I'm the Matrix, I'm Jonathan, and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich, and I tend to lean a little bit more
to the right, but the bottom line is, is together,
we try to look for the balance of what it means
to be human in today's world.
All right, let's get started.
Welcome to Living in the Matrix, everyone.
I'm Jonathan, this is my co-host Rich.
Say hello, Rich.
Hey everybody, happy 4th of July.
Happy 4th of July weekend.
Looking forward to having a great time
and celebrating our great nation.
Cheers. Absolutely.
You know, it's interesting living in the times
because we are kind of in a unique time.
I'm glad you started that.
I love the 4th of July.
I think it's probably one of the most interesting
holidays we have, but we have sort of an interesting season
that we're in, and one of the things
that we're gonna do today is we're gonna talk
about three or four topics.
We love these topic conversations
because they really bring out a lot of really interesting
thoughts, and so the first one we wanna dive into
is we just had a debate.
My question for you is how are you incorporating
these developments into your decision to stay?
And separately, what concerns do you have
about Vice President Harris's ability to beat Donald Trump
if she were at the top of the ticket?
Look, I wouldn't have picked Vice President Trump
to be Vice President till I think she was not qualified
to be President, so let's start there.
Number one, the fact is that the consideration
is that I think I'm the most qualified person
to run for President.
I beat him once, and I will beat him again.
What do you think, Rich?
Oh, yeah, so I mean, obviously his performance was abysmal.
There was a point in time when people were just kind
of cringing and feeling sad, and I looked over at Trump,
and he's just like, all of a sudden,
and he looks back, and he goes,
and in one moment he goes, I don't understand
what Joe just said, and I don't think he knows
what he just said, and what's sad for me is that Trump
at first was very lucid and eloquent and went to the issues,
and then he just started talking about himself.
By the end of the night, it appeared after a break,
he kind of had a little bit of a resurgence,
got back into it, but then he finished very poorly.
That's what I understood, and there was a lot
of interspersive stuff in there.
Are you talking about Biden or Trump?
No, I'm talking about Biden overall
was an abject failure, right?
Everybody knew after that that it wasn't good,
and here's what's really sad and scary.
CNN at the end of that said, okay, guys,
after the debate, please tell us, the audience of CNN,
who won that debate?
And it was 67% Trump and 33% Biden,
and for those 33% of the people out there,
that is just either you're ignorant, you're stupid, naive,
or you just are holding onto some kind of threat
of something because that's so disingenuous,
because he wasn't functioning as a human.
There was nothing to vote for in that particular,
for that 33% to say, yeah, I'm still casting my vote
for Biden, I think that what they meant was,
I'm casting my vote for the Democratic Party.
That's my observation.
Yeah, they'll typically say 40% will vote
Democratic or Republic, so you have two groups of 40,
and you have about 20 that's sort of the float.
I think we're seeing a lot of people realize,
here's the thing, you and I are polar opposites
on this regard, I don't like Biden at all.
I think Biden's a puppet, but I think Trump is a menace,
and I think Trump is, and you think completely opposite,
but I think here's an interesting point for the,
because I'm not really a Democrat,
I'm more of an independent,
I don't like politics at all, but it's necessary.
Biden is at a loss, he's at a point functionally
that I think we're watching the Democrats go off a cliff.
And what I think is gonna happen, at least in the dialogue,
is that someone like Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom
is gonna step in at the convention.
It's just wild how this whole season of politics
has played out because at the debate,
you began to really see, oh, the traditional idea
is Joe can beat Trump at debate, he couldn't do that.
He couldn't, because Joe,
Trump didn't say anything at the debate.
That's his shtick, he didn't say anything.
He lied incessantly, but that's his deal,
that's who he is, and I think people just deal with that.
Whereas, he lied about the border.
The border is being overrun, Jonathan.
He's not lying about that, he's not lying about.
The fact checkers couldn't even keep up with him,
it was so bad, and I think you ignore them.
But the point here is that Trump's not the one in problem.
Trump won because Biden looked like he was ready
for the retirement home.
That's fair, I agree with that, I agree with that.
Trump didn't come out eloquently on his own,
did he come out, right, right, so the question is,
am I voting for this candidate because I love them,
because I fear them, or I believe in them,
or am I voting for them because I hate the other opponent?
We always want it to be a positive experience, right?
I'm voting for this person because they bring hope
and change, let's say, right?
And this person just brings hate and division, right?
And so I'm voting for the positive side of things
instead of like, that other guy is so bad,
I hate that person, that's why I'm voting for him.
Our candidate sucks, but what else are you gonna do?
So anyway, do you wanna play a clip or?
How do you feel about it?
What do you mean?
As an American citizen?
In terms of where we are at as a country,
you're an American citizen, and this is our presidency.
How do you feel about this is all we have at the top?
So I'm gonna say something that I think
we've fleshed out before and might have been brought up
on our last episode with Davidson,
and one of the things, and what we brought,
what you and your son brought up midweek,
and it's about neoliberalism and the defeat of,
and how Trump separated from that,
and you said, well yeah, he did break away,
and so one of the things I have to get out there
in the front and say, Trump is not the swamp.
Trump is not an Obama, he's not a Bush, he's not,
Reagan was different, but he's not any of the Bushes,
he's not a Clinton, he's not a Obama, and he's not a Biden.
This is a guy who's built things his whole life
and definitely declared bankruptcy,
and has been known to be an egotist,
and a narcissist, and a playboy, right?
But he came in, and this is undeniable.
He, this is what kills me, Jonathan.
He met with King Jong-un, he freaking kept China at bay.
He likes, and Putin likes him,
and he basically kept us out of world wars,
right where we are.
Economic prosperity, unemployment, border safe.
He did the things that people didn't like on the left,
because he actually walked the walk and talked the talk.
Now, one of the things he didn't do
is he didn't build the wall.
He said he was gonna do it,
he said he was gonna make Mexico pay for it.
That's the one promise that I think he said
that he didn't come to fruition on.
He was gonna start an infrastructure project.
He builds, builds, builds.
He was looking forward to making our infrastructure better.
He actually helped out with the Rust Belt.
He didn't have a chance, he lost the election.
It takes 10 years to rebuild the country.
Biden doesn't done shit.
Have you seen the infrastructure?
Our bridges are collapsing.
Our dams are collapsing.
The largest infrastructure bill signed ever.
So we gotta start there.
It was on the heels of Trump.
That's what Trump was putting in place.
Who's the builder, Jonathan?
Is it Biden or is it Trump?
Trump is the contractor.
Trump built the infrastructure.
I've spent years to defend Biden.
So I think the point of this is-
Okay, let's take a step back.
I'll take a step back.
I've had a dart this morning.
I had nicotine and coffee,
which I've never really had those conversations
on our podcast before.
Let's go back.
He would have won again, except for COVID.
Everybody knows this.
He was at a 52% approval rating.
And then COVID came and blew everything up.
And this is what's really so sad is that the,
we've exposed that this country only wants
what makes them feel good and comfortable
about walking in the walk and talking the talk
and towing the line.
And once you realize that Biden did nothing
and everybody looks in the mirror and says,
I'm not better off than I was four years ago,
which is undeniable.
Whether a guy goes on the Walmart website and says,
I just looked at my old shopping cart from two years ago
and I paid for groceries for an entire month
and it was $114.
And I had the ability to go in there today and hit reorder
and it's $450.
If people don't understand that the policies
that he's put in place,
including people getting raped and people getting killed
and an entire lawlessness happening,
this wasn't happening under Trump's watch.
And yet here's what people are still saying.
Let's give Biden a chance.
And this is what just absolutely blows my mind.
It is, it's the matrix.
It's the absolute matrix.
Let me give you a counterpoint to the same matrix.
Okay.
One, Biden didn't raise prices, corporations did.
So I think it's just his policies.
His economic policy put it in place.
Why is a policy going to raise prices?
How do you make that correlation?
It's called printing money.
Talk to the Federal Reserve.
That I agree with.
Okay.
But businesses raise prices.
I'll give you a counter example.
Arizona Tea.
Are you familiar with it?
They're on the hot seat right now
because they refuse to raise the price on a can
from 99 cents to a higher rate.
He's never raised his price in 19 years.
And it's very easy to say, oh, Washington.
See, when Trump was in and he raised two trillion
or gave a $2 trillion tax break
and it's hurting the middle class, nobody complained.
You don't count that part.
That's the problem I have to deal with is
help me understand why you think Trump is so great
when you've ignored that he's done just as much.
That's my point is the debate shows-
The fiscal policy.
A total shit show and a guy who cannot think.
You're talking in academics
and the people were actually better off.
Absolutely.
You're talking in theory about like tax cuts
and how the middle class sucked
and everybody was fucking happy.
That's a fact, bro.
We gave a $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthy.
Do you disagree with that?
Go up to a hundred, dude,
all the wealthiest have gotten even more wealthy now.
Do you agree that he created that tax cut?
Let's start there.
I agree and guess what?
It benefited everybody.
Okay.
Dude, are you-
It has no-
Ask a hundred people in small town Arkansas,
ask a hundred people in small town Arkansas
if those tax cuts fucked them over four years ago.
They're gonna go,
please take us back to four years ago
because we're paycheck to paycheck.
I can't actually pay my bills now.
My farm is done.
Everybody is looking at this and what you're saying,
you're putting this up on the chalkboard
in terms of equations and about tax cuts and fiscal policy
and everybody's looking at you in the face right now
and they're saying,
I don't care what you're saying.
No, they're not, bro.
No, they're not.
Everything was better.
Everything was better four years ago.
Jonathan, everything was better four years ago.
Nobody-
No, it wasn't.
Only the trillionaires.
Here's my point, okay?
Here's my point.
As a debate, it showcased two really important things.
And this is my point.
You know I don't like Trump and you don't like Biden.
We're clear on that.
But here's the reality.
Both candidates suck.
And here's why.
I think Biden in history will show up better
than Trump long-term, okay?
But that's neither here nor there.
That's neither here nor there, okay?
That's just a conjecture.
It's pure conjecture, okay?
Pure imagination, yes.
But you don't have that imagination
because you're so locked into Trump, bro.
Here's my point.
We have two candidates that are both shit shows.
And here's why.
Let me give you the point of why.
Tell me why, tell me why.
Biden is clear.
I'm not a Biden fan.
Biden, faculties-wise, it's time for him to retire.
It's pretty clear.
But during those four years that Trump was a president,
the United States was in utter chaos.
And that's my point is you lift Trump up to this point
that it's going to make the country a better country.
It has no historical precedence for doing that.
And it ended with January 6th,
which is sort of the capstone of saying,
this is exactly what Trump brought.
And that's my point is we are gonna hold this book
and we're gonna do some shit shows.
All the facts that you're getting with January 6th
where the Supreme Court is saying,
we're gonna probably throw out all of the injunctions
against them, that you've got ghost buses showing up
on the day there's a pipe bomb being planted.
The fact is January 6th happened when he was there.
Nancy Pelosi was in charge of the National Guard
and she failed to deliver.
Because Trump didn't have any responsibility to it.
Not the way that the speaker of the house did.
The leader of the country didn't have any responsibility?
He asked for it.
And that's what I think you wanna give him.
He asked for it.
You don't want to atone.
My point is not that,
you're not winning a counterargument.
I agree with you.
Biden sucks.
I'm sad that we are in a point in history
where this is the best we got.
That's my point.
I kind of agree with that, what our options are.
But one of the things that the Democrats don't understand
is they hated Trump for his causticness.
And imagine a father who raises his kids
and they all end up being really well,
but he tells course jokes and he farts in public
and he's not very cultured
and people look at him like some kind of pariah.
And then you watch his freaking,
but he's got a good household in order.
His kids grew up to be great.
Maybe a little rough around the edges,
but they end up being good citizens in the world.
And everybody goes, oh yeah, that guy was,
he was a terrible father.
He was a terrible guy.
And behind the scenes, everything was fine.
That's the difference between Trump and Biden.
People don't like him for his making fun of women
and calling them horse faces
and all of the narcissistic things.
But if you look and you peel back the onion,
when you look at keeping peace relatively strong,
keeping jobs and unemployment low,
keeping the idea of, I don't know,
it just to me, there were so many things
that he accomplished along the way.
That's why people are looking back and they're going,
my God, if we could just have that back again.
And anyway, I think-
Do you wanna go back to the chaos?
Do you think we are more chaotic or less chaotic?
I don't know what chaos you're talking about.
The entire, right now is the most chaotic we've ever seen.
There are people across the world
who are looking at this country right now.
They're being interviewed.
We're living on a different page, though.
We are living on a completely different page.
Yeah, what the hell happened to America?
Right, I mean, that's what's,
I truly believe that the deep state
has put things in place to make us less of a strong nation.
And it is true, we are less safe and less healthy
than we've ever been at any point in time in our history,
as of right now.
That is something I completely,
that to me is the matrix is we have this issue
of the Obamas, the Clintons, and Nancy Pelosi's
who have created this sense of organization to say,
neoliberal, I think that's what it ultimately comes down to
is neoliberalism tried to control Washington
to such a degree.
And Trump came in, and if Trump did anything,
he disrupted that.
He did not drain the swamp.
He did not.
Fair, right?
Fair.
That's fair.
We are still in a shit show.
And I think that has to do with bigger things,
but the matrix still exists in Washington
as neoliberalism trying to control this way of operating
that says, hey, there's the elite,
and then there's everybody else.
So there's money, and then there's everybody else.
And we are not fiscally, financially, economically,
socially in a better place than we were four
or eight years ago.
I do not think Trump added to the value,
but I can't say Biden did as well.
Biden has been a puppet to neoliberalism.
And I think to that point is my point of this topic,
or at least what I wanted to get out of it was,
how do you think we as a country get out of this hole?
And what I hear you saying is it's more of the same,
which is Trump,
because I don't think either of them are the answer.
Okay.
What I was actually gonna say is,
at the beginning was, now that you've watched this,
what is the course of action for the Democrats?
Because we already know what the course
for the Republicans is.
It's gonna be Trump all the way, and it always has been.
But you've got people spinning their heads around saying,
is it gonna be Newsom?
Is it gonna be Michelle?
Is it gonna be Gretchen Whitmer?
Because they're talking about a couple other people
on the ticket too.
Is it gonna be Kamala, right?
People are talking about, is it gonna be Kamala?
And when you look at Kamala,
the montages of Kamala make it go like,
oh God, this should get eaten alive.
So that's actually how I wanted it.
Yeah.
On top of that,
I think Kennedy splits the Democratic ticket.
Splits it in half?
I think it's more fringe.
It's enough that Trump has a clear lead,
and now after that, that was the point of the debate,
is the debate shifted people's perceptions of Biden
to such a degree that it became a talking point.
And when it's a talking point, it's like,
remember, what was the name of Howard Dean?
Remember Howard Dean?
He lost because of that talking point,
and we're there now with Biden.
We're there.
Well, he also got that,
his one thing was like, he just got really fired up on,
he went, ah, on camera,
and that was like, dude, this guy's unhinged.
But going back, just to be fair to me,
I told you and Davidson, I love Andrew Yang.
I loved his ideas.
I could have voted for that man, right?
Being, even though it was Trump going there ultimately,
and I originally wanted to vote for Marco Rubio
because he just came across as a much more polished candidate,
and then unfortunately, he,
what I'm saying to you is-
We're not in a political thing.
I'm just not looking, I'm not a Trump worshipper.
I'm not a Trump worshipper.
I want you to understand that.
I could have voted for Andrew Yang.
You did end up in pretty vehemently there.
I know, it's because he's what we had.
I'm telling you, and I've told Davidson,
I've said this before on podcasts and for other people,
that I really liked Andrew Yang.
He came across both aisles,
and I liked some of the things he said.
He liked nuclear power.
He was on Fox and Friends.
I also liked RFK Jr.
I think he's got a lot of important things,
and he's helping people break away, right?
One of the things that RFK and Trump do,
and my God, can you imagine them as a team,
would be they are the dystopian, no, not dystopian.
They're the ones that are opening the matrix up, right?
They're saying, peel back the matrix,
and let's see what the real world is,
and let's really roll up our sleeves and dig in.
That would be an amazing, for me,
I would love to see something like that, right?
Wait, what do you mean in terms of peeling back?
If RFK became his ticket, if it was Trump and RFK,
imagine what they could do.
RFK would never do that.
I know, and Trump wouldn't either.
I know, but he's not a Democrat, right?
He's not a Democrat.
He could be, I think as a Hail Mary,
the first Hail Mary is to Michelle or Gavin Newsom.
I think that's the talk, at least what I hear,
but I don't think Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom's an interesting card.
I think he's a terrible governor,
but he's got enough cachet, and he's also a Pelosi, so.
Yes.
Yeah, and that's the problem, is the Democratic Party.
I was talking, the Democratic Party is fucked.
They really are.
They're kind of in a really shitty situation right now,
and I think given Kennedy,
Kennedy splits the Democratic ticket,
because I think Kennedy pulls from the Democratic Party
much more historically than the Republican Party.
Ross Perot pulled from GHW Bush,
and that's why GHW Bush lost, and then of course, Clinton.
Yep, you got it.
Yeah, I agree.
That's the same kind of scenario going on.
Yeah.
All right, let's switch topics.
I wanna show you this video.
Or did we watch it?
Yeah, show it.
Show it.
Yeah, this is AI, baby.
What is it?
AI.
All right, so let me, I'll let you listen to it again.
Yeah.
Work optional, yes.
Will you work?
I'll try to work, yes.
Yes, now this may sound great,
but I think there will perhaps be a crisis of meaning.
If the AI can do everything that you can do,
but better, then what is the point of doing things?
So that's, I think there will be a bit of a sort of
existential crisis of why do I do anything.
It will be like the Roman Empire,
at the peak of the Roman Empire.
Yeah, with AI and robots.
So, yeah, I think we are headed to an age of abundance.
I think we're at the most interesting time in history.
So, you know, there's supposedly some proverb that says,
you know, maybe you live in interesting times as a curse,
and we live in the most interesting of times.
So what Elon Musk is proposing is this idea that
if you have all 30 million robots,
that's what he estimates in the next three to five years.
He's gonna have 30 million Tesla robots in the workforce.
They're gonna be between 10 and $20,000.
And it's going to create an age of abundance
because people are gonna have to work.
But what's interesting about that, especially as a man,
what happens if you don't have to work?
He calls it an existential crisis.
What do you think about that?
Well, the guy in there mentioned the Roman Empire,
the peak of the Roman Empire, right?
The same thing happened with Alexander the Great,
the famous quote that Alexander the Great did
when he had almost the entire world as we know it,
all the way out to Persia, all the way out to England.
And when he realized he had no worlds to conquer,
Alexander wept, right?
That's the famous quote.
He realized he had no worlds to conquer, Alexander wept.
That's the famous line, Alexander wept.
And there's a drink actually in Portland, Oregon,
at a great bar.
So one of the immediate things that comes to mind
is when we lack purpose teleology,
then things get really bad.
The things we've been seeing as men are becoming more,
trying to become more masculine
and trying to actually overcome the Homer Simpsons
and the Al Bundys and the pejorative masculine framework
that has been giving us is like, dude, we gotta come back.
We've gotta have kids, we gotta support,
we gotta provide, we gotta be healthy.
And you're seeing a lot of stoicism and stuff.
Having that purpose and meaning,
when you take that away from people,
they either become dependent on drugs and sedation
or they go out and they become violent and destructive,
right?
When a man has no purpose,
and it's kind of like what Janis Joplin says is,
freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, right?
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Imagine there was a word in a movie that says,
if somebody's got nothing else left to lose,
then that's a dangerous person, right?
And it's also, what do you have to gain?
So that could be the prescription, Jonathan, in my mind,
for a terrible formula of either on one side,
depending on what you're tapped into,
complete sedentary-ness and drug induced,
like opioids, opioids and stuff, and there's no more point,
or it's like, I'm gonna go out there
and fucking take out the world.
I'm gonna take these robots out.
I'm gonna just, it's gonna be a separate future.
It's gonna be the resistance, right?
There's gonna be an uprising.
And so I would see those two things
balancing against each other in that worldview.
Do you agree with his premise
that we're gonna have a crisis of meaning?
Cause I do, I think that's the-
Absolutely, no, that's not the purpose.
The crisis of meaning is the idea of purpose, of teleology.
100% we're gonna have a crisis.
And how would we address that, right?
In light of all those things going on.
Now, I'm gonna tell you what's craziest.
I pulled up chat GPT and I said,
my question is, if AI is gonna take over our jobs
and do things better than we can do,
what will our purpose be?
And it goes well, human, focus on creativity and innovation.
As AI handles routine tasks,
humans may have more opportunities
to engage in creative, innovative work,
which is harder for AI to replicate.
Interpersonal skills,
jobs requiring emotional intelligence,
empathy and social interaction,
ethics and oversight, societal impact, et cetera,
adaptation strategies and how do you do that?
So it tried to give me a chat GPT 4.0 version
of why there's still gonna be some opportunities for us.
But I'd love to ask you,
in light of both of us agreeing on this
as existential crisis,
what are our options and how do we prepare for that?
Well, I think you and I have talked a lot,
cause we talked to my son a lot about this.
We're always talking about what is the black swan.
And black swan is the unknown mat,
like 9-11 was a black swan.
It's the thing that comes out of left field
that captures this completely by surprise.
We did not anticipate it.
There may have been signs, but nobody could see it.
I think this is,
has the setup for a black swan that is profound.
And here's why.
In scripture, in Genesis 3,
when God describes the curses,
work is the male curse.
The toil of the fields.
So in other words, the very existential crisis
a man can encounter is having meaningful work.
And it's never gonna be enough.
So imagine if you take that to the nth degree and say,
hey, you don't even have to work.
And so the very thing that provides you
at least some form of meaning is gone.
I think that's a black swan of
an order of magnitude of the cross.
Something's dying.
I do.
Because you're fundamentally addressing
the very core problem of a man.
Guess what, man?
You don't have to work anymore.
Well, wait a minute.
That's how I create my identity.
By what I do.
What do men do?
Hey, what do you do for a living?
That's the number one question men ask each other.
What do you do for a living?
Now take that away and do that work.
Wow.
Think about it.
You know what's interesting, Jonathan,
is that you know who that guy Ro is, right?
Mike Ro, the guy did Dirty Jobs.
Dirty Jobs.
Yeah, we've had, we've talked,
he's been on podcasts, he's been on shows
where he talked about there's like seven,
I don't know, 15, 20 million men out there
who can work, who are actively disengaged already.
But the other thing that I wanna ask you is.
Gen Z, disengaged.
Totally.
But there's about 30% of the workforce is women now.
I mean, since we've had women's lib and rights
and we've allowed that kind of freedom to take place,
it's pretty safe to say that I think there's a good 30,
40% of the workforce is women now.
So if they take away those jobs
and it's not just the men anymore,
because we've changed that a little bit.
It's not just, I mean, we're not talking 1950s, right?
Where the guy's going out, pounding the pavement
for the mom, bringing home the TV dinners and she's cooking.
That paradigm has changed dramatically.
So maybe will the crisis be less existential?
Because going back to Black Swan,
I think COVID was a Black Swan for us.
That is, I mean, people are still reeling today.
Yeah, it doesn't seem out of nowhere.
I think people are reeling more from COVID.
As a humanity, we're reeling more from COVID
than of course the world is from 9-11.
That affected us and some Middle Eastern areas.
But I think.
Well, it's the first.
I agree.
COVID, here's my take on COVID.
COVID was the first time in history
that we contracted from productivity.
Yes.
The work model, I live in Silicon Valley
and Silicon Valley is all about productivity
and how do you increase it for the sake of the dollar.
COVID was the first time we took a step back functionally
and sent people home and said, don't work.
And they're like, holy shit, this is actually really good.
I'm getting to know my kids again.
And it broke a spell.
So I completely agree with you that COVID was the black swan
that started the process.
But where it's going is, and I'll be sort of hyperbolas,
I think we're in the apocalypse
because if you take away the root of work from a man
and you say, and here's the other part of that video
is it leads to abundance.
Robotics is leading to abundance
because they're gonna be able to do everything for us.
And I know people don't like Elon,
but I think Elon's youth in South Africa
made him realize that he's not the tyrant
people think he is.
He's trying to solve world problems.
And I think he understands this AI thing
is going to be functionally different
because here's another part of it.
AI is smarter than every human being already.
So imagine what that does to a Stanford professor
who is no longer the smartest cat in the room.
Remember Goodwill hunting when Will came along
and the mathematician's like,
holy shit, this kid's smaller than me, I'm nothing.
That is the existential crisis
that's going to happen globally.
Think about that.
What happens when you take away work from men?
You fundamentally take away the mechanism
that they derive their identity from.
I don't think women are going to struggle with the same
because that's not their curse.
That's not their drive.
Their drive is much more around experience,
childbearing, being a mom, being a woman.
Work came along really,
I think it's great women can work.
I have nothing, and I think they should be paid equally,
but I don't think that's their driver
the way it is for men.
And I think that's what's gonna change
is we're going to have to reorient.
If I don't have to wake up in him,
where does most of our stress come from?
From work.
And then COVID showed us what happens if you go home,
you can actually start working on your family,
working on your marriage.
So I think there's gonna be a sub-benefit,
but I think globally we're gonna have
a very significant existential crisis.
And that I think-
What if I didn't have that?
I just looked something up.
What?
This is gonna blow your mind.
And this is why I'm going back to,
I think it might be less existential of a crisis.
I mean, I think for me it would be,
but what do you suppose the workforce average
for women in the workplaces for the globe,
as opposed to the United States?
What's the-
I think in America it's like 51% now.
46% of the population.
So what I'm telling you is it's almost half,
almost half of the people working in the United States
in the workforce are women.
Now you just said that's not their job.
Well women are actually more college graduates,
so it's only gonna increase.
Yeah, and for the globe it's 40%.
It's 39.4.
And this is 2022, so by the way,
I think it's probably gone up since then.
So what I'm asking you is knowing those statistics
and what the reality is,
why is it that women are not gonna be as affected
if they've already been shown to be half the fucking workforce
at least in the United States?
They're gonna be displaced too.
Because work is not their driving means of meaning.
In other words, the curses are, for men it's work.
Men derive their ideas.
Women don't go to parties and go, what do you do?
They don't.
And so what's happening is we're,
like we've talked a little bit about this
of the flipping of the polls.
We have been a masculine age for 6,000 years.
What happens if that flips?
Because post AI, the most valuable asset you can have
is empathy, because AI can't do empathy.
This is correct.
It cannot create physiological connection
and that's what women are really good at.
I think what we're gonna see is men going, okay,
because think about it.
If I don't have to work and I have enough abundance
to have enough food, shelter, clothing,
like I have sustenance.
If we can eliminate poverty,
because poverty is the primary driver of stress
in American society or most global society.
Poverty is the lack of care for myself on a daily basis.
If you remove that problem and now people can functionally
say, I don't have to work, I have enough to eat,
I have enough clothes,
because I don't need 17 million pieces of clothing,
I need enough to wear today.
You take care of all of those primary issues,
you've created the possibility of either
absolute fucking chaos or the birth of a new civilization.
And I think that's where we're at.
I think we're at a birth where the feminine energy
is gonna rise to balance the masculine out.
It's not gonna take over,
because women don't wanna take over.
They say they do, but they really don't.
It needs balance,
because we've been way too balanced towards the masculine.
And pulling away work directly addresses that.
And it forces men to say,
where is my identity as a human being?
And it can't be just in work.
So I wanna make a little bit,
it's not necessarily an argument, but it's an observation.
So were you the one who sent me this video
about this guy who lives in Asia,
and he goes, I live by the ocean,
I've got all these things,
these people are wondering why we're so much a slave
to society here.
I don't remember it.
So here's a guy who got up, moved to some place in Thailand,
I think he's in Asia.
These people have nothing yet,
they're happier than we are here.
Yeah.
Going back to the United States,
there's two things I wanted to break down.
Number one, going back to the women of the workforce,
and number two, eradicating poverty.
The problem that's happening is,
I believe that what you say is correct.
Ontologically, women are child-birthing.
In their core, if they tapped into their own divine feminine,
they would be the nurturers, the empaths, all these things,
but they've been given a false promise by society
that says, you rise up to the ranks.
They've been given this false promise that says,
hey, these guys are a bunch of assholes,
you can climb up the corporate ladder,
make a lot of money, have the success,
and obviously they're part of the workforce.
So even though deep down in their DNA,
they're the ones that you just talked about,
the nurturers and supporters,
they've been given this false premise.
And the same thing is gonna happen if you eradicate poverty.
If all of a sudden they're given something,
our society has been shifted to need a bigger, faster car,
a house, all these things that they're put in front of us.
I get a new iPhone put in front of me every year.
I've gotta get the new AirBots, I've gotta get the new wine,
I've gotta get the new golf clubs.
This stuff is forced upon us.
That's what this guy's saying in this video,
and I'll send it to you if I ever get it.
I'll send it to you if I get it.
Find it and I'll put it in this.
Yeah, the premise of the video was this guy was in Asia.
He was living very cheaply, he was by the ocean.
And Carnivore Aurelius talks about this too.
He's like, get out, go by the beach,
hang out with your girl, walk in the sand,
ground, eat good food.
And this guy's saying that this country
is so desperate for consumption
that it's a striving, you go to that job,
you live in the cube, you've been promised these things.
If you do this and work your ass off for 40 years,
you will have X, Y, and Zed and you're slaves.
That's what he's saying.
You're slaves to this machine
and it is a matrix of its own right, right?
You do, and these kids are getting up on,
they're talking about, oh my God,
I was told get a job after you graduate.
I can't go out over the weekends.
And it's really sad, you're seeing these good people
who are trying to follow that dream
and they're looking around and they're despondent right now.
And so going back to what you were saying is,
if you could get rid of the poverty,
let's not talk about poverty.
How do you help that more of a middle-class
who can't make ends meet,
who literally are people are having to get together
multiple generations of families
are having to live in the same household
in order to make ends meet?
How are we supposed to alleviate that
in terms of that next step?
Well, I think the first thing is
we've got to fundamentally realize
is that we've been on the hamster wheel for 40 years.
You and I are a product of that.
So really, if you look back at when Nixon separated
productivity from the,
he separated dollars paid to the worker to the profit
and it was a shift to shareholder value.
That's the beginning of the experiment with Milton Friedman.
And for 40 years, you and I have lived an idea
of what happens if you take off
any kind of regulation to business
and just say, keep producing.
Well, guess what?
The 80s were the birth of, wow, this is pretty powerful
when you focus on productivity.
And then the 90s was the burnout of that saying,
oh, but you gotta keep the movement going
because GE's Jack Welch says, we just keep charging.
And the 2000s was, you got Y2K
and then the 2000s going,
we don't really know how to handle everything.
And it blew up with the housing crisis
because we couldn't manage it.
And I think that's the thing that we're realizing
is we've been living a 40 year experiment
that asks, can we keep the hamster wheel going?
And the hamster wheel was our carrot.
So you're an I generation, the Gen X generation is,
we lived the ride,
but is the world a better place
because of that?
And I think fundamentally we're exhausting the idea
that that hamster wheel can continue.
And I think you insert 30 million robots,
you fundamentally create a crossroads to say,
wait a minute, let's hold on.
And I think honestly, going back to the first context,
I think both Biden and Trump are a desire
to go back to that old way.
And I think the world is saying, no more.
And there's enough inertia that says,
Gen Z is like, I'm not gonna work.
I don't wanna work.
Because the carrot's not there anymore.
They know it's bullshit.
And our generation is at the tail end of it,
we've gotten just enough.
And most of the middle class is pretty much gone.
It's gotta start, the balance has to shift away from,
I don't know, really the ethic of the entire process
has been greed.
That it's okay that-
Talked about this many times.
I think Elon and Larry Ellison,
I think people like that who have the brilliance of that
should be responsible for billions and billions of dollars.
Yes.
But we have to have a process or a way of operating
that doesn't leave 99% of the people
moving towards the bottom wrong.
And I think that is what is shifting.
And so if you insert those robots,
you take away the impetus to work,
men are not going, it's gonna naturally cure itself
because we don't have to be buying into greed.
It's an alternative that may shift a thing.
And now I've gotta learn how to have empathy
because I'm not working as much
and I wanna actually hang out with my friends,
but if I don't learn empathy,
I can't hang out with anybody.
And we're in an existential crisis right now
that is profound.
So-
My hope is that AI starts to realize
what they did in the fourth matrix
where they actually ended up working together.
Once Neil went into the machine
and made a deal to be absorbed into the one
and took out agent Smith, who'd become this aberration.
Agent Smith himself had become this aberration
that was gonna destroy everything.
And the machine itself is saying,
this guy's become unplugged, he's an absolute disaster.
Okay, let's work on shutting him down.
And then obviously everything dropped
and then fast forward to the fourth one in resurrections
where you're actually seeing AI working with humans.
And I think ideally the scenario is AI gets so smart
that they're actually realizing if they fail to do
and to work hand in hand with us
that they're gonna try to destroy it,
that they're gonna cause their own self-destruction.
Kind of like what we say on Terminator, right?
Where we're coming back to destroy that entire thing.
And they did, right?
And they destroyed Skynet before it actually came
into fruition in Terminator 2.
So that's my hope.
But at the same time, you have all horaries out there saying,
hey, there's gonna be a bunch of guys out there
that are just useful idiots for video games and whatever,
and they're kind of unuseful.
So he's literally on camera saying like,
we can eliminate these people, right?
They're like this massive humanity.
So that's talk about another existential crisis.
If you can't provide value,
then you're gonna just be incinerated.
So that scares the shit out of me.
Well, it goes back to the World Wars.
During World War I and World War II,
an average of 1,000 people died a day.
Wow.
Think about it, okay?
So what's interesting is how much is not broadcast
of like the Ukraine War and Israel's war with Hamas.
The reality is that social media is fundamentally
changed the way we share information,
so bullshit can't travel fast, okay?
The world is starting to call bluff to say,
hey, listen, what is the fricking point of war?
What is the fricking point of all of this?
Like, why are we doing this?
And I think fundamentally, the younger generation
are waking up and saying, I don't want it anymore.
That's what we learned from Davidson last week
or a couple of weeks ago is they're saying enough,
but they don't have the power.
And I think what's gonna happen over this next,
probably three to five years is we're gonna see a shift
to, oh, from what I call competition,
like the world is a competition with each other.
That's the fundamental problem with capitalism
is it's always about competition.
What about cooperation?
What if the 99% said, screw that?
What if we all got together and started to do something
started creating cooperative economies that work together?
We've got the robots now.
I think what's dying is the dollar.
The money as a concept is dying.
And if you take that away, you start with a flat world
that is very, very different.
And I'm really curious.
My prognostication is then the next three to five years,
we are going to see a massive shift
that is gonna fundamentally change everything we do.
I really do.
Yeah.
So.
Wow.
All right.
Good stuff.
Let's go a little bit lighter and talk about,
you wanted to talk about some nutrition.
What do you wanna talk about?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what's going on.
And maybe this is just me,
but I came back from the trip to Istanbul and Greece.
And while I don't feel, I actually weighed a buck 93.
So my ideal weight,
if I could actually have this magic wand, I'd be buck 75.
I'm sure you've got a magic weight too.
And I've had this, just like everybody has at the gym,
they're trying to put up two plates or three plates
and you never get there.
It's just that one mental physical barrier.
Getting below 180 has just been impossible for me.
So even having gone through ice baths and workout sessions,
what I've actually come back recently to discover is,
it's a lot about what you've done,
but I think it just, I'm trying to figure out
it's some additional supplementation.
So I feel leaner than I've been before.
I feel a little bit more ripped.
You look lean.
Yeah, it feels good.
And maybe it's the shaved head, man.
That's kind of put that kind of top down approach.
But when I got back, I said,
okay, I gotta freaking get my shit together.
So I did exactly what you did,
where it's intermittent fasting, but I wasn't drinking.
For me, the key thing is,
I can't stress this enough
with all of the podcast listeners out here.
If you get rid of alcohol out of your system,
it's gonna just change everything.
That's the thing that nobody wants
to actually fully agree with,
because it's just such a crutch for us.
But I have to- Why do you think for you?
Well, it's just a natural thing,
because I mean, when you actually get to it,
whenever you create an excuse for drinking, you do it.
And what I realize is,
the reason I realize I'm not an alcoholic
is because one of my priority was for my head,
that I literally had to not have anything days before
and days after.
Like, I went 10 days without anything,
except for a glass of wine that they said,
it doesn't really matter.
But those 10 days, I lost the pain in my shoulder
that I'd had.
And I realized if I had a cause that was good enough,
I was able to adhere to it, right?
And so what we have to do in our own mind is,
we have to look at the goal,
and we have to look at the overall health of ourself,
inflammation, everything, and say,
that priority is gonna transcend that friend's birthday
in three days, or 4th of July barbecue with beers
and this, or sickle to my mouth,
because this is going back to this Asian guy.
Our society has Merlot Day, freaking taco Tuesday,
oh, it's tequila, right?
There's literally in your face, if you're on Instagram,
you're seeing a new reason to have a martini
or something else, or a glass of wine,
or celebrate your mom.
And what I found was that first 10 days back,
eight days back, I lost eight pounds, Jonathan,
and they went lower, lower, lower,
and it was this idea of, if I stopped eating at 6.30,
it's not even an eight hour window now,
it was like a six and a half hour window, seven hour window.
I literally don't have anything
except for a little bit of coffee, maybe a touch of cream,
and then I have a smoothie like you did.
I broke it up between having just a very high protein,
like set of sardines and maybe some olives,
or just a light meal, or this,
I think the smoothie is so key,
because when your body is craving something,
it's got that liquid in them, even if you have a banana,
even if you have some carbs, it doesn't matter, and protein,
that really just helps that process.
And I went down to 184 within that.
And of course, what happens the next weekend,
wine tasting up with friends and solving,
and it became to me like clockwork.
It was just a no-brainer.
I know exactly the formula now,
and I think that everybody needs to find that for themselves,
but if they pull, they take that alcohol out of the system
for five days, what ends up happening is
if you do indulge over the weekend,
then when you do it up again, it comes back into place.
So one of the biggest barriers that I had was,
I've been, let's say you've been on a freaking bender
for a week and a half, to be able to come off of that
and to see the results you want to,
it takes so much more time.
But once you get yourself in that zone of like five days off
and then two days on, then when you go back to that next week,
then you see it work in that kind of flow.
Anyway, that's what I noticed recently.
Well, you said a lot about it,
I want to focus on the intermittent fasting part.
I think there's two things that happen in your thing.
One, you switched your diets.
When did you switch to intermittent fasting?
When you got back from Istanbul?
I've done intermittent fasting all the time,
but the problem is, is that when you have-
But you did it intentionally different.
You reduced the alcohol.
That was it.
The question is, when did you lose your weight?
I lost it when I got back.
I was, because I thought it was-
You didn't lose it on the trip.
Well, it's because you ate a lot of carbs, right?
I mean, every meal had rice and pita bread.
I'm gonna bring this up.
European diets do not include processed foods.
That's true.
So European diets are very different than American diets
because the food is not processed.
If you look at the labels,
they're primarily whole grain elements.
And so I'm wondering if the shift of the European diet
flowed into your intermittent fasting,
which is going primarily towards proteins,
because here's the thing.
I think every human being probably lives
in 10 pounds of inflammation.
Because every time I started a new,
because all disease comes,
it originates through inflammation of the body.
They know that now.
It's very, very clear.
And so every single time I've started
an intermittent fast intentionally,
I lose that inflammation weight.
Usually it's like 10 pounds, just like that.
And then the real hard work comes,
but the intermittent fasting,
what I've learned is when you get into that process,
your body really starts to look forward to it
because it's developing a pattern and it'll follow along.
When I was clear, and I agree,
no alcohol was a key indicator
primarily because it converts to sugars, I think.
That's just a guess.
Your body gets into a habit,
and I was losing a pound a day.
A pound a day.
Okay, a pound a day.
Yeah, a pound a day.
But I'm heavy.
When I started, I was 250.
Now I'm at two, I think I'm 230.
So I fluctuate between 225 and 230.
So you went down to 220.
Yeah, you went down to 220.
I went to 225.
At your best, because you lost 30 pounds.
And then yeah, but that's still pretty good.
You're only about five pounds above that.
For me, when I got down to my 182, 183,
during my one fast back in the spring,
I went back to the 190.
So I hover now in the 190 area,
and then I try to get down to the low.
So my weight is less than yours,
and yet I still have this bigger volume, bigger swing.
It's because you don't drink as much as I do.
That's the main thing, I think.
How often do you drink?
You don't need to that much.
We'll drink four times a week in this household,
or more sometimes.
I mean, it's not uncommon to have a glass of wine
every day.
I will rarely.
One more.
I used to drink wine pretty consistently
since I moved to Discovery Bay.
This is a drinking community.
So I'll drink on the weekends,
but I try and limit it to the weekends
because I don't like the inflammation.
I don't like the hangover.
I never get drunk.
That's it.
I never get drunk.
I just don't like the feeling,
and I don't like the feeling after the fact
because it's primarily dehydration.
You can feel the inflammation in your body.
I'm lethargic.
I don't like that feeling at all.
But I do enjoy alcohol.
I do.
That's been sort of the curve for me is I enjoy it,
but I don't drink it that much.
You enjoy it as much as me?
I'll have one beer.
I don't drink like six or seven beers.
Having an amazing Cabernet with a great steak,
I mean, that's something that you can relish.
You just pair the two.
But for me, this right shoulder was such a pleasure
and such a pain for me.
And I was like, okay, what am I doing?
I need to go to the chiropractor.
I need to get this acupuncture, more ice bath.
And I was on this trip.
Imagine sleeping.
You're sleeping in a whole bunch of different spots.
We had a hotel in Corfu.
We had an Airbnb in Istanbul.
Then we had another Airbnb.
Then I had a hotel.
And I'm literally in random places on random pillows,
which is always a problem.
And I come back and I go, oh, there's no pain anymore.
And then I was good and didn't feel any pain.
And then you go into that bender weekend or so,
and then all of a sudden, oh, it's back.
And it's that so easy.
So maybe the other question I might have is,
if you bring in one glass of wine into your meal
so that you're having that glass at 6.30,
for me, the key thing with intermittent fasting,
which is almost, you can't break it.
You have to be legalistic about intermittent fasting,
Jonathan, you have to be legalistic.
We don't like to be the idea of being legalistic.
But if you really wanna see what that autophagy
and what that thing does,
you cannot have any calories in between them.
When you have that extra whiskey at 9.30
watching Game of Thrones or House of Dragon,
that's what kills you.
It's not even just the volume.
It's that extra piece that you have empty calories, correct,
that your body is fighting to metabolize
ahead of everything else.
And that's what causes it the next day, even in moderation.
So for me, it's both and.
I think also going to the other side of the world
probably put you in a different emotional state.
Going across the world to unfamiliarity,
it's a constant limit.
It's called a liminal state.
And what a liminal state is when you,
everything is brand new
because you don't have the defense mechanism
set up like you do at home.
When you live at home, you know all the corners.
You know everything.
You don't have to worry about anything,
but when you're in a new world,
you have to be present for everything.
And I'm really curious how that affected your body.
Did it distract you from,
because the muscle pain is just something emotional,
but you weren't focused on it and it went away.
And then you came home and I don't know, I'm just guessing.
But I think going overseas
kind of took you out of your norm substantially.
Yeah, yeah.
It also got me into the-
Eating and intermittent fasting gave you
a new process for your body.
Are you gonna stick with it?
I'm gonna stick, because this is, I know this now.
And I think with the question,
I should probably try,
what I should try to do to mix things up is like,
do I do a smoothie all week?
So sometimes I get tired of a smoothie.
You are so good about that muscle milk
and the protein and everything.
And for me, it's like, dude,
I would love to have that leftover carne asada
with a few vegetables and some salsa
and just something else.
And so for me, I think one of the things I'm gonna try
is if I just, in one entire week,
I'll just have my almond milk, my 26 grams of protein,
a banana, blueberries, some ice,
and then maybe some collagen.
Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
I think the hard part is,
one of the things that I realized that you just touched on
is when you have the capacity to say yes,
especially to really enjoyable parts of life,
it's hard to say no.
When someone busts out a really great bottle of wine
or busts out a really nice tequila or a whiskey,
it's like, it's hard to say no
because that's part of the enjoyment of life.
And I think one of the things that I learned
through intimate fasting was,
I've gotta start teaching my body how to say no
because I'm always saying yes.
I'm always saying yes to the things that I want.
And what is the cost of that to me
when I'm constantly indulging?
Because indulging is part of life,
but when I'm 255, it's starting to affect me.
And I think that's the thing.
There's tremendous value in just the process
of intermittent fasting because it's saying,
I'm in control of my body.
Because when I have, it's not a clock at night,
I get up and I graze.
I have two chips, three grapes, a piece of salami,
a chip, I'm serious, dude.
It's like, I just graze because I want flavors.
And what I realized when I started my intermittent fasting,
I said to myself, for 60 days, I'm not gonna cheat at all.
And I did it and it was rockstar
because I put my body into a constant state
and then I fell off.
And when I fell off, I stopped losing weight.
So part of it is gaining the sense of control
over our own bodies to say, no, I love carne asada,
but not today.
That's hard.
Well, the other thing I would think,
so what I did yesterday afternoon,
which I felt pretty good about is I had olives,
a little bit of chorizo, some salami,
and then I had, there was one other thing,
but for you, instead of getting a chip,
how about trying a Parmesan crisp,
which has a lot better for you and it's cheese
and it's a protein.
So maybe for you, it might be mixing that grazing up.
So if I'm grazing, if you've got olives, dude,
olives are so freaking good for you.
They've got healthy fats.
We used it when we were doing our five day fast.
They're a great source, obviously, of fiber.
And then that anti-inflammatory quality,
having that, going with pork,
even though it's nitrite free is not the best.
So maybe you go with like a beef stick,
a grass fed beef stick or something to help fill you up
that you know is also gonna be good for you.
A carrots, maybe they don't work the same way,
but I think grazing shouldn't be frowned upon
unless it's really gonna be detrimentally caloric wise.
Yeah.
And I think ultimately it comes down to,
can I control my body?
I think that was what I was really trying to dig into is,
I started seeing the weight really come off
and it was simply because I said no.
You know, I did the work and part of the journey for me
is not just about how do I lose the weight,
but why am I not losing the weight consistently?
It's because I'm lazy.
It was really hard.
The biggest thing that I learned the last two years
is that I can be lazy because I can afford to be.
And it's-
But what if you couldn't afford to be?
Yeah.
But the value of self-control
through that entire experience was infinitely greater
than the gain from the Karnia Sada.
That's what I learned is the more that I put my body
under my control, the more I benefited from it.
And it's whatever it is.
When they go to the gym for 30 days,
they don't do it for a week, they go for 30 days,
they go, God, I love the way I feel.
And that's the value of self-control is
we love how we feel.
So.
Yeah.
Awesome, man.
You'll wanna talk about,
did you mention we've got a podcast guest next week?
The guy that had that kind of talking about-
He dropped out.
He did?
He dropped out, yeah.
He said he didn't wanna come in.
I was kinda surprised.
He was like totally jacked up and then he,
and then he said, sorry, I can't, I don't wanna do it.
Not like can we reschedule it?
I don't wanna do it, so I'll-
That's really bizarre.
I was really impressed though.
You and I both commented on this with Brittany
in terms of that, dude, there was something that came through.
It wasn't just her actual physical words.
There was something inside of her mind.
It was so unscripted and real and helpful.
She was processing emotionally her own loneliness.
Yes, yes.
It was wild. It was incredible.
It really was wild.
I wouldn't mind having her back on.
I think she broke through, man.
You said that was her emotional power.
You wanna reach out to her?
Yeah, but what you said right there was,
because what she was basically saying is,
what if, it'd be like having somebody in a coma
and they're loving their world.
You know that they're in a very peaceful place.
Nothing else is gonna change.
They're gonna die or something else.
Would you wake them up?
And they're saying, what if they are in this environment
with healthy people and they're living healthy lives
and they're doing this,
would you try to take them out of that reverie
and maybe leave them alone for a little bit?
There was just so many things going on in that post.
I thought it was excellent.
I think we should see if she can come on.
Because I think fundamentally we learn a lot
when we question our own assumptions
and that's what she was doing.
She was saying, what is the cost of me believing
that this is it?
The whole conundrum of,
do I talk people out of their joy
when I know they're not going to experience that joy?
That was a profound thought.
Dude, that's union.
This is what we've been talking about.
Maybe it's the point of the love that you talked about
where it's the meeting.
It's like, let's just, can't we get along?
It can't be that simple, but it is.
It's like unified field or the source or God, right?
How about the same thing?
We're in the same place.
We're vibrating at the same level
and it's all about love and it's all about union
and peace with our fellow man, right?
That's it.
Yeah, awesome, brother.
All right, everybody.
This has been another, I love these topic episodes
because they always get interesting.
We always get to share our hearts.
To all of our listeners, we appreciate you.
Thank you for listening and would love to know who you are.
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It's 4th of July week and to all those out there,
please enjoy, be safe, don't get hurt.
Be safe.
Any final words, Rich?
No, don't be like Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder.
He gets his arms blown off, blown off.
So anyway, have a good one, everybody.
All right, much love, everybody.
Take care.
So let's get started.