Stupid enough to be right

A big inspiration for this (almost) daily blog is Austin Kleon. He wrote Steal like an Artist and Show Your Work, and his latest book, Keep Going is right around the corner. But more importantly, he writes almost every day on his own blog.

And when I had trouble writing today, I went to Kleon’s blog for an adjustment. Of all the endless topics we could write about, I found it incredible we were sharing a wavelength - chasing stupidity. In a post entitled A fine line between stupid and clever, Kleon wrote:

“Every artist knows the truth in this. I often know an idea is worth working on if I honestly can’t tell if it’s incredibly stupid or absolutely brilliant. (“This idea is so dumb,” I’ll think. “I bet everyone will love it.”)”

I need to consider stupidity my new compass.

Especially because what I wanted to write about was what Jerry Seinfeld said on the topic. Reflecting on the two years he spent writing a joke about a pop tart, Seinfeld told The Times:

“It’s a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that’s what I do. That’s what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time, wastefully, so that I can then waste their time.”

Later on, he continues:

“I know it sounds like nothing. And it is nothing. You know, in my world, the wronger something feels, the righter it is. So to waste this much time on something this stupid, that felt good to me.”

Kleon, you’re in good company.

The story of the hotel maids

You need to be aware of the stories you tell yourself.

Why? Because our minds are more powerful than we know.

How do I know? I don’t know, I read an article.

Ten years ago, some scientists studied a bunch of hotel maids. One group of ladies had their work reviewed down to the detail. The researchers told them how many calories they burned every day with every activity, and that they met the surgeon general's definition of an active lifestyle. Wow. Makes your desk job feel a little less appealing, huh?

The other group of maids were told shit, as science goes.

What do you think happened?

Well, one month later, the maids that were told they were active, the maids that were told they were burning calories, they actually did. They lost weight, they dropped their waist-to-hip ratio and their blood pressure decreased by 10 percent.

They didn’t even realize what they were doing. But once they put their mind to it, the body followed.

Scientists are still arguing about what happened here, whether or not this was a placebo at work, but honestly it doesn’t really matter to me. What it shows is we’re a bunch of monkeys that tell stories. A bunch of monkeys telling stories to ourselves and to each other. And those stories have consequences.

Don’t think so? When you watch a movie, do you ever cry? Or jump at a scary bit? Are there really people in front of you making you experience the reality on the screen?

If you think about tigers trying to wear your skin right before you’re going to bed, do you think you’ll fall sleep easy?

Our brains aren’t dumb for thinking these things, they’re more powerful than we know. But we don’t take advantage of it. We worry about getting to the gym and sweating on the treadmill, but we don’t change the bad stories we tell ourselves.

If we knew what was good for us, we’d start thinking about it.

Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17792517

The anxious mind and climate change

Climate change is such a huge threat we don’t even know how to think about it.

Vice had me with that title. I’m fascinated by problems bigger than our individual minds can handle. Sometimes it takes a village. Sometimes it’s just unknown and we have to charge forward.

With that being said, the Vice piece chronicles David Wallace-Wells’ new, horrifying book about climate change - The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Vice reported Geoff Dembicki writes that the book “sets out to describe, in vivid and nightmarish detail, the hellscape that earth will become if we do not radically cut our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade.”

When asked essentially how Wallace-Wells manages to sleep with all this knowledge bouncing around in his brains, he said:

“I live like everybody else does in the world in part through compartmentalization and denial about it. One thing that noticing that made me realize, though, is just how important that makes it for us to look directly at the science and to take it seriously.”

I think there is good in accepting anxiety. Lately, we want to push it away. Take some pills. Meditate. But that anxiety can spur action. It can be the butterflies you need to know you want to ask for someone’s number. Or the nerves that make you want to nail that presentation without stuttering through.

Writing gives me anxiety. But I do it anyway. To see what happens on the other side. Because sometimes we just need to make some moves on the things we can barely wrap our minds around.

College is a rigged competition

College was a great time of my life, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons, but I could never forgot that I was paying for the privilege.

Because I’m still paying a decade later.

But I can’t even be mad at William Rick Singer. He may be Public Enemy Number One today, but all he did was seize opportunity. Colleges are business first, education second. Wealthy people often know one more than the other. So when Aunt Becky from Full House throws cash at you, you find a way to get her kid into Harvard.

How? Make some nerd take the SATs. I’m not even kidding. Singer hired Mark Riddell and paid off the test administrator, so Riddell could take one of the student’s tests back to his hotel room and return it with a near-perfect score for a cool 10 grand. What did Riddell do before that? Oh, he was the director of a college entrance exam preparation business. Talk about knowing your lane. He must have went to college. Oh, right, he went to Harvard.

What trips me out even harder is the kids would have known. They were just find getting accepted into a school they know they didn’t deserve or earn.

Meanwhile, a group of Asian Americans students, called the Students for Fair Admissions, have been trying to sue Harvard for discrimination. These kids worked their fingers to the bone to get admitted to a school with a big name, and, hell, probably study something cause that’s all they know, and Harvard stands by their decision to judge students by a personal rating, including traits like "courage" and "likability.”

The problem just might be competition. When 40,000 students every year want the same sheet of paper that considerably less can receive in the mail, there is bound to be some winners and some losers and some cheating too.

What are you, fun?

Almost more bizarre than the very statistical hail mary we call consciousness is our ability to just straight up swallow it. Somewhere along the line we stop being amazed that we wake again and again in this world.

I don’t want to take it for granted. I want to understand more about what people think is going on. And with that being said, I found some giggles and thoughts in an episode of the You Made It Weird podcast, where comedian and host Pete Holmes sat down with comedian and former talk show host Craig Ferguson about higher powers.

Craig: I think it’s Descartes that said all societies no matter who they are have a deity. All societies - Aztecs and Chinese, and people that have no connection at all, but they all have the idea of a deity. And one of [Descartes’] proofs of God was that for for every appetite there is a cessation. For the desire to procreate, there is sex. [For] the desire to eat, there is food. The desire for war, there is, you know?

Pete: Right.

Craig: So for every appetitive, there is a cessation. The proof of God is the fact that humans have an appetite for God, proves there is a God.

Pete: That’s interesting.

Craig: Because if you didn’t have an appetite for it, it wouldn’t exist.

Pete: But we also want to fly and stuff.

Craig: We do!

Pete: Yea, but I mean I want to take off by clenching my butt.

Craig: But that’s not how it works. How it works is, I mean, the fact we fly in the air, we fly in the air, so just because it’s not the way you planned it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exists. Of course it exists.

Peter: To that logic then, God very much so, following this logic, might not be clenching my butt to fly, it might be an airplane.

Craig: Of course!

Pete: Which means it might not be the God the Aztecs were worshipping, or my Jesus, or…

Craig: Or it might be the exact same God at a different point in time. But because God and Time don’t have to be the same thing. If, for example, you say the Aztec God or the Hebrew God, or, does Confucius have a God? Yeah, whatever it is - whatever God in whatever society, that God takes the form of what input you give it. For example, you plug the toaster in, it’s a toaster. You plug the sauna in, it’s a sauna.

Pete: I love this. We quote this all the time - you can dig a bunch of different wells, but it’s all after the same water.

Craig: Right!

Pete: You plug the sauna in, it’s a sauna. What are you, fun? You’re like a fun guy?

Craig: Yeah, I like the sauna.

Be careful with creativity

“The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.”

— Isaac Asimov

Questioning the hunt for one-shot answers

My father is turning 67 in a few days. And despite his first-born son, ahem, working during the day as 3D product support, and during the night on a personal blog, he couldn’t tell you how to use the Internet beyond pecking in the letters for youtube.com to watch the music video for Skid Row’s 18 And Life.

But, to my surprise, when he was gifted an Alexa last Christmas, he found a new way to rock out.

My one year nephew, AJ, isn’t far off either. He barely knows how to speak but he can certainly yell “Alexa” while shaking the hockey puck shaped device in his tiny baby hands. And, yes, it is adorable.

The future is here. We’re talking to robots. And, as James Vlahos writes in this month’s Wired magazine, “it’s going to upend our relationship with information”. Because we want answers and we wasn’t them now. We don’t want to rifle through pages of links. We want the undeniable facts. As always, we want the speed.

But what becomes more interesting is the other part of the equation, the question. You’d think we would need to train ourselves to talk to robots, but they are already a few steps ahead. Before Amazon released the Echo, William Tunstall-Pedoe developed True Knowledge - a website offering one-shot answers. Vlahos explained in Wired:

“Most exciting for Tunstall-Pedoe, True Knowledge could handle questions who answers were not explicitly spelled out beforehand. Imagine somebody asking, “Is a bat a bird?” Because the ontology had bats sorted into a subgroup under “mammals” and birds were located elsewhere, the system could correctly reason that bats are not birds.”

True Knowledge was getting smart, and in pitches to investors, Tunstall-Pedoe liked to thumb his nose at the competition. For instance, he’d Google “Is Madonna single?” The search engine’s shallow understanding was obvious when it returned the link “Unreleased Madonna single slips onto Net.” True Knowledge, meanwhile, knew from the way the question was phrased that “single” was being used as an adjective, not a noun, and that it was defined as an absence of romantic connections. So, seeing that Madonna and Guy Ritchie were connected “at the time” by an is married to link, the system more helpfully answered that, no, Madonna was not single.”

But can technology always grow to understand what we’re asking? Are there limits to the one-shot answer, or is it that we’re already living in a miscommunication world? Is there a single, correct answer for when to say “I love you” or how to negotiate a salary?

Life can feel messy but could there be a one-shot answer after all?

A funny train ride home

I thought about being a stand-up comedian on the train home tonight.

It wasn’t a serious thought, just an experiment. I’ve been diving so deep into the scene lately I didn’t even realize how wet the water was around me.

A week ago, Cynthia True’s American Scream - The Bill Hicks Story found me on the dollar rack at a local bookstore. Last night’s Netflix choice was Tig Notaro’s special Happy to Be Here, and I was not disappointed by her ten-minute tease whether or not the Indigo Girls would perform to close out the show.

And right before my train home, The Fighter and The Kid podcast hosts, Brendan Schaub and Bryan Callen, were talking shop with comedian Andrew Schulz in my ears.

But just toying with the idea of being a stand-up was an interesting shift. Instead of getting lost in the show, I started to excavate anything around me for laughs. Was someone wearing funny shoes? Was it weird how fast we’re hurling as a crowd at break-neck speeds through a very dark and narrow tunnel? Who approved all this? Some idiot with funny shoes?

And it might sound simple to you and me, but it’s something not everyone can tap into. David Foster Wallace said it best with one of my favorite quotes:

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’”

Wherever you pay your attention, you start the process of making meaning. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of the time we’re not even trying. We think we know what things mean. This is a train. This is my commute home. It’s boring. End of story.

But if you take a second to choose a different reality, all with the single second of a thought, you can find some new meaning, and maybe some new life.

Take your valuables with you

A freelance client asked me today to add a promotional pop-up to their website. Has there ever been a person happy to be interrupted by a pop-up? It’s such a non-consensual way to push something in your face when you know exactly what you went looking for.

Information is no longer a problem in this world. But, as Derek Sivers once said, “If [more] information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

What we want is value. Be valuable and no one will have trouble finding you.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit after finishing Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. (I even took down some notes on my personal website.) Newport makes the argument to declutter all this optional technology from your life for the purpose of only leveraging the good stuff intentionally for your values.

That’s no small feat, but it’s real. We should be helping people get rid of distractions. Make life easier so we can find better problems. We shouldn’t be worrying about paying for a doctor visit or our education. We should be exploring worlds together.

The problem with a connected world is that there has never been more annoying fucks wanting to take up little bits of your time. They have horrible stories and bad jokes. They want you to buy their t-shirts.

The world wants your attention. And you have every decision to make, starting with “do I click on that pop-up, or no?”

Access to one another

Some beautiful people in this world don’t want to bother you with their problems. They don’t want you to go out of your way, even if it means a call or a meal or a minute. And sometimes they should.

Because we waste time constantly. On stupid shit. And if you love someone and you can help them in some small way, why wouldn’t you?

“Historically, we have overestimated the value of access to information and we have always underestimated the value of access to each other.”

— Clay Shirky

We didn't ask for robot dogs

I must be missing something - did the world get together when I wasn’t paying attention and ask for robot dogs?

Or did someone in Japan wake up one day and think, you know, dogs are cool, but what if instead of literally thriving off of enthusiasm and tail waggles, dogs had batteries and a grey, plastic shell?

I’m not kidding - Sony made Aibo, the robot dog. He has two cameras and four microphones. His tail jerks around, and his brain is hooked up to every other Aibo!

This isn’t the first time, either. Sony tried this bullshit back in 1999. And while Americans were all freaking out that Y2K would whip out our MP3 libraries and our chances to collectively date the Spice Girls, Sony sold 3,000 robot dogs in 20 minutes.

Now, after taking a decade off from building them, Aibo is back. Just when we’re starting to worry about robots taking our jobs and feeding us perfect crinkle-cut French fries, Japan is cranking out good boys.

Was there something wrong with dogs before? Did they not love us enough? Did we not breed them into being adorable life-long companions to the point that some even die horrible, disfiguring deaths just because we wanted more adorable faces?

I’ve thought about this long and hard, and I think I have the only explanation.

Isaac Asimov had Three Laws of Robotics:

1. Robots can’t hurt people, or by inaction, allow people to be hurt.

2. Robots must obey humans unless the orders conflict with Law #1

3. Robots must protect themselves unless it conflicts with #1 or #2

Okay, some dogs bite. Most don’t.

Some dogs don’t listen. We can train them better.

But if we’re just doing this because we don’t want to pick up some poop, we deserve to be chow for the robot dog apocalypse.

Book magic

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

— Carl Sagan

The Reality of Palessi

The Atlantic nailed it with this one:

“You could say that we’re all hallucinating all the time and when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality. But sometimes this consensus breaks down dramatically, begging the question, ‘What is real?’ ”

Like when Payless opened a fake store recently and called it Palessi. They sold Payless bargain-brand shoes at astronomical prices:

“Party goers, having no idea they were looking at discount staples from the mall scene, said they’d pay hundreds of dollars for the stylish shoes, praising the look, materials and workmanship. Top offer: $640, which translates to an 1,800 percent markup, and Palessi sold about $3,000 worth of product in the first few hours of the stunt.”

There is no reality. There is only story.

The drugs we all love

Caffeine and sugar. Often together. I don't know too many folks just drinking black.

We forget caffeine is a psychoactive drug. And everyone is high. According to the National Geographic short video Caffeine 101, 90% of Americans drink at least one caffeinated drink per day.

What's so special about this magical bean water?

It's an acquired taste. And a routine. It's become the symbol of the productive and it's available on every street corner. It’s roasted and sweetened and steamed and frothed whatever way you want.

And it makes the morning a bit more pleasant.

Death by lettuce is almost poetic

Last time I checked, death is the end for all of us. You'd think the thing that would take you out in 2018 wouldn't be fuckin lettuce. Or spinach. Or really any vegetable. Samurais and soldiers died with honor. Now we're all in danger of enjoying a sandwich.

The CDC issues an outbreak alert today. They tweeted: "Do not eat any romaine lettuce, including whole heads and hearts, chopped, organic and salad mixes with romaine until we learn more. If you don’t know if it’s romaine or can’t confirm the source, don’t eat it."

Why? Wired reports that it's most likely the water. Again, the thing keeping us all alive and healthy could be just the place for horrible diseases to float around. It's almost poetic.

But in 2018, the modern world that can offer free flu shots and argue over vaccines for babies, juggle food waste and growing obesity, and jail people for plants and pay to prescribe addictive painkillers, what else can we expect?

The incompetent man without a computer

Sometimes the world feels like it's moving so fast, it's hard to get a grasp on things. And other times you hear about someone like Yoshitaka Sakurada, the Japanese deputy chief of the government’s cybersecurity strategy office, who recently told the world he doesn't use computers.

I only want to imagine Sakurada spoke with such confidence that you'd feel like the idiot for questioning him.

The Guardian reported how he got his work done:

“‘Since the age of 25, I have instructed my employees and secretaries, so I don’t use computers myself,’ he said in a response to an opposition question in a lower house session, local media reported.”

For four decades, the man hasn't touched a computer. You have to be kidding me.

When the world feels like too much of a joke, I often think about how jokes can spin into reality. Back in 1969, Peter and Raymond Hull did such a thing. They wrote a book called The Peter Principle. According to Wikipedia, the Peter Principle is described as "an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence."

It was meant to be satire.

The power in our hands

By now most folks know about the brain-hacking psychological powers of app designers - the infinite scroll, the random reward systems, the bright red notifications. But we barely stop to think about how the simple security of holding something powerful might be in our genes.

Professor and author William von Hippel was on The Joe Rogan Experience this past week. He talked about his new book "The Social Leap" and a great deal of the evolution story, as von Hippel details it. And one segment caught me off-guard in a way I don't think von Hippel meant it. In discussing our evolution toward bipedalism and this massive brain of ours, Hippel tells Joe about the reason we would learn to hang onto our tools:

“A chimp can plan for needs that it currently feels. It can say, “Oh I want to go get termites out of that mound. I’ll break this stick off, I’ll strip the leaves, and then I’ll go over there and do that.” But it can’t plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow. If it doesn’t feel the need, it can’t plan for it.

And humans can plan for unfelt needs and the best example of that is the notion of taking the tool with you that you’ve now used and say, “Well I’ll want to use it tomorrow” right? So whichever Australopithecus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future for unfelt needs, but it could plan for felt needs, cause a chimp can do that too.

And if you think about how would you feel if you’re about to walk across the open savannah and you’re kind of small, and the leopards and lions are way faster than you, I think the primary thing you’ll feel is fear, like “Oh shit, I’m going to get attacked.” And so I want something in my hands to help me defend myself - a spear, a club, a stick, something. And so what I suspect is a part of the process is my desire to hold something in my hand as I’m looking around and I’m scared and a bunch of us are doing that. And so I suspect that that’s what played a role in leading to bipedalism. There would have been other factors at play, like persistent hunting and stuff, but I suspect that came later.”

Could that be why we're so attached to holding these things?

Questioning the rules

I think we need to constantly find our place on this supermassive spinning rock. It's in our blood to search. And every day brings new challenges to the point that it's all too tempting to cling to certainty.

But if you fall too deeply into a groove, you run the risk of your own programming. The Internet has deemed this meme, an NPC or non-player character. Author Michael Malice explained the meme concept on The Joe Rogan Experience as the video game characters that don't exist outside their realms. They don't have fleshed out lives or stories, they don't think independently. And Malice explains:

“You see this on Twitter, where it’s one thing where people say cliched ideas but they’ll say cliched ideas in a cliched way. And it’s like you have no mind. You’re just repeating what has been programmed to you in your script. And as soon as you mention certain terms, there’s a knee-jerk special that they give.”

But all it takes is a second to change. That's the point author, professor, and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky tries to highlight in one of my favorite parts of his latest TED talk, The biology of our best and worst selves. He explains how millions of years have guided us to act in certain ways and how quickly we can recognize and adjust our most ruthless and violent behavior:

“Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man’s-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers had to arrive and said, “We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other.” And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of “us,” all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a “them,” those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.”

Drinking poison

First, it was Flint. Now, it's Newark.

Living in New Jersey, the water crisis crept closer to home for me when I read about it in the New York Times. A new study has confirmed that lead is leaching into the water for the state's most populous city. Even worse was that Newark officials denied the gravity of the problem for the past year and a half and now claim Newark has "some of the best drinking water. The problem is that our infrastructure is not safe.”

I'm left wondering what fucking difference does it make? How did we get to a time when water doesn't take priority for people?

It’s a technological world with a crumbling infrastructure, and even the solutions are technological - with water filters handed out of a local church to band-aid the problem.

The ugly truth is we've stretched ourselves thin. With as complex and progressive as the human race gets, we're still drinking poison as the world keeps spinning.

And it's not a new problem. In his book, Sapiens, Yuval Harari said it happened all the way back to 10,000 years ago during the Agricultural Revolution, or what he calls History's Biggest Fraud. Harari wrote, "The agricultural revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return."

Is this just the luck of the hand we're dealt? How could we let this happen? Harari has an idea how it happened before:

“Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work - say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface - people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful!’ We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.”

And it worked, almost too well. Population grew and newer, more complex problems locked us into agricultural society. Harari explained, "If the adoption of ploughing increased a village's population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times?"

It is the Luxury Trap - "One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can't live without it."

It seems we're still left to suffer for the growth of society. Like someone fell asleep at the wheel. We've become so obligated to modern society's luxuries that we're in danger.

We deal with poor nutrition, poison water, living with loneliness, shaky spirituality, and a price tag for an education. Sitting is giving us cancer and we don't even have healthcare to cover it. But, hey, we can order anything we want to our doorstep and watch anything we want from our phones.

Where is the antidote?

Your body wants conflict

On the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the comedian, actor, and UFC commentator spent the last month competing with his comic friends (Tom Segura, Ari Shaffir, and Bert Kreischer) in what they called Sober October. In addition to staying sober, each comedian wore a fitness tracker and acquired points for a specific heart rate. The highest score would win.

And in reflecting on the insane workouts they each put themselves through, Rogan, as usual, explored the evolutionary perspective through a substance-fueled rant:

“We have too much of a history as a species of constantly avoiding danger. And I think we live in a place that’s far too safe for our natural instincts. So we’re constantly looking for things to be bad or looking for things to be dangerous or confronting our own mortality and putting it on the back-burner and letting all that weirdness manifest itself in all sorts of other fears - fears about the government, fears about economics and fears about this. I think we’re dealing with this as human beings all the time, and I think there’s only a certain amount you can do.

And I think when you have rigorous exercise it puts in perspective what that certain amount actually is and what you can control as a person. You can just chill your body out and look at this whole thing for what it is. It is what it is. We’re gonna be fine or we’re not. And then it won’t matter.

But this whole thing that we do when we do this, we do this because our body has a need for exercise. It has a built-in need. It’s got an engine that needs to be pushed. And if you don’t push it, it starts fucking with you. It starts fucking you and asking you weird questions, like, “Who the fuck does that guy think he is?” Like it wants to start problems. It wants to get upset at things that don’t make sense to be upset at. It wants conflict. There is a part of you that wants conflict. Because it thinks that conflict is part of the programming. It’s because it’s been our way for millions of years.

So whatever the fuck we were then to whatever the fuck we are now, there’s been conflict along the way. People have been trying to eat us. Things have been trying to kill us. And this is the only time ever that there’s none of that. And I think the only time you can see things with perspective is when you blow out all the biological shit.”