Julian Dorey Podcast - #8 - Nuance, Discourse...And Why We've Lost Them
Episode Date: September 15, 2020SOLO POD - Why are we so polarized on everything—from politics to pop culture? When did having nuance in our opinions become a problem? The internet is an obvious culprit. But older generations also... like to pin the blame on Millennials and Gen-Z—claiming that the younger generations “never experienced struggle.” They’re wrong. On both counts. ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q YouTube CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Truck Month is awesome! Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. A lot of these people are a part of these generations, these
Gen Zers and Millennials that I'm a part of as well, who are having this crisis of purpose,
who are having this question of what is there for me to do in this country, who are looking for their tribe to feel like they're doing something to help their fellow human
because they don't think they're going to get that in their job and they don't think they're
going to get that fulfillment throughout the rest of their career in life. They question it at the five or six days before the 2016 presidential election i was out to lunch with my boss
and a guy at another company that we were starting to do a lot of business with
and at the time throughout that whole year a very customary question that my boss would ask people
we took out the lunch was
what are you seeing what are you thinking with the election what's your thought something along
those lines and we got answers all over the board all the time and one of the reasons he always asked
was because occasionally you know we'd get some really interesting tidbits guys in finance
especially some of the guys my boss was able to deal with they're talking interesting people getting some things that you can't always find
on the internet and you could kind of get a feel for how some things were going that might appear
to be going differently so like everyone else the guy we went to lunch with on this day sat down and he got asked the question.
And his response at the time was something that just interested me.
But over the years, it's become a stronger and stronger voice in my head, sadly, I might add, of what I feel is very much the truth.
And what this guy said, and I won't have it word for word it was fuck it was four years ago but along the lines of what this guy
said was first he explained that if you were coming to him as someone with a
political opinion you you were coming to the wrong guy he said he didn't give a
shit but he said if you were coming to someone
as an outside political analyst he felt pretty good in that role which i thought was a very
curious thing to lead with but the way he explained it was this he said i am a political cynic
and what that means is i believe that a wide majority of people an overwhelming majority of people
vote on the one maybe two and at most three issues they actually give a fuck about
usually it's just one or two and what ends up happening
is they pick the team that most represents their key issue and over time
they just get along with whatever else that team seems to think and they actually make themselves
believe many times incorrectly that they believe all those same things it's tribal it hasn't
changed for a long time it's not gonna moving forward so I don't really give a fuck who wins on Tuesday.
But if you held a gun to my head, I'd say I think Hillary's going to win, but it's going to be really tight.
That was his full answer.
And he didn't vote.
He wasn't a voter.
Now, when I heard that, it was a very politically charged time.
And I was like, wow, that's a real, it's a downer.
That guy's got no hope seemed kind of fucked but over the years i've really come to appreciate exactly what he said not because i'm
happy that i believe he was right about a lot of what he said. But because it explains so much that is going on out there in our country in particularly.
And so much about why we are at such a point of division.
And people like to just bring up Trump or Obama right away depending on which side you're on.
If you have a side.
And yeah, you know, guys like that, they have different political opinions.
They're naturally
going to be gas on the fire no matter what they do and obviously trump's pretty bombastic so he
definitely doesn't help with that but the politicians like them and like many others
they're not necessarily the cause
they're a symptom.
They're a representative of where we are.
And the biggest problem is that today, it seems like we have very little nuance.
The opinions are here or they are here.
And this isn't about politics even this is in general it's everything
or nothing nobody ever considers that there's little pieces of things that could serve as a
greater answer on everything i've obviously heard like many of us the old quote that bruce lee said where he said i take something from everyone
i take the good things from them and then i look at the bad things too and i discard those and then
i kind of add it up over time roughly said that along those lines
and we're in a position now where that's not really what we do.
We already have a point of view when we go into new situations and new people and new concepts to explore.
We have a point of view.
And the confirmation bias we have to just simply reassure us that our view is correct is absolutely insane.
And guess what?
I'm at fault too.
I mean, shit, I slip into it a couple times a week.
I'm on different group texts that are kind of across the board.
I'm on one that's really liberal, one that's really conservative.
Half the time they piss me off, and half the time they say something that seems to hit right,
or even slightly right.
And I sometimes respond accordingly.
But it's not healthy.
And it's those echo chambers that have led us to this point. It's those group think reassurances that have led us to have these lines in the sand that are drawn between us with no ability to determine the things that might actually make us more similar or
more in agreement or more striving to things that are better in the future.
So when you listen to me say things like this, of course, you just hear the politics.
And the thing is, I've said it before on a podcast.
I don't remember what episode but it's it's almost
impossible not to inject politics into any conversation these days politics is downstream
from culture and culture is downstream from politics like it or not that's the reality
and now we're at a point where
as a society we tend to make decisions and that's it we pick our
hills and we die on them repeatedly very often we're the last ones to know we're
dead it's an institutionalized problem on both ends of the political spectrum
just to go right at them.
On the one hand, you have progressives
who claim to be all about change,
all for the good,
seeing the best in everyone.
But the minute you have an idea for change
that just doesn't exactly line up
with exactly what they think,
you're out.
They call that cancel culture.
We'll talk about that more today too.
And then on the right side,
you have people who just fight against any and all change
and seem to ignore any problems and write them off
and claim to pull yourself up by the bootstraps
and then it'll take care of everything,
which is just a total cop out of an answer.
And you have this friction between the two that causes nothing but strife and stress and anger.
And if I'm speaking your language right now, congratulations. Welcome to the middle ground.
Happy to have you.
So today, we're going to talk about some of the history that led us to this point and talk about all the different things that are a part of the ingredients
that cook this terrible meal we get served every day of bullshit and tired yelling and anger and
annoyance and while this is one episode and it's the one that focuses on this concept of nuance
and the lack thereof that we see far too often in society. This is a general theme.
That is going to carry through.
In podcasts moving forward.
Because it's just critical.
If we're at a point.
Where it's always everything or nothing.
Or zero or a hundred.
We got a problem.
And I think there's far.
There are far more people.
Who feel like. They're somewhere in the middle of these things these daily issues these daily questions these long-term even political questions
i feel like there's far more people in the middle with some nuance who are just
very afraid to speak up because they feel like so few people do.
So in this episode, at least we'll start speaking up a little bit.
All right, let's do it. You know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Dread and Fire.
Let's go.
This is one of the great questions in our culture.
Where is the news?
You're giving opinions and calling them facts.
You feel me?
Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it.
If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.
I've always been interested at how we as human beings form tribes
how we form teams and integrate ourselves into social groups both small and large
that represent certain cultural ideologies that we fuck with it's not new at all it's it's primal it's it's something that
you know from the early days of how we evolved we we've always been that way when humans were cavemen
we figured out which cavemen we wanted to hang around with and we figured out how to go find dinner for tonight to survive to tomorrow those were the simplistic cultural ways we related
to one another and survived today we have many more things to think about many more things to
consider there's far more people on the planet. There's far more trains of
thought, ideas,
technology, connection, whatever.
And we end up separating
ourselves out all the time.
We end up
finding our way to
different people and different groups
based on how
we're feeling at a certain point in our life,
or even in our day.
And it can get really, really fucking confusing.
Because you're constantly, no matter what,
going to be pulled in different directions.
It's just a reality.
But I think one of our key problems
is that we don't have a fine line of empathy.
And that's not what you think it's going to be.
What I think is that people are either separated into tribes that have no empathy
for anyone but themselves, or tribes that have way too much empathy that
by default they then have no empathy for anyone else because they can't even stand how anyone
else thinks.
It's like this catch-22 of being able to identify with other humans where both sides
lose.
You just pick the way you lose.
And let's be honest.
The internet's not a help to this whole thing.
The internet has created the ultimate tribes. I often use the example when I talk to people when we're going through, say, the two-party political system, which is always a common conversation, and why it doesn't make sense in a true democracy.
And I tell them like this. This is how I explain it because my opinion is it doesn't make sense. I tell them we live in a world where for over a decade now,
if you want to join some group online, specifically on social media,
a group centered around what country you're from, all the way down to what your favorite movie from the week of November 13th, 1987 was,
you can do it.
The permutations of different streams of thought and finding people who have similar interests along those lines of thought
are in the billions,
and I'd have to check it, but it's probably not trillions,
but maybe it is, who knows, it's a lot.
And yet in that same world, for example, in America, which is the shining light of democracy as far as the hallmark of what the world aspires to be in democracy, in America, we still have two political parties, the same two in power who were in power 100 years ago
and 100 years before that, who now have more power over more people with more size, scope,
and money in their coffers. And those are your choices to pick. So in a world where you can be
pulled into all these different directions
of all these different little tribes
that have different worldviews and opinions
and are from different places,
be it in this country or in other countries,
in that same world,
we have the same selections that some asshole did 150 years ago.
What part of that makes any sense? It doesn't.
But the point on the internet that led to that explanation, the point about how many choices and
options and communities the internet provides us and therefore world views and perspectives that
we otherwise in previous generations never could have gotten the unlimited resource that that is
has built an extremely unnatural way for us to communicate
and it's affected how we do it. You heard me say in the intro
that politics is downstream from culture
and culture is downstream from politics.
Exhibit A should be Trump winning office in 2016.
He won office using Twitter.
That was his best resource to build a political brand before running for office,
and it proved to be his most powerful tool while doing it.
Communicating from behind a keyboard at the time in 140 characters or less.
Dropping bombs left and right without
necessarily
always being just in front of the camera
with the lights on and
having a conversation.
It's not like he invented that.
That's what we do.
That's what comment sections
are for. That's what
Twitter threads are for. That's what comment sections are for. That's what Twitter threads are for. That's what online abuse is for.
We're constantly just looking for people who think differently, not to engage them in how they think differently, but to point out to them and remind them that you think differently
than they do as if they should give half a fuck about it.
And we do it often in a way that's dismissive, troll, trolly, to use the word that's so often
thrown around now, and completely devoid of anything that's not an opinion
we don't seem to like
long form discussion
and evidence
we don't seem to like
the opportunity that maybe
on a lot of situations
neither of us are 100% right
maybe in a lot of situations, we both have ideas,
us in the Contra Party, we're engaging with online,
that could be based in some truth or in a better tomorrow.
We don't consider these things.
And when you look at 2020 with coronavirus hitting,
that was the ultimate gasoline on the fire.
You send people home to be inside with nothing but the internet.
What the fuck do you think they're going to do? They're going to go on the internet.
And if you don't have a constant relationship with yourself to be self-aware
of what you're seeing and what you're reacting to
and why you are feeling the things you do when you do,
you can get into some deep shit on the internet.
And it can totally change your mind on how you think and how you feel
and affect the chemical firings in your brain.
It's an unhealthy thing.
Naturally, I've been inside like a lot of people too.
But this is something that I would say I was very not aware of for a long time.
But something that over the last couple years,
before there was ever a quarantine,
I really started to disassociate myself from and become aware of exactly the traps and the things you fall into and why you want to these social media tools, the internet can appeal to our worst instincts in these types of situations.
Becoming aware of that is critical.
And it's a battle of other people, as the quarantine rolls on throughout 2020, I hope a lot of other people are trying to figure that out for themselves too.
And I hope you're also disconnecting from the internet when you can.
It's a very healthy thing to do.
But I say that all this was pouring the gasoline on the fire because it didn't just represent
sending people home to sit inside
and therefore creating time for them to be on the internet.
The corona quarantine represented
sending people inside to be alone and on the internet
and potentially losing their job
and losing hope
and constantly seeing negativity in the news which is usual
but now just seeing it 24 7 because there's nothing fucking else to do
that's the environment that this pandemic created and so every time something happens
be it some form of police brutality or fight over some next economic move that's going to need to be made to fix this mess
or argue over whether hydroxychloroquine works or doesn't
or whether COVID is a pandemic or a plandemic, which is actually something people have been arguing heavily online.
Hilarious. actually something people have been arguing heavily online hilarious no matter what it's over
people are going farther and farther and farther down the rabbit hole and losing their minds
often with people who they don't know and are never going to meet
there was actually a podcast to come out during the pandemic relatively early on, maybe like April and May, from a tech reporter at the New York Times their marbles over the past five, six years especially as the internet is really coming into its own online.
And why it's happened.
Why ridiculous conspiracy theories get any credence and then get out of control
why people's worldviews and even political opinions can shift massively left right and
back around again and how it happens how different platforms like youtube sometimes
accidentally encourage this by sending content to us that we want to engage with, even if we know it's not good for us.
You know, these algorithms, they know our buttons.
They know where we're going to give into weakness and they know where we're not going to be able to help ourselves.
That's their job.
They got to make us watch as much content as possible content doesn't have to be a bad thing but when you're doing it
all the time and these algorithms sometimes accidentally appeal to your worst instincts
that can cause a problem and i'd highly recommend that podcast to anyone who hasn't listened because it really puts a face on the issue. And there will
be things in there that, yeah, there's some extreme stuff a lot of you can't relate to,
but there will be things that on a smaller scale, you can definitely understand and you can
empathize with and feel like you may have some experience with.
But even before Corona, and then especially with it,
the idea of our mental health has become a bigger and bigger thing on the center stage of our society.
We see a lot of people who struggle with it. A good thing is that on the whole,
we're becoming a little more open about it as a society. But the amount of it that exists maybe is at an all-time high. I don't know. I'm speaking out of my ass there.
But some of it could be because people are recognizing things
for the first time in human history and other parts of it could be there's just more problems
out there and more things to upset people and more things to get people's brains a little bit
wired off to the to the left or the right or all around my theory though
is that above all the mental health problems are often a result of a societal issue of dwindling hope.
We touched in the three-part series where we see a massive difference between the
working class and the upper class of society that wealth gap a lot of times when people just throw
that out there it gets an eye roll and people go that's all i ever hear about the wealth gap
but over time it's a very, very real thing. And the more a bigger percentage of society skews towards the bottom half of what's possible in our economy, and the more a smaller percentage, continually smaller, wins the winner-take-all game that is the technological environment of the economy we have
now, the more room there is for anger to creep in in between. And on the point of technology,
it's overwhelming. And it's assumed to be overwhelming. We may not realize it, but subconsciously, when we use these tools every day, when we use our phone and every once in a while we remember the power it has.
Sometimes we joke about it, but we know.
When we use the apps on our phone, when we use social media apps and see just how quickly and easily we can engage with other people,
find other people we don't know, keep up with the people we do, and share content whenever we want.
When we do these things, we realize just how powerful these tools have become.
And it inserts in our brain, I think, this is my little theory, it inserts in our brain the idea that we're at a point as humans where we just don't measure up to that.
So what's the point of even doing job X anymore when maybe one day technology will just do it?
What's my purpose?
Why do I have the job I do?
I'm not creating any of this stuff I hold in my hands,
any of this tech.
Does it really mean anything?
And a lot of the reason we ask these questions
is because we do have access to see what other people are doing.
We can see the coolest, newest, latest shit that's going on
no matter who's doing it. Whether it's an important guy
like that, pointing to Elon
on my wall here,
or somebody that just
invented new fucking fire today,
or
people who do things better than we do.
There's a constant
culture of comparison
to technology and the best things that humans have to offer that we constantly feel like we cannot measure up.
And the point I'm arriving at here is we're losing our purpose.
That's the issue.
Everyone sees the perfect lives that we all know about on social media
and we just assume ours is much much worse
we assume it may never get better for us and we assume that if we don't have that aesthetic of
the life of a winner then what's the point of this whole thing anyway?
These are common threads I hear from people when I have conversations with them,
and they give me really in-depth, great answers.
And I just think it's finally time to actually report on some of them, because obviously when
you're hearing it from a lot more than one, two, three, or four people, there's something to be said for it.
And that concept of purpose is not a light topic.
We all have different opinions of why and how we were put on this earth. But something's always been the case,
and that is when we are,
we are born with an inherent need to do things,
and specifically to do things to survive,
because we don't want to die.
That sounds really fucking deep,
but it's really fucking relevant.
That's our instinct. It's an animalistic instinct instinct and we're the kings of the jungle here we're the most intellectually the humans are the most intellectually
advanced civilization on planet earth and so when we get to a point where everything is comfortable around us and we don't need to do anything
to survive we know like we're not going to be mauled by a bear when we walk outside in most
places and everything's easy and given to us and things that we previously had to work for
it's great that we don't have to work for it anymore but we take it for granted
because everyone has access to the ability to not have to work for that anymore or most people do
as these things happen the human instincts we have
to go out every day and do something new and take some chances and survive and help other humans
and make a difference out
there it's what we want to do we're wired to do that that human instinct gets beaten down further
and further and further now an argument that i've heard consistently from a lot of different people
this has been i've heard this from probably a thousand people on social media over the last couple years.
And that is when they get to this conversation around purpose, they start to say, you know, the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation doesn't feel the purpose because they've never had a struggle and I'm not saying that's
entirely untrue
but I'm saying I disagree with the premise
because first of all
there's plenty of people who are in Gen X
and even in the boomers
who are having the same existential crisis
and that statement is not relevant definitely to the boomers and to most of gen x based on what they mean by struggle
and so what i did is i started to think about it in the context of history
because this this argument on struggle to be clear is always you know previous generations had to fight wars shit was going on it was life
or death you had to survive and that's why i bring up that survival point before i brought this up
you had to figure it out you had that challenging shit and now you don't have any of that
and that's i don't totally agree.
But let's look at that history.
So if you could say that after we figured out our greatest mistake and did the earliest parts to fix it with slavery by having the Civil War and ending that shit, if you could say that you want to start the clock there and start to figure out
how different generations developed over time,
I think it's a good spot to do that
because it also happened to coincide
with when the Industrial Revolution started.
So when I look at demographics usually generations are in that 15 to 20 year handle
so like boomers are born between 46 and 64 gen x is 65 and 81 millennials are 81 to like 96 or 97
and then gen z we still haven't created one below them. So it's technically through today, but the ones who have been born recently are going to be a new generation. Either way. You get some really.
Really interesting.
Understandings.
So industrial revolution happens.
Society tries to.
Redevelop itself after.
The south had tried to form a new country.
And that didn't work out for him.
And you had the first wave of immigration
so really my first time period here is really focusing it's more like 30 years
i'm thinking like 1870 through 1900 and so this is when America had its first great expansion happen on two levels.
On our ability to compete economically through innovations that were also occurring in other parts of the world.
You know, guys like Vanderbilt building all the railroads across the country.
Rockefeller figuring out that oil was a big deal.
Carnegie figuring out the whole steel thing.
These things really changed our economy.
And all the while, towards the end of the 1800s, we started to bring in, in mass, all kinds of immigrants who ended up forming the melting pot that forms the country we have today. And so you saw growth in population through brand new cultures on one hand
and growth in population through economic resources.
And times were still tough.
You know, people could die on these jobs.
They were hard jobs to work.
People had to survive.
We didn't have electricity.
It was still the old days in every way.
So then you get into the 1900s. 1900 through 1920, what happens?
For one thing, we have some imperialism throughout the early 1900 to 1910, you know know the Teddy Roosevelt years we start to expand beyond
our own borders and muddle into territories that previously you know
Great Britain and countries like that had been in and things that we had
actually fought against to form this country so it's kind of like okay are
we gonna do this or not and that all culminated with us then showing our power in the world by coming into
world war one which was obviously not a great thing that happened and helping the allied forces
win and right at the end of world war one right before 1920 we were at the head of the committee to sign the treaty of versailles
i think that was it was the treaty versailles to establish the quote-unquote new world order
at that point and make sure it didn't happen again so now we win the war we're more significant as a
country we have we've had a generation that went through a very difficult war that was brutal, and also a generation that understood American expansion
and how we were cultivating our power on a world level beyond just winning wars.
And now you had the 1920s and the 1930s, which were two massive...
I mean, they were...
It was a paradox.
It was one thing and then one thing entirely different
so on one hand the 20s were an enormous time
in the rise of
like almost the second boom
of an industrial revolution
the roaring 20s
stock market and the financial system
really came into its own
and also
you had prohibition which created a ton of crime
and invented organized crime for all intents and purposes in this country.
And so you had major cities that also immigration was continuing.
So you had major populations of all different cultures and tough areas.
Tough areas that still have molded generations through today as far as attitudes and ways they go about doing things.
And then when the stock market crashed at the end of the 20s, you had the Great Depression throughout the 30s and everyone lost everything.
The trusted system, the banks, the government, let everyone down.
People lost their homes, their jobs, prices were untenable, and shit was bad.
It was really bad.
And you want to talk about struggle, you want to talk about figuring out where your next meal comes from.
Yeah, there was plenty of it there.
And so what happens next?
You get the 40s and 50s.
The 40s and 50s, we go in to World War II,
the greatest war for humanity in the history of our country,
of the world, excuse me.
And with the Allied forces, we come in once again and we win.
And in doing so so we establish ourself
as the preeminent world power not to fuck with and so we come home we have the baby boom and we
have the happy 50s that invent the new american corporate structure and so-called the military
industrial complex and remember the 50s in a second.
Because the 50s are important.
Because in the 60s and 70s,
the boomers were coming of age and you had the entire counterculture movement.
And it was the counterculture movement to that
specifically 15-20 year period after World War II ended.
And you saw the boomers fight back
against these societal structures that they felt were constructs that had been invented.
And then you saw a really bad war that represented some of the worst instincts we had as a government
at the time in the middle of the whole Cold War which i'm not even mentioning right now but obviously the war in vietnam was not one we won and it was highly controversial and it dragged
on for years and years and years and a lot of americans died they were drafted they had to go
just like world war ii and world war ii a lot of them died and towards the end of the 70s, the economy crashed.
So it was a giant rollercoaster of emotions and waves and the mix between culture and politics coming full circle.
Maybe fully for the first time at that point.
And then you had the 80s and 90s.
And the 80s and 90s represented growth.
Represented the introduction of technology into our economy throughout the 80s and then really big time in the 90s into the new millennium.
And it represented a time where America was clearly on the back end of winning the Cold War and communism was losing its grip in Russia, which was a major goal that our government had had in our country it had for a long time and we were the undisputed champ of the world we were we had succeeded in becoming even despite
things like vietnam we had succeeded in becoming that preeminent world power
that we were coming into
forming after our victory in World War II. And so as the new millennium came in,
prior to September 11th, we were really at the peak of our game. I i mean it was hard to have a country have more sway and more economic
military and general political power around the world than what we had
and so throughout the 2000s and the 2010s which have now just come to a close which is where people say we didn't have struggle
i think we can all agree at the very beginning we did september 11th happened and that was a disaster
it was the worst attack on our soil ever something no one will ever forget
and that was the very definition of a country having to come together around something abhorrent.
So initially fighting back against that and Al-Qaeda, that was fine, but then you got Iraq, which was to say the least a controversial war, albeit not one like older previous wars where a lot of people had to go and there had to be a draft, but a lot of American soldiers had to go over there and plenty of them got really hurt and plenty died.
And to this day, people don't really know for what. and people were questioning our role in the world as the world police and what we were even trying to do,
what the hell was going on out there in general,
then the global economy collapsed.
And it hit here just as hard as it hit anywhere else.
And we had the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, the effects of which in many ways still resonate today despite the fact that economically we fully recovered and have been in a bull market for a long time.
Coronavirus not a side.
But throughout the 2010s, as things got better for some, that wealth gap increased because the people who were winning were lesser and they were winning more.
And so the people who weren't winning were left behind and had lost everything already, the little that they may have had in the Great Recession.
And couldn't really do anything about it or felt like they couldn't do anything about it in the aftermath.
Again, this is something I would describe as certainly some form of struggle to fight back against that argument every single two decade period i've pointed out some form of
shit hits the fan and people got to respond they're all in different contexts but it's true
the stress levels of the country based on things that are happening to the entire society and people got to respond. They're all in different contexts, but it's true.
The stress levels of the country based on things that are happening
to the entire society
have constantly been in different examples
throughout those decades
of being triggered
and having to figure out
what you're going to do next.
And so as that bull market went on
throughout the 2010s and certain people were able to recover
and have more than ever before and other people were left behind, we got to a point very early
on, I might add, in that period where it was becoming clear that was going to be happening,
that the political divide came in with a whole new force and it came in with the internet behind it.
That's why you saw Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
That's why you saw the Tea Party movement in 2011.
People like to look at those two movements and say they're polar opposites and enemies.
And maybe when they're standing next to each other, that's what they would have thought.
I would argue that the only difference between the two was their solution ideas, not their problems.
They had the same complaints.
And this is where my argument starts to come into play.
My argument is not that this generation here, the millennials and the Gen Zs who have come of age over these past two decades
my argument is not
that these two generations
are soft and haven't had struggle
my argument
is that they've seen a divide
in the ability
to pursue the American dream
which is something they were sold as kids
which may be true
but it's gotten a lot harder
now the time has gone on and we've developed as a culture and as humanities develop more technology
and furthermore because and this is the bigger point there are 7.5 billion people in this world.
And we have the most people we've ever had in this country at 330 million.
But it seems like the peak of the power we had where we felt like we could fucking do anything.
That existed back in the beginning of the 2000s and then even after September 11th.
I think there's a big question among people that that can ever be topped or maybe even matched.
I think there's a big question in the back of people's heads, even all kids who know their basic history.
I think there's a big question of how long can a country actually be at the forefront of power?
And then you see controversial politics come in and divide us, and you're naturally going
to get a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum, regardless of who's in power, thinking
that if the other side's in power for the moment, that represents the end.
I mean, that's what people preach for eight years of obama and it's what the other people are preaching for the four years we've had a trump
so this idea that america has peaked and that the American dream is not attainable for nearly as many people
and that it's this accepted reality that technology is becoming more and more powerful
and we're just kind of at a point where we accept that and assume that that means that we're going
to have less and less opportunities to actually do things that make a difference in daily life
and therefore affect not only our own self-worth,
but our ability to help other humans, which is inherently something that
is one of the ultimate feelings we want to get joining any kind of tribe
and is built into our DNA. We think that all these things put together
represent only downside in front of us rather than upside.
Now, if you had talked to me a year ago, I wouldn't have given you this theory.
Because I had some of this in the back of my head, but I kind of assumed that we were just politically divided and people were blaming a lot of stuff on that.
And that, you know, once Trump got out of office, we'd have a little reset.
I think that was kind of naive.
Because the way that I've become confident in this is because this is the vibe I get from a ton of people.
And more importantly, I'm not just getting it from people who are 20 or 30 years old. I'm getting it from people who are 50, 60, 70 years old.
Who have seen how this stuff develops over time
and who want to say yeah you know this reminds me of time x or time y or whatever and draw
everything back to history because history repeats itself and they're not wrong about that but
who want to do that and even sometimes for certain things can't
i'm not not gonna talk about the singularity with machines or what Ray
Kurzweil thinks is gonna happen over the next decade or two decades or even about
some of this stuff I talked about with Kai Foo Lee I don't need to talk about
that right now we know that machines and automation and continued innovation are all realities.
What I'm saying is that we're letting that affect our self-conscious and wondering, righteously so, where that leaves us in society in the future with a purpose.
It's why things like the UBI come up.
Like what Andrew Yang introduced when he ran for office briefly.
I guess he was in the race for a while.
On the Democratic primary side.
About universal basic income.
Where he was planning for a world where people weren't going to have a job because they couldn't get one.
And it's not a crazy idea of his.
He's probably a little bit ahead of his time.
But one of the things I really struggle with in that is I think the guy's intentions are great.
I think he seems like a great guy.
But, and he's an outsider, which it's always good to inject a few of those, I guess, depending on the outsider you're looking at.
But anyway, the question I have is, is a monthly check going to change the attitudes of people who sit on their phones and have to watch the winners and the people who actually get a chance to feel a purpose and wonder what that would be like and then wonder why they exist in the first place
it's a very depressing thing to talk about but it's it's true
it's it's reality so we got to face it these are questions we got to ask. And all of this, all of this, the search for purpose, the search for what it all means and what it's going to mean, that's the biggest question.
And where we're going to be and the uncertainty around that.
It's led us to a point where the one way that we can feel our sense of purpose and do something is by injecting our opinions.
And guess what opinions get the most retweets, the most likes,
the biggest echo chamber claps, and the biggest followings?
The ones that have a major league slant.
Hard at zero or hard at a hundred and so when that's the case
yeah that's going to work its way to political opinions too
yeah it's going to work its way to societal issues
it's going to work its way to
even opinions we have about things that are out of our control.
And it's just the lighter fluid on the fire, man.
And so the reason we don't see nuance is because all the trending topics are the ones that have a major point of view because they attract not just the people who retweet what they say
or endorse it, whatever,
share it on their stories, reshare the post, whatever,
but it also includes all the people
who want to tell them to go fuck themselves
because somehow that's going to make a difference
and somehow them doing that is going to get them heard.
It's going to get commenter X would handle Y who no one's ever heard of who's sitting at home searching for his own purpose during the coronavirus lockdown to suddenly be important.
Because he commented, fuck your ideas and your facts on some post that some guy put out that just didn't agree with his own worldview.
And when we do this from behind a keyboard,
and we don't have these discussions in person,
or face-to-face on FaceTime, or whatever it is,
when we don't do that,
and it's as quick as boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
moving a few bits, and press and send, the emotion, vitriol, anger, passion, everything behind what we do
can get out of control. Like I said earlier, one of the things where I notice this in myself all the time is on some private texts. Very rarely does it get out of control in face-to-face conversations where I have a massive disagreement with someone. That's harder to do. That should tell you a lot. I'm not alone in that. emotional with is my mom because she knows how to push my buttons but outside of that i can have
measured conversations with people who have radically extreme opinions on different spectrums
about stuff and yet those same people and the people who share opinions or who have opinions
on the opposite end of whatever they think are online ripping each other to bits to the point that you think they're going to kill each other.
But it's hidden from behind communication that's not the basis of reality.
So it just makes us angry.
It makes us angry at the people who do the things we wish we could be doing and maybe could but we
just don't get off our ass and do it it makes us angry at people who have the audacity to put out
an opinion maybe a little different than ours and it then is a constant repetition that happens
every day that makes us more and more rigid in our train of thought and not open to a conversation on other things that would happen or that are possibilities, I should say.
I took a phone call the other day from a close friend.
I hadn't talked to her in a long time.
And she was borderline in tears and this is what i
mean this is part of this is just because people are just getting so opinionated with so much time
on their hands with corona but she was borderline in tears because she's engaged loves her fiance
to death and has a slightly different political viewpoint than him.
She's probably a little bit to the left and he's like a little bit to the really know what they're called, but maybe like some of
the immigrant refugee houses like out in Arizona. She worked at one of those for a couple years. So
she's got a very interesting worldview and, you know, a ton of empathy for the struggles of some
people who've had a very difficult time. it's obviously a hot button issue but this girl called
me in tears not about something that happened but about what she fears might this should tell you a
lot and her sister who by all intents and purposes has done a lot of great things and has always been a sweet kid
her sister has gotten really angry at the world over different social issues and injustices that
she sees to the point that her opinion is extremely extremely far to the left. And what this girl was upset about
is that the dismissiveness of that opinion
could push anyone else away.
And her family was the most important thing to her
and she didn't want to see this happen with her sister.
And she specifically feared that,
not that her fiance ever really brings anything up, but she specifically feared that it could happen.
And that there might be some form of disagreement.
And she'd have to choose between her sister and her fiance.
This is no way to be, man.
This is no way to be.
And I mean, I didn't have advice for her i was like look that's
that's your it's your only sibling it's a tough spot to be maybe just avoid the topic
but in saying that i'm like what why do we have to be like that
i remember growing up sitting around the table with adults in my family who clearly were all very conservative and hearing them talk about certain
stuff and being afraid to say something out loud that sucked at the very least you know i was a kid
and they were an adult so there was already an inherent difference and who really cares
when you're both adults. It really sucks.
Because the fact that this girl had to fear something that hasn't happened.
And legitimately fear it.
She had good evidence for it.
And you know I empathize with her.
But the fact that that's the case goes to show you.
Just how far apart we are. And how unable we are to consider open conversations
so when we previously formed these tribes hundreds and thousands of years ago
when the world was a lot simpler there were far less people far less ability to connect with people outside your tribe or people from other ethnic backgrounds.
And when the sole goal was literally survival of you and also therefore your tribal unit.
When these things were the case, tribes represented a way to peace. They represented a way to work together. They
represented a way for human beings to form cultures and form small little sectors where
they could think in similar ways and communicate among each other to come to
consensus. And we know all the stories of when certain people in tribes tried to take too much
power and wouldn't accept consensus. And that's what caused division and wars and changing of the
guard. But the concept of working together and having things in common and building that culture
is something that is inherent to us throughout history and continues to be.
Today, we just happen to have access looking at all the different tribes there are out there at any time during the day with the swipe of a finger on a phone.
And we also have access to a whole bunch of different tribes to join ourselves,
from the simplest things to the most complex things that exist in society.
And there's too much choice.
It's not the emphasis as much on survival.
For some people, based on the issue, it can be sometimes, but finding the different end of it. And that
end being us questioning our worth moving forward. And so many of us seeing that there's fewer
winners. And so what's the hope there? In that theory, when I look at all the people who have taken to the streets and protested during Corona.
If you remember, the first protests were people who were fighting against the lockdown.
And George Floyd was murdered and the protests turned into racial justice.
And that's only continued, obviously, with Jacob Blake.
And there were other people earlier this year,
Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery.
We see the anger and we see a lot of people taking to those streets
who maybe were less involved in the past.
And look, as long as they're not looting and rioting and they're some of the peaceful protesters, that's fine.
But a lot of people are taking up opinions and trains of thought and action items that they want to happen moving forward,
whether that be talking about defunding the police or who me to do in this country, who are looking for their tribe to feel like they're doing something to help their fellow human because they don't think they're going to get that in their job and they don't think they're going to get that fulfillment throughout the rest of their career and life.
They question it at the very least.
And so they're finding a battle to fight.
It's not because there hasn't been a struggle.
It's because they're looking for the struggle that they can't find in the challenges and endeavors
that they don't think
are available to them in the current economy. There's a big difference between those two.
And what's been lost in all of it is the nuance. What's been lost in all of it
is the fact that when people pick these tribes and they pick these trains of thought, it's zero or 100, man.
I talk to people who either tell me there's no racial problem and no police brutality problem in this country or that we're living in 1850.
Neither of which are correct.
I talk to people who think that if we elect Trump again, it's going to be the end of America as we know it.
And I talk to people who say if we elect Biden, it'll be the end of America as we know it.
In all likelihood, neither of those are probably true.
But fuck if I didn't wish we had a different candidate to
to vote for i'll add that one in there
nobody considers that the things we're fighting over and politically some of the policy points
we're fighting over often have a lot of people on both sides who, if they could find the priorities and what it is they seek to change,
instead of focusing on exactly the final end solution and the way they want to get there,
that's apparently non-negotiable,
if they could actually come together and look at the things they really want to change
and problem-solve to find solutions with the other sides, respectively,
to figure out how to get there,
then maybe we'd have policy that actually makes a change in this country.
And maybe we wouldn't still, three months after George Floyd,
be watching more police brutality videos and wondering when it's going to change.
Maybe there would be action.
But I challenge anyone, when you get the text or even when you're talking with a friend and the strong, strong ideological opinions come out, I challenge anyone to push back on it.
And don't push back on it saying they're wrong or shutting them down, even if you have the complete opposite opinion on it.
Try to figure out why they feel that way.
I said at the beginning we either have way too much empathy or none of it.
And the end result is we end up having none of it.
Because way too much then shuts out having empathy for anyone else who slightly disagrees with you you how about we have empathy where we actually try to understand where people are coming from
and open up the forum how about we start there for some nuance
so listen i i hope you guys like this episode this was much more just off the cuff, talking about things I've been seeing,
talking about the effect that I think has been exacerbated by the coronavirus quarantine that's
left people with a lot of time on their hands to get lost in the rabbit holes.
And check out that podcast from the New York Times called Rabbit Hole, by the way. You'll love that. But I'd like to do some more of these moving forward. And I'd love to get other people's thoughts on
where they disagree with me on anything I said here. There's a lot to disagree with.
I am never going to pretend to be right about everything. I'm not going to shy away from putting out new ideas, though.
And occasionally I'll put out opinions. And I'm always open to being changed and moved on those
opinions where the evidence is frankly better from someone else's perspective. So that's all I got.
Until next time, give it a thought get back to me peace