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Unknown A
The preponderance of the reason why most people today are substantially overweight.
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Unknown B
One of the few things that Jordan Peterson said that I agree with is it seems like with prison the goal.
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Unknown A
Is if you really think the racial thing is up, you really think that white police officers dealing with black community members is a dynamic you don't want, no problem.
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Unknown B
What do you do when people are willing to suffer economic harm to do like damage to other people's rights to exist? We can all agree that some self segregation is fine, that if certain people hang around certain people because they want to, that that's okay. But then you get these weird like second and third order questions like, okay, well if all the white people want to hang out with the white people then and all the black people hang out with the black people, that's a okay. But if the white people want to hang out with the white people because they think all the black people are criminals and the black people want to hang out with the black people because they think all the white people are going to lynch them. Growing up I thought this that men just have good brains for learning and women just can't ever do school as well as men.
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Unknown B
It's just not a thing that they can do. Debate might have actually grown alongside weightlifting because for any two guys going to the gym, there's at least 15 different arguments on whether or not you should ever be in a Smith machine, whether or not you should lift smaller dumbbells instead of barbelling everything, whether or not deadlifts only exist to destroy your back. How do you decide what to make a video on when every topic has been covered like so many times? Curious.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's. So I have a collaborator in the, in the whole YouTube side. My collaborator in YouTube is Scott the video guy. And he's been with me from day one, with us from day one from YouTube. He's like amazing. He's an audio engineer by trade and so he just really know what's going on. And he was, I would qualify, one of the most normal people in my life. Like kind of ear to the street type of guys. Like he's younger, very good looking, professionally successful and just like very few people after they meet him will be like that guy's weird. Whereas if you meet me, you'd be like, that guy's weird. And so since we have such a large audience to appeal to, I have a Scott the video guy filter at the end of all of the idea streams that I have to tell me if ideas are likely to or not.
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Unknown A
As the terminology goes like, will people find enough marginal utility in them for them to do well on our YouTube? And well on our YouTube means like view, count and watch time. And because we want to provide people with compelling content that they find useful. And so if we're talking about esoteric fitness things that I find enjoyable, but everyone's like, you know, there's a couple thousand people are like, this is peak content. And like most people that subscribe to our channel are like, you lost me at like five minutes and I stopped giving a shit. So we have to have that at play. But most ideas come from me sort of ideating in a few different ways. One is what have I seen covered that I think is missing big pieces? Or what have I seen covered that I think is just almost like orthogonally wrong to the truth and then really needs to be addressed?
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Unknown A
Another one is where are people struggling that I know they're struggling with their fitness or with understanding the world or whatever on my other channel. And where do I think that I can help best by being like, I knew the answer to this question. Like, imagine you're watching someone like try to start their car, but they're not putting their key in the right place. You're just like, can I just do that for you? So there's a lot of that, There's a lot of ideas that come to me from like, just like passion. Just like, man, I really, really, really love thinking about this. I think it's fascinating. I want to talk about it. And then another area of ideas Scott brings to the table. So we have a bunch of shorts that we put out, and the shorts either do some degree of not so great pretty well or really well.
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Unknown A
And so Scott takes all of our shorts that do super well and sort of delivers to me the topics that the shorts were on generally. And he's like, people seem to like this topic. Can you think of a way to make this into a long form video to get them more of what they want on this topic? So I would say those are probably some of the major categories of kind of idea generation. And then they all bump into the, the Scott the video guy filter. So I ideate, I write a crap ton of ideas down and every few months, maybe twice a year, Scott and I get together and he'll just sit with me next to me by my computer and we'll just go through each idea and he's like, nope, nope, nope, that's dumb. That's going to be good. I bold or highlight that the rest of it gets pushed Down.
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Unknown A
And so after a while, we have ideas float to the top of the pile that are like, okay, this is it. Then I outline them and put in talking points, bullet points, and then that's done. And then I sit in front of a computer and yap about it.
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Unknown B
What's the best idea you've had that Scott has taken from you? Have you had one where you're like, this would be so good. And he's like, absolutely fucking not.
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Unknown A
It's too many to count.
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Unknown B
Is there one where you're like, this would just be. I really want to talk about this. And he's like, nobody would care. Or is there, like, a thing that you're super passionate about when it comes to fitness or diet or exercise, and you're like. Scott's like, most people just don't care about this particular thing.
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Unknown A
Yeah, probably say most things. I'm a scientist by trade. One of my passions is the theoretical space, because the empirical landscape gives us really awesome clues as to the underlying structure, kind of the world model of what's really going on and connecting. All of those can't be done with studies alone. You have to use various degrees of inference and connection, and that's all theoretical. And so if you think about an idea long enough and connect it with other ideas and connect it with experience and what other people are saying, understanding base physiology and like, that, you can end up abstracting to a degree where you're like, ooh, I think I found some kind of thing we can even put into an equation that makes a lot of sense. And that kind of stuff is like my bread and butter. It's the thing I like. One of my top things that I would rather be doing nothing else but that all day long.
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Unknown A
I've published extensively in it, have a whole book about all these ideas, two books about these ideas, one on strength and one on hypertrophy training. And I would love to get into the weeds of all of these ideas and really break them apart and examine how they interconnect. So there's a relationship. People say, how much should I train? And then they ask, how hard should I train? Those two are intricately related to one another in ways that are both linear and nonlinear, in ways that are sometimes multiplicative, sometimes additive, sometimes combinatorial, sometimes they cancel each other out. And so there's so much nuance and so much amazingness there that if you talk about it, someone who's really, really curious and nerdy and has zero friends like me, they're going to watch that lecture and be like, this is fucking mind blowing shit. And I love every minute of it because that's how I feel about it.
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Unknown A
But like, that kind of shit. We have a members area on our YouTube channel, which is actually quite large. Those go to the member section. But right now we're in a phase. We're pushing a lot of just content for the main channel. We have tons of member content of me doing this months ago and years ago, which is already like. And it's been recorded, so it's coming up. But in the last few months, I haven't gotten to do a lot of that kind of real theoretical video making. And that, that's the thing to me that I'm just like, all right, another video about how to do bicep curls very well. And I think I have marginal advantage in that as well, in the sense that, like, yeah, I think I can talk pretty well about how to do bicep curls and give people actionable advice that has science stuff in it, but real world shit too.
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Unknown A
It doesn't exactly excite me as much as other things, but it's also super valuable and helpful to people because at the end of the day, if I'm just talking about theoretical weirdness, I could just do it to a wall in my house just the same. But real humans in the world have fitness problems they want to solve, and I love helping them solve that. So it's not a bad thing. It's just one of those, like, all.
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Unknown B
Right, I think when I got involved in politics like eight, nine years ago for when my stream started to turn in that direction, I kind of had this idea that all of my debates would be getting into like, these papers and going back and forth on, you know, different ways to model inflation or, you know, behaviorally kind of whatever. And I didn't foresee back in 2016 that all of the debates would be on who's more gay than the other guy or who has the more awesome slogan or who. And it's, it's. It's very irritating. Um, actually on that, funny, I got, I got an email from a guy who, I think he just. I think it was snowboarding. And he said that one of the frustrating things about how Internet content works is that you have a whole base of people who are beginners. And then as you become more advanced, it's like, I guess what would be like an exponential curve or whatever in terms of, like, the, the amount of interest, but the amount of people becomes much, much, much smaller.
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Unknown B
And so if you are a really advanced Snowboarder. And you can either put out a video on some. I don. Know anything about snowboarding, so I can't even ad lib what you would do, but something about doing really high jumps or something. Some very complicated something about that that it would be. You can get into a ton of detail that exposes your special interests and your special knowledge and the people that would be interested in talking about it would be so interested. But you're losing 98% of the audience. Whereas if you do like the 400th video on how to lean back or not fall over. Not fall over. Yeah, yeah. And that. Yeah, it's an unfortunate trap, I guess, of a lot of content because we measure our success largely by your viewership numbers to some extent and the engagement. Everything. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
We have a way of dealing with that. That's an excellent point. That is distinctly a phenomenon that occurs and you can watch it occur. It's a good thing because it means you're getting popular. You know, if you can always stay esoteric and in the weeds, it means you have a small subscribership, which is nothing wrong with that. It's a really awesome thing that you're helping so many numerically, so many people, but it's not millions and millions maybe. And we have a way of dealing with that on our RP side of the equation. And it's kind of like a tier list of how deep do you want to get? We got whatever you need, but you don't have to get as deep as someone else does. So many of our videos on YouTube are very straightforward, very simple. But some of them are quite complicated. Then we have a members area of the channel that is like quite complicated.
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Unknown A
And above. We have actually a little online, it's called RPU University. It's not really university. It's like you pay like 30 bucks or something. It's about to come out in I guess a few months. It's currently in beta, but you get like access to a ton of courses, like 200 something, 215 lectures.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I just wanted to clarify real quick. A lot of people might be confused. Listening channel that you do is Renaissance Periodization.
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Unknown A
Renaissance Periodization.
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Unknown B
Some people might hear RP courses and they think red pill courses.
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Unknown A
Oh, good job.
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Unknown B
Just for people. Just people at homelessly. Yeah, go ahead.
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Unknown A
I've taken many pills. None of them are red. Some of them were red. So basically it goes up and then we have books that are real technical and various other ways of disseminating knowledge even more technical and esoteric still. And then we have like, elite coaching option for someone who's like, I want to be mentored by someone who's done the thing, like gotten PhDs, won world championships. Not me. We have other coaches that do that. And so we have this kind of like, how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? Phenomenon. So we're kind of serving, we're attempting to serve that entire kind of hyperbolic curve, but it is difficult. And there's often, like we were talking about earlier, I really want to attack that upper end sometimes, but then again, sometimes I do want to attack the lower end. Because one thing that happens is when you become bigger in the fitness space, you start being compared to other folks who are big.
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Unknown A
And a lot of times those folks are really just giving the most excellent information for beginners. But a lot of times, because there's a knowledge examination problem in beginners, they don't know if they're receiving something that remotely is true. So they'll just be like, that sounds right to me. Then there's a big problem with a lot of influencers putting out out content that was just not that great. And so sometimes I see that content and I'm like, this is the biggest video on protein anyone's made. Protein is a totally random example. Oh my God, it's full of wrong things. And then boom, okay, we're making it. And then I'm passionate about making it, even though it's for the beginner. I do have a big passion for making things as clear and simple as humanly possible for beginners as I can.
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Unknown B
Okay. Do you? It's funny, we've watched so many videos and done so much thing. It's funny you say protein is a random example, but even than on protein, I've seen whole videos on like, does a complete protein matter? Or is it 0.5 or 1.0 per kg or is it of body weight or of lean muscle? And people have very, very, very, very, very strong opinions. Yeah. About all of that. When you. Is there anybody in the, like the traditional weightlifting world or book publishing world that you've wanted to meet as you've gotten larger? Like, like a mark rip toe type person or any kind of like traditional author or anybody like that or anybody in the space you really wish that chat with? You haven't gotten to.
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Unknown A
That? I haven't gotten to. I mean, tons of people. There are people doing the primary work, the actual empirical and investigative work of like laboratory examinations of what's actually going on. And a lot of times at the cell Phys level, muscle phys level, human subjects level, animal studies. And those are the people that their breadth of knowledge is very impressive, but their depth in their particular areas, like the deepest in the world. And every time I get around one of those people, I'm just like a yap machine with questions. And they probably think I'm annoying accurately. And so there are too many people to name doing primary work that I've never met. And every time I meet them now on the RP channel, we have this thing where interview with the experts. Every Wednesday we bring in an expert who's often very immersed in the data if not doing the data collection themselves.
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Unknown A
And then so every time it's wonderful because I just get to ask questions that like, I'm curious to find out the answers. We had the guys from Data Driven Strength over and they're just amazing guys. There's three of them and we did like six hours of interviews straight, two for each. And I was like, this is amazing. I was a kid in a candy store. So there's, there's tons of people like that as far as major authors and stuff. To be completely honest, bro, when I came up and made my heroes in the space, almost everyone there is retired now or just no longer around because I'm 40 and I started looking into this when I was like 20. And so most of these guys were in their 60s and 70s by then.
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Unknown B
What are the. What do you think are like the most annoying pieces of dumb or bad advice that go around when it comes to diet fitness?
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Unknown A
This is a very funny question. I get asked this question surprisingly a lot. Surprisingly only to me maybe.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
And I always have trouble answering it because I don't keep a catalog mentally of things that annoy me the most.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
But offhand, just kind of mining the GPT in there. Attempts at saying something doesn't matter when it matters 25% oversimplification happens all the time. Another like, you know, technique doesn't matter for growth. Like there is a very good way to steel, man, that there's so much to say about that. That is true. It doesn't matter nearly as much as many people think, but also matter substantially more than many people think. So the oversimplification gets to me. Another one is choosing a thing that you vibe with emotionally. This one probably gets to me the most. Here's your answer. Choosing things that vibe emotionally from a training perspective and basically like circling the carts around that and defending it as much as possible. So you know what failure training is, right? Like pushing all the way to failure, you can't do anymore. There's this kind of Paleolithic manhood thing about that.
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Unknown A
And there's something very magical in it, not to be discounted psychologically from a human development perspective, especially for young males, probably everyone, it's incredibly cathartic. And I can say 50 other amazing things about it from a psychological perspective. And it's a great way to train physiologically. But some people get so into the, the egoism of it. Like, if you're not going to failure, the only reason you're not doing that is because you're sort of giving up on yourself. You're not tough enough, you can't handle the pain, and clearly you don't want maximum results. And then they're in a different world where they're making technical claims about outcomes, not about vibes. It's like saying like, dude, I love salsa dancing. It just fucking speaks to my soul. And you're like, dope, dope. It's the best kind of dancing in the world. Like, what? What does that even mean?
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Unknown A
And they're like, no, I really mean that. And you're like, have you heard of ballet? Have you heard of modern dance? Like, yeah, those are all stupid for a bunch of different reasons. And then they elucidate the reasons for that and it's all nonsense, mostly nonsense. And so a lot of times people will do things like training a failure. And you'll say, what critiques could you give about training a failure if you had to red team yourself? And they're like, what's a red team? And you're like, nevermind, are there any downsides with failure training? And they're like, yeah, man, if you're not tough, it's not fucking for you, bro. And you're like, we could do better with this, we really could. And so the human body is a complex adaptive system. It's a machine in every single sense of the word machine. And when you have results out in the world, like, I want my muscles to be bigger, you're doing an optimization problem with a complex adaptive machine.
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Unknown A
And so everything else after that's just engineering. It's just questions of what are we doing to optimize the system to get the results we want. Any emotional attachments you have to any kind of ways of doing that need to be noted. And you need to assess their costs and benefits of applying them and be like, is it worth it for me to get slightly suboptimal results but get amazing vibes in the gym? The answer to that might be, yes. But if you're not aware that the trade off exists, you might have basically made into, I suppose, what Thomas Sowell has called before the shibboleth. Like this monument. We can't touch it, we cannot examine this idea. This is the right way. And any attempt to recede from that is an admission of essentially like lack of mental fortitude. I hate that because when results matter the most, it doesn't matter how you feel in the gym, I've taken mid of the pack close to dead last and done a little bit better in various bodybuilding shows.
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Unknown A
And I tell you, anything other than first place stings like shit. And once you don't take first for long enough, it becomes very imperative to you to examine what it is that could be doing, that it could be doing better. And a lot of the training I do I don't enjoy particularly. Like my delts have a very high maximum recoverable volume. I can just continue to pound them and they just kind of grow linearly the more I pound them. I don't even like training delts, bro. And when you're doing six sets of delts six times a week, you're like, just, God, fucking take me out. I hate this shit. But I want bigger delts. I hate the vibe. I still have to do it. And so people go on vibes and they assume because I have a vibe for this it must be true. And because I have a vibe for this, it must be true.
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Unknown A
I think explains probably 90% of why people have political opinions at all.
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Unknown B
By the way, it's really funny you said. Because I was going to say there's one way that this ties to politics very cleanly and another way that it doesn't tie in at all, which is very frustrating. It ties in very cleanly in that I have a lot of, I don't know if I call them slogans or heuristics. I don't even know what you say. But like, one thing I'll tell people is we should be attached to outcomes and not processes. And sometimes people confuse the two. So I think we disagree, I think quite a bit politically, but I think on outcomes I think most humans agree, broadly speaking. So for instance, I think we all want less homeless people. So in the steps to getting rockets, shoot them to the moon, maybe not quite that, at least to Mars you're worse. So we want to do things to have less homeless people.
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Unknown B
And so maybe we look at housing policies and one that people talk about a lot is rent control. Based on what I'VE seen rent control is a really bad policy for managing, for managing anything related to housing. But people will hear you say I don't like rent control. And they're hearing you say I want more homeless people because they're so attached to that process you described as like this monolithic, unassailable thing that you can't talk about it now. The only thing that I wish reality and politics mapped on more cleanly to, for the gym stuff is at the end of the day it is very, very, very easy to see who has the biggest competition, bench press or squat. You put more weight on, you see who can lift more and you're done. It's very hard to see politically, you know, what's the better economic policy or what's the better.
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Unknown B
Yeah, like political ideology. Because there are so many different ways, like how you even measure that could theoretically be, you know, debated. And then it's funny too because a lot of the same things that you said about people will confuse. I do this a lot to be fair because I'll be hyperbolic. You know, I'm sure you've heard I probably actually even said this. Like the idea that cardio doesn't matter for losing weight. It's all about diet. And there's like a aspect or truth.
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Unknown A
To that, but it's also completely true.
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Unknown B
Yeah, completely true. Yeah. But I mean like doing more physical activity, running or whatever will help a little. But so is to say it's completely ineffective. And then it's the same thing with one of the really hot topics now obviously has to do with personal finance. And it's like you can't budget your way to wealth. You know, you can't responsibly spend your way to wealth. And to some extent that is true. You're never going to become a multimillionaire making, you know, a high five figure income or whatever. But how you personally manage your finances can be incredibly important to the outcomes that you experience on a day to day life. So it's having people being able to hold on to these like 5 to 25% without completely getting rid of them and then only focusing on these larger things which are important but are oftentimes out of people's control completely so therefore won't have any good impact on a person's life.
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Unknown B
And then you have these other things that are actually happening. So like something that might be like 20% of your impact versus 80%, that 20% that you focus on might actually give you the most results because the 80% is totally outside of your. Like, if it's about capitalism or whatever. So it's a. Yeah, it's a total waste of time to fix it on it.
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Unknown A
Fitness is like that, too. There are two variables that determine how in shape you get. One is your genetics, and one is just how much brutal work do you put in over, like, how many years? That's 80% right there, man. Everything else is 20%. And so I get critiqued on my channel every now and again for like, man, this guy makes things super complicated. Majoring in the miners. Like, well, unless genetic engineering comes up here in a few years, which hopefully it will in 10 or something, I'm for you, man. It's all miners. And people sometimes also have the supposition that if we really hack the system super well, then we can get these 80% gains unlocked. And, man, gee whiz, that just does not seem to happen often. So I hear that frustration a ton. There's a very big, very big, A very fine line between trying to make things very simple so the folks can understand them and entertaining as much nuance as possible real quick.
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Unknown A
One of the things that always baffles me when. When I'm in my negative headspace, as a comment on, like, a short or reel, is that's 30 seconds. And in my positive headspace, I'm like, I understand where they're coming from is, man, this just skips the nuance altogether. It's 30 seconds, motherfucker. Nuance takes hours. And there are ways to couch things that say, you know, for the most part, this is not a big effect, and the major player is versus saying this doesn't matter. But just like you, I get comedically hyperbolic quite often. Also, it's funny.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
Say this doesn't work. That's funny. People love that shit.
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Unknown B
It's also, I would argue it's also generally pretty obvious. I actually ban these people in my chat. When I say I ban them, I call them the well, actually the well actually people. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, because I wish I remember examples of him. But, like, I'll say something like, yeah, like, it doesn't matter, you know, if you do this or that, and somebody feels like, well, actually, there it can matter. And it's like, okay, like, you've watched me for 15 years. I'm, you probably know, not a total idiot. So, yeah, give me a little bit of. I haven't watched you maybe yet. No, they're. I think they're the. Well, actually, they're the. Well, actually, it's like, Obviously this is going to have some impact. Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm curious. So one of the reasons why I reached out and one of the reasons why our audience wants to have us fight over politics.
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Unknown A
I love this kind of stuff.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I watched your. I called you guys Evil Mike and Good Mike. Not because I necessarily think you're evil.
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Unknown A
But just I heard an hour of that four hour video and I ran out of time.
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Unknown B
Oh, geez. Okay. All right.
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Unknown A
But it was great. The part I heard was awesome. Awesome.
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Unknown B
First of all, I'm curious, how did that conversation even come about?
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Unknown A
I had been on Dr. Mike's show before and he's awesome, like, as a human. And we talked about doing more collaborations and, you know, like, there's always a what do you want to talk about when you come on next kind of thing. Because the episode did really well and he's like, oh, sure would love to have you on. And so he actually had a very nice lady on his podcast a couple months before I went on again to do this talk that you're talking about, and I forget her name. So absolutely super brilliant, super well intentioned, but was laying blame, some of which is absolutely a necessity for things like the obesity epidemic and the mass health maladies of Americans at the foot of corporations. And at least a lot of the clips and reels hit me all wrong. And I have been ideating about the relationship between poverty and obesity and health for.
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Unknown A
Since I was in my first year of PhD, which was like maybe 12 years ago or 13 years ago or something like that. So it's an intellectual landscape I'm very comfortable with, and one that I am very passionate about, and one in which you just generally have. Two of the loudest voices are either on the extreme political left, which has an anathema to assigning responsibility to individual humans, like an allergy to it. And then the political right, which has its amazing moments, as does the left, but is often trying to say, like, it's 100% personal responsibility and like, everything else is an excuse, bro. And boy, do those miss the mark. And so I really wanted to get on a show and kind of address the issue of like, well, you know, what is the relationship between poverty and obesity, for example, and other related factors, and really talk about, like, what can we explore there in our intellectual space that in some sense pisses off everyone?
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Unknown A
Because a lot of these things, I don't want to be the person saying them, but I just happen to have, like a bit of media attention at the moment, at least. And no one else is saying them that has like, and two orders of magnitude or, like, more or less attention than I. And I'm like, well, fuck, I gotta say it. So I hit him up and I was like, can we talk about this? And when I sent him the DM and he said, yeah, sure, I was like, the hell am I getting myself into? Because that podcast, you know, had a lot of, you know, Hitler references, the usual. But I was glad, in retrospect, glad I did it every time. Sometimes I'll watch. I almost never watch my own shit that I make.
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Unknown B
I know that feeling.
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Unknown A
I can only hear my voice in my head so much. I hear 24. 7. Anyway, I don't need any more of that shit.
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Unknown B
But.
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Unknown A
But as people are like, I find you annoying. I'm like, join the club, sir. But I do occasionally watch the podcasts that I appear on with other folks. And I'm like, my biggest thing is, how could I have said the things I said better? And so I rewatched that one, and I definitely have a lot of things I could have said better. But I think the general arc of what I said, I say largely correct in my view, but I could be wrong about everything.
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Unknown B
The. To go back, we're gonna have to find something we. Maybe it'll be in here where we seriously disagree with it.
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Unknown A
Sure.
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Unknown B
Because my honest would be mad if we don't. But one thing that's very frustrating is, I think, like you said, you've got these people that are kind of married to their political ideologies on both sides, and then they end up. The problem is that, like, in some ways, I would say an answer that's like 20 or 30% correct is actually 0% correct. I don't know if you. I'm sure this. This absolutely applies to gym stuff as well, where sometimes you take a person and it's like, I wish that you wouldn't know anything at all about this because we're gonna have to spend so much time unlearning this insane shit to even begin again that it's gonna be frustrating. Bad habits are a great example of that. Right? And yeah, it's very frustrating. Obviously there are super hot button topics that come up and, like, easily.
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Unknown B
I just had this with a guest actually last month, but easily the most prickly topic that will come up is somebody will say something like, oh, yeah, like, I watch these crazy people online talk. Can you believe that some people think that IQ matters? And I'm like, oof, this could be. Now I have to Decide if I want to say anything or if I just want to say, like, yeah, wow, that's crazy. You know, So I definitely empathize with the frustration of these are uncomfortable. So we're going to say they don't matter. One of the things that I find when I'm trying to gauge, and I'm sure you're aware of this, and I'm aware of this too, that as soon as people head down these roads, very easy to be like, he's. This is a dog whistle, or this guy feels this way and he's not letting you know his full power level show.
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Unknown A
He's kind of hiding. I'd be very explicit with my actual political opinion. So there's no reason to suspect I can just answer all those questions directly. But I do get a whole lot of that.
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Unknown B
Yeah, for sure.
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Unknown A
Apparently I'm a right winger. Well, which is news to me.
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Unknown B
Sure. The. I think the thing that I usually look for the most, I kind of wonder, has to do with prescriptions because I find that that's usually the unsaid part the most. It's one of my biggest issues with. With Jordan Peterson sometimes is he'll talk sometimes, all the time now. But he'll say something like, he'll lay out arguments. We'll say, women in the workplace are distracting. We haven't figured out how to overcome sexual harassment. And it seems like there are all these bad outcomes when you start to have multiple genders involved in the same work area. And then he won't say anything at the end of that. And I think a lot of his fans are like, okay, well, we need to remove women from the workplace. And then if you ever argue with Peterson and you say, well, it seems like you don't want women in the workplace.
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Unknown B
Well, I never said that. It's like, okay, well, what are we supposed to do about all these problems you just laid out? Because it seems like they lead to an obvious place. I guess when I look at. So obviously in your conversation, the I don't know what to call you guys place. Dr. Mike. I don't know what Dr. Mike's first name is. The other Mike was very much on.
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Unknown A
The first names are Mike, by the way.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Last name, you mean.
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Unknown B
Oh, that's true. Why did I assume Mike? Because you're Mike Isratel.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Pronounce it. Yeah. Okay. What is his last name? Does he say. Yeah, okay, okay, we're just gonna. Dr. Mike. Okay. We'll go back to Good Mike. Good Mike Evil. Mike. No.
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Unknown A
Good Mike Evil. I'M totally fine being labeled as Evil Mike. I mean look at me. Sure, no, yeah, you know, fucking Bond villain.
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Unknown B
But the, the other Mike's perspective was very much like a social engineering perspective. But not like, I don't think in the totally bad faith. Like nobody has any individual responsibility. And then yours was a more best faith possible. Yeah. And then your side focused more on something that I wish more people talked about in that we have limited resources and we can only put them in a certain direction. And if you're spending all of your time on an area that is only going to give you like a 5% increase, then we have better ways to allocate our resources. I guess when we look at something like obesity, I guess what do you think should be done about stuff like that when you look at those types of things? So I think that was the thing that was absent from. And then that's what allowed people to fill in so many blanks about what you really wanted society to look like.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I guess. What do you think are like the best ways to combat stuff like that? From a top down approach.
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Unknown A
To combat obesity? From a top down approach.
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Unknown B
I can give a little more too. So one of the things you brought up a lot is that you can tie these things to. You're using a lot of five factor analysis in terms of tying outcomes to certain types of personality traits that are. I think my understandings are largely static from like your teenage years. Like I don't think these ever change that much.
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Unknown A
They change at the margins, but not in any grandiose way.
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Unknown B
One of the things that I think is interesting is when we talk about things like heredity or heritability. Sorry. And you talk about like genes versus environment, you have different people that will respond in varying ways to the same environment. However, if you look at the overall environment. So I'm not touching IQ at all here. I'm only touching obesity. And you look in the United States. Right. If you took the most. I think the traits you looked at were, what was it like? Was it low in conscientiousness and high end food drive? Food drive. Okay. Food drive is not a five factor one. But, but these, these traits, these two things.
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Unknown A
Yeah. The only five factor trade I, I brought into. Brought to bear in that conversation was conscious.
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Unknown B
Conscious. Okay. Yeah. So high and food drive and, and low inconscience. If you were to take them back 100 years ago and put them in the US despite that genetic or personality or biological disposition, they will never reach the mag. The great weights that they Could. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.
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Unknown A
So my proposal shorthand is to empower people as much as possible and make sure that they understand roughly the topography of what choices they have to make in the matter. And after that they may or may not be interested in making the choices you want them to make. But as a government or as an individual that has both a respect for liberty of humans and autonomy, but also understanding that even if you were like, look, let's just run this system like a machine, are just pawns, you still arrive roughly the same place, that's how to run a society. Because on efficiency grounds, capitalism is undefeated and social liberalism is also undefeated.
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Unknown B
And so so far we're, we're starting to test that, but depending on, on who you ask. But yeah, sure, sure, sure, yeah, it.
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Unknown A
Always has its malcontents. Yeah. And so for me, basically the potential, I don't like to call it a solution, a way forward is to make sure that individuals are easily available to the information about how to make healthy choices in their diet and how the process of weight loss works. They're easily availed to every assisted technology in procuring said food, cooking said food, and organizing the structure of their diets, and that they are not limited by financial means or anything like that, and that they are availed to the latest medications that can help them in that journey at as low a cost as the insane efficiency of innovation in the market competition can provide. Potentially, I find government subsidies troublesome on many, many technical grounds in economics, but there is an argument for some kind of subsidization potentially. I'm open to that. But cautiously and basically you have the situation where someone can, can just reach out to their phone, say, oh yes, I, I want to lose weight now.
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Unknown A
No response. Then the GPT is like, oh bro, I got you. Here's the plan. And whether or not they do the plan or pick up the phone to ask about losing weight, boy, that's not up to us. Would be very weird society if it was. But I want everyone to be as empowered as humanly possible and if they choose to go into this situation, that they have as few barriers as they can and that they have as many opportunities as they can. And I don't mean opportunities in some esoteric American enterprise institute kind of way. I love that institution. Like the old right wing politician like opportunities. And you're like the, does that mean in the real world? I mean like you go to the pharmacy and a day later for a dollar a day, you have the most modern weight loss drugs available to You, I mean, there are stores with healthy foods around you, there are plenty of gyms and you have, you know, I think this, this problem becomes way more tractable when we get in a few years into the age of universal robotics.
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Unknown A
I believe in, in five or 10 years, 10 being very pessimistic, five being also a little bit pessimistic, that many, many more people and eventually everyone, like with iPhones, will have robots in their home cooking their food and doing their dishes and trash and buying groceries. And once you have a robot doing, sort of getting the input, stream, whatever you want it to be, all you need to do is be like, hey, robot, I want to lose weight. He's going to be like, cool, I'm just going to start cooking your food differently. I want that world, that's my zenith. And combined with drugs and eventually with genetic engineering being options for people so that anyone who like, wakes up one day and they're like this, man, I want to lose weight. And all they do is tell the robot or tell the GPT on their phone, hey, I want to do it.
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Unknown A
And the rest of it is, I got you, fam. Food delivery shows up, your Robot's like, Hey, 2pm, you got Jim. I'm going to walk with you to the gym and I'm going to stay there and I'm going to train you and we're going to walk back. I'm going to bring a towel, I'm going to bring a shake. Once you have that level of empowerment, then anyone who wants to be in shape gets in as good of a shape as science will allow at the time. The rest is up to them. The reason I was on the Dr. Mike podcast is I think we're like a large fraction of the way to that world in most cases already. Obviously you have to do a bit more of the work yourself. And there are barriers to that that I think should be broken down. Like robots cooking food for you means you don't even have to bother with that shit.
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Unknown A
But I think the barriers are much smaller than most people would like to assign them. And I think the preponderance of the reason why most people today are substantially overweight is that they are not in the real world with revealed versus stated preferences, interested in making and continuing to pursue the choices that allow them to lose that weight. It's a giving a shit problem is a big part of the problem. How do you deal with that? I have all sorts of ideas. I deal with it, but those ideas don't have as much bite as I would like them to have.
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Unknown B
Gotcha. One of the things that I think a lot of this stems from, you have a very like maximizing choice for people type of ideology. Libertarianism. Right. I've heard you say. Yeah. On your philosophy also for an insanely.
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Unknown A
Overpowered military and insanely overpowered police force. All the shit the libertarians hate. So yeah, very libertarian inspired.
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Unknown B
Sure. One of the things that I feel like there's like an underlying kind of like a presupposition to this, and I'm curious if you've ever considered this before, that if there, let's say there are two worlds, one where you maximize human choice, one where people are free to do what they want. But. But because our bodies have spent so much time evolving towards an environment that we've moved so far away from, the ability for us to organically gravitate towards better world states becomes basically impossible. And left to our own devices, where we are continuing to develop technologies and other types of more sophisticated mechanisms for existing in society, we're on like a path to destruction. Let's say we get an ultra libertarian government at age 18. There are, you know, heroin clinics outside of every single college or every single high school and you have the opportunity to do this and be like, oh, let's try it or whatever and you get a whole bunch of heroin addicted people in society that maybe there are some worlds where if you, if you don't even have the opportunity to make those choices, it's just a better
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Unknown B
world for every single person involved. And obviously there's a whole other slippery slope theoretically on that side where, well, what kind of choice do we take away from people? But, but I mean to like a fitness credit. I would be very surprised if anybody ever in a hunter gatherer society was thinking of is my blood sugar too high or am I eating a good balance of carbs? And they didn't know what blood sugar was. Exactly. Yeah. But they were all probably reasonably fit compared to today. They were probably gods in terms of physiology.
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Unknown A
Through no effort of their own meager struggle to survive.
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Unknown B
And I can think of. Just because society's become so much more complicated to where I would imagine probably by the age of anywhere from 7 to 10, you've probably learned almost all the things that you need to know in life to now you basically need at least like a college degree to be competitive in the, in the workforce. The amount of knowledge that you need is so much greater understanding that there are other paths to. I see. I didn't do the full. I didn't Say you have to. Almost. Almost have to. Right. Just on a purely empirical, outcome oriented standpoint that I think the college is.
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Unknown A
Sorry, real quick. I think you get very little out of college in most cases. I think it's a vetting process for the most part. It's 80% vetting, 20% skill injection. Skill injection is largely accounted for in fields like engineering and medicine and not fields like liberal arts of which you have all verifiably and empirically almost, if not zero net utility on your future income or even world.
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Unknown B
Understand, I think I would argue a little there. I think even under income, even your lower quintile of even liberal arts degrees are outperforming high school grads.
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Unknown A
But that could varied for genetics.
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Unknown B
There, there is that argument. So the counter argument you're bringing up that is somewhat compelling is that your highest level of education is actually just an outcome of your predisposition genetically to be that educated. And that means that you're not actually getting educated to go through school. It's just a filtering process for who's doing better. But then I think the second question on top of that is if that's the best filtering process, that would still be that. But you don't think so?
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Unknown A
No, not even close. By God.
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Unknown B
I think that if I think for living in the society we live in, I feel like if we had a better filtering process, I think everybody would.
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Unknown A
Just opt for absolutely not. That's tons of vested interests and tons of myths about how education works. Most people have the value injection model of education so deep down their understanding that even asking them to parse it seems offensive and insanely contradictory.
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Unknown B
And sure, I'm not thinking of the, I'm not thinking of the actors that have strong like moral opinions about what society should do.
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Unknown A
I'm thinking of like regular people.
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Unknown B
I'm thinking like, like people who hire. So if you look at like Silicon Valley, if it was the case that it was easy or trivial to pick out the really gifted high school students, then I think they would be recruiting vastly like right out of high school, as opposed to grabbing generally people who have college degrees.
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Unknown A
But most of the very, very top Silicon Valley companies are doing now. You go to a coding camp, you show up to an interview, you're a rock star, they give a fuck where you went to school. Elon just did a recruiting push for one of his projects. We said exactly that. But it's so much easier to just. If there is a huge abundance of people, as a 95% of the real smart people that are Coming to you in interviews, went to Stanford or whatever. It's easy to just be like, yeah, clearly if they made it through Stanford, they're already smart. But we could do away with a huge fraction of a collegiate education system and replace it with a system of standardized exams and then that would have the same function. There is an optimization problem where once you get a system into lockstep, pulling it apart needs top down action.
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Unknown A
Otherwise you're totally right. There's this kind of like, well, this is how we're doing it and this is how it's set up. I'm not. No one company wants to be the first to buck the trend. And even it's one company, most people don't get the memo. I would say also most people in most of these companies just also assume that education is something that is poured into you and that good things happen when you go get educated. Another thing is education vets not just for talent, but it vets for the talent of perseverance, being able to work on it. Going to Stanford and doing this shit for fucking four years is beyond most people, which is why they want you to have gone through. There are absolutely shorter, quicker, easier ways to do that. But because we have a government supported and mandated and massively subsidized educational system, that's not changing any time soon.
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Unknown A
But if we made a massive shift, that is absolutely. There's absolute ways to kibosh like 80% of the educational system, save an unbelievable amount of money and human lifetime and make society that much more productive. It would.
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Unknown B
Do you think there's been any. Has anybody tried this yet?
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Unknown A
I don't believe so.
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Unknown B
I feel like the. So when I look at the tech world, I actually, I used to believe that it operated like very more efficiently, less efficiently in some ways. One of the examples that I think of is, I believe it was Google first that tried the open work space where nobody had an office and everybody was in an open workspace. And every other company I think in the tech industry followed almost immediately after Facebook changed their stuff to open. Everybody was like, oh hey, Google's doing it. And I don't think it worked at all.
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Unknown A
I think that it's empirically demonstrated that it did not work.
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Unknown B
It didn't. Yeah. But when they saw Google do it, everybody's like, okay, well we're doing it now. And then it didn't work out.
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Unknown A
It's also supply and demand issue. The employees are often young, very talented people who want to work to be a part of their social life because they're there all the time. And it's just way more fun at work to have an open concept office with food and delivery and candy and board games and ping pong. And you want the best talent. You got to attract them basically to a amusement park at some point. Like Facebook. I went to their headquarters a while back and they had like free ice cream. Just like gave out free ice cream. I was like, what the.
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Unknown B
Yeah, but they've got like rooms for arts and crafts and projects. Yeah, for sure.
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Unknown A
And that often happens because when there is a booming industry and lots of talented people, like Facebook was for a long time, money machine, just printing money. And when that's the thing and you want the most talented people, you're like, what's the marginal cost to our corporate bottom line if we give them free ice cream? Who gives a shit? But that doesn't mean that you're sharpening the edge of the sword to make the company as efficient as possible at all times. Which quite frankly, if you said, hey, I want to work for a company that does that, there aren't that many companies that will explicitly tell you they do that. And it's a little scary to even apply for a company like that because you're like, jesus Christ, I'm like a cog in the machine here. Like, well, like, how productive do you want to be?
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Unknown A
So companies hire people, they are humans to deal with humans, and humans come in with their own wants and desires. And a lot of times humans are limited by kind of what kind of structures they want to be put into. Like, if you let high school kids vote on how to be taught in high school, you get a lot of wacky shit going on for sure.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I guess all that to say that I feel like if there was a system that vetted as well as college did, I feel like somebody would be trying to push in that direction. I do know that you can grab exceptionally talented kids out of high school, but in terms of creating like a wide enough system that would capture and adequately, I guess, place like most people for all the downsides of a subsidized college system and time potentially wasted there, it does seem to be like probably the best predictor of like economic, like productivity. Like how much of a labor hour can you do to predict?
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Unknown A
Predictor and major causal effect are not.
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Unknown B
Necessarily the same for sure.
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Unknown A
I think most of the best ideas in the world about how to run things have not even been tried. And I can illustrate this with the. It's quite arbitrary to pick 2024 other than the fact that it's 2025, but God, I just dated myself. Why don't we pick something like 1970 where still intellectually in contention among modern thinkers that communism could have been a good way to run things. 1970 was already modern times. We had computers and shit libraries.
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Unknown B
Well read people, people forget the space age was that time before we say.
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Unknown A
The rocks to the moon. We still as kind of a mass movement in society didn't understand that communism actually just total dog in almost every possible regard. And so anytime we try to pat ourselves on the back for like, well, and I totally hear your point, like it is, it is a compelling point to think like, come on, someone should have tried this before, right? But I think it's also a compelling point to say like, no, no, this is a future thing that after we'll do it, we'll be like, can you guys. Do you guys remember when we used to do all this crazy shit back then? Like that's just the best we knew. And also considering that there is a body in the educational space that has lots of power that is preposterously open minded and willing to unweave its own power structure for the benefit of society is an interesting supposition.
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Unknown A
I have yet to see evidence for for sure.
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Unknown B
But then I also caution that on the other side, and I'm sure you've heard people do this, there's a lot of, well, people thought this, this wouldn't work in the past and it did. Therefore my idea will definitely work. Oh totally.
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Unknown A
The random out of the hat idea could just be dead wrong. 100%.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So again, not that I'm too. You took me off track from the college thing. No, you're good. You're good. Okay, so I think before the question that I kind of had was there are world states where do you think there are world states where left to our own maximum free will choices, society fails and ends in some amount of time versus one where you're a little bit more constrained, where you can't even make some of the bad choices that society is better.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you wrestle fails and ends? Almost certainly not has outcomes that on average in any way you measure them or in the aggregate of ways are suboptimal compared to a society that is more controlled. Very possibly, very likely. What I like to come from as a perspective is when we do these attempts at regulation or restriction of freedom, can we get, can we run an ROI projection on those and talk about what are the upsides and downsides? For example, A very straightforward thing that some people actually say is, you know, we should subsidize healthy food to make it cheaper. The next question you have is, okay, so what are the dynamics of price versus consumption on making healthy food cheaper? Who is going to buy more of it, and who is basically just not going to budge? If you actually look into that, it turns out making healthy food substantially cheaper will definitely get like literally millions of people to eat more healthy food, but the cost to the economy may be like an order of magnitude higher and thus money spent better elsewhere to not even bother doing that or
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Unknown A
do it to a much more small extent, because a large fraction of the people that aren't eating healthy, they don't want to eat healthy, they don't give a fuck. They're just going to eat the food they like because they pick on one variable only, it's taste. What am I in the mood for tonight? And for folks like that, how much healthy food costs or doesn't cost is almost entirely relevant. They're not even in the technical economic sense in the consumer pool for that kind of food. And so, you know, it's like, it's like being like, okay, we need, we make amazing skateboards. We have yet to crack the old lady market. We need to get on it. Hold on, someone raised their hand, but the old ladies skateboard. Someone's like, why? My grandma does. That's one person. What about. I guess that's. She's famous on YouTube for it.
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Unknown A
So subsidizing skateboards since old people don't have as much money, which is actually wrong and totally backwards, let's say it was true. For this example, we needed to make skateboards cheaper so that old people get on skateboards more. But it turns out that it would result in a whole bunch of other effects. And also, when you regulate top down, you have an injection of one variable and it leads to a literal fractal expansion of other variables into the economy as the economy adjusts for that. So if we can run a decent ROI return on investment, what are the costs and benefits on a proposed law to restrict freedoms like, okay, we have this drug called Super Ice and you take it and there's a 50% chance that you get addicted for life and you ruin yourself. And there's also a 50% chance you just die on the spot.
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Unknown A
Should we make it illegal? Like, I'm absolutely into that conversation. That ROI is going to be one hell way to calculate if you're a pure libertarian. Because it's like, dude, like, some children don't have sufficient supervision such that they will get to it. So, like, how many dead children on this side of the equation do you want versus how many preservations of the structure of government that promotes liberty in the future are you willing to trade off for it? That is a conversation to have behind close closed doors. But gee whiz, it looks kind of different. Whereas for marijuana legalization, for example, like, we gotta keep weed illegal because it has downsides and it absolutely does. But what are the upsides of letting people have weed? And also what are the downsides of making something legal? So with healthy food, there's another gnarly alternative that people say we have to tax the living shit out of processed junk food.
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Unknown A
Which as a notion is a dope idea. Like, no shit, it's gonna be expensive. People are gonna buy it less. What you're almost certainly going to get, like the next day is a black market in junk food. Do you want children and adults to interact with literal criminals to acquire junk food? You're coding for it. Now, is it worth the trade off? Maybe let's run the roi. But very few people will actually run that estimate in their head even and be like, oh, fuck, that is what's going to happen. Because at the end of the day, you're dealing with one really big problem. People want to eat junk food because they love it and they don't really want to eat healthy food. Not all people, just some, specifically the some that are much more likely to be overweight. Because if you make, if you subsidize healthy food, tons of rich ass whole foods motherfuckers will be even richer because they don't spend as much money on food and leaner.
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Unknown A
The whole thing is great for them. But that's not even our target, like vector population. We want to help. And so you raise junk food prices for those people and you drop healthy food prices and they just like have more trouble making ends meet. And they might lose a little bit of weight, but their household income has been devastated and they're now buying fucking Doritos off the back of a shady truck. And who knows where they're coming from. And the cost you pay to your CVS to get Doritos money and you walk out, the cost you pay to a drug dealer is altogether different. And so we have to contend with this issue that lots of people really want the shit. And that's one of the biggest reasons. And I was on that podcast with Dr. Mike, and one of my biggest driving forces is a lot of people are unwilling to say like, hey, these people really want this.
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Unknown A
And we have a couple of assumptions we bring in that are very good assumptions, but they don't bear out like all these people really care about their health. Wrong. All these people are interested in making good health choices if given the opportunity. Wrong. Once you realize that for some fraction now some people you can help with those things, but the fraction the meat of humans remaining.
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Unknown B
I just want to still just as a real quick to clarify because you're saying this very hyperbolically, but I do agree with you that there's a difference between. And I say this a lot, there's a difference between like. Like being jacked versus wanting to be jacked. Like you have the physique, but there's also a lifestyle component. And just say that you just want the physique without the lifestyle component. The world doesn't work that way. So sure there are a lot of people who want to be healthy, but living healthy and making the correct choices to being healthy are a lot of things that are just. People just don't want to make those for sure.
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Unknown A
That's another one. So we can at least have three factors just off back. One is people just don't give a shit. One is people who give a shit nominally declared part but not revealed preference. They're not actually willing to do the work. Other people are people who are willing to do the work, but the work for them in their particular case is so difficult for a variety of factors, it doesn't get done and the tears go all the way out. So when we impose policies top down the tiers close in a little bit. The way the distribution of health maladies is, the topography of that is that most of the people you want to help are closer to that core. Are you into Star wars at all? Do you? You fuck with Star Wars?
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Unknown B
I've seen the movies, but not like Andor and all that.
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Unknown A
Coruscant is the main planet with all skyscrapers.
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Unknown B
Sand, right? No. Oh no. Coruscant is where they go with the. They're all above the clouds.
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Unknown A
Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. Skyscrapers. As far as the eye can see, the whole planet's covered.
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Unknown B
Skyscrapers. Yeah. Okay.
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Unknown A
It's one of the core worlds.
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Unknown B
Right, Gotcha.
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Unknown A
The core world of the very intractable obesity epidemic is people whose some combination of either revealed preferences.
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Unknown B
I feel like this analogy didn't help me understand core at all. I could have said core, but go ahead.
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Unknown A
A lot of your followers will be.
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Unknown B
Like my man, like Coruscant. Okay, but sorry Go ahead. Yeah, I know when you try to target with a certain policy, you're helping 5% on the outside and you're spending a lot of time and money on it, but all these people in the middle are not being impacted.
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Unknown A
And to me, it may very well be worth the policy to help the 5%, and maybe it's 20% and maybe it's 50%, and then maybe it's good. If the ROI and the policy make sense, that's great. But afterwards, this is another big. One of my big points on Dr. Mike podcast was you're going to be left with a situation where there's like literally tens of millions of people that are still overweight and still obese and have basically not budged. And you're like, we really just kind of fixed the social end of this. I mean, you can make a society in which healthy food is like nominally expensive. It already kind of is, if you know what you're doing, but even if you don't know what you're doing, nominally expensive. We can make a society in which, like, the legal purchase of junk food is very, very difficult, insanely expensive.
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Unknown A
And a lot of people will still remain very, very overweight because we never bothered to ask the question, like, do you want this? And sometimes they're like, yeah, but really they're no. And sometimes like, no, I want to eat McDonald's, get out of my face. What do you do about that? And you have to recognize that that exists before you go out and have these Napoleonic plans of like, man, we're going to do all these really expensive things to alter society. We're getting these massive benefits. We're going to end because people will say things like, we got to stop the obesity epidemic. Nobody's stopping it with that top down bullshit, man. The obesity epidemic begins in the human soul, so to speak, and really begins with our genetic drive to consume super tasty things. I think that is a tractable problem. It's already getting a huge bite out of it with medication.
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Unknown A
I think the future is just genetic engineering. Like, humans are literally not ideally optimized remotely for our modern world, but it is a solvable problem. If we genetically engineer humans while voluntarily, of course, to basically just not really have the same kinds of interests and temptations as they do now. But insofar as they have them, the idea of just like, we'll just make stuff more expensive or cheap or do regulations or inform people more, it falls on, it helps tons of people and then lots of people, it just almost doesn't help. At all. And we're stuck standing there like, did we do something wrong? Yeah. We just had higher hopes than our policy could have realistically put traction on.
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Unknown B
Okay, I follow you there, and I understand all that. I'm going to add one more layer on top, and then I'll see where we're at for this. So I do agree that if you come in and you just say so. One thing I fight against a lot, and I'm sure you've probably fought against a lot. You've heard of the concept of, like, food deserts, right? I think that there is a very technical definition of food desert that is true. Which has to do with people in incredibly rural areas having to travel very far distances to reach supermarkets. But the common understanding that if you live in any major city, you're 20 miles away from any healthy food is absolutely absurd and is not found in a reality whatsoever. And then also, I think, reveals part of what you're saying and that people kind of have this misunderstanding that, oh, well, if you just, you know, put chicken and rice in front of these people, they would never go to McDonald's again.
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Unknown B
They would only consume, you know, chicken and rice and broccoli, and it'd be good. And they would only eat the healthy stuff. Yeah. And try. Yeah. And the reality is this is just not the case. One thing that I would add as a layer on top of this, though, that maybe could modify choices is I see you're drinking water. Do you drink soda at all?
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Unknown A
All the time.
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Unknown B
Okay. One thing that I noticed when I was in my 20s, I don't know what encouraged me to do this or why, but I stopped consuming soda, and I only drank water for probably, like, six to eight months. And one thing I noticed, and I've heard other people will travel here and they'll have this similar take, is that if you've only consumed water for a long time and you try to drink soda, it's. And I'm not exaggerating, so it's very difficult that a sip of, like, a Coke, it is insanely sweet.
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Unknown A
It's too much. Blow your mind. I used to do this.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And even with Red Bull. Now, like, I like to sip on Red Bull throughout the day just because I'm not eating as much or whatever. But I remember when I first started drinking Red Bull, like, one. It was like, Jesus Christ. And now, if I had to, I could probably drink, like, half a can if I needed to. I'm combining, okay, so with the understanding that our environment kind of, like, can shape our Behavior, you know, to some extent over time when it comes to our tolerance for certain types of sugary foods or salty foods or whatever. And then the second part of you mentioned before that, and I think even libertarians would agree with this, that offering a seven or eight year old, you know, the heroin or fentanyl or whatever, I don't think anybody thinks that those children should be making that world.
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Unknown A
Now. Maybe libertarian would say phenomenal number of people.
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Unknown B
Yeah, generally this is probably not an okay thing. However, and I'm sure you've seen this, one of the most tragic things is to see like a 12 or 13 year old that is obese because it's like, my God, you have. The road in front of you is, I wish I could find this number again. But I think, I think I read that it's like 2% of people who are ever in the obese BMI range. Only 2% will ever make it back to the ordinary, the healthy bmi.
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Unknown A
But the better scenario, the more likely scenario if they do get traction on it is they go just to overweight.
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Unknown B
To overweight. Yeah. So that. So when you're already obese, when you're 12 or 13, it's like, Jesus. When I think of things like taxing sugary foods or I think of black market Doritos, I feel like as unintuitive it is, I feel like black market Doritos are awesome because I think right now the society that we live in, Doritos are like a staple food. If a Dorito was a thing that it's like, okay, it's Friday night, I'm going to go get some Doritos and I'm going to buy it from the black market. Dude, that's like a. Okay, you know, it's an illegal or an ultra high tax food. You're going to go and get it. But at least it's not part of your breakfast, lunch and dinner that you're eating Doritos. And what's more is I feel like if you have these types of structures in place where you are, we'll go with the.
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Unknown B
I prefer taxing here versus subsidizing healthy food. I don't know how much subsidized healthy food would help versus taxing the very unhealthy ultra processed sugar foods, whatever, that when it becomes less and less affordable, when people are forced to kind of like make decisions because of what's financially possible, or at least there is more friction to choosing the higher thing, then not only will they begin to choose the other thing to choose the more healthy option. I think eventually your preferences kind of morph over time into choosing the healthier thing. I think another example of this has to do with eating, as stupid as it sounds, eating vegetables. So despite the fact that half my family's Cuban, my nuclear family, my mom and dad had a very white approach to food, which means you have a piece of meat, a protein, and then you have like a carb, and then you have your vegetables are, you know, like people take cold showers in the morning.
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Unknown B
That's what white people eating vegetables is like, it's steamed something horrible on your plate. And vegetables just suck when you're a kid in that kind of family. But when I started to eat other types of food, Indian foods, Asian foods, Hispanic foods, vegetables are, they're really good. They're part of the meal. They're, they're are a part of what you eat. I think that growing up in an environment where stuff is prepared better like that, if I had to choose, do I want vegetables in a piece of food like this, I'm not even making a healthy choice. I'm just like, this tastes good. I want this. It's good. I like having all of these greens and vegetables in this dish versus I have to make the good choice and suffer through it. Whereas when all of it's so freely available and so easy to get, and especially when you're a kid and you're younger and your family buys it and you eat it, that by the time you're 18, the machine that you've been crafted into is one that is only going to select for these worst types of things all the time.
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Unknown B
And there is no friction there whatsoever. So you're going to continue to make this choice because you've been crafted into making those choices. I guess as a final kind of analogy, you brought up the grandmas on skateboards thing, right? Well, let's say that we lived in a world where skateboards cost $10 and walkers cost $5,000. As stupid as it is, you'd probably see some really crazy skateboard contraptions where grandmas are skating down the street like, well, fuck it, I'm not paying $50,000 with a walker. I'm going to learn to skate. And I got some big ass pads to make sure if I fall over on the other hip, you know. Yeah. So I guess. So I'm thinking when I'm looking for the top down, I feel like there are ways to kind of subtly make behavior better because we've in some ways limited choices, but that that limitation of choices actually creates a different type of choice making machine.
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Unknown B
There's like a feedback thing going on there.
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Unknown A
Yeah, so. So great ideas and lots of validity there. There are. After everything I say you still have to run the roi.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
But some ideas that could work. One is to make sure that you are not in somehow subsidized, not some way subsidizing the creation, proliferation and low cost of unhealthy foods. So like we subsidize lots of grains in the United States and that's just full stop. 98% of economists will say that's insane. Except the political process means that folks in red states just continue to vote for farm subsidies because it's pro farm or whatever.
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Unknown B
To add on to that. I haven't read anything about this a long time but I've heard that like ethanol fuels are not the greatest but because it's so subsidized that the ethanol is. Yeah, because. Yeah.
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Unknown A
So there's a very good argument that almost all if not all government subsidies are a gigantic just misunderstanding of fundamental economics and bad. So there's that.
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Unknown B
Don't know if I go that far but I. But I'm sympathetic. I understand. Yeah, sure.
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Unknown A
And then so we could at least do away with some of that shit. The next thing we could do is basically somehow establish maybe through government. I would prefer private organizations which corporations opt into of labeling every food that you ever see in the grocery store. Grocery stores. Because he could easily do this the grocery stores association where the food is labeled as green check approved for developing children or some kind of other yellow thing or red thing that's like adults only. This is for people who know how to make their own healthy choices. And however you structure that dichotomy then parents have a real easy time shopping for food because if it's not green checked, do not fucking feed it to your children. Doritos out. Regular soda. Pepsi out. Junk food is not hard to catalog out red. That means as an adult when you get a high Spock on Saturday I'm going in the store everything, all I see is red.
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Unknown A
Baby boom. Doritos I love. I fucking know what I'm doing. I want. Even if I'm insanely overweight and obese, I'm an adult. I'm a rational actor. I'm 18, I'm allowed to vote. As soon as you're allowed to vote, any kind of restrictions on your freedom start to make curious like almost no sense whatsoever unless impingement on other people's freedoms. But if you're a Child and under the care of someone, be at the parent or the state, depending on if you have parents or you live in a home, then feeding your children red check foods. Red check mark foods is. This is the tough part. Maybe get somewhere into the culture to get people to understand. Like it's like if you went over to your parents or your friend's friend's house of younger children and like their 8 year old had like a beer and like you guys let them drink beer, they're like, yeah, what's wrong with that?
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Unknown A
You're like, this is unconscionable. We have to start looking. More and more people have to start looking at that feeding of the Doritos to kids. Just normal work a day purpose. Like here's a fucking bag of Doritos to go to school as. Like now. The green check is something you receive from making your food meet certain standards that this organization can develop with nutritionists to be like, actually yes, you can eat a lot, lot of this food. It can be quite tasty, but it's unlikely to be very obesogenic. Right? Which is like a known thing. This isn't a very complicated question. And so if the junk food manufacturers want to just target adults only with like just random bullshit, hey, fuck off. Amazing. Red check. But if they want to, or no check at all, just green check is kids approved. And everything else is by default not.
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Unknown A
Right. But even if you want to make it easier, green and red, right? Those companies, if they want to target the child demographic, which is huge, need to get their products to get into certain, like there's a proof of children. If you want to make children's toys in the United States and sell them, you can't have like little bite sized things that kids can swallow. It's nominal. It's a very easy, very straightforward regulation that can take less than a page to be like, if your shit passes this, you're good. Sell the fucking sell away to kids. If we get that system going and humans actually care, then we have a very powerful system to be like, why is I kid eating Doritos? And the parents like, well, but I was in a rush, I didn't know what else to get. Shut the up, you liar.
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Unknown A
You're at the store. There's 80 other things. There's so many things approved for children you could have got. You're just lying. And convenience foods are a big deal and should be available to busy parents who are trying to feed children. But if they meet the green check standard, you're like, they're gonna be good. And then it's just not like a toxic food problem. Children can still overeat, but at least we're not like funneling milkshakes down their throats. So that's.
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Unknown B
And I would even say on that that it. It seems like my impression personally. And I guess overeating becomes significantly harder when you're consuming stuff that is like put together in a better way. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Just not as tasty.
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Unknown B
Sure. Yeah.
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Unknown A
And has calories too.
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Unknown B
I mean, chicken is tasty, but I feel like it's a lot easier to eat.
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Unknown A
Everything is.
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Unknown B
Well, you've probably consumed a whole bunch more chicken. I imagine that I have actually. You might have personal traumatic feelings about chicken. I would say that, yeah, chicken. But I could eat 700 calories of French fries in an instant without.
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Unknown A
Exactly. It's all magnitudes. Right. Everything should be tasty if you're hungry enough. Hyper palatable food that is insanely high in calories per. How much it fills you up is the real thing. So if we have children's foods, we could say okay, per unit of calories. It has to vet itself in scientific studies about how filling it is for how long. And you can be quite palatable as like very tasty as long as it fills you up so much with so few calories that you're like, there's only so much of the shit I can eat. And it's very difficult to get over fat. There's a conversation there for that. It doesn't impinge on hardly any liberties at all. It's basically a top down sorting and labeling problem that can be solved by some institutions. And if that's a thing that's ubiquitous, that's one of those things that will not solve the problem, but it'll make it very obvious who's making the kind of choices that they should or shouldn't be.
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Unknown A
Because if you're mom and you reach for a red check, big ass shit on the front. Do not feed this to children under 18. If you're their caretaker, then that becomes one of those things that you buy an alcohol for kids too. Don't do that. That I think has a potential to do a lot of good at. Very, very tiny negative ROI in any other way. That's an idea where I think that could be a thing. Another one is like, almost nobody should be drinking regular sugar soda. Almost everyone who wants to drink soda should be drinking diet soda because diet soda is safe.
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Unknown B
You're not part of the aspartame causes cancer crowd.
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Unknown A
So I'm Scientifically literate is what you mean. There was never that crowd. It's just like two Ramazini foundation studies that people went off with that. It was never a debate. And so diet soda is safe and healthy and all that great stuff, neutral for your health and dental health aside, you can always fuck yourself up with something. Almost everyone should be drinking diet soda and not full sugar soda. So if we want to have a conversation about what's a good way to maybe label diet soda as, like, this will make you fat. The government has declared that in excess amounts, this is poison, which is true. And then the diet soda is labeled massive green check mark. Have as much as you want. We don't even need to fuck with the price subsidization. We could, but that's so complicated to touch so many other parts of the economy, so many unintended consequences just with labeling.
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Unknown A
Something I've said before on a podcast is, do you think PepsiCo really gives a flying at the end of the day, as long as they're not killing their customers, as long as the customers are happy, what it is they're putting in their soda, they don't care. Everyone wants diet soda now. All right, sweet. It just changed the pinks. Boom. Aspartame or whatever. Sucralose instead of real sugar. They don't care, so it really won't hurt them. So you're not going to hear them being like, how dare you? We need full sugar soda. They don't care. But a lot of humans in the world, a lot of voters think that full sugar soda is better than diet soda. How do you with that? We live in a democracy. That's tough.
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Unknown B
Okay, the. Okay, so I, I like the marrying of kind of like cultural, like individual things with the. I guess like the societal restructuring. Yeah. Because I feel like that's the. I feel like that's the good takeaway. If you're trying to analyze somebody who's. Who's just giving one side of the equation and not balancing the other. The. I think the labeling thing is a good example too, because I don't know if it was in. I don't know if this was in Mexico or it was in Europe, but I remember looking at labels and they will just have like a breakdown of, like. I think these were relatively simple. I think it was just percentage of calories from simple sugar, I think. And it would. It would literally be either, I think, red or yellow or green or something. Yeah. Anyone seen something like that? When I looked, I was like, oh, okay.
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Unknown B
And then there's also a bit of, like you said, kind of like a social cost. Like if, like, even if something is stupid, even if there's a rated R movie, you know, with no nudity in it, hearing somebody say, I took my 12 year old to go see a rated R movie is like, hmm, that's interesting. Like it just forces people to kind of like consider for a second, like totally.
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Unknown A
Like, yeah, you've been in movie theaters before, like NC17 movie or whatever where like people snuck their kids in. They're like five. I'm like, oh my God, this is a slasher movie. I have my eyes covered. So there's definitely a thing. And social stigma is a motherfucker for good and for ill, an incredible force for good. But also like bullying and shit is terrible. And so if we can get that going in that direction again, you need cultural buy in. If most people in a subculture just don't care, man, that's really tough, man. How do you deal with that? So another system, Even if, let's say the green and red doesn't strike people super well, green, yellow and red is dope. Green is like, you can feed your kids this all the time. Yellow is, you had better not be feeding your kids a lot of yellow foods, but on a weekend, on an occasion, that's totally cool.
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Unknown A
Red is like, you're just gassing them up. And if you consistently feed your kids red foods, like, bad things happen to your children in most cases. And so then we can have another situation where you come to your doctor and this requires. We can already do this. The systems aren't in place yet. Technologically, very feasible. You go to your doctor, you're like, my kid's obese. He's like, dope. Can I get your approval here on the HIPAA form to API your grocery store purchases real quick? So I can see it on the pie chart. You're like, yeah, sure, he gets the API. And he's like, you're buying your kid like 90% red shit. You're like, is that bad? Is red bad? Yes, it's the thing that's half the label and says, this will kill your kids. At that point it's like, okay, very actionable to be like, what are you doing?
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Unknown A
And if you buy mostly green shit, hey, great. And if it's really a price issue or whatever, hey, then various tax breaks, subsidies can play into that equation at that second level. But if we're subsidizing people before very clearly informing them about what's good and bad. And if we assume that's going to work before they give a shit. We're like two steps away, subsidies wise, from anything working like we want it to.
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Unknown B
Okay, yeah, I think, I think I largely agree there. I think the first issue is people have to target what the actual problem is. I find that a lot of politics and a lot of social stuff starts with people not understanding the problem. I'm sure you, you could probably tie it back to gym stuff, too. Here's my program, you know, why am I not making any progress? And it's like, well, how many times are you going to the gym? And it's like, well, I think I missed like eight workouts this month. And it's like, okay, well, that conversation. All the time.
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Unknown A
All the time.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Or, yeah. Or even with eating or budgeting. Right? Like, oh, like, why are you losing money? It's like, I'm not sure. Do you have a budget? No. It's like, okay, well, so you don't.
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Unknown A
Know if you're losing money or not.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So the, that I think even getting off the ground there can be difficult, though, because people morally load so much, especially around lifestyle choices, to where if you say that somebody has bad financial habits or bad dietary habits, people instantly assume you're making, like a moral judgment. And so you can't go down that road.
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Unknown A
That's okay. What's wrong with moral judgments?
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Unknown B
I mean, I don't, I don't necessarily disagree. I'm just saying this is why it doesn't happen socially. It's because people are uncomfortable, like, heading in that direction.
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Unknown A
Yes, It's a prickly direction, especially because.
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Unknown B
There are so many other associations. Because we can probably given one or two things about a person, we could probably make a bunch of other guesses about that person, and then that gets into very murky territory very fast where people are uncomfortable making assumptions or they. So like, like the, like I say theoretically, but almost certainly obesity is probably largely correlated or has a huge correlation with your socioeconomic status, which is also probably heavily correlated with your, with race in the United States. So saying that, you know, if you're making these choices, that's bad. And then it's heavily tied into race. People think that you're. The immediate assumption is you're attacking somebody based on something like that, which is stupid, but it's stupid.
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Unknown A
And there's a thing to say there where a good retort to that is whatever the demographics are, the causality of the variables is the same. And it's racist to assume that race is the causative variable rather than a correlated variable offhand. So when they say like, so you're really making a critique of race xyz and like, no, no, absolutely not. I'm making a moral critique of people that behave in way xyz. And there's people of every race that behave in every single different way. Fact. So if judging people by their behaviors is wrong because it has association with race, we're dead in the water. But if assuming that just because someone is some race, they're gonna behave in a certain way, for sure, well, it's just like a statistically uninformed. But understandably, to your point, a lot of people have neither the patience, the inclination, nor the cognitive ability to like, do some kind of analysis where there's fuzzy boundaries, normal distributions, crossing distributions, that all gets.
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Unknown A
That's really wacky. But I think something I've come to lately as a proposal for how to treat the world as a human and as a voter is I think we really need to begin getting to judging people on their actions and judging everyone on the same universal standard of actions. Like, for example, you got the hood gang bangers and shit on the corner strapped, causing all kinds of raucous. My personal proposal is police force beefed up due process. Body cams everywhere. Drones following all cops with body cams to make sure any malfeasance or injustice is addressed enormously. Body cams are like this magic unlock where all of a sudden you see where real criminals behave like and like, it's really difficult to be a corrupt cop with a body cam, bro, why'd your body cam turn off? 20 minutes and interrogation. We can't protect you as a police department if your body cam turns off.
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Unknown A
Now, if you have a body cam, you have a dual body cam, you have two drone cameras following you, your cop car has a cam, and all three of your other guys have that. The probability that you're gonna beat somebody to death because they're a certain race is incredibly low. Because, like, how the are we gonna get away with this? The cams don't even stream to the police department. They stream to a national data center, right? So if you have this whole police system in force, then you just treat everyone the same, no matter what. Race you out here dealing drugs, you out here on some bad shit. I don't give a fuck what the hell your name is, what skin color you are. You get in that hammer. And by hammer, I mean a very, just, very civil process of the police physically removing you from the corner and getting you into the justice system for processing.
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Unknown A
And we just never have to ask questions about racing race. That is my proposal. And that whole like defund the police bullshit and all that stuff I think misses the mark entirely because while yeah, there are absolutely sensitive issues of policing and a nasty history of racial stuff, it's also true to say that if we just say, okay, well this is real hairy, we gotta take the police and recede from black neighborhoods. Guess where most of the crime happens? Black neighborhoods. Guess who most of the victims are? Black people. And if you're a racist fuck and you think all black people are criminals or whatever, you're forgetting the fact that almost no black people are criminal statistically, almost all of them are fucking just awesome regular ass people just trying to do their best. And these are the people you are being. You're leaving victimized to criminals because you have too much white guilt or some shit like that and you can't do anything about the problem.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I always bring up that. Like that crime bill that Everybody hates from 93, 94 that had the support of the Congressional Black Caucus and a lot of black community people, tons of black Democrats crack was like destroying black neighborhoods. And crime was the friend black nervous. And nobody, nobody likes crime regardless of race. So yeah, but, but teasing apart the. Not teasing apart, that's not the correct word. Getting people to make evaluations of identifying problems like divorced from, I guess like personal uncomfortable feelings of exploring stuff can be very difficult. And even on that defund the police thing, it's very funny because if you talk to somebody who is pro defund the police and you start asking well, what should the departments do differently? And they're like, well, police clearly need far more training. We need to have body cams on everybody. We need a way to source stuff.
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Unknown B
And it's like yeah, yeah, but this is like none of this has to do with defund. This all needs more money.
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Unknown A
Yes, totally.
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Unknown B
Yeah, true.
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Unknown A
So basically tldr. Yeah, we can judge all humans on essentially the same standard of behavior. And then we have an easy ability to verify in an open ended way our application of the law and that the outcomes might be different. And then we ask the question of why the outcomes different. But at least we know it's not because the law is being applied in a way that's unfair. Sure. Because we can now document it.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I guess we probably agree here. But just to clarify on language, when you say we can judge all people on the same standard of behavior, we probably want to treat all people at least at the point where you're especially breaking laws. Similarly, if not identically, I will say, I'm guessing you probably don't disagree with this, but one of the problems when people hear that judge people on the same standard of behavior is that just the choices available to people growing up sometimes could be so heavily influential on the things that they do that. So for instance, if somebody were to give me credit for, hey, you went through high school, did you ever sell drugs? And I say no, I don't think I personally deserve much credit for that decision because I don't. I don't even know where I would sell drugs. I don't even know how. I don't even know how that would.
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Unknown A
Ever be in your bedroom.
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Unknown B
I have no idea. Yeah, I don't even know where to buy weed. I would have to ask a friend who knew a guy who knew a guy on how to get. That's just not even a choice that has ever entered my mind. And actually I guess, I guess on a kind of related sense, I used to be a professional gamer in my early 20s. But the one thing that people think when they look at people that, and I'm guessing this is true of every successful person in life is that, oh my God, when you're at this upper elite level, you are just able to make so many amazing choices and adapt to so many scenarios and do all of these awesome things to be constantly successful. And it's like, that's like making like the crazy decision is probably 5% of the really successful part. And then 95% is just preparing a successful environment.
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Unknown B
Like you just don't put yourself in scenario. Like if you're on a programming level, if you're in these crazy situations where you've got to output, play or do like this incredibly complicated crazy maneuver that means you've already up. By the time you're having to make those decisions, you've already made mistakes. If everything plays according to plan and simple, it's because you've prepared your environment in such a way that you don't have to consider these things right. For my own son, I don't ever want my son to have like a. This is how I overcame the temptation to commit crime, sell drugs, you know, do all these horrible things. He just didn't even have those choices in front of him, so I never had to even consider it. Now, obviously there's going to be some level of, you should have some, I wouldn't say struggles, but there needs to be some amount of contention in your life where you're dealing with things that Overcoming problems and obstacles.
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Unknown B
But yeah, I think one of the frustrating things when people say that everybody should be treated the same based on the decisions they make from a moral standpoint is just some people don't even ever have to contend with difficult decisions in their life. And other people, maybe from a very early age are constantly having to contend with those types of things. But I don't know if there's necessarily disagreement there when you're just saying judge somebody at that point of being. Or maybe you think, well, fuck them anyway. That's a harsh way to sing it. But yeah, go ahead. You're smiling. You have something.
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Unknown A
You're onto a lot of shit though. That makes a ton of sense, man.
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Unknown B
For sure.
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Unknown A
I like to approach this from a consequentialist lens, okay. If we do not reduce crime in a neighborhood to nominal levels, any mass success that people could experience is illusory. It'll just never happen. The number one reason why people get into slaying that in the hood is because it's what's going to get you and easy money. And also you have a fucking gat anyway because you got to protect yourself and you got to be in a gang because otherwise gangs are totally in control. And even just one person with a gun can't fight a whole gang. And the gang is involved in drug dealing as their primary source of income. And so how do we stop gangs? Is one question, easy question to answer. You just put them into prison for a long time for obvious repeat offenses. So first offenses I believe should be incredibly lenient in most cases.
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Unknown A
Cases as long as you're not like raping babies or some crazy like that. But second, third, fourth offenses should be exponentially longer prison term. I also think that prisons should be unbelievably damn near sanctuary, like places with the best possible human treatment that can be given. The only reason prisons should exist is to keep violent and non law abiding people the away from everyone else because they can't play in the sandbox. So it wouldn't even be accurate to say, yeah, but prison's a fucked up place. Like no, we should do everything we can to make it really, really awesome. Just remove those people. So that's the easy way to. You can get rid of 90% of crime in the United States and gee, a couple of years if you just started actually enforcing law like it's supposed to be.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I think that on the two points is that one, I think part of the brutal law enforcement idea would be that the reason why people make choices are usually because it's the choice of least friction and it's the choice for the best outcomes. And I think that when people are committing crime, oftentimes you're looking to like a selective enforcement thing. I would never, ever, ever speed if I knew that every single time I did, I would get a speeding ticket. You do it because you don't think you'll get caught. But if you live in environments where the chances of getting caught and then the punishments coming after are exponentially higher than those, the landscape of choice that you want to make would change significantly.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And then the second thing for prisons, man, we really don't do any rehabilitative anything in the United States. And I even heard somebody say something along the lines of like being able to do book reports for lesser sentencing time I think would be way better than what we have now, which is one of the only things. One of the few things that Jordan Peterson said that I agree with is it seems like with prison the goal is you take men who are at their optimal crime committing like, like hormone profile, and then you basically stick them in prison until you age them out of like the younger violent years and then you. Yeah, and that's basically it.
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Unknown A
Rehabilitation is another topic we could tackle. Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of empirically validated rehabilitative practice that works very well. There's a lot of data on this from the criminology aspect, which almost no one knows because it's really politically incorrect and icky to look at. But it's definitely true that people who come from different backgrounds and environments will have more run ins with the law because of just cultural elements. But the solution to that is not to take away the policing, because if the policing is reduced, we're just back to crime and there's just no winners there. Yeah, the crime has to be reduced and like you break the law is happening. And there are, there are tractable ways to address that, by the way. We'll get to in a sec. But if you're really a person who cares about others and you find it unjust that people come from different situations through no fault of their own or thrust in these cultures, what are you going to do about it?
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Unknown A
Give me ideas about how to change culture and about how to empower those people with opportunities that has nothing to do with getting rid of the police. That's a whole different conversation. A very productive conversation, but it's a two pronged approach. Help people, but make sure when they up, they get the hammer. Here's another thing, you don't have to surprise people with a shit. You can have mass campaigns for months and months of months, door to door campaigns. We show up to people and you speak to them in their own language. Be like, check this out. They find you with an illegal gun today, you're gonna do the rigmarole. Court, whatever, probation, you're 17. You get out, nothing's gonna happen. The usual. Do you get that in six months starting July 1st or whatever. It's a 25 year prison sentence, full stop. Unless you can prove that was not your weapon.
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Unknown A
And the burden of proof is like you have documentation that's coming. It's not here yet. It's coming. You motherfuckers better realize that shit is going to hit you and start getting rid of your guns or else. Oh by the way, we just started police patrols to start fucking eliminating crime. Basically cop on every corner type of shit. You don't even need a gat anymore, bro. Nobody going to be doing crime. So either bury your shit in your backyard, throw it in a fucking dumpster somewhere, turn it in, we don't care. But in July 1st, the shit don't play anymore. So when you catch people on July 2nd and give them 25 years and psychotic leftists with all the best intentions of course come out of the woodwork and be like, this is not justice. These people knew. They knew. And maybe they didn't know because your leftist asked was not in front of their house telling them how the shit was going to happen in six months.
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Unknown A
You can prepare people for these things. There's no need to foist them upon a surprise wise, you can, you can even do a year, bro. A year would just make it very clear to people in their own language, bro, you are gonna go for this. Do not with these people. They don't play like the past people. They're new, they're different. They're here to put you the away. And it's gonna be nice. Prison's nice now, but you're gone, you ain't getting away. You let people know that they still keep on their guns. Now it's trade off. Problem is someone who was doing it just because their culture just didn't know any better, who ends up going to prison for 25 years? A tragedy, yes. What is the trade off of that tragedy versus that person spraying somebody's house and killing a nine year old black girl.
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Unknown A
Now it's a trade off, now it's a discussion. Now we talk about it. The anathema to doing Anything about the problem because you have whatever, some other kind of race and you feel a whole shitload of guilt is terrible. Another good traction to the problem is you really think the racial thing is up. You really think that white police officers dealing with black community members is a dynamic you don't want? No problem. Huge subsidies, talent search, rigorous approval process to get the best black cops in the world to the United States trained up like crazy and have them rotate through cities and just do anti gang warfare. Can you imagine a bunch of fucking stuff? Black dude SWAT guys who come to Minneapolis for six months, train up their department and go on raids every night. They're there for it and they're black, bro. What you gonna say?
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Unknown A
The gang members gonna be like, this is racist. Oh, it is.
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Unknown B
What the hell do I look? I'll say the black on black doesn't gain anywhere near as much traction even if they do do up shit. Because I remember watching this is recorded. It's not funny. I was gonna say it's funny, but it's ironic I guess because you mentioned like the body cams. I think there were like, like five different angles of footage where I want to say I don't remember the city and it was several years ago, but it was like five black cops had another black guy who I think was basically on his knees or handcuffed and they ended up like basically beating the shit out of this guy until I think he died. And I think we talked about this for all of two days and this was like 4K high definition, like captured from so many angles. But I think because the cops were black, nobody cared as much.
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Unknown B
Whereas if that would have been white on black, that would have been. That would have been the George Floyd before George Floyd moment. It would have been insane. So yeah, having the, having the cops of a similar race is sad, but it's. I don't think that's important to keep the racial like the white on black cop, you know, racial violence out. I think it's just important for the perception of it. People don't care as much.
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Unknown A
Totally. Most cops, 99 plus percent are not in any functional way racist. Of course you get some racist assholes every now and again on every race. By the way, most cops are also real reasonable human beings. Some of the most reasonable human beings that we have. Because if you ever watch body cam footage, the amount of abuse cops take from people and never even raise their voice is sure shit outside of my ability. You don't see me becoming cop anytime soon. I'd be like oh, what's that we drawing? That's it. So they're doing an amazing job. But at the same time, there are ways to deal with the police where you're just like. Like, you got me. And there are ways to deal with the police which are like incrementally more disagreeable, disruptive, and violent. And whatever race you are, if you get to that point, whatever race the cop is, and this bears out, statistically, you're going to get the hammer sooner or later.
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Unknown A
But if you're chill, the cops deal with you almost always as a normal, chill person. And the good thing about body cams and ubiquity and drones and everything is like, this is a literal, solvable problem to where we have a few incidents every year in the United States with like, whatever tens of millions of police interactions that are actually unjust. And the rest of them. You watch. You ever watch police body cam footage?
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Unknown B
Yeah, I watch a ton of it.
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Unknown A
And the perception of how cops act and how criminals act that you would get from maybe mainstream media, if we can call it that, the leftist side of the perspective versus the reality of police body cams is like, really shakes the world model. Because you're like, why would you ever say this to anyone, let alone a cop? Incredibly clear instructions repeated five times in a row. And they're like, sometimes they just close their door and they're like, you. And they just sit there.
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Unknown B
Why would you do that? Yeah, I don't like to. I'm not trying to cover for bad behavior because there definitely are cops that have bad behavior.
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Unknown A
Absolutely. Cough with body cams. That's good.
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Unknown B
But there are police encounters where that I wish people could understand a little bit more. I remember one where it was two cops who were shouting at this white dude to get out of his car. And I think the whole encounter is all of like 20 minutes. And by the last, like five, six, seven minutes, I would say it's probably stuff that's like, kind of sad or like, you're like, man, these cops are kind of being assholes where I don't know if they break the window, but they're trying to pull this guy out of his car and he's like complaining and crying. He's like, come on, come on. And at some point on the way out of the car, he grabs a gun and he ends up killing both officers as a friend drives by and.
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Unknown A
Then he, oh, my God, have you seen this?
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Unknown B
Do not. Oh, this is. It's a. It's hard to watch, cuz. Yeah, you. Yes, it's, it's a bad one. Yeah. And a lot of people will see footage up to of the guy being like upset in other encounters and they're like, well, come on, why is the cop being such a dick here? And it's like, it's like it's a different world. It's a little bit scary knowing that every person could theoretically have, you know, a gun or theoretically for you and.
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Unknown A
I, for a cop. Realistically.
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Unknown B
Sure. Yeah. And that people don't understand all the time that it's. Yeah, yeah. I don't like, it's very annoying. Like there is no like non compliant physical. Non compliance is always rough too. Like sometimes like, yeah, like, well, why did he have to throw him or why did he have to do that? And it's like, especially when you're talking like 5, 10 or higher, 200 pound, you know, adult male. There's no trick or easy way that doesn't involve like actually, you know, strangling somebody or using, you know, like a shotgun. That gets a good, you know, connection. Like there is no easy way to make a person like that comply. Especially when you're talking like arms and stuff and getting a parent. So they're always gonna be showing like, oh, like stop or whatever. And yeah, it's annoying going over a lot of that, I think.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've talked more political stuff recently. I want to say it's like new ish. Like I think people had like inclinations to where you were politically years ago because every now and then you would slip a thing kind of into a video. Yeah, slip a thing into a video. But now if you've been a little bit more overt about. Are you enjoying talking about on your personal channel more heavily political stuff or do you hate talking about it just because of like the responses? Yeah, I guess. How do you feel like diving more into that world?
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Unknown A
That's a great question. Yeah. Last couple years. I basically started like a year and a half ago maybe. No, like just. Just a little bit more than a year ago I started the Progress Channel as I call it. Chris Williamson said, don't make things titled other than anything other than your name. So it's just Mike is retal, I guess, but just trying to talk about. Basically I'm hyper obsessed with progress in every conceivable way. And I think when there are clear roads to it and it's a knowledge problem of people just don't know that actually these are pretty well understood problems we could get to or at least get some bite on them, get some traction understanding them. I really want to at least get my voice going. A lot of the reason I started the channel is just kind of stuff. I think about my spare time and I was like, I just have to yell at somebody about this.
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Unknown A
And another one is I'm tired of like watching a lot of punditry on media and like they'll have like some rabid leftist and rabid conservative person and psychotic out to lunch anarchist debating. And I'm like, there does not need to be this insane discussion. Everyone here is largely wrong, but there's actually a good way to get at this problem.
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Unknown B
Oh my God, you're so. I love how naive you are. I'm just, I'm half joking. But that what you're saying right there is exactly the same thing I thought in 2016 when Trump came on and I saw a lot of insane people on the right, instant people on the left. I was like, I feel like I could contribute better to these conversations. And then years later I find that I'm just part of the everybody screaming into the abyss. So it's funny that you see that. Exactly, yeah.
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Unknown A
Screaming yet. But maybe in the future I don't have any illusions about my ability to contribute, but I think I'm tired of eye rolling at people's opinions and I decided to be like, you know, I'm actually going to put out my opinions on the world into some kind of long form discussion that is good faith and attempts to be informative and nuanced and to see things from every perspective. I do have a decent ability to be able to steel man every single argument that you could possibly give me, every single position I can steel man. I can oftentimes steel man it to an incredible extent to where you're like, dude, you're a Nazi. Like, nope. But they had really great ideas in many regards. If you're a communist, like, nope, they had many ideas that were great in many regards. And if you can steel man an idea and then you can red team the idea and you can find some logical structure that emerges that's like, seems to be a good idea than not.
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Unknown A
I'm really passionate about working towards that. And as I've been doing that, I've been not explicitly political in the sense of Democrat versus Republican or something like that, but I have been wading into the political front because it intersects with, okay, there's ways to get progress and sometimes the politics are very helpful and sometimes they're not. So then I end up speaking on political issues mostly because I'm kind of just trying to get to that corner of the room where, like, we all have a better world. Something you said earlier we started the discussion was you think you and I largely agree on the outcomes. And I think almost everyone largely agrees on the outcomes. And the really cool thing is that we understand so much now that we can make societies function in such ways that at least in a very large scale majority effort, they get real close to really awesome things.
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Unknown A
And a lot of the opposition to those awesome things is either ignorance or ideology. And I can combat a decent amount of ignorance. And ideology is tough to combat if you have already been bitten by the bug. But if you haven't yet and you're like, those people seem like they're making a good point. I'm over here, like, let me tell you something real quick. And then you can decide and you talk to me. And after that you're like, yeah, that guy's an idiot. These guys are right. Or you're like, like, whoa, why do these people have this opinion? You're like, well, they just have a lot of feelings. And I literally. And I mean this a little bit of as a meme and as a joke, but I think it's a grain of truth. I think a huge fraction of why people have certain political opinions is they just have a lot of feelings.
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Unknown A
And running a society for certain objective outcomes that we mostly ran. For example, how many people want dirty streets? Sweet. How many people want unclean waters? Can't drink dope. How many people want unclean air? Cool. High crime, expensive education. Yeah. Super expensive food People can't afford. National defense, Not a priority. So ISIS can just establish a caliphate here if they want. Almost everyone's for the same shit. Then we can ask the question of, like, how do we engineer a society to get to those things without, like, trampling on other things we like? Like, how many people are against their own individual liberty? No. No one. Okay, so individual liberty is big. Everyone likes it. Right? Sweet. So how do we conserve as much liberty as we can while vectoring into those good places is a technical question of economics and social construction? And that question intersects sometimes with political biases people have from political right and left, for example, in many other vectors, but only in some cursory way.
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Unknown A
And most of the time when people are like, well, I don't like that. They're just having a lot of feelings and they're getting distracted from the technical problem of how do we do the things properly.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I've started borrowing a lot, kind of from this, like, emotivist perspective to where when people are saying they don't like a thing or we shouldn't do a thing, I'm trying to figure out what they're actually saying, because oftentimes it's not the thing that they're expressing. And then oftentimes people will say that. You know, like, people might say something like, I don't want to be involved in war anymore in the United States. And then Trump will say something about Greenland, and they'll say like, okay, well, I want to attack Greenland. And it's easy to try to evaluate the statement as, okay, well, they said that they were anti war and now they're pro war. Well, seems like they're hypocrites when in reality the statement was never, I'm anti war or I'm pro war. What they're probably emoting, what they're saying is, I don't want to be involved in wars that I don't see, like, a good justification or rationalization for.
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Unknown B
That's probably what they're saying.
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Unknown A
It's like a tautology. But, yes, a lot of times people just expressing those in emotive language.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it seems like it, but I find that it's bad.
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Unknown A
You're like, whoa.
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Unknown B
A little bit. Yeah. But I find that people will say things like that, but then they'll even.
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Unknown A
Violate that kind of.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Or they won't realize. They won't realize the extent of what they're saying. And then when it comes to some other area, they will get tied up in the former statement and they won't be able to apply it, I guess, like, fairly or reasonably in other areas that just. And what I'm saying there about the I don't want to be involved in war versus I don't want to be involved in unjust war. There will be a lot of, like, people won't even be aware of what it is. I guess the extent to what they're saying is a great example. This might be like, I'm opposed to all government, like, assistance or subsidies or whatever. You find a lot of conservatives that'll say stuff like this, but if they're older, my God, don't touch their Social Security, because it's all over for you, you know? Or I think the government shouldn't subsidize anything.
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Unknown B
And it's like, okay, what about your churches? Right? And it's like, okay, well, hold on. Maybe they do deserve tax breaks. Or for the left, you know, it could be like, we need to defund the police. It's like, okay, well, the most expensive new tech that we brought on our body cam, so we're getting rid of all of those. It's like, okay, well, hold on. Or, you know, we talk about police training or we talk about sending out EMS or people for, you know, medic, like mental health emergencies with the cops as well. Like, okay, well, this all needs more funding. It's like, okay, maybe I don't mean defund the police. Maybe when I say defund the police, what I really mean is I want less funding going to police that I think are engaging in bad activity, but maybe there should be more funding going to.
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Unknown B
But that doesn't slogan against bad police activity. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, but it's. That's not as marketable and everything. So, yeah, it's frustrating, I guess, kind of bringing that out of people because when you go into the political world, start arguing with people, they will defend the slogans and they will defend. And then sometimes get caught up in a world where they're trying to defend the slogans to where I've argued with people who take that, like, we shouldn't be involved in foreign wars position. And I'll say, like, well, what about like World War II?
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Unknown A
That's a tough one, huh?
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Unknown B
And they'll be like, no, well, if we would have been a trade partner to everyone and an ally to no one, you know, it's possible that just through trading with, you know, the British and then that we would have cut off Japan's ability to win this war in this front or we would have cut off Germany's ability to proceed more if we would have traded. And it was actually our interview, like, it'll. You'll get into so many worlds from. It was like, wouldn't it be like, do we really feel this way? Yeah, there's a lot of. When it comes to politicking or arguing political stuff, the vast majority of it is like chewing through people's rhetoric or trying to figure out what they actually mean rather than, you know, let's look at the study and let's look at this discrete stuff stuff because kind of like you said, I guess this ties back to the gym stuff completely.
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Unknown B
A lot of it is, I wouldn't say solved, but we kind of know the answers. If you remove ideology from it, you know, like, you can watch 50 trillion videos on, you know, optimal lifting form and optimal dieting and all this. But there's some that goes to the gym and curls in the squat rack and is only ever in the Smith machine who has A better physique than you. And he doesn't know what the he's doing, but he just does every day. And he likes, likes going. He has fun with it and that's it, you know? Sure, yeah. That a lot of it is just like this kind of like nibbling around the edges or people are getting lost in the ideology instead of focusing on the actual problems itself.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I would say that if you are, if you consider yourself intelligent and you consider yourself a rational thinker, a really good mental exercise to do is excise all ideology from your headspace as a temporary exercise and try to aim for a world outcome which you think is nice and everyone will like. And then see like, okay, which ideologies on the margins are helpful and which ones aren't. And I'm kind of going to pick and choose because imagine saying something like I only like American food and then trying Chinese or Indian food for the first time and being like, look, the matrix, like the green sliver start to fall and you're like, somebody lied to me. It would be preposterous statement, but unexamined. It goes nowhere. So then you can say, you know, I really like tasty food. Oh no. Now you're much closer to the truth about what you really like.
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Unknown A
And so a lot of times if you have a lot of ideologies, it's in your own head. This is not stuff to say out loud. I'll say some of this out loud as an illustration just to give yourself the freedom to think about things that you might not have been cool to admit. Here are some. Every single hippie leftist communist with a fucking sign that said ban nuclear proliferation in the reactor space. The energy space in the 70s had a series of very good points. We need to consider them. That one hurts me deeply because I think that missing out on the complete electrification and nuclear fication of the US in the 1960s and 70s was like, we could have just never dealt with a fraction of the global warming that we have. Not. So one of those things is not debatable. It's debatable, but you're going to lose the debate if you do it.
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Unknown A
Because all the evidence is on one side and none of it's on the other. However, the intentionality of those people is often very sound. I mean, like, is nuclear 100% safe? Fuck no. What happens if nuclear goes wrong in the wrongest way? Real, real bad stuff. Real bad stuff. All right, let's talk about that stuff. Let's open our minds, not just push the hit beside to Be like, they're insane, but they have some good points. On the other hand, conservative individuals who say, you know, there are only two genders. Do they have a point? They have 98% of a point. They have most of the point. There are mostly just two genders. Is there space on the periphery for some gender stuff that's not just one or two? Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. But if you say, like, these are hateful, I have no idea where they're coming from.
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Unknown A
Like, stop, stop. They're almost completely correct. The thing they're doing wrong is saying there are only two genders. Where they could just say, you know, it's mostly two genders. It's almost all two genders. You'd be like, yes. And the real thing they're doing wrong is making trans people feel derided and unwelcome and harmed psychologically and occasionally physically. That's the real bad stuff. We don't want. We don't have to throw away biological sex to help trans people go through a really tough time where there's lots of hateful pieces of shit around that have nothing but mean things to say to them. That's really the problem. But you can agree with most conservatives on the fact that, yeah, like, the gender thing is a real thing, and we have to contend with that. So being able to steel man your opponent's positions and extract as much good from them as you can from even the most vile and evil people.
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Unknown A
Kim Jong Un in North Korea, a person that I think if you give me a loaded pistol and he just materializes instantly. Fuck. Oh, my God. I probably put the pistol down and start ripping his face open because he does not deserve to die quickly. But what are the good points to what he's done now? He has managed to have a very robust degree of state control. He has a government that does not suffer much from a dissolution of power and a question as to who really holds authority. That's good. If he wants something done, they're gonna get it done. Or they're gonna try anyway. And up because it's communism. But that's good, right? We don't want total anarchy. Like, that's the opposite extreme. But that's also got its downside. What's the upside of total anarchy? Raw freedom, bro. Get them titties out, girl. Let's fucking go.
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Unknown A
Light up the cigars. Give your kid a cigar. It's dope shit. Anarchy is the most fun way to go, but it has its own downsides. So instead of being like, I'm an anarchy Or I'm a totalitarian. Or I'm a this, I'm right, I'm left. Let's get together in a big circle and go. What can we pick from these ideologies that seems to make places where everyone in the world actually wants to live and seems to not make as many places that no one in the world hardly at all wants to live? If you open the borders between north and South Korea and you somehow disseminate freedom of information to where the North Koreans know what's going on in Seoul, Bro, ain't nobody left in North Korea after five days, they're gone. No one actually wants to do that. Turkmenistan, which actually my dad is from, no offense, Turkmenistan.
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Unknown A
You guys are great. Turkmeni people are awesome. The Turkmenian leadership also needs the fucking gun to the head. Versus Sweden. Who's debating that?
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Unknown B
There weren't very many people trying to escape from West Germany into East Germany.
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Unknown A
Okay, so were there any. That's actually a question.
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Unknown B
For the only reason why I just said there were none is I didn't say there were none because I'm sure there was somebody with like a family member or somebody. So I'm not gonna. I'll always hedge because I'm.
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Unknown A
No, it's a great hedge. And I'm not saying there weren't there were zero, but I'm actually asking the question of maybe there were zero, which doesn't make your point any less well received. 500 people over the course of 50 years is functionally zero when the populations are 50 million each. But what if it is even zero? Then you're like, well, really, no one. Like West Germany is so much categorically better in almost every way than East Germany, we can at least pull out some ideas from that. And so once we have an understanding that we as humans really agree on roughly the same shit, and we really want societies to be roughly the same way, we can take our ideologies, put them aside for a second, and establish at least a system of government which has all the shit in common. So, for example, if a government is not protecting us from criminal.
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Unknown A
If a government is not keeping our water supply and air supply clean through intelligent regulation, it's failing, and so on down the line. Almost everyone agrees on that. Let's just have the government be small but powerful, do the shit we all agree on. And look, if we can't agree on something 90, 10%, like if 90% of the people don't vote for it, then it just doesn't get done, and then it's up to you to do it in private industry or with your own associative mechanisms. So I think that's a way forward, like essentially consensus government. Another wacky view I have that you might find weird is I think hopefully in the future this is the case. But I think governments should be run by corporations, top to bottom, full send. Okay, the deliverable of the corporation is standard of living and justice and the payment you give it is taxes.
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Unknown A
Corporations run almost everything category levels better than governments do by design, by economics. And we should just let corporations in a very intelligent way, not just blank check to PepsiCo to go run the government. If you have a corporate approach to government and hugely to this is the ability to have relatively open borders. Not open borders, we just walk through. Legal immigration is something that requires some due process but is easily vettable. And you can just, you can just fuck off and go to another country. If you arrange that system, hopefully the globe is moving towards that. Then you just have a competition of countries that are not just corporations. And people go to the ones where they like what they're getting for how much they're paying. And there's no right answer necessarily to what tax rates are. For example, I could want to live in a world, in a country, I want to live in a country where 60% of my income goes to social services.
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Unknown A
But you know what man? I walk down the street and I know we don't have homeless people. And I know every kid, no matter how fucked up their life was, no matter how sick their parents were when they were a kid, no matter what their genetics were going to have an unbelievable life because everyone cares for them at all times. There's lots of people that'll pay 60% tax for that. But why do we need to foist it on people who don't? So if you let people live in different jurisdictions of a country or in different countries, they can see which relative tax rate to which delivery of services and lifestyle is dope. You might be like, I want 5% taxes. And you go to a country and you're like, here's 5%. It's like the fire hydrant's blown up, no one's showing up to fix it.
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Unknown A
There's a dead dog on the street and you're like, but there could be another country just across the border has the same 5% massive efficiency. And it's compared. What that's going to lead to eventually in global evolution is a reduction in how much cost is being born. A tax rate is going to go down because functionally no one actually wants to pay taxes. Right. Your ideal cost for all goods and services is zero, including the rendering of government goods and services. So competition will make the price of government go down like this and competition will make the quality of life that government supports escalate like that. Right now we have very little competition between countries because like if I'm North Korean, I can't just like go to America or South Korea if I don't like what the fuck's going on. And I think that kind of directionality is something that just makes a ton of sense.
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Unknown B
I like the concept. I think I would probably fight a lot on a lot of the, on a lot of the individual incentives. So for instance, the government representing like one person, one vote, I think is important, I don't know. For corporations representing financial interests, like I think you'd have a higher proclivity to be nicer to your big, I guess, taxpayers.
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Unknown A
Do you get the perception that PepsiCo discriminates how it treats customers based on their wealth?
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Unknown B
No, but I don't know if you have terrible corporate. But PepsiCo sells like an individual product. They don't tax me on a percentage of my income. I think that if I stepped into a PepsiCo store and my income determined how much I paid, I think I would get much better service.
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Unknown A
Another totally, that's a very good point. Then the model could be modified to a fee system. The government charges you a fee for service delivery, monthly fee to live there, a yearly fee. It's not based on your income, it's just a fee. Everyone gets the same. If you have governments that are more like corporations, you have freedom of movement between peoples of the world. You can try a bunch of these different models and you can see which one works better. Because if the one that's based on income, it's kind of gross and icky and it's just they like rich people and the poor people aren't doing shit. Then the poor people can just fucking move to a country in which they're like, I just pay a fee and I get the same thing as everyone else.
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Unknown B
Sure. I think another, another big issue is we don't, obviously we don't have to explore the nitty gritty of all of it. But another big issue would be that the vast majority of corporations, 99% fail at some point. Right. Even for small businesses, the vast, I want to say it's like 2010 or 20% make it to the five year mark. Like the failure rate is very high for understandable reasons. I don't know if as a government you have the luxury of complete and utter failure, bankruptcy, and then we just bring it all the time.
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Unknown A
Governments fail all the time and they just like kick the can down the road with debt or get various bailouts.
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Unknown B
But there's a difference between kicking the can down the road via debt versus I'm insolvent and I can't continue to operate like so for the US government, I don't think we've hit that point for a variety of reasons, we can't. But also like, would a corporation have the luxury of also having like a treasury where they can, you know, like.
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Unknown A
Corporations have cash on hand.
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Unknown B
Yeah, but they can't usually create the cash.
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Unknown A
So here's the thing. They would be charging their citizens money, thus they would have a lot of money. And now the only two questions is what is the relationship between how successful corporations are managing scarce resources that have alternative uses versus governments? And the winner is corporations hands down a mile, with some, maybe some exceptions that are interesting to talk about. The other question is what. What percent of governments fail and how do you define failure? I would say the Korean, North Korean government has been failing from the start, but still there, right? Because they can just literally rob their people. And so if corporations start to fail, what's going to happen is they're going to be like, hey, like we can't provide goods and services anymore. Haiti. Then other governments, AKA corporations come in and go, can we buy this country out and help hook you guys up with our ball or standard of living.
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Unknown A
That's a big thing. After a while you're going to have some diversity in who administers the governments, but it's going to be one of those like power law distributions where 80% of countries are served by like five big companies like Amazon, Google, type of bullshit. And they're going to do an amazing job all the time and the competition is just going to escalate the amazingness of the job. It's the same dynamic with government government, except they have way less incentive to do better and way less downside if they do worse because people can't leave and you can just keep robbing them for their money.
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Unknown B
What do you. Do you think there comes a conflict of interest where people are voting for things that aren't easily quantifiable from a corporation standpoint or from a financial standpoint, but have more to do with how people feel socially about a thing. So how would a corporation decide how to deliver things like abortion or trans stuff, I guess, or gun rights or whatever. These are very divisive issues among the left and the right. They don't have like a clear financial.
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Unknown A
He doesn't know how to quantify how much soda you like or want, except for how much you're willing to pay for it. And so it's the government's job to decide what policies are going to be enacted and to see if that pleases or displeases the vast majority of people in the country. But corporations have one awesome unifying principle, and it's greed. They want as much money as they can humanly get out of you, but they also know on second order thinking that if they fuck you over, you'll just leave or you'll just become so unproductive they don't get as much money. And so what they'll think about is, okay, what system of laws can we put in place that pisses off almost no one, makes everyone as well off as possible, but does it for an amount that doesn't also piss people off? That multiple constraints to the condition thing is something corporations deal with all the time and governments have no good way of dealing with with currently.
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Unknown A
So at the limit, it's very, very high efficient process where, you know, in one country it'd be like, you guys deal with trans rights like this, and they're like, yeah, most people seem to think it's okay, but not everyone. And if you don't like it here, like, you could just go somewhere else. Because 95% of the people here, they seem to like that. And we want more people. So please don't leave. We'll really try to reconsider our laws. But generally that means means corporations probably wouldn't want to extend themselves into individual freedoms hardly at all. They're just gonna do like police, fire, service provision, civil support, military, and then they don't have to bother with like, when you say trans, what exactly do we mean? Like, do. If I'm running a corporation that's running a country, do I think trans people should be beaten to death with clubs in the street?
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Unknown A
No, that's highly illegal. You will go to jail for forever if you do that. Okay, what else do we need? If is it considered ethical to be outright hateful towards people in the street? Like, no, yelling at someone in the street when you don't know them is considered harassment and is punishable by a certain degree of offense. Or, hey, better yet, we just ship you the fuck out of the country. Like, someone else will take you, get the fuck out of here. So that's really the policy side of it. And if you harbor secret anti trans views inside your head, but you're not allowed to yell at people in the street about how they're whatever different colored hair, then you don't like, then really no one cares and it's not really a problem anymore except for to you in your own head. So a lot of these issues we have that we demand massive like one way or the other way, a lot of them are just kind of private issues.
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Unknown B
Do you think, what do you do when people are willing to suffer economic harm to do like damage to other people's rights to exist? I guess so I think of like in my perfect capitalist mind, the Civil Rights act never should have happened because corporations would say, oh well, we want to sell to black customers and white customers so we're just going to stop discriminating. Or banks are like what we're going to loan to everybody. But the decisions of the actors in that systems can sometimes constrain even the financial decisions that corporations will make because the amount of money to be made will change based on the social inclinations, I guess, of the people beneath them. A classic example of this would have been there's this concept called blockbusting where if you had a whole block full of white people, you would come in and you would offer a huge buyout for a house of a person way above maybe 2x the market value.
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Unknown B
And everybody knows that everybody is getting this offer from a realtor and they know that if they don't take it, what's going to happen is one person will take that offer and then when they do take that offer for their house to be bought in, the realtor will move in a black family and then the property values will decrease.
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Unknown A
Why would the realtor move in a black family?
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Unknown B
Because the property values will decrease everywhere. And then the realtors can come in and buy up all the other stuff.
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Unknown A
Because does property values, the realtors already benefit from being high. Don't realtors want high prices?
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Unknown B
Realtors want to buy and sell. Doesn't really matter if the price is going up or down. They just want to be able to buy and sell. So if people are living even if the property prices are going up, up, up, if everybody's living there for 50 years, you don't really make any money as a realtor, but everybody wants to move out. Then you make money on all the closing fees and everything else when you're buying and selling stuff. This happened. I read a book on this. I think it was in Boston. This was happening a Lot and it was called block breaking because you would move in one black family, property values would decrease. Nobody want to live with that black family on the street. And then they would all move out. And then they would basically come in and clean up. The realtors would.
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Unknown B
But in a situation, and there's a number of other examples to where like in a perfect capitalist economy, why would you ever want to have or in any capitalist economy, why would you ever want to segregate anything since it could always make more money selling to, you know, two different races of customers.
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Unknown A
It's almost always true.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Segregation is very rare in the private sector.
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Unknown B
Yeah. But it wasn't prior to the Civil Rights act in that you had a lot of segregated places, especially, you know, in the South. What do you do, I guess when you have a group of people assuming that's true, and I think we can probably assume depending on the time this is true. What do you have a group of people like, I, you know what, I'm okay running this less efficiently if I can guarantee that these people don't have rights because fuck them. Yeah. How do you. I guess, is that a solution that you think your system would solve for or how would it solve for it or how do you approach those kinds of problems?
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Unknown A
There's a ton of different ways to solve for it. One way we can potentially solve for, for a society that looks more like ours does now is to empower people who find themselves living among racist people to just leave. Like, why would you. So for example, you're a person of whatever color and you go to a restaurant, they're like, we don't serve your kind. Do you want the government to mandate them to serve you? Why don't they poison you in the back? They're racists, they'll poison you. I don't ever want to buy food from them. Don't make them have to fucking serve me. I don't want to be around them. I'm going to go to another restaurant, I'm going to move the out of this dumb ass town. And it turns out that people that are brilliantly racist are generally like regressive backwards. And it just.
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Unknown A
No one really wants to live around them. And so after mass migration of people which you can help empower financially or otherwise, definitely freedom of movement, housing regulations, another topic don't even get me on because it's totally insane. Deregulate housing. Like crazy. All of a sudden people kind of live where they want and they live around the people they want and they don't ever have to deal with this in real life because the people that are racist as fuck, they live usually somewhere the hell else and nobody cares about them. They all know white or black or purple town and no one cares. Give you want to be racist in your own town, God bless you.
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Unknown B
Do you think that there's something to be said for, I guess similar actually to the obesity stuff, the dieting stuff we were talking about earlier? Do you think there's anything to be said for be around people that you hate and endure it and after a generation or two, people actually get along much better. I think in the United States, I think we are a testament to a lot of different people coming together and getting along versus in the beginning be like, well, let's just empower you to move now. You have like, this is where the whites live in the U.S. here's where the blacks live, here's where the Asians live, here's where the Hispanics live. Because as soon as people hated each other, they just, you know, peace the out. And now everybody's like in their own little racially segregated corridor instead of being forced to kind of deal with each other for some period of time until they became more accustomed to each other.
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Unknown A
If you make people that hate each other live together, if they hate each other for gigantic misunderstandings or cultural inertia, it's going to help the problem at great cost. But it will help. So you could go either way on that one. If you make people live with people of other races and it's not a race thing, it's a culture thing. And they actually don't like the culture of the people they're living next to, you're going to engender their racism to expand even more. Sure, some of the most racist people you'll ever meet live in New York City because they're around every f cking race. They get to see it plain as day. And some people behave in certain ways they do not like because they're not statistically.
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Unknown B
Nobody is doing a cross sectional analysis factorial.
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Unknown A
It's a culture.
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Unknown B
Rather than when somebody tells you they hate Indians or black, it's because they've had one or two bad experiences with or a few bad, saw a TV show or something.
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Unknown A
And then. So but if you put them around a lot of people of a certain race that are actually quite toxic and ridiculous to be around, they're just going to hate them more.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
And hate them in a deep way that you can't understand and hate him in a way that a Nice left softest 21 year old college student who's only ever been around one race will tell them like, you're just ignorant. They're like, no, I'm profoundly not ignorant. Come live in the hood for a bitch or see what's going on. She's gonna come out of that shit either very, very monk like or racist as sure. And that doesn't, you know, I could have said hood. I could have said fucking trailer park, it doesn't matter. Or like, you know, there are Southeast Asian communities that are violent as too bro. Every I'll do my own. My own people. Jews, you got dope Jews all over the place. And then you got some Hasidic Jews that don't even believe that you and human. And I'm Jewish, I don't look at me like a human.
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Unknown A
They don't think I'm human. They think I'm charitably at least fallen from the great race. But I mean, are you Jewish at all genetically?
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Unknown B
Some people said that I am, but no, not at all.
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Unknown A
So they mean you're subhuman to them and so does that mean all Jews are bad? No, but are there some Jews that real humans will run into and be like, you know, they told me to love everyone, but these people hate me. What the hell are they supposed to think after that? Now if they're really enlightened, they'll be like, they're just people coming from their own perspective. They're kind of persnickety and I'm going to give them their space. But we have every right to say that versus like live right next to them and be best friends with them. If they don't want to be friends with you is the problem, then it's tricky. I don't think we should be doing a lot of top down shit with race. I think it's really fucking maricacious. I think we should be treating everyone to the same civil standard of what is legal and illegal and what is behaviorally approved and not approved.
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Unknown A
And after that people should mix and mingle as they like. And if a lot of people like to hang out with people that look like them, dope. I love that shit. I'll throw the peace sign when I walk by you guys. What's up? No hate. But if you ever people want to mix and mingle and hang out with all sorts of different races, then that's also dope. There's no wrong answer there. Segregation is wrong because people said, hey, you can't hang out with those people. It's not wrong if it just happens by itself. You ever see a f cking group of four Indian families at the museum and you're like, motherf ers Just keep to themselves, what the fuck? They're just friends with each other, you idiot. They have culture in common. They don't hate anyone. They're just like, together. So sometimes that can happen in community scale.
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Unknown A
It's not up to us to say it's bad or whatever. And some people really like being the outsider. I know tons of white people that love living around brown people. It really enlightens them and that's dope. And if you move to a city where most people are brown and you're white and they love you and you love them, they like having a min. You're the minority now and they love that. There's nothing wrong with that. It's people being hateful and criminal to each other that's bad. And governments encouraging segregation, that's bad. Bad. Whatever happens after you let people be free, as long as they're not hurting each other, you know, it's not really up to us to decide how much intermixing or mingling there should be. That's up to people to decide.
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Unknown B
Sure. I think that one of the more frustrating things I have. I guess I'm kind of wrapping this part up. The I wish that people had better ways of measuring outcomes and that we were just moving towards outcomes rather than everything is kind of a like an exercise in political ideology, outcomes be damned. Because I feel like there are. There are some. There, like there are some things that I believed very strongly that even in my lifetime have radically changed. And one of the challenging things. So when we talk about, like, you know, who should have the do what or where should segregation come from, like there we can all agree that some self segregation is fine. That if certain people hang around certain people because they want to, that that's okay. And then you. But then you get these weird, like, second and third order questions where it's like, okay, well, if all the white people want to hang out with the white people, then.
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Unknown B
And all the black people want to hang out with black people, that's. That's a. Okay. But if the white people want to hang out with the white people because they think all the black people are criminals and the black people want to hang out with the black people because they think all the white people want to lynch them, well, maybe that's actually not okay. Maybe there's something else that needs to happen there. But it's always hard to figure out, well, it's not, it's not really hard. It's hard to fight through people's ideologies to figure out, well, what is the good friction to where it's like. Because we all, I mean to go back to the gym stuff, that's good friction. Right. The gym is not fun, but you suffer through something to hit some good outcome, you know.
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Unknown A
Sure.
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Unknown B
And it's hard sometimes to figure out where the good friction is versus the bad friction when people aren't measuring outcomes, but they're measuring ideologies. I think one of the funniest flips I've seen of, of nature versus nurture, of biology versus environment, I think happened with education where I think that. And even growing up I thought this, that men just have good brains, brains for learning and women just can't ever do school as well as men. It's just not a thing that they can do. Yeah, because like guys are good at math and science and women just aren't. And I think a lot of society kind of thought this. And as we've pushed more and more on the affirmative action side for women and given them more opportunities, now we've hit a world to where I feel like a lot of the conversation has flipped. Where it's like, okay, well, school is bullshit because men are actually physical learners.
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Unknown B
We want to be outside and we want to learn this way. And the fact and sitting at school and being demure and so submission submissive and to a teacher and all that, that's a woman's thing. Like it's insane that they're allowed to do that. And it's crazy to see how much the, the talk has changed about the environment of schooling needs to be changed to suit men more. Because now it's unfair towards women when it feels like none of the actual, like that change feels like an ideological flip where a lot of the same people before they would have been like, it's all biology and like, well, actually it's all environment. And yeah, it's frustrating when it feels like what are we trying to do? Are we trying to create like a better world? Will we all agree on the different outcomes? Outcomes or are we just trying to flex our political ideology to see, you know, who's can win in, in I guess in the voting booth or, or in a debate.
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Unknown B
And then we don't like outcomes be damned? And that's very frustrating. When political ideologies sort of create bad environments, everybody is like, okay, well this is, we have to change this. We need to do something about this. Because this Isn't helping anybody, just making you feel good about it. And you don't even live here, do anything about it. Yeah, yeah, totally agreed. Do you think, in the future, do you think, are you heading in a more like political content direction or are you happy with the mix you do right now? Do you think you'll always feel like fitness related content on your channel or on the Renaissance periodization one or have you thought about that at all? Because some, some, I guess one kind of like a sister question that is sometimes getting into political ideology sucks because now if you do something that is, I say non political, but every single thing is political these days.
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Unknown B
But if you do like weightlifting, you know, workout stuff, some fans might see your political stuff and go, oh, well, I used to, I used to think, you know, one gram of protein per what, whatever was good. But since I saw that Mike is a Nazi, I don't listen to him anymore. And I only listen to, you know, this other fitness influencer. Do you ever think of how those two things cross over or if you want to push one direction?
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. I used to not speak openly about politics basically hardly at all because we didn't want to alien any future customers. And then it dawned upon us that being an organic human trying to talk about their best ideas is such a big upsell and we can't please everyone that may be letting me talk about politics in a way that is kind and respectful for the most part. Occasionally I. Catoclastic and pithy and humorous probably does us more good than harm. We're not sure about that. It's a tentative hypothesis. That's what we're exploring now. So so far it's been okay. Most people who follow me for fitness content have neither the experience nor interest in engaging with my political stuff. I do not blame them. And so they just don't care. Almost nobody cares about politics. I'll put another way, I can put that a better way way more people don't care about politics than do.
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Unknown A
Voter participation is super low and all that stuff. And I think fundamentally it's actually a great thing because like, like why? Like just let me live my life and do my shit. The fuck do I have to go voting on shit I don't even know about out for? And so it's not really a big problem as far as politics is concerned. Like, and there are definitely illustrations of people that have been very successful even though they have politics that are quite divisive. Like Andrew Tate, you know, I mean, politics aside, his sociological views are kind of like you know, roughly abhorrent, but he real hard, super popular and even in the fitness space. And so it's not as big of a deal as it once seemed to us because cancel culture is kind of dead. It's a good thing. So we're kind of exploring that space of being more open and having like, hey, if you don't like my politics, no worries.
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Unknown A
If you like my politics, there's this whole channel for it. Now I do get occasionally political on the fitness channel, the Renaissance privatization channel, when it impacts fitness. And I think there are very straightforward answers to problems and the politics of just a distraction. Then I'll address political things like the antipathy towards Big Pharma, I think is just like mostly wrong. I think pharmaceutical companies are like one of the tips of our sword of accomplishment as humanity. And we need to make that sword bigger and stronger and thrust it more deeply into everything humanly imaginable. Because altering the biological space that we occupy from a very precise scientific perspective is almost everything right about it, almost nothing wrong about it. And so sometimes people are anti Big Pharma. They just haven't a lot of feelings. Now, I'm saying that in a joking way. They have excellent, excellent reasons to be suspicious.
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Unknown A
But most of those reasons can be addressed in technical ways that I will do on the fitness channel.
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Unknown B
I will say that on the. Not to start any huge debates on vaccines or anything, but I feel like everybody that was a big, like anti Big Pharma, you know, don't, don't trust any of the vaccines, new or old. Now, I guess feel like all those motherfuckers should have been banned from the GLP1 agonists. Like, if you don't trust them now, why the are you taking these drugs, you motherf cker. Yeah, that drove me insane because. So it was funny because I read. I'm sure you've heard of Scott Alexander, that Slate star, Codex plus whatever. I think he wrote an article, I want to say it was three years ago, saying that the most likely way that we would escape the obesity pandemic or epidemic was through. Was through drugs.
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Unknown A
And it's not controversial. I've been saying that for years and years and years.
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Unknown B
Sure, you say it's not controversial, but I think to most normal people, I think that would. That's like an incredible. Like nobody would have expected that really quick.
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Unknown A
I mean, more specific. Yeah, it's not controversial in the empirical.
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Unknown B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
But now things that are in the empirical space, we just don't know if they're for sure.
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Unknown B
Yeah. Yeah. But now that the. All the semaglitude and the oceanic, like, all of this has become more standard. Yeah. Holy. It's like. Like Jesus. Yeah. And, you know, whatever side effects there are, it's probably less than being £400.
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Unknown A
That's probably. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Almost definitely. Yeah. I think the best. I think the best post I saw in relation to this. I would never do this, of course, but it's funny because I've seen this work with other people is to start investing. They call them in Ozempic girlfriends that you find the girls that are, like, super nice and cool who weigh like 250 pounds, because in a year or two, they're all gonna be. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And it's funny. Yeah. Because there's so many people now who've lost so much weight and. Yeah. That. Yeah. It's frustrating because I think, to summarize, I guess, like, my thoughts on the whole political space, the thing that I hate the most about a lot of those types of arguments that really ideologically driven ones, it's not even that if you want to be dumb, be dumb, that's fine. It's that they take so much space and they take away all the oxygen from the good conversations. Because I think rightfully, I think there are times when you can be critical, obviously, but big anything. Pharmaceutical companies, of capitalism, of. Of social, you know, ideas of government or whatever. But all of the arguments become exhausted because they're being spent on the dumbest. Right. Like, if you. Like, if you think that a government is inefficient in some way, that's fine.
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Unknown B
We can talk about that. But if your starting position is the 5,000 people that are part of this government agency are all evil and they're trying to poison and kill you and your children, it's like, okay, well, like what? Like, these are ordinary American people. How do we even begin to have this conversation? It's just stupid. Yeah, it says very frustrating there.
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Unknown A
Yeah. It's just, again, people having a lot of feelings, and you have to. It's kind of like if you are a police officer that arrives at a traffic dispute and the people are screaming at each other. The first thing you want to do is make sure no one's screaming anymore. The second thing you want to do is make sure to try to derive what every person's calm analysis of what happened was and then juxtapose the two to find out what seems more reasonable. Check the traffic cams, et cetera. Same thing in politics. A lot of people yelling at each other. It's really good to be like, hey now, everyone has has great points, but everyone's flawed and might not be seeing the clearest picture. Let's sort of talk, talk in a calm, logical manner, get to where we can develop a consensus. Once we can develop a consensus, we can actually just direct government to for sure address that consensus.
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Unknown A
And if we can't agree on other things like there's a 55, 45 split it, we just don't even have to do it through government. 999 times out of 100. So I think that maybe is a really good way forward. I will say there's probably not much antidote to lack of political progress that is better than people becoming more calm and more intelligent. And I think that pharmaceuticals and genetic engineering will be addressing those problems down the line. And it's going to be a different world.
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Unknown B
Hopefully we get there before we tear each other apart under the weight of our disagreements.
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Unknown A
But the stability of the world and the proneness to violence is, is stochastic, but in exponential decline at all times. We used to be much less stable and much more warlike. So we have every reason to believe that trend is going to continue. That is not to say that there won't be massive spikes every now and again. World War 3 is absolutely realistic in many regards unlikely to happen. But it could. But we have very good objective reasons for optimism on two grounds. One, it's the trend and two, there are things about how societies develop that code for progress over the long term. So progress is the expected thing. We could sure shit be getting there faster. The 1950s world of much more peaceful than the two world wars world. Wouldn't that be great if we got there without toasting 100 fucking million people in two world wars?
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Unknown A
That's really the big thing. I don't think society's likely to collapse or go down the drain entirely where the American experiment will end. But I do think that there's going to be a lot of bad done that could have just been avoided if we thought a little bit clearly about things and calmly about them.
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Unknown B
Where do you want people to find you? Do you want people to follow your. Which YouTube channel? You could shout anything out.
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Unknown A
Renaissance periodization. Nobody can spell that myself RP strength on YouTube but just type in Dr. Mike Israel or Mike Israel, fuck it. And my face will pop up. Hit the subscribe button or look at a few videos. That's cool. And then just Mike Israel. If you just type that in on YouTube. It's my progress channel. It's just my fucking cheesing face on there. Click on that. Click through videos. The cool thing about the videos on that channel is they're all numbered. It comes out like, on average once a week. And they're all numbered. So if you really want to just go back to video number one and watch all the way through, that's dope. Because there's some linearity to it. Every topic is kind of separate, but you really start to get a good understanding of where I'm coming from, from. If you've watched a few of the earlier videos, if you're curious, or if you really like what I'm saying and you're like, I need more of this talking in my ear.
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Unknown A
Go back to video number one and start from there. And then I'm an Instagram, but I just. I don't post as much on Instagram as I should. I post all my workouts pretty much, or almost all of them. So that's nice. But I don't post much of anything else. I've recently hit a tipping point with comments where I am. I pretty much just. Just don't read comments anymore because it just hits me all wrong. And it hits me all wrong. And I get really, really angry at comments and it hurts my quality of life. There's nobody to have exchanges with. I grew up in the Facebook era, and I would exhaust every disagreement down to either they stop responding, we reach consensus, or I get. Or they tell me to go myself and that's that. I can't do that anymore. There's too many people. I have a million on Instagram.
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Unknown A
It does not work. It would use all my time because when people are wrong on the Internet, it hits me all kinds of wrong. Bro. I don't even know how you do your live stream. I'm incredibly envious of your mental capacity to be serene in those regards because.
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Unknown B
I look forward to your political journey and then watching. Because they're watching. Be Mike outbursts. And we will enjoy those.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Holy. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's funny you brought up that still Manning thing earlier. For me, that's actually one of the quickest ways that I can tell if somebody has ever given actual consideration to an issue before is if you can still man the other side. I never go first in debates anymore because I was so fucking tired of somebody having me steal my side. And not to be rude, but like, if. If I'm. If I can win a debate against you on a particular topic, that necessarily in my mind, it necessarily means I can also steam on the other side better than you're arguing it. So oftentimes by the end of a debate, they'll say, okay, can you guys steal in each other's positions? And I would give the steam in for their position. And rather than so fucking frustrating, rather than their audience going, damn, Stephen understands both sides of this really well.
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Unknown B
It's, oh my God, if you get all this, how can you be so fucking wrong on these things?
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Unknown A
So you agree with him, right? He receding to his point, he just defeated himself.
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Unknown B
And then the other guy, when it comes time to steal my mind, to be like, oh, yeah, I guess destiny thinks that for Israel, like, oh, Israelis, I guess, can just kill Palestinians because they were mean once. And it's like, really?
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Unknown A
That's the. Are you even trying?
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Unknown B
Exactly. And I'm like, yeah. So from now on, I'm like, he can, he can steal man first and my Steelman will be as strong as his. We'll go from there.
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Unknown A
Cuz that, yeah, that's a really good strategy.
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Unknown B
But okay, well, thanks a ton for coming out and chatting and I loved it.
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Unknown A
People told me you're awesome. You did not disappoint. Thank you so much for having me on, man.
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Unknown B
Cool, thanks a lot.