Unc and Phew have their most personal, intimate conversation to date. Both came into the podcast with specific, very different objectives, but – in the end – they find surprisingly powerful common ground. Listen now!

Show Notes

Phew coming in feeling down about things

• Lots of change going on in his life
• Like being sick but not realizing it until it really hits you
• Two X refugee
• Tried to do a rant-ish show
• Screamed until he damaged his voice

Phew: I don’t think I’m OK

• Didn’t realize how important it is to get on stage to do comedy
• Absorbing everything happening in the news
• Bombarded with all things “the news,” from all across the spectrum

It’s just too much

• The sound-biting of everything
• Death of real investigative analysis
• Specific example: Jacob Blake/Kenosha
• Another: the Rochester incident
• If you just heard the sound bites, you’d be like “WTF?”
• Until you hear the rest of the story, which potentially changes the entire story
• What you get in your mind vs reality are night and day different

Phew: I don’t think I can take this any more

• Everyone is angry at me, and the people themselves don’t have the facts
• I think I’m checking out of a lot of this stuff
• The death of objective journalism: RIP Journalism
• Vast majority of thinking adults believe the media is biased

What’s changed recently

• People used to care about being factually correct and the facts themselves
• People now have a hubris that is endemic to all sides of the political spectrum
• Everybody believes that they know better
• A man without a country

Attacked wherever Phew goes

• The “Group Who Hates Groups” Facebook group
• Phew gets attacked there for being too conservative
• Everywhere else, Phew gets attacked by liberals for not being liberal enough
• Unc: thinks Phew is measured, respectful, courteous, thoughtful, and, even at his worst, not a dick
• The Group Who Hates Groups, founded by Unc’s friend Tracy Lorenz

Unseemly behavior

• How many people are patronizing and condescending
• Both sides do this: in response to an attempt to provide real information and have a real conversation…
• “You just need to go educate yourself, honey”
• The Altucher story has become a liberal fetish, and that is wearing on Phew

The lubricant of destruction

• Unc blames social media
• The good news: everyone has voice
• The bad news: everyone has a voice
• It lubricates the rails of the destruction of our culture

So much easier to throw the third brick

• Video from a liberal who has walked away
• A very small percentage of people would be the first person to pick up a brick and throw it threw a window
• But, once someone has throw the first brick, a much higher percentage would be the second to throw a brick
• Once two people have thrown bricks, that many more will be willing to throw the third brick
• Apply that concept to the worst behavior in social media

If we can’t have a conversation…

• Sam Harris: Can We Pull Back from the Brink?
• His main focus was the death of discourse
• If we can no longer have a conversation, there is no way forward
• Dave Chappelle: You have to be able to have a conversation

Which is more real: reality, or virtual reality?

• Concepts: The hyperreal and virtualization
• The virtual world has become more real than the real world
• The internet world is now more real than the real world
• You have to remind people that you are a real human being
• People then either double down and increase the attack, or they take the conversation offline

Misplaced and misdirected emotions

• None of the things being discussed are truly real to these people
• Feelings people have for these things are so strong
• Like getting mad at an avatar in a video game
• Attaching all the anger and frustration the person may have and lashing out at people they don’t even know

This isn’t the country I grew up in

• Really sad: people expressing gleeful envy at what Kyle Rittenhouse did, or the guy who shot the Trump supporter in Portland
• This doesn’t feel like the country Phew grew up in
• Unc: this doesn’t feel like the country from four months ago
• Low information diet from Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek
• Cut down consumption by 90-95%
• If something major happens, you will hear about it
• Reduce your consumption for awhile

We are being played

• We are being pitted against one another
• High percentage of people arrested in riots are from elsewhere
• People are being paid to protest
• Ads for paid protestors

We’re mad at the wrong people

• Being pissed off at the people who are not really doing the things you hate
• So much of our anger is misplaced
• Misdirection, smoke screen, focus on the race war while we take your rights away and shred the Constitution
• Woman arrested in Australia for advocating resistance
• Manufactured racial division that is specifically designed to distract us from other things

Race relations set back decades

• Growing up in a really diverse culture
• No tension whatsoever
• Progressively improving race relations Unc’s entire life, until recently
• We have set race relations 40-50 years
• Unc is aware of the presence of African Americans, which is entirely new

Something smells 

• The most incendiary things that were done were done by just one or two people
• The guy with the umbrella in Minneapolis, who was picked up by a black SUV
• Protestors tried to stop him
• People dropping off pallets of bricks
• Phew’s “feels like there is an outside element” vs Unc’s “I am positive there is an outside element
• Then it becomes a question of who is the masterminding these actions

We need to stop the disbelief

• We have to stop being incredulous about all of this
• There is simply too much evidence to support the idea of there being an outside influence
• Phew wants to not believe in such things
• The natural progression from idealism to realism
• Idealism is eroded by reality over the passage the time
• Unc simply accepts the reality of human nature and of life itself: So, this is how it really is

Evil exists; we need to stop denying that

• There is an evil element, to everything
• “The line of good and evil is written across the heart of every man”
• Where is your line drawn vs someone else’s
• People are being paid to incite violence
• Phew came into conversation mental health has taken its toll
• Unc came into conversation recognizing that his anger has been misdirected
• It’s not US who is doing this

Finding common ground

• If we sat down and had a real conversation with someone on the other side, we’d probably have a very different view of things
• Four hour dialogue with a person on the other side
• Agreeing to disagree, and realizing that we agree on a lot of other things
• Reasonable disagreements among reasonable people
• You’re not such a bad guy after all

So many narratives

• There is an active element trying to prevent meaningful conversation among people that disagree
• There are plenty of people who hate America: Russia, China, Soros
• Why isn’t China a bigger part of the conversation
• We’re living through the greatest leveraging of narratives in world history
• The consistency of the messaging from day to day
• We’re being fed very specific messages
• Analysis: What is the opposite of the message being pushed on us?

Unc: changing his ways

• Unc: Has started writing a blog post about his related epiphany
• Leads his demographic in use of the term “libtard”
• I’d like to apologize to everyone I’ve ever attacked, dismissed, or made fun of
• Phew: The idea that you feel that way gives me a lot of hope
• Unc: I am course correcting, I have made things worse
• We’re all on the same side of this

Identity politics must stop

• This internal political division cannot continue
• Supporting or defending things in which you don’t really believe
• Brett Weinstein’s “the grift”
• Context elicits behavior that would not exist outside of the specific context
• Taking positions in which we really don’t believe for the purposes of the greater political good

I don’t want to live in this world like this anymore

• The political climate almost forces us to take this collection of positions in which we may or may not believe
• Like supporting Black Lives Matter: Unc supports black people, but not the specific agenda of BLM
• Sam Harris’ latest podcast with Graham Wood
• Willing to let go of everything in the interest of finding a better way
• Mike Lurvey: You guys have respectful conversations; do more of that
• We never know how much we might influence other people
• Rather than throwing even more gas on the already raging fire, trying to do the exact opposite
• Phew feels “nourished” from this conversation

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