejection of, oh, that
small thing made your week.
That tiny incident made your day.
You must not have a lot going on.
Like how weak and how small must your life be that seeing a cute golden retriever
this afternoon was like a fucking sick part of your day.
Yeah.
I think about Scotty Scheffler as a good example, him making it all the way to
the top.
And if all that you were doing was waiting for that final moment for this main
stage at Glastonbury, day that I get married, sell the business for $500
million, whatever.
You are forgetting almost all of the journey and then just cashing in at the
destination.
And there's the guy that's just won everything in all of fucking golf, like the
goat of right now, is saying it's fleeting.
Yeah.
It's really, really short.
It's not going to last for very long.
And that shame that people have, I certainly know that I do as well, that it
almost feels like a reflection on the smallness of my life if I take pleasure
in little things.
But when you take pleasure in little things, you don't just get more of them.
You get them right now.
You don't need to wait.
You don't need to like be a fucking world champion at winning the marshmallow
test, just delaying gratification so long that you never actually end up
getting any gratification.
Yeah.
The problem with that thought process is to achieve true greatness, you must be
mad.
Madness and greatness are inextricably connected.
You can't separate them.
To get true greatness, there has to be some demons.
There has to be a mad struggle in your mind.
And you have to want it so badly.
You have to want that result so badly that you are willing to put in more time,
more effort, more focus, more hours.
And just you don't get to smell the roses, man.
You don't.
You don't get to pet the puppies.
You do.
You're petting the puppy thinking about the thing that you do, thinking about
getting better because you need those resources.
It's like a demon that sort of climbs inside of you and wears you.
Yeah.
You know who Ronnie O'Sullivan is?
Yeah, the snooker player.
Yeah, the greatest of all time.
Like there's certain people in certain sports.
I'm going to send you something, Jamie.
So you see what a wizard this guy is.
I'm actually in the middle of his book.
My friend Billy Thorpe, who's a top flight pool player, recommended this book.
Oh, no.
I'm sorry.
Tyler Styler, who's another top flight pool player, like world class pool
player, recommended this book.
And I started the book and I can't stop it.
It's so good.
It's about it.
I think it's fairly recent because it's post-COVID.
I thought it was going – he recommended it because of the way Ronnie
describes picking the perfect cue, like the relationship that he has with the
cue.
But it is so eloquent and so – but the story – the whole story, the whole
book, rather, the story of his life is really more of – it's an exercise in
him trying to explain like what it's like to be this good and this mad.
Like he's a mad man.
Like watch this.
Watch this.
Watch what he does here.
This is crazy.
This is a performance here from O'Sullivan.
Now, if you don't know how difficult it is to make these balls – he doesn't
give a shit that that guy's in front of him, that the referee's in front of him.
Watch how quickly he does this.
I mean, he's making the audience laugh.
He's moving around that guy.
He can't miss.
This is – this is the zone personified.
He gets to a point in this where he's feeling so good he decides to start
shooting things one-handed.
Watch this.
Watch this.
One-handed.
Now he's doing it one-handed.
One-handed.
These are tiny little pockets.
He's shooting one-handed with English and getting position.
Everyone's going crazy.
I mean, that's how fucking good Ronnie O'Sullivan was.
Like –
Oh, my God.
The book is really about managing madness.
It's about him being sober and now he's – he's kind of taken a lot of that
insane competitive drive.
Now he runs.
Like he's a runner.
Like he runs long distances.
And he talks about that.
He meets up with his running club and they all get together and go on runs
together.
But it's like – it's just managing whatever the fuck that – and he's also
describing even in his prime.
He was saying – he was thinking he's worthless.
He's thinking he's not good enough.
He's going to fall apart.
He's going to choke.
He's going to this.
He's like all these demons are popping up.
And meanwhile, he's just – everybody's like terrified of him.
He shows up.
It's like, oh, the genius is here because he's a genius.
Like he's a snooker playing genius.
There's something about what he does that's just different than everybody else.
But the book is like – it's not just about like picking the perfect cue.
It's really about managing madness.
And everyone who's great is fucking crazy.
But you can – I think like Chappelle does.
You can take that greatness and just throw it into the thing you do and love it
while you're doing it.
You can't – it doesn't have to be a demon.
It doesn't have to be an adversary.
It could be like just this romantic affair of you being so fortunate to be able
to pursue this thing but maintaining that same level of enthusiasm.
I don't know if the same level of enthusiasm, though, can be maintained in
something that has like a winner and a loser, like a game where there's so much
riding on each shot.
Binary outcome.
Yes, versus art, which is like Dave goes to – he's already won.
They're going to – the show's sold out.
He knows how to do comedy.
He gets out there.
They all cheer.
He's got great material.
He can't wait to make them laugh.
He already won.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's the problem with turning the art into the competition.
Yeah.
Which you said there, right?
The rankings.
Well, that means that even if I did it and enjoyed it, but I'm number three or
whatever.
Yeah.
That's horrendous.
That's not good.
Yeah.
There's podcasts that game the system.
So there's podcasts that release multiple episodes a day and they're short
podcasts, so they have more downloads than everybody else.
And so –
Because downloads are counted to get you up.
Relatively speaking, you know, this – so it's like a scam.
And so like they'll be very highly ranked, but no one's ever watched or heard
of it.
I think –
But they'll get quoted in magazines as being the number two podcast in the
world.
Oh, dear.
But that's really what it is.
It's like you've figured out a way – which there's nothing wrong with that.
If you want to do that, you can game the system.
But it doesn't matter.
Like what is – what are you doing?
Like are you doing something that you're putting – like I don't talk to
anybody that I'm not interested in talking to.
That's it.
It's the only reason why I do this.
I talk to people that I think will be fun and I look forward to it and I still
do.
That's why I do it.
That's why, you know, it continues to work because I do it the same way I've
always done it.
I just talk to people that I like to talk to.
No like, oh, if I got that guy on, he's super famous.
Like that will get a big rating.
Game the system.
Yeah.
There's a lot of famous people that I've said no to because I'm just not
interested in them.
I'm like, yeah, maybe that will get a lot of people, but I don't want to do
that.
What I've found, the single best determinant for when I know that modern wisdom
is going well is if I wake up on the morning of the episode,
and I can't wait for it to be 2 p.m.
I'm like, fucking yes, I get to speak to such and such today.
And then I finish up and I go, I learned something.
That was fucking cool.
Like that was a good one, two, three, four hours.
That was a good day.
And then there's other days when I've like, I don't know, I wake up and I just
think, I should have thought a little bit more about it.
I'm like, I'm looking forward to this, but I'm not super fired up.
And the more that you push away from that instinct with whatever you're doing,
because your instinct is ultimately your only competitive advantage that you
have,
because it's the most non-fungible thing that you've got.
So Douglas Murray told me this story.
It's a really fascinating one about this guy.
When Douglas was first on the scene, this guy that was the head of the paper
that he was at,
it accumulated all of the fans and all of the foes that you would in an
industry like that over the space of a couple of decades.
And he decides that he's going to release a West End show about the life of
Prince Charles in rhyming couplets.
Douglas is like, what?
Okay, well, you know, do you trust him?
This guy, this illustrious history, so he must know what he's doing.
And by the opening night interval, there is nobody left in the entire auditorium,
including the cast.
Everybody's left.
And this guy is dejected and all of the people, all of the enemies that he's
accumulated throughout his career,
they start sharpening the knives and they come out.
And he's just despondent.
He's like so, so sad.
Douglas sees him a couple of weeks later and he goes,
what were you thinking?
Fucking West End show about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets.
What were you thinking?
He said, Douglas, I followed my instincts.
And the thing is, instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the
only thing that's ever led you right.
And I thought, that's such a cool insight about, yes, you're going to make some
errors if you follow that.
And maybe you need a team around you or a friend to go, ah, not with that one.
But you just going, I think this guy's interesting.
I think this girl's interesting.
I think this topic's important and I'm going to talk about it.
Maybe he just did a bad job.
Like, look at Hamilton.
They did a rap about Alexander Hamilton.
It's fucking huge.
Okay, yes.
Right?
In a modern context.
You might have the great idea, but the delivery is wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
Totally.
If you think about Hamilton, like, Hamilton is a great example.
That play is gigantic.
It's on Netflix now.
And it keeps on crushing.
Yeah, it's killing it.
Yeah.
And it's so preposterous.
If you think about it, like, they're talking in modern language about a guy who
lived hundreds of years ago.
Like, that doesn't even make any sense.
They have black people playing white people.
Like, this is going to be weird.
It's great.
It's fucking great.
Where do you think that drive comes from in people?
You know, that demon thing.
Is there a common thread that you've seen with the people that have got it?
Yeah.
Most of them had unhappy childhoods.
Yeah.
It's very rare that someone has, like, the best in the world demon and their
childhood was awesome.
It's very rare.
Generally speaking, there's something there.
Something, some loss, some trauma, something not good, some lack of what you
needed when you were young.
You didn't get it.
And, you know, and then you're like, I'm going to fucking show everybody.
Like, Mike Tyson, maybe the best example of that ever.
Like, for a period of time, the scariest heavyweight that ever walked the face
of the planet.
And redefined the heavyweight division in modern boxing.
And, you know, he was 13 years old when Customato had adopted him, and his life
was hell before that.
It was hell.
It was no love.
It was crime and being around the worst people.
And then all of a sudden he's in the Catskills with this guy who's a
psychologist and one of the greatest boxing coaches of all time.
And also a hypnotist.
And is hypnotizing him on a regular basis when he's 13 years old and teaches
him to be the best.
And so then he's got this, I will show you that I'm worth something.
I will show you that I'm special.
This one thing that I'm good at.
And that is separating men from their consciousness, finding a way to get in
touch with them, finding, get close enough at launching, launching bombs and
watching them drop.
And he was the best at it.
And it was, I think, the drive to be the best.
It has to come from some, there's got to be something wrong where you have that
fire inside of you.
I love thinking about this.
I think it's been the question that I've probably been the most obsessed by
since doing the show, the price that people pay to be somebody that you admire.
And I think it's just endlessly interesting.
So one thing that comes to mind there is, do you know what the fundamental
attribution error is?
It's like we attribute to other people motive for their action.
It's like their character.
But for us, it's situation.
So for instance, I cut you off in traffic because I'm late for work.
You cut me off in traffic because you're a dick.
Right.
So we have this asymmetry in how we judge other people's behaviors as opposed
to our own.
I think that there's an equivalent here when we think about our parents.
So you could call it the fundamental parental attribution error, maybe, which
would be we attribute to our parents our shortcomings, but not necessarily our
strengths.
Right.
So we're very happy.
Like modern pop psychology, it's like a rite of passage to lay at the feet of
our parents.
I've got anxious attachment because nobody ever came to look after me.
And you go, yeah, maybe.
But also, isn't this the reason that your hypervigilance means that no one ever
gets to take advantage of you?
It's like, I am unable to relax and chill out because love was always predicated
on me performing.
It's like, yes.
But also, it's driven you to be an incredibly successful person.
And I think we should just be a little bit cautious when laying at the feet of
our parents only our shortcomings.
They can either have both.
You can either say that my strengths and my shortcomings come from my parents
or my strengths and my shortcomings come from my own agency.
But you can't say I authored the things that I like about myself, but the
things that I don't like about myself came from some past situation.
Yes.
Yeah, victim mentality.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also, bad things that happen to you when you're a kid.
Being bullied.
Being bullied is terrible at the time.
But it leads many a person to say, I'll fucking show you.
Yeah.
You know, and then you get this incredible result.
But then the thing is, like, are you happy?
That's the real dance.
The dance is between success and happiness.
And a lot of people have achieved success but have not achieved happiness, and
they'll die a loser.
Well, that's you sacrificing the thing you want for the thing that's supposed
to get it.
And that's why, like, okay, what's your definition of success?
Right.
Interesting question.
Would you just want to be the best in the world?
Mm-hmm.
Like, that's not bad.
That's not a bad.
Well, it's this thing we talked about before, too, that just because something's
difficult doesn't mean it's good.
And there's a lot of things that you do that are very difficult to do, and then
you see other people have achieved them.
You say, that must be really worthwhile.
And then you do it, and you realize, like, oh, this isn't worth anything.
This is just hard to do.
This sucks.
That's often the case with success because if you become incredibly successful
and then you have all these haters and, you know, like the guy who wrote the
shitty play, you know, like they come for you.
And they want to chop you down, and that's part of the game that you're playing.
And if you don't like that, if you don't like that, but then you've gotten
trapped in it, and you're constantly being attacked, and you listen to it, and
you pay attention to it.
So you're in – you see it with successful people.
You see it really with famous people, especially young people.
They have no history with this, and then all of a sudden it's just thrown at
them.
And then they are both the thing they wanted and something they would never
want, which is to be, like, constantly under attack.
I've thought about how brutal it must be to have the talent but not the
constitution to be able to handle success and fame.
So I don't know whether you've been tracking Lewis Capaldi, the Scottish singer.
So there's a great documentary on Netflix.
You've got to watch it.
How I'm Feeling Now.
It's a bit old now.
It's, like, maybe four or five years old.
Lewis Capaldi breaks onto the scene.
Unbelievable voice.
He's been playing working men's pubs around Scotland and is just a fucking phenom,
right?
Billions of streams, billions and billions of plays, arena tour, global tour,
all the rest of it.
COVID happens.
He's back in his mum and dad's house near Glasgow in Scotland, and he's in the
hut out the back trying to do the difficult second album.
And there's the pressure of the world on him.
Now, he's got the talent, but the pressure from agencies, from record label,
from fans, from himself, from his parents, from his peers, from everybody,
starts to get on him.
It weighs on him so heavily that he develops a tick.
Oh, Jesus.
Like, Tourette's.
It turns out he's always had Tourette's, but the pressure has caused him to,
like, he can't, he can't perform.
And toward the end of the documentary, he goes back out on stage at the O2 in
London, does the thing, walks out on stage, and he's still doing this.
And you've tracked this whole journey.
This is toward the end.
And he can't get his words out.
This is his calling in life.
This is what he was built to do.
This is what he was made for.
And his talent has been taken away from him by the pressure of trying to do the
thing.
Not by his inability to do the thing.
And this is such a fucking unique kind of hell.
I think about fighters that have performance anxiety that just can't get
themselves into the octagon with the lights on them, put them in the training
camp, they're sparring, there's not that same amount of pressure, not yet.
And they're unbelievable.
And Louis Capaldi did Glastonbury, I think, two years ago.
And the same thing happened.
Comes out on stage and basically can't sing.
He can't.
You're hearing these little croaks and squeaks come out of him.
And then this year, he comes back out.
He's done a ton of mindfulness, got his health in order, mental health work,
therapy, comes out and fucking destroys it.
Oh, wow.
Dude, it makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
It's so fucking cool.
Wow, that's awesome.
That's a great story.
That's what I like to see.
I like to see someone who fucks their whole life up and gets it back together
again.
I love that.
I really do.
Because I think that's what people really root for.
They really root for you to get it back together again.
What they don't root for is once you're on top, like staying on top.
They like you to fall.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a little too much.
Well, I mean, I think especially with what most people feel, they want to see a
little bit of themselves in that story.
And they want to see a little bit of struggle.
Right, and they also know that they've fucked up their life.
Because everybody's fucked up their life at some point in time.
Redemption.
Yes.
If this person can be there and lose it and then come back.
Maybe I can get my shit together.
That's the problem.
As a 42-year-old alcoholic.
Yeah, you're not going to be Lewis Capaldi.
Maybe you are.
Maybe you're Oliver Anthony.
You know, Churchill didn't get into power until he was 65.
Wow.
So, all of my life up until now would be less than two-thirds of the warm-up
set for Churchill starting his thing.
Right.
So, you never know sort of when this stuff's going to come along.
I do love, though, the idea of watching somebody climb to the top, lose it, and
then turn it back around again.
I think it's just such a fucking wonderful idea.
We all love that.
But I think it's because we try to see some of ourself in someone, which is why
we don't like things that are created by a corporation, where they put together
a band, like the Monkees or something like that, and fake it.
Nepotism, silver spoon baby.
Yes, we hate all of that.
We hate all of that.
We hate all the people handed their life on a silver platter.
If it feels like somebody didn't earn it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I worry about where motivation comes from for people, in a way.
If you are able to game the system, which people are now, they can, like, speedrun
relatability and authenticity.
But you don't know if this is some K-pop thing, some industry plant-style
scenario that's just been placed together to try and get this, give you a sense
of resonance with this person that doesn't deserve it.
They didn't actually struggle in that sort of a way, but they can construct the
narrative that they did.
And I think in a world that's become increasingly prefabricated, like people
are looking, they're scrutinizing very aggressively.
Is this person who they say they are?
This is the hypocrisy that points out that they're not.
Right, right.
And that's where you get performative vulnerability.
Oh, woe is me.
They pretend to, not pretend to have Tourette's, although I'm sure some people
do.
They pretend they're struggling.
Correct.
Yeah.
Because I need the sympathy vote.
Yeah.
Ugh.
Ugh.
Yeah.
Isn't that an interesting thing?
Well, the real problem is when someone pretends and you catch them pretending
like that, then you're never going to trust them again.
You could fail.
You can fail and fuck up.
You could think you got it right and you got it wrong and you just, ugh, fuck.
But if you pretend, if you lie, if you show deception, if you pretend you're
something that you're not and they find out, like Ellen, you know, she's a nice
lady.
She's all dancing.
Meanwhile, she's fucking screaming at people and mean.
Yep.
You know, that's like, oh, you were lying.
That is fucking catnip.
Yeah.
To people.
Ooh, they love it.
Yeah.
Well, there's nothing that the internet wants more than to find somebody that's
a hypocrite.
Sure.
Right.
Because the internet is basically one big spot the difference competition.
Yeah.
You said this thing here, you behaved this way here.
Right.
I can compare the two, you have fallen short.
Like, and the fucking jury comes down and smashes you in the head.
It's also because we crave authenticity.
We wish we had it.
We crave it in other people.
We want, like, we're all trying to, we're watching all these different people,
like this guy play golf and that guy play music.
And we're watching all these people do all these different things and we're
getting something out of it all.
There's a reason why you like that thing on Netflix.
It's like the, there's, it fuels the human condition.
I mean, it gives you happiness.
It's like, it's some, there's some, in a genuine moment like that, it's like a
very special element that it adds to your life.
And we crave that.
And it's hard to know what's real and what's not real.
That's why people get mad at me when I say, like, AI music.
Oh.
Like, I know, I know it's not real.
I still like it.
But I don't like it the same way I like listening to Johnny Cash sing.
It hurt.
You know what I mean?
It's like, there's an authenticity to that.
There's a real thing to that.
That's like, it's very tangible.
It's different.
There's an upper bound on it.
I certainly think, I'm friends with a lot of musicians.
And one of the issues I think that they have with the AI revolution, apart from
the fact that, like, they're coming for our jobs, which is obvious, is that
learning a musical instrument is really fucking hard.
And it takes a very long time.
And it takes a very long time.
I think that the revolution for podcasting has made it fucking fantastic for
people to feel less lonely and have exposure to conversations and information
they never would have done.
But anybody that sticks a microphone in front of them can record a podcast.
It may be a totally shit podcast.
But if you give me a guitar, I can't make notes come out of it.
So the bar that you need to get over to just be acceptably proficient, enough
to be able to do, to have the conversation, right?
Everybody does what is equivalent of a podcast.
Everybody that has never recorded a podcast has had a great conversation over
dinner and gone, dude, if we recorded that, that would have got millions of
plays on YouTube.
So everyone is a little bit closer to this.
And I think that one of the issues that the music industry or musicians within
the industry have is that AI feels like it's allowing people to leapfrog the
first very long, very boring, very grindy stage of, well, this is where your
fucking fingers need to go on the saxophone.
Or this is how you need to pick the strings in order to make the sound come out
of the guitar.
And if you leapfrog it, that feels like a little bit like a technology-enabled
nepotism in a way.
You've got yourself toward the end.
You shouldn't be able to make this.
This is like a guarded and highly invested.
I mean, you guys see this in comedy.
In comedy, you're like, dude, until you're eight, like the first seven years,
like they're just you earning your keep and then you're right, whatever it is.
Like it's a thousand shows.
And once you've done a thousand spots, then you can say that you've started
doing comedy or whatever it is.
For podcasting, I think it's like 150 episodes.
Before anyone that asks me, like, I'm beginning my podcast and what's your
advice?
And I'm like, once episode 150 starts, you have begun doing a podcast.
Up until then, it's basically a warm-up set.
I think with music, because it's such a high investment that people need to
have at the very, very beginning, this sense that there is a shortcut that
allows people who haven't earned their way to get there.
It would be like if you were using AI to write comedy sets.
Yeah, I think you're correct.
But I also think that's probably what lions felt when people invented guns.
Like, this is bullshit.
I've been chasing you motherfuckers down and eating you for thousands of years.
Now, all of a sudden, you just squeeze your little finger and I die instantaneously.
Like, that's bullshit.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's coming in all forms of entertainment.
They've figured out what you like.
They've got a giant catalog of billions of hours of human beings paying
attention to things.
And it's coming.
It's coming.
It's going to overwhelm you.
And it's going to be indiscernible from reality eventually.
It's going to be something that you've physically experienced as well as visual
and audio.
You're going to have the whole experience.
We'd better enjoy ourselves while we can.
Yeah, have fun while you can.
Chris, I appreciate you very much.
It's always awesome talking to you.
Your podcast is excellent.
Tell everybody where they can get it, where they can find you.
Modern Wisdom on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, Chris Williamson on YouTube, et
cetera, et cetera.
I appreciate the fuck out of you, man.
I appreciate the fuck out of you, too, brother.
It's always good talking to you.
It's always fun.
Goodbye, everybody.
Peace.