Macrodosing: Arian Foster and PFT Commenter - NANODOSE: The Art Of War - Chapter 2

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

On today's episode of Nanodosing, the crew reads Chapter 2 of The Art Of War and reviews it. Make sure to tune into Macrodosing, every Tuesday at 7am EST.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/macrodosing

Hey, macrodosing listeners, you can find us every Tuesday and Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. I got some scars from many wars. Art of war on deck, PFT, if the truth, we got motherfucking sons who gonna tell you what to do. You got an army going to battle, that's hot. You don't need to read this book to know what to do. and what tonight is the fucking Arnold War Yeah, we know this shit now

But in China, 3,000 years ago, they didn't know how It was wonderful. That was a great way to walk into this room. So I guess we'll just start right now. You guys already heard it. That's the Art of War freestyle. We should just do freestyle Thursdays. Just everybody, we'll get a beat.

When we finish the book, we'll just freestyle for 15 minutes. Everybody have 16 bars ready to go. And then we'll just go around the room. Well, if they're ready to go, it's not freestyle. Yeah, it's not freestyle. That's fair. That was all freestyle, though, right, Big T? I mean, yeah.

None of that was written down? I wrote mine before. Did you? No, you didn't. Well, welcome back to nanodosing, mini-dosing, small dosing. We're reading The Art of War. We're on Chapter 2 today. So we're going to do it a little bit differently this week.

We're going to go around the room. Everyone's going to talk about their favorite part, or maybe not their favorite part, maybe their least favorite part, the part that they found most interesting, or just a part that they wanted to discuss. This one is a long chapter. How many pages was this one, guys? I think two and a half. Two and a half pages.

There's just so much of this book that's like no shit. I just read it and I say out loud to myself, no shit. But I think my favorite part, if I could go first real quick, I'll toss mine out there that we can move on. I liked how he was just basically saying you don't want to play road games. You don't want to stay close to home. But what I didn't realize, I guess, about warfare. And I thought about it afterwards is that if you fight a war that's far away, the people that are at home that are funding the war are way less likely to support it in the long term or give up a lot of money to support it. So basically everything in the art of war, literally everything in the art of war is like, don't do exactly what the United States has done for the last 20 years.

That's everything. Every single sentence so far has been like, you know what, this, the whole Iraq. mess could have been avoided if George W. Bush had spent $4.99 at Barnes & Noble in 2000. So I actually thought about a lot, thought a lot about the Iraq War when I was reading this, because the one I was going to say was actually, it's something that we did do, I think. It was the 16th. Are we calling these like what? Verses? Proverbs. Maxims. The 16th. Yeah. That was mine too. 16? Yeah. Now in order to kill the enemy, our men must be roused to anger that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy. They must have their rewards. And that made me think a lot

about like the media during the Iraq war and how things were framed to the public and and to the military also like that we had a an objective in going there you know what it was it was Marine Dowd pulling an Adam Schafter and being like hey Dick Cheney I'm going to send you my my article that I'm writing just want to make sure that this is all correct Mr. Editor can you read this over Dick Cheney was like ah yeah add in add in the part about the aluminum tubes. What's the what's the what's the Shepter stuff? I read briefly into it this on my timeline but what what did he do? What happened? I mean Shepter just like I think anybody with the brain understands what Shepter does and that's he gathers information and his sources tell

him things for specific reasons like if you're a general manager you're not just calling up Adam Schaefter and being like hey we're bringing in Blake Bortles for a workout thought you like to know because you're a good guy you know like they get information back from him he he puts information out that they give him that they want to be put out there it's like a mutually beneficial transaction for the two of them but i don't think anybody's out there thinking like adam schaefter is a bastion of journalistic integrity you know uh so apparently what he did uh and one of the emails that came out from the washington football team email treasure cash that they have is uh back in like 2011 you remember when the lockout was going down yeah i was there yeah so uh it was a really

contitious time between the NFL and the NFLPA and uh loved it by the way absolutely loved it the best offseason ever yeah would you would you do how did you spend that off season well i got to do what i wanted to do which was work out how i wanted to work out and enjoy my summer how i wanted to enjoy it um and it was just like no coaches and no OTAs OTAs OTAs are the dumbest thing in the world by the way but it was just like you got to you got to take care of your body how you wanted to take care of it rather than all these like one size fits all workouts that they have you do were you worried about coming back to work or not being able to come back to work? Nah, I knew they figured out.

One thing I know about American businesses, they're going to make it happy if it's going to fuck with the money. Yep, yeah, exactly. So when the lockout was about to get started, Bruce Allen, the president then of the Washington football team, then the Redskins, he hit up Adam Schaefter, who was putting out a report about like how the labor negotiations are going. And Bruce Allen, I guess, was feeding him information.

Adam Schaefter wrote his story, sent it to Bruce. Allen and was like, hey, can you look over this story that I'm writing and let me know what you can add or what I need to take out? Thank you, Mr. Editor. So Shefter was giving his story to the president of a football team during labor negotiation, asking him to edit it for him before he put it out. So I'm not surprised by that, but I guess a lot of people are. It's definitely not like, it shows no integrity. It's not journalism, what Adam Schefter does for the most part. He just like you know he trades in information and so he was just you know that it's not really shocking to me But a lot of people are surprised by Adam Schaefter not being like Walter Cronkite

I'm I'm just as he spoke on it has he spoke on it I don't think so I've got I've got alerts on for his tweets and he hasn't just been tweeting about how like ESPN's going to televise the Monday night wildcard game like he's just tweeting through it Yeah I'm I'm just going to put that this out there I've never talked to a source about a story I'm writing like someone who's directly related to to it. So I just want to say, shocking, my journalistic integrity is quite high. I also don't think that's true, Billy, because you DM with a lot of college football players behind the scenes when you write

your blogs about football guys of the week. That is totally umstantiated. It's obstinciated. Unsubstantiated. No, it's true. It's true. It's okay. I also definitely be talking to sources. Well, I'm not sources. That's where you get the information from.

So I've been writing several blogs on X-Fact. the chief super fan and I've not spoken to him once about what I'm writing. Yeah, I don't know if we're running this most reason on this guy. Everything I read more about him

through you makes him seem like someone I don't want to keep giving publicity too. Seems like a really bad person. Coley, you bring up a good point that Billy's flexing. I never talk to anybody that knows what's going on when I'm writing anything.

Can I? That's how you know I'm giving you the truth. I, you know, I saw Billy was writing a blog yesterday and the title when I saw it was why Americans need assault rifles and I was like hell yes and then when I

saw that the blog had been up the title was like a bore is scary or something I assume did you change it or did you change it Billy changed it because I think he knew that shit wasn't getting posted as well as I thought it would be click baitie and then like yeah you're not wrong like

like what the hell is he writing about click and then it's like oh someone just got attacked by a whart hog and there are several warthogs in the south in the southeast united states wildhogs but same thing but yeah that's the adam schafter story um so yeah that's there's something i think in-house we need to discuss billy did you draft fifth in the chicago dog walk let's let's let's not talk about my drafting skills did pfd did you see this i saw i saw i saw billy's draft did you see where he selected the african bullfrog he took african bullfrog with his second round pick at the turn, right?

What a fraud. He's an idiot. Big Vante Mac, no matter what energy. He's an idiot. It's the opposite of that. It's the opposite of that. If Vanty, if Bullfrogs are his Vanty Mac, he just traded back to hope he was still there on the floor.

But he, did you have, so you had the last pick in the first round, right? And the first pick in the second round. So, so he, they had both them back to back. It didn't matter. That's even more reason to take Bullfrog in the first round, because you know the other animal you apparently like more than. bullfrog was still going to be there. Okay, so the bullfrog would have looked so much cooler if you had the balls to draft it in the first round. The fact that the bullfrog was your second round pick

is like, why the fuck is this guy taking a bullfrog in the second round? That frog would have been there in the fifth round. But if you had elevated it, you give it that prestige of being a first round pick. Absolutely, it's a statement. And you're like, okay, you know what? That tells me Billy's in win now mode. He's just one piece away from a championship. And that's he had his guy. You know what? I didn't realize that, you know, if I've gone like vanilla as fuck on my choices, it probably would have won. Aaron, if you were to do a draft of animals, any animal in the world, what are you taking one, one overall? What's the goal? What are the animals doing? Just animals you like, right?

Just anything. Just in general. Yeah. It's just like the best team of animals you could create. They're not really trying to do anything, but like the best. You're ranking the best animals, essentially, in your opinion. I've got to take orca number one, man. You've got to go with the orca, number one. That was a big. That's a good pick.

That was the first round pick, I think. They're just smart as hell. They're beautiful. They're really nice to humans, which I like. I'm a big fan of. And, yeah, this gorgeous, magnificent animals. And they're huge. Yeah.

I would take everybody in this room and on this Zoom. That's what I would do. We're animals. You guys are all, yeah, we're all animals, right? Yes. We're all mammals. Did anybody take humans? Cannibals.

I would not take a human. We're the stupidest things. I'm pretty low on humans. Our draft stock is through the floor. We're Spencer Radler. Wait, Aaron, you wouldn't take humans, but would you take a human? No. Like the rock?

Well, yeah. Definitely not the rock. I don't know. There's a lot of people out there you could take. Tommy Laren. if we're if we're massaging fantasies then yeah i'll take something yeah i thought you were going to bring out the men in black quote of humans or people are stupid a person is smart whatever that is great it's great i'm gonna send that video to the to the chat because i have it saved and

edited it's beautiful i'm gonna send it yet also look at the macro dosing twitter account for uh for arian's video of him playing the piano in the mario outfit on halloween great video great video um okay art of war anybody else have anything from chapter two they want to talk about i was a huge fan of that same quote uh 16 now in order to kill the enemy our men must be roused to anger that they're maybe advantage from defeating the enemy they must have their rewards so i think that even today having incentivization does make people perform better that reminded me of um when cabul was attacked and kate wrote that blog about what was this all for that's kind of what it reminded me like of of like there was no this whole time so this whole time they were like you know fighting for

they thought something and now that kibu and uh the taliban is taking it back over it's like what was this all for and then everyone in the war i mean i'm not speaking for everyone in the war or that was a soldier in the war um it's kind of like what was this all for like what was the incentive to go there and it's like how important well because obviously people don't want to just go and kill people for most of the time for the fuck of it so it's like what is the incentive to go do this and will the incentive be worth all of this? I like where Billy's headset. I think what Billy's dancing around right now

is making like Uber but for wars. Like let's figure out like some sort of incentive based thing where if you're a soldier you get like what mercenaries? Yeah mercenary. Well you get paid by body that you deliver. Is that what you're saying? No, I'm saying

like strictly a low base salary. Hired guns is hired guns. No I think low base salary plus commissions. I think that you know Basically, I rather work in a job where my work is directly comparative to how much I earn. So if you... Say that one more time, bro. Basically, you don't get...

For how much you work, you get paid appropriately so you have incentivization. So the more you work, the more you earn. You have to define appropriately, though. This is the problem with wages in general. Like, for example... Who sets the... Like, what's the metric? What's appropriate?

Like, for example, when I was, I worked in sales one summer in that the more sales you made, the more money you earned. I like that. So that's not necessarily the more you work. That's the more you work. That's the more you produce, the more you work. Yes. Production. And production traditionally in our economy is skewed towards ownership, not towards workers.

Right. But are you saying, like, if you're, the soldiers should be paid more depending on their output? Like, for example, I feel that, like, a payment. structure that I think has been vastly moved away from is the hourly wage is both it's a double edge sword or for example let's say an amazon worker they're sending packages they're supposed to be active for the whole hour they work but as opposed to being paid by the hour they should be paid by a percentage of the package so output not time spent right so kind of what billy's dancing around here is, like, workers should own part of the company that they're working

for. Let me find out. Let me find out, Billy, the socialist. Yeah, no, that's what you said with Amazon workers. That's what you're advocating for us. They should get a percentage of, of the profit that's made from every package that they help to deliver. This is called an economic term, means of production. Right. But I'm not saying that, but wouldn't it make more sense if you were Amazon to pay? It does make more sense, Billy. It absolutely does. I know, but socialism needs a big time rebrand just in the name. I think people like hear socialism, they think immediately

like the hammer and sickle or something like America collapsing. If they just, if socialism got a new name, I think more people would be for it. If you, if you explain it like this, workplace democracy, people are more on board with it because like everybody loves the democratic process in

politics, right? We all want to have a voice, but your workers should have a voice in that as well. Private ownership, super that, which is authoritarianism in the workplace, which is at odds, it's funny. I think we need to take what Billy just described in the way he described, call it super capitalism. No, that's it's super capitalism.

No, we do exactly what Billy says, which is if we do work for Amazon, you can take all the pisses that you want during the hour as long as you can, you can get the packages out on time. That's fucking, that's brilliant. So many people get, like, leave those warehouse jobs. the turnover rate of an Amazon worker. So wouldn't you want someone working there to, you know, be incentivized to stay and then be better workers? Yes.

Yes, it increases workplace morale. It increases productivity. Is that just, but is the turnover? Don't know. Say what the chess. I said not if it's easily replicable labor. There's a reason those places have a high turnover rate, but people still keep taking those jobs.

because what is that I explain it as to do with anything I don't understand so people in jobs like that who don't make a ton of money don't make a lot of money because the labor is easily replicable and replaceable.

There are people willing to step up and take those jobs that don't require a ton of skills or training and so they don't have to be paid as much thought the more training a job requires the more money you're going to make that's why doctors are not easily replicable labor

they make a lot of money. I think I think understand so so so you're arguing that the workers are not worth paying that much no that they're worth what someone's willing to pay them and what you're willing to accept they think i agree so your so your value your value your your value system is directly correlated to whatever the owner is willing to pay and what you're willing to accept if you don't want to accept it don't got you yeah but even in billy's argument, it was not just showing up and just being there. It was outproducing other people. So technically you're, but you agree in a sense. Like, not everyone is able to do things as quickly or as

efficiently as other people. Sure. And then, and then if someone sees that you're doing like an awesome job and they want you to do more and take on more responsibility, then they'll pay you more to keep you. But, but even, even that is, is, is, is set by the, but by the market, right? It's a snake. Yeah. So, so it's, if, if there's nobody willing to do that work, work automatically the value goes up. So owners are incentivized to keep workers poor so that they always have more poor people willing to fill those slots. That's literally what explicit. That's exploitation. I think once you reach the point where companies, you have these giant monopolies. I think Big T, you'll agree that Amazon, having a company like Amazon or like Walmart is not good for the

country as a whole with what it does to small businesses, right? Maybe. So you do, you're not sure if Jeff Bezos is bad or not. Amazon does what it does incredibly efficiently. That's pretty bipartisan though. But that's not the question. Monoplies are not good for the economy. Yeah, in terms of like,

sure, but I, like, Amazon does a great job, so. I kind of want Amazon to be around. You like Amazon, don't like the Washington Post. Well, they're liars. Okay. I mean, they're an active enemy of the American public. Okay, so here's, here's what.

what I'm getting at is, and maybe it's just because I watched the episode of the Sopranos last night where I watched the episode of Sopranos last night where they're redoing all of the Newark area, the boardwalk, whatever they're calling it, and then you've got like Starbucks moving in and they can't shake down Starbucks for extortion fees because it's like, well, that that money would have to go through corporate. They walk outside. They're like, well, there goes the neighborhood. There's no room in this country for a little man anymore. It actually made me think that what if the United States had just come up with a law, call it like 50 years ago,

maybe 100 years ago when they were trust busting, that said a company is not allowed to employ over X amount of people. Do you think that would be a good thing or a bad thing for society as a whole? Let's call the number 20,000. A company can't employ over 20,000 people. So you're actively putting a cap on jobs? I don't think that's a good idea. No, you're not because it would encourage other companies.

It would encourage competition. And entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship. Because that's the whole point of trust busting. If you have one company that controls like Amazon does or some of these other companies that have hundreds of thousands of people that work for them, that actually is bad for the market. It's bad for people that want to start a competing force. You know what you have to do to compete against Amazon right now?

There are a lot of people that could provide great service in some of the different facets that Amazon does it that are better for the local economy, that are better for mom and pop businesses, but just financially are unable to even come close to being able to get off the ground because Amazon will crush any sort of competition they have by either duplicating their products at a cheaper way because they have the power of the purse where they can buy more or just trying to buy them out when they're really, really small. they'll never have a true competitor unless we do something to break up a company like Amazon. Yeah. So I don't disagree with you. I just like Amazon didn't start as a company with 100,000 employees. Like it started as a small business. Right. So you've got, you've got like one guy that can do it. But it started from the ground and built its way into that. So it'd be like one business every 30 years to be able to compete. I'm just saying like I don't know what to do with that. I don't disagree with what you said. You regulate. You regulate. So, so, like, what does that mean?

Like, what do we do to Amazon right now? Tax the shit out of them. Tax them. You make sure they pay their fair sharing taxes. You make sure that they're ceilings. Because if you're not, because if you don't do that, what you do is you have, what we have now is you have lobbyists, lobbying Congress for pro-business laws to keep them in those powerful positions. I guess this is a great conversation.

I want to continue it on Tuesday for the real episode of macrodosing. But we got to get out of this room real quick. So to wrap up the nanodosing, anybody else have anything for art of war they want to discuss. Basically, this chapter was like, if you're going to fight a war and it's going to be long, make sure it's close to home, which that's, that also seems like a double-edged sword. It's like, well, I don't really want, I don't want war in my backyard. Well, the one part that stuck out to me was the end of the chapter where they talk, or Sun Tzu talks about treating prisoners of war like fairly and humanely. And I think it's pretty sad like 2,500 years ago they cared more than currently.

Yeah. My favorite part was, was interesting. He said there's no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged war. And currently that is not the case. but I wonder if that's just like foreshadowing because I do agree with that sentiment that constant war is not beneficial but but in our current day

it is 100% beneficial for us for certain people yeah like yeah for certain people but that's why I say like in the now it is right but like is that foreshadowing for maybe he's I'm hoping this is like some kind of Nostradama shit where he's like yeah you keep doing it long enough though and that's

The people that work for the defense contractors. Like I grew up in Northern Virginia and there were, you know, probably half the people that went to my high school, their parents work for Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Raytheon, or had some sort of business that did business with those companies. And it's like an entire ecosystem there. And it's so ingrained in people's jobs and livelihoods that it's going to be very, very tough to have a society that is not actively involved. involved in some sort of war, or at least the threat of war. That's the way that you can get around it is to be like, you know, maybe they're not always at war, but eventually, well, everyone's always scared of maybe going to war, so they're still spending that money.

Well, I feel like looking at the role of war in capitalism, like Adam Smith talked about the importance of a national defense in Navy, and basically that is long, that was its only sort of role in capitalism, is that there should be. there shouldn't be a free market on when it comes to war because that should foster the free market like we should spend on a national defense it had to do with like naval battle in shipping lanes and that we should spend a ton of money to ensure that it's safe enough to conduct commerce but i think that that's a really weird place where sunzu doesn't understand the role of war in a society that bases much of its dealings on capitalism. Yeah, he's just like talking about the nuts and bolts. Yeah, he's just talking about war. Just war.

In like monarchy. You could probably have a country that just did war, and that's how they made their money. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think that was his dealings. But he never, I don't think he could even understand just a strictly capitalist society that conducts war in order to. make money for profit for other stuff yeah all right um that's art of war chapter two we'll see

you guys next week on macrodosing thank you guys for all joining this is fun sorry about my rapping no that was the best part of the episode don't apologize love you guys you didn't even hear it I don't know.