Transcription
I've been thinking a lot about Owen Benjamin's episode on Tucker Carlson.
"Despair is the sin. Despair is that's why like there's people I'll go at. I'm like if you spread despair, you're basically poisoning people."
"You know, that is such a a wise thing. I've done a lot of despair spreading and I and I regret."
"Oh, me too. Yeah. But see, telling the truth can come off as despair, but it's still good."
"Yeah. But I I think it can be too much. I mean, it bums me out. So I, you know, we're commanded not to despair."
"Exactly. Exactly. There that that's when like that uh principle like those fundamentals kick in where there's been times where I'm like but I know like despair is a sin like that's like spitting in the face of a gift. Right."
"Yes."
"Conspiracy theories are entering a danger."
"Information is the oxygen."
"There's so much evidence out there that even if less than 1% is true that enough to collapse the current paradigm and change the whole planet."
I think it's one of the best podcasts that's been recorded in a long [ __ ] time. I think it is such an interesting and wise and inspired conversation that also like moves at a million miles an hour. Owen thinks in so many funny like sort of metaphorical jumps that you kind of have to catch up to the the neural architecture that he's built to understand the world as you're listening to him in order to keep up with his rapid sort of theological or philosophical or just intellectual kind of bounces around topics.
Owen's an interesting character on the internet in my opinion because I had no idea who he was at all. Zero. Un. Didn't know about his career. Didn't know about his comedy. Didn't know about his online stuff. Didn't know about him getting censored off the internet. Nada. But I didn't know who he was or like what his background was and I hadn't seen a lot of his content except to know that he was, you know, a funny kind of conspiracy theorist that had some good takes, but I hadn't really heard much. But in hearing this Tucker interview, it's so interesting what his perspective is on all this.
The piece that I keep on circling on that I think is really inspirational that I'm sort of taking to heart as like a mantra holding with me all the time is this shifting away from the doomerism of the pessimism of looking at all these conspiracies and looking at how [ __ ] up the world is. Just looking for optimism and and good stories. I mean, every dark story has has a light side and every [ __ ] up thing that's going on has silver linings and and good truth to be found. and good stories to be told and a lot of it is just your perspective.
And he has a lot of points about how certainly you can blame various groups and peoples and specific individuals for, you know, most of the horrible [ __ ] that's going on in this world. And that's cool, worth doing. In every instance of something going wrong, you can also turn the lens inward at your yourself individually and at your group and a culture and your country and like everything bad that's happening to the US, we are letting happen to ourselves. Everything bad that we wish was better about our culture is in part carried by ourselves being a part of our culture. And certainly we do need information outwards about who's doing what and what's wrong in this world. But we also I think we need a lot more introspection inwards too into how can we be better and how can we like basically bypass the negative and just move towards the positive direction.
Just huge shout out to Owen. I thought it was one of the most interesting conversations I've heard in podcast form in months and months and months. I almost never listen to podcasts anymore because it's just really easy for them to become repetitive even when I love the people on them and I like the topics they're talking about. And I wasn't expecting to watch more than 5 to 10 minutes of this one. I've now watched it through twice and I think it's just it's really cool. Huge shout out to Owen and Tucker for an awesome conversation. If you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. Um it won't be everyone's cup of tea because Owen sort of like thinks, speaks, and sort of logically leaps in a very much sort of fast-paced and fluid flow state kind of way. But I love that [ __ ]. That's exactly how my brain works.
So anyways, just a little preamble. No, I'm sick of the the part of my job that has me constantly looking at all the evil in the world and just talking about that because it's important. I'm relatively good at it, at connecting dots and following the money and going wherever the truth leads and not being afraid to just tell it like I see it. It seems to have worked out pretty well for my career so far. But it also is a trap that traps you in the cycle of constantly fixating on everything that's wrong and everything that's going bad. And the more you know, the more horrible humanity can really start to seem. You can really get very down about the human condition. When you look at the big picture around the globe with a particular focus on the most evil nexus points of power, money, influence, and everything else, it's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for me, and I'm sick of it. Plus, it's just like how many times can we talk about the same abuses, the same genocide, the same lies over and over and over and over and over.
And I'm not saying that I'm going to stop talking about it. What I'm saying is that there's other angles that I think are important that I'm thinking more and more about that I feel the need for self-healing in terms of like my emotional and mental state of what am I focusing my whole life on? I need to focus more on positive sides of these stories. Same stories, just look at them from other angles. If I'm feeling that way, then to me that says that I bet a lot of you are feeling that way, too. I bet that a lot of us are feeling pretty overwhelmed by how horrible the world seems when you're trying to be tuned in because it's important to be tuned in. It's a good thing to be tuned in to what's going on in this world. That's how we wake up and that is how we free ourselves from, let's just say, the cabal of people of powerful that are controlling our government, buying out our elections, killing people endlessly and senselessly and telling us to shut up about it. It's important that we are all awake and aware and paying attention, but oh boy, is that draining.
I've been thinking a lot about that feeling of how do you refocus to still become informed and be aware and and ask those questions, learn the truth, but doing it in a way that twists the lens that recolors the situation and holds the positive perspective because ultimately you can see it half full, you can see it half empty. History is a long journey through a lot of evil [ __ ]. And all across the crazy story of history, all the evil dictatorships, all the terrible genocides, all of the really horrible, horrible, [ __ ] up [ __ ] that humans have done to each other over thousands of years that we know of. Across all of that, there were stories of wonderful human beauty. There were stories of love. There was stories of overcoming. There was stories of the underdog. There was stories of good rising up and fighting back. There's always both sides. It's push pull. It's humanity. It's the light and the dark. It's it's just the way it is. We're not going to defeat evil in our lifetimes or in any future lifetime. But we're also not going to succumb to it either. It just depends how you want to look at it. And you know, in any given time, there's different amounts of good and evil. And there are very real forces in this world that very much deserve to be inspected, called out, made plain for everybody, and fought against with everything we got. But we don't need to dwell on it, and we don't need to assign these people more power than they have. And I think when you really look out at the world today, I think that what we're learning is that these people actually have a lot less power than they think.
We just are very focused on the wrong time horizon because we all live in this digital age now. We've been here for like 20 years, kind of more like 10 for this actual digital age and really more like two or three for sort of the intensity of this AI ramp that we're on. It's changing so much and it's going to keep going. But there's this enduring question about social media and technology and all this communication that we now have that we've all asked a million times. Is it worse now or can we just see what's going on, right? Like is is there more evil in the world now because of technology and because of this acceleration or are we just all more aware of it because we all have it in our phones and outrage and fear are the best at selling things. They're the best at getting views and your attention. Probably a bit of both. Probably both true. But the point that I keep coming back to is regardless of how much evil there is in the world in any given year, regardless of whether things are getting better or worse, things are definitely getting more technologically enabled. As in everyone is getting more technologically enabled. The evil rich folks very much more technologically enabled. But all of us are way more technologically enabled as well. That leads to very bad things and very good things from a very technical like sophisticated businesses, palunteers, digital mass surveillance like on that kind of scope of things all the way down to the deeply like soul level where do you find meaning and are you dopamine addicted and are you like is this taking your job you know like your personal life being affected by these technologies too but I think we can all agree that if you choose to wield it you as the average citizen anywhere in the world has the potential to make a way bigger impact than ever before. Not everyone is going to take the steps to make that impact. Not everyone is going to do anything with it. I mean, I am a perfect example of someone that has made a very strangely outsized impact for where I came from by using technology to just try.
And we're starting to see a lot of political campaigns springing up out of this digital space, out of this sort of decentralized space, if you will, of sort of more regular type folks. Not necessarily always 100% regular, but more regular type folks. Not so hand-selected establishment picks that are paraded around like little paper puppets, but instead just regular Americans that are like, "Hey, I have a big social media following or I'm up to try or I run a successful business or I'm going to get in the race." And we are now seeing all of these sort of grassroots riser uppers. We're seeing the rise of citizen journalism, right? We're seeing regular people just popping up out of nowhere, starting YouTube channels, contributing on Twitter, getting involved in X spaces, contributing information, scrutinizing, exposing. It certainly comes with a lot of noise. It is clearly a trend towards increasing potential to make a difference. Tell me if you disagree, but the way I feel about it, we're looking at the wrong time horizon. When you feel like everything's getting worse, lots of things are getting worse, but every time I try to logic out how this technological revolution goes, it either goes entirely towards technological military control state where you are in a literal goolag. They control everything. They control all and you break the law. uh the drones come, they put you in the box, they steal your money, they torture you in secret, whatever it is, it like either goes all the way to the digital goolags or they will set themselves free. It just doesn't seem like it when you look at a 3-month time horizon or even a one-year time horizon.
This is just my opinion. But suppose there's a million civilizations out there in the universe somewhere at some time. All of them different. But suppose that all those million civilizations invent electricity at some point because it's out there. You know, it's like possible. They're smart. They invent fire. They they make food. They look different. But whatever. Imagine there's a million civilizations that invent electricity. And a million different civilizations that start figuring out what you can do with electricity. Basically any civilization, any grouping of beings that think that create a society where you can communicate remotely with each other. That that's what this is. It's just a remote communication system. And any civilization that makes a remote communication system will would have to go through all the same things we're going through. You'd have to learn how to become a part of a civilization and culture where there's a lot less privacy but a lot more communication, a lot less uh clarity on truth, but a lot more decentralization of contribution. All these things we're learning about the digital age, these growing pains kind of feels like we're middle schoolers still just getting our first telephone and figuring out how to like hang with the boys and everything's very weird. We're all very immature. I think we're just going through that as a civilization that has just entered this technological space where no longer are we all individuals in our far-off places doing our own things in our own little communities. We're just now all part of one globalized culture. And there's a lot of sad stuff about becoming a globalized culture. There's a lot that's lost and there's a lot that we could be doing to mitigate that to preserve our actual unique cultures. That's a conversation for a different day. But I can't square any logical like understanding of where this goes that doesn't lead to our culture evolving and just inherently marching closer and closer towards values that align with the decentralized truth because no one wants to be lied to. No one wants to be taken advantage of. Everyone wants the best life for themselves and their family. And ultimately that always comes back to truth. Either you're manipulating everybody else or you're not. And it doesn't take a genius to realize that if everyone acts like you, think through what the world would be like. And if you're a manipulator, if you're an evil doer, if you're a taker from the system and everyone else acted like you, everything would be [ __ ].
And so I don't think it's I don't think it's rocket science to imagine how we all slowly walk ourselves towards a brighter and brighter future, always with new challenges, always with new, you know, new evil people in this world. But you're seeing it live very slowly as lies are exposed, as stories go viral, as the flood of information comes through, as they freak out and distract and try to buy politicians off. But it's all happening because everyone's waking up. And it's not like literally everyone's waking up, right? Lots of sheep out there, lots of people still just sucking down the slop. But little by little by little by little, everyone's slowly starting to get the hang of how this all works. Like how a comment section works, how a chat thread works, how you can or can't trust what you see, you know, how to vet things, how to think through things. So I I'm getting more and more optimistic. Not for the short term, but just big picture. Big picture.
"Conspiracy theories are entering a danger."
"Information is the oxygen of the deac. There's so much evidence out there that even if less than 1% is true, will that be enough to collapse the current paradigm and change the whole planet?"