Drew I'm so over it. I'm so over the election. I'm so sick of it. I think this is a really useful thing to talk about, especially this year is how much we should give a fuck about politics. That's the fuck of the week. How, how much should we actually care about all this nonsense that goes on week in week out? That feels like a soap opera that you that is on every channel, every podcast, every radio show, all the fucking time. I, I kind of just lost it this morning.
Like I, I might, I, I usually I make my morning smoothie and I do like some house stuff and I listen to a podcast in the morning. It's like just, it's not my morning routine, but it's one of the things I do in the morning. And every podcast I listened to this morning had an election episode. Even the non political. Ones even the non political ones like the business ones, the finance ones, all of them. And and now I'm here making an election episode. I've I've officially become what
I hate. Yeah, yeah. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. But seriously, I I do want to get into, you know, how much does this actually matter? How much is it worth caring about? I think you and I were we're old enough now. We've been through many election cycles. We've been through many, you know, quote UN quote seismic shifts in the the American polity. Like how much has it really mattered? I don't know. I'd like to discuss that today.
Cool. So. Well, I mean, how much should we give a fuck about? I mean politics election like big elections, elections in other countries. Sure. Politics in general, How much do you think we should give a fuck about it? Does it differ for everyone? So clearly we should give some fucks, right? Like, you can't just pretend nothing's happened, right?
Like ultimately, you know, if you were blessed enough to live in a democracy, then it is part of our responsibility to give somewhat of a fuck about what's going on among the leadership. I have two takes around this. They both took me a long time to figure out and I think both of them are under broadcast towards the general public. But I think more people need to hear them. The first one is I think people put way too much weight on the person and less weight on the
party or policies. For instance, I don't like Donald Trump. I never liked Donald Trump. I've been, I've like been on the record for many years. I'm not a fan of the guy, but if you look at like what he actually did in his four year presidency, it didn't differ that much from what any other Republican would have done. And you could say the same about Biden. You could say the same about Obama, You could say the same about George W Sure. I think the individual can
influence a lot at the margins. And there are maybe like rare specific occasions where the the actual individual does have a lot of effect. You know, I think Obama's choice to go after Osama bin Laden is an example of that. You know, I think some of Trump's choices foreign policy wise are examples of that. But it's like the bulk of it,
95% of it is the party. And I think people lose track of that because it's human nature to glom onto personalities and find all the things you love or hate about certain personalities and, and not realize that they're really just kind of figureheads of these like larger blobulous movements that take place. But I mean, personality matters still though, right? The the character, the the person matters, right? So this is something I might be changing my mind on. OK, OK, so this is low
conviction. Like don't hold me to this audience. I, I am playing with an idea. But this this is something that I'm reevaluating personally, because if I look back the the presidents in my adult lifetime, the two people that I think were very high integrity people. I think George W Bush was a very high integrity person. I think Obama is a very high integrity person. I think, I think Trump and Biden are not high integrity people.
If you look at who got the most done and who affected the most actual change and actual policy, like actually got their policy agenda through Congress and into law and actually affected the country in the world stage. The two guys like I think Obama was largely ineffective and I think W was just made really bad decisions. Whereas I think both Trump and Biden, whether you love him or hate him, you can't argue that they both were very effective at getting their policies done
right. Like they they both got shit done. So I don't know. I'm, I'm re evaluating that. I, I think it is important that you don't have just like a total criminal right who's like trying to subvert everything. But like, I don't know if I need a St. either. I don't know if I need somebody who's honest. Like, well, first of all, anybody who gets shit done in politics is, is by definition not an honest person. Like you have to lie to get shit
done in politics. So I don't know, maybe I'm becoming cynical with age, but I think people over index on the personality of the person. And I think that's human nature. We tend to, we want to like elevate people as heroes or denigrate people as, as villains when really they're just figureheads for, for movements of large interest groups.
And I use interest groups in a very broad context, not just like limited to like certain corporate industries or whatever, but like also demographics of people, right? So that's the first point. Right. Second point is I think we over and in the age of social media, we over index on global and national issues and we under index on local issues. I think there is a tendency we are overexposed to things that happen very, very far away that
are often very terrible. But we have absolutely no controller influence on and they have no controller influence on us. Yet we wrap up so much of our emotional well-being and mental health in the outcomes of these things that happen on the other side of the world. I just can't help but feel like that's insane. Meanwhile, like your local school is underfunded, the crime in your neighborhood is going through the roof. You know, there's like a housing crisis in your city and nobody's
paying attention, nobody cares. Like, to me, that is just absolute insanity that you would over index on this thing that's happening 5000 miles away while ignoring your neighbors and your schools and, you know, the streets that your kids walk down South. That's another drama I've been banging on for a long time that I just think people need to
like. Again, it's good to know the things that are happening on the other side of the world, but I don't know if we should be basing so much of our like investing so much of our emotional well-being. Totally agree on this one. And yeah, just just this morning. So I took this one to heart. You've been saying this for a while. Like you said, I took this one to heart a year or two ago. And I signed up for like, like my local newspaper.
You know, I live in a small, fairly small city and it's like, I don't really know what's going on. And, you know, there's been like, I didn't know this. There was this whole long debate about closing schools and everything that I had no idea about then that affects my neighborhoods even too that I live in. So I wouldn't have known about that had I not been paying attention to what was going on in my own community. And just this morning actually too, there was some data that
came out. They do the survey in Colorado every two years, mental health of the kids in school. And actually it's improved drastically in the last two years for 2021 to 2023. So they they collect the data in 2023 that's not reported. Nobody, nobody probably sees that. Hardly anybody in my city probably sees that, you know, but in at a local level, great. That's a great thing. Things are improving in that
way. But you would think if you're reading the national news, everything is going to hell on a handcart. Oh, yeah, I think this is a, this is probably a third really good point is that bad news will come to you. You need to go find the good news because there's actually way more good news than there is
bad news. Like if you, we've got a book on the shelf here, better Angels of our nature, Steven Pinker, like he it's an 800 page book and it's just the whole book is essentially charts and data and graphs showing that by most metrics, we live in the best time to ever be alive. Like there's less crime, less violence, less war, less disease, people are living longer, they're more educated, there's more freedom, there's more equality. Like all of these things are the best they've ever been.
And if you watch the news all the time or if you're like doom scrolling TikTok all the time, your instinct is to not believe that because you're you're simply not exposed to all the the amazing things that are happening. But if you do go dig into a lot of data like that, things are getting better all the time. Like there's, there's improved, there's vast and drastic improvements happening in all sectors of society on a pretty regular clip.
So it's, it's like, again, it's, it's finding context I think is the thing to give a fuck about. You know, it's yes, you should care about what's happening in the world, But instead of getting sucked into whatever narrative is going viral that week, which there's always a narrative going viral, Like the thing you should be giving a fuck about is finding the context, finding like, OK, what that narrative's nice, but like
what is actually changing? What is actually going on with, you know, the world economy or education or like whatever is going on, you know, like whatever the story of the the week is? Right. And I think you and I were talking about this the other day, like there are times where it's almost impossible not to get sucked into it, right? Like for sure, like July was crazy for politics, you know, assassination attempt on Trump, Biden drops out, that whole thing.
It's almost impossible not to get sucked into that. But what you just said about putting that into context, so somebody is getting sucked into this, like, how would you, how would you recommend that they do put that into context? One of the things I thought about anyway through all this was like, I, I get, I will nerd out about the procedural stuff. I'm like, oh, the, that the Democrats now have to find a new replacement, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Or, you know, what is the history of assassination attempts in the United States? It's, it's a kind of a, a complicated and active history. What do you how, how does somebody put that into context you've you've mentioned before, like reading history books, learning about history more and if you want to think globally, is that, is that how you do that you think more historically and larger context or what do you
think? I think reading history is, is hugely important because it just shows you that there's nothing new. Like nothing that's happening is unprecedented or new. We've had multiple present presidents drop out of the race. We've had multiple presidents with like major mental health or health issues who are still in office. We've had many, many, I think like almost a dozen assassination attempts and four successful assassinations in our in our country's I. Have 46 presidents. Right.
So like these things are not uncommon. They're not unprecedented. I think one thing to keep in mind, you know, coming back to the narrative thing is like people have to remember that the the best marketing and publicity minds on the planet are working around the clock on US election years to suck you into their narrative.
So you are like, you know, people love to complain about advertising and, and the the unrealistic marketing messages of like such and such industry and how it's like skewing people's perceptions to reality. It's like, dude, that those are the minor leagues. Like the people who are who are writing the narratives and pushing the narratives today are like, this is the big leagues and you've probably like surrendered and gotten sucked in the one with without realizing
that you did. So it's important to understand like the the playing field and the playing stakes that we're on. But you know, to your point about just like the the inevitability of getting sucked in in these moments, I'm always trying to zoom out and reading history is one way of doing that. Looking for the broader statistics, historical statistics, is another way of doing that.
Again, fighting against the human inclination to put all of my hopes or hate onto a single individual and realize that like, they're kind of just riding this wave of large demographic and economic interests. And so pay more attention to the demographic and economic interests, and less attention to like the person who happens to be surfing on top of. It right, right. And I think kind of related to that point too is that it's something probably somewhere between 95 and 99% of people
have already made-up their mind. Yeah, right, right. So why, why even give a fuck about the the weekly, you know, gyrations of the media landscape when you already know who you're going to vote for? I mean, and you know, you know the issues, you know the talking points are going to hit Sure. Why? Why you pay so much attention? And there's also the point that there's, there's a significant
overlap between the two parties. Like there's a whole swath of policy decisions that are going to be the same no matter who's in office. So you, you mentioned earlier about caring about elections in other countries. I was doing some interviews in Australia. Oh, by the way, speaking to her in Australia coming up. Check it out. Unplug. Yeah, quick plug, I'll actually be there during the election.
Thank fucking God. But I was doing some interviews to to promote the tour in Australia and, and it was funny because like they kept asking me about the US election. And it, it is funny. There's like this, this love, hate relationship that the rest of the world has with our politics. Like they, they can't look away, like they want to look away, but they also can't because we are the biggest economy in the world and we also have the best marketers and publicist working 24/7 to like get these
narratives out there. So how much should you care about politics and elections happening on the other side of the world? Again, I would argue not a whole lot. First of all, like the vast majority of the influence, you know, unless you you live in like a very like a rival country, like unless you're in like Russia or Iran or, you know, Israel, like what happens politically in the United States is not going to have that much of an effect on like what happens in your country.
What happens with the US economy is going to have way more of a difference with what happens in your country. So again, putting most of your attention on the demographics and the economic waves and less attention on the jackasses surfing on top of. It right, right. Cool, so we'll be right back with another edition of Brilliant or Bullshit. Quick message from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Merrick Health. Staying healthy isn't just about hitting the gym and devouring
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gender gap opening up right now. So what they're finding across many different countries actually, is that young women especially are becoming more liberal, while young men are either remaining conservative to moderate or getting more conservative. And there's been a a widening gap recently in them in recent years. In some countries, it's huge. Like in South Korea, there's now like a 50 point difference between how how Conservative and
Liberal young men and women are. In the US, it's like a 30 point difference. Most of the most of the effect seems to be driven by women becoming more and more liberal. Yeah, young people have always been more liberal than older people. But what's happening right now is that they're they're diverging. Young people are diverging from one another. What do you think's going on here?
I find this super fascinating, especially because, you know, to my knowledge, previous generations it was much more about age than it was gender. And what we're seeing now is that genders are polarizing across generations. Men are becoming more conservative, women are becoming more liberal. I, I have a theory about this.
I I have no data to back this up but this is just and maybe I'm being biased because this is just the world that I live in, but correct me if I'm wrong that the the polarization starts around like 2019-2020 right? So my theory about this is actually it has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with the For You feed on social media and TikTok. OK.
So what most people don't realize, I think this is one of the most underreported significant events of the past 10 years is the rise of TikTok people. People mistake what actually made TikTok successful. Most people look at TikTok. TikTok had two innovations.
The first one was short form video, and I think that's what most people associate with TikTok success, that they pioneered the short form video and that they were, you know, this gave them inroads into the social media environment and everybody got addicted to it and everybody had a ton of fun. There's a bunch of dopamine yadda yadda. There might be some truth to that. I think the thing that is way underrated that people miss is Tik Tok's second innovation, which is the for you feed.
So it used to be prior to TikTok, all of the social media algorithms were based on something called the social graph, which was essentially it looked at who your friends were and it looked at who you followed. So it would understand like, OK, so he's friends with this guy and he's in a relationship with this this woman and he follows this famous actor. So he's probably going to be really into, I don't know, like Quentin Tarantino movies. So like, let's show him a Quentin Tarantino movie.
And the social graph was really effective and everybody was hooked on social media and everything. I think the side effect of the social graph is it push people in very tribal directions. So people became very like conscious of the group affiliations that they had. What TikTok did is TikTok said, I don't give a fuck who you know or who you like. I'm just going to pay attention to what you actually watch and then I'm just going to serve you
more based on that. So so the for you feed is is what's is based on what's called the psychograph, which is essentially what do you enjoy actually looking at? Because sure, maybe your friends like this thing, but you're different than your friends. And maybe there are things that you like that you don't talk about with your friends or that you don't show to your friends. But TikTok will figure that out based on your viewing patterns of all the short form video.
And so the for you feed. Is it segments people not by group affiliations and relationships. It segments people by their personalities and their just their inherent likes and dislikes. Now, when you look at people, what are the things that what are the greatest determinants of what they're likely to like or dislike? Well, one of the biggest ones is
gender. You see very consistent differences between preferences, between men and women, what they like to watch, what they like to listen to, what they like to read. And sure, not all women and not all men, but on average men and women didn't have some of the biggest differences in in content and media preferences. And so it would make sense to me that the 4U feed would create new epistemic bubbles, new echo chambers of content that were
largely based around gender. And the reason I thought about this when I saw this data is because we are experiencing this in our industry at the moment. Like for the 1st 10 or 12 years of my career, both men and women read my content in roughly equal proportion. Suddenly, in the past three years, there's been more men showing up. And that trend is is accelerating. I haven't changed anything. I'm not changed, like I haven't
changed my messaging. I'm not targeting men any more than I used to. I'm not speaking specifically about men's issues. I think what has happened is that the 4U feed is just picked up that as an older man myself, I tend to resonate more with younger men. And so that's those are the people that are getting exposed. Those are the the newcomers to the audience more and more, whereas women, they're getting shown, you know, women thought leaders in this space more and more often.
So you're starting to see a polarization in the self help industry between what men consume and what women consume for the first time in like 1520 years. And yet nobody's really like, it's not like we all got together and likes like you, you take the men over here and you will take the women over here. It's just like everybody's doing the same thing they always did. It's just the algorithm that is sorting who is exposed to what has fundamentally changed over
the past few years. Right, right. I, I've seen some data too about the 4U algorithm for TikTok and it only takes something like 30 or 40 minutes of using TikTok for them to figure your psychographic out basically. And when you think about that, like Netflix has an algorithm, right, you can't even watch a show in 40 minutes and on Netflix, right, it takes them weeks, if not months to figure out what you like. They can figure it out in 30 to 40 minutes. I.
Don't know. I can't tell if that's if that is scary that TikTok is that smart or sad that we are that simple. It's. Like 62nd videos just wiping and they can figure out like we all this is what you're going to like. We all like the thing that we're like these sophisticated, like thoughtful people with like very nuanced taste. And it's like, no, Tik Tok's got you figured out in like 30 minutes. No, for sure, for sure. But you know, this is it's it's widespread though too.
And so I think you're right. I mean it. It because it's cross country and cross culture, like it can't be, it can't be like you can't blame like Trump or you can't blame, you know, some political thing. It, it's anything that is that multinational. It has to be something like very fundamental. And to me, technology is just kind of the most obvious. Like anytime you see anything happening across the world simultaneously, the 1st place you should look is technology.
Information technology for sure. Yeah. To me, then there's there's a concern here that this could have wide-ranging effects. Now we should say that a lot of people who research this, not everybody quite buys this story just yet. It's early on, it's kind of a sudden shift and sometimes these things will regress back to the mean or there could be something in the data collection. So there's, there's like proceed with caution a little bit here.
But if this is a real thing, what do you think are some of like the second and 3rd order effects that we're going to see? Well, I, I find it deeply concerning because I, I feel like there's always been a little bit of a battle of the generations, You know, the older generations have always skewed much more conservative and younger generations have skewed much more liberal and progressive.
And that to me that makes sense Like that, that there's like a balance in the force to that gender feels scary because like ultimately men and women need each other. Polarization around gender, like to me is a little bit scary because it's, you know, now you, you start to get into repercussions in the dating market, you start to get into repercussions around household formation, family formation, fertility rate, just children like fucking propagating the
next generation. It worries me for sure. And, and I don't really, I don't know how you solve for it. Like, I don't know what the counterbalance is here. I saw a related statistic just just recently, just the other day and it, it was, it was like married men. I think it was married men, like 70% voted Republican, Married women it was 52%, single men it was like 60% and then single women it was like 75% Democrat. Right, right.
And so then you get into there's like a, if you like, you know, dig down further into the data, you, you, you, maybe you get this effect where it's like, OK, the only women getting married and forming families and having kids are the conservative women. And then it's just like you have this like this loose demographic of, of single women who are just like becoming more and more radicalized left wing. There's nothing that I know of in history. I mean, women have only been
voting for like 100 years. So like, there's nothing that I know of in history that like was similar to. This, yeah, yeah. But I mean, if we use South Korea as kind of the the harbinger of this though, because they they have the the widest so far studied, the the widest gap, they have one of the lowest birth rates of all. They do have the lowest birth rates. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's under one per woman, under one child per woman .78 or something like that.
So they're not even close to replacement rate, you know, which needs to be two. I feel like there's there's another aspect of this which is just the the transition to the service economy. Definitely. Like, like I, you know, there was this book a long time ago that got shit on a ton. It was called, I think it was called The End of Men. I think her name was Hannah Rosen. I think it came out around 2010.
But she pointed out, and then Christina Hoff Sommers like wrote a book on this, I think in the mid 2000. Like there were people, there were women who were like pointing to this coming a long time ago. And what they pointed out is they said that like starting in the 90s or so, girls started performing much better in school by like the 2000s, that by far getting into college more often, they were getting more degrees. They were getting more graduate
degrees. Now we're at the point where it's like, I think up until about age 30, women are out earning men by a significant amount. And it's like that, that statistic, you know, every every decade that statistic creeps up, you know, another 5 or 10 years. And I do think that like if you are a woman who has worked her ass off throughout her life, gotten a good degree, have a great job, I think there are two two things start happening.
One is, you know, the the opportunity cost of getting married, settling down, having children becomes much, much greater and much a much more complicated decision. And then the second thing that happens is that like you're you're dating pool of acceptable men. Like if if you are a high achieving woman, then the vast majority of the men you're going to meet are less successful than you, less accomplished than you have had fewer life experiences.
Educated. You know, and like that's not an exciting dating pool, right, right. So it it becomes harder to find a partner. You can kind of see how all these things that you know, we've talked talked about all these subjects we've talked about like the how weird the dating market is. Now we've talked about, you know, some of the educational attainment. We've talked about loneliness. Now we're talking about politics.
And like you're seeing the same like echoes of the same pattern show up in a bunch of different places. But back to my point about like paying attention to the economic and demographic wave and less attention to the people writing it. I think a lot of this can simply be explained by the world is largely switched to a service economy and women are more like women seem to excel in service economy, you know, like it's men's natural advantages are in physical labor and blue collar work.
And you know, and it's you could argue that women's natural advantages tend to be more in service, service jobs, care oriented jobs, dealing with people, relationships. And like, that's the economy we live in now. So I don't have the answer but it's like I can see where the threads are connected. Like what do you what do you
think about it? Back when I was doing research, I did a little bit of research with a political scientist actually he was looking at like physiological markers and how they relate to political polarization more or less. But one of the things he found, which was really interesting to me was that your political views actually predict your your mates political views more so than like any other measure that they
like smoking, even like one. It's more likely that you would be a non-smoker and marry a smoker than to be like a, a liberal American conservative, like that sort of thing. So this like really, really matters. And that makes sense on some to some degree because it's like a values thing. Sure. So the more, this was back in the late 2000s too, when we thought polarization was going crazy and we had no idea what was in front of us, you know? Well, I don't want to.
I don't want to interrupt, but generations ago that wasn't true. Right, right. That's another, that's another interesting thing is that now more and more people, I forget the exact number, but more, more and more people are saying I would not want my son or daughter to marry someone of the opposite political. Right. Yeah, which that's getting a little bit scary at that point because now you're starting to
see them as the other. And that's not too far of a. Really sorting society in the 22 camps and yeah, that doesn't. There's more, there's more and more super districts now to what they call super districts where, you know, one party basically has a monopoly on this, that that's more and more common now. It's like one in four people live in one of these districts now or something, something crazy like that. I have never lived in a state where my vote mattered on a
national level. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. I mean the trend is very, the trend is scary. There is a lot of 2nd and 3rd order effects, 4th order effects we probably can't even think of right now. I don't, I don't know. I don't like this. I don't. I don't like it either. All right, we'll be right back. Support for the podcast comes from Bond Charge. So you know how I've been on this whole health and recovery
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off your order. That is BONCHA rge.com and use the code mark for 15% off your future Wellness tech. Your future self is going to thank you. All right, we're back. Mark, I got a couple of questions for you from some YouTube viewers. OK, this first one. Is it possible to get fully numb to all the tragic world events? With all the wars and conflicts going on, will we eventually become more apathetic and give less attention to things like genocide?
Is there a limit to the amount of empathy we can give to larger tragic events? Oh for sure. I mean people are already numb to it. I mean, nobody gave a shit about the genocide in South Sudan, Nobody gave a shit about the genocide in Syria. Nobody gave a shit about the Uyghurs in China. Nobody gave a shit about the civil war in Yemen or the like the civil war in all the the murders in Somalia. Like Congo's been in the civil war. I think there's like been 10 million people killed over the
last like 40 years. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody's talking about that. Like people are already there. People aren't protesting at college campuses over like the fuck at civil war in Congo. So like, again, coming back to the smartest marketing and publicity minds in the world are constructing narratives around certain interests.
And so if you're getting swept up in one of these narratives, I, I'm sorry, maybe I'm, maybe I'm jaded, but like, I don't think you actually care about the thing you think you care about. Like, if you actually cared about genocide, you would have been protesting every day of your life since you were an adult and you were old enough to read the news, right? Right. So the fact that you're only protesting or upset today means that you've bought into a narrative.
You've been manipulated. Yeah, yeah. So yes, you are already numb. We are all already numb to massive tragedies and we hear about them all the time. And we, we don't care, don't listen unless we find that specific narrative intriguing enough to buy into and get invested in. OK, well this next question is a follow up and I think you can elaborate a little bit on that then too. So how do we deal with uncertainty in these troubled times when so much sad news is
around us? The general trend of the world is getting darker every day. Not true. And it makes me more anxious. So how do I not give a fuck about the status of the world? You should give a fuck about the status of the world, but you should have an accurate perception of the world and news media is not going to give you an accurate perception. One of my favorite studies ever, and this is cited. I I did a huge article on the
website a number of years ago. I think it's literally called Why You Should Not Watch the News. Yeah, we should. Put the news. Yeah. And it there was a study and it found that people, the more news that people consume, the less informed they were about specific topics that they had watched. And so like news media is actively making you less informed.
You are more informed on like in the abstract, like you're more aware of certain things that are happening, but you are completely unaware of like the details, the context, the data, the historical context around certain stories or pieces of news. Like news is optimized for the moment. It's not optimized for truth, right? It's not optimized for getting the data, right. It's not optimized for
historical context. So my advice to this person and to everybody is I spend way less time watching. Like I'd say cut out 90 plus percent of your news diet and replace that with readings of history and looking up and trying to understand historical data or the data of certain issues, certain conflicts. What you will find is that most data is either bullshit or it was created by one side or the
other to feed a narrative. And what you'll find when you study history is that none of this shit is new. It's been going on forever. So whatever thing you're upset about, whether it's Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, presidential candidate being shot at, a pandemic, go read history. Go read all the other times this has happened throughout history. And the first thing you'll discover is that it happens all the fucking time. And actually, it's typically been much worse than it is today.
And we still got through it fine. But the second thing you'll discover is that a lot of this historical context will start to inform your opinion about what's happening today. Like you'll have a much greater context and understanding of the different forces and interests and and back story and history that are involved with whatever is happening today. In my case, my mind has been changed by reading history more than anything else in my life.
News media has never changed my mind about anything. Listening to a politician has never changed my mind about anything. Arguing with friends has maybe very very rarely changed my mind. Finding good data and statistics has change my mind a decent amount, but it's very hard to find good data and statistics. But reading history, man, reading history that will fucking change your mind about stuff because you can't argue, you know, with 100 years of human experience.
I remember during the pandemic, I kind of started having a freak out and I decided I'm like, I'm going to go buy every history book about every pandemic and plague that I can think of. And, you know, and it was crazy. It was like all the stuff that seemed completely unprecedented and like unacceptable in 2020 happened every single time, right? It was like people behave in the exact same way every single.
Time. And yet I don't think I heard the word unprecedented more than any other time during that period. Of course, everybody's everything was unprecedented. Again, it comes back to news because if the news, it's like everything has to be unprecedented because that's what's going to get you to watch. It's like this has never happened before. Stay tuned. Right, right. You know, and it, it's, if you just go to a library, you're like, oh, wait, no, this has
happened like 100 times. It was funny, actually. I was reading during the pandemic, I was reading Ron Chernow's biography of George Washington, which is fucking fantastic, by the way. Huge recommendation for everybody. George Washington's underrated. That's another that's another topic, though. It was funny. I was reading the, the biography of George Washington. And so there was a cholera pandemic in the United States, I think in like 1794 or something
like that. And it was funny because Washington was like, there's this huge cholera outbreak. All these people were dying. And so he he gave like a stay in home quarantine order. And like, like, all fucking pandemonium broke loose. Like, people started protesting, conspiracy theories emerged. People started saying that Washington like invented the pandemic for his political purposes. Like, it was all the same shit. Like is the exact same stuff all over again.
I'm like, wow, like, literally nothing has changed, Right? Yeah. What were some of these other books you would recommend though too? Historical books. So we're talking about to learn about history and. Just in general, it really comes down to like, so this, if I could just succinctly put my recommendation into a single sentence, it is whatever, like whatever issue in the world you are really concerned about that you're really upset about that seems absolutely horrible and
and unprecedented. Go buy two or three books on the history of that region of that conflict. If it's an event, if it's like a pandemic or a president getting shot at, like it's like, you know, go, go buy all the books about the previous times that event happened. And what you will find is that A, things don't really change a whole lot. B, every single time the thing happened, people thought it was the worst it's ever been. And this has never happened before.
And C it just helps you understand that like. The the interests and the the stakes are like way more complicated than you, you think they are. And there's like there is history and precedent going back centuries, most of which you probably don't understand, most of which like a lot of people within like whatever issue, whatever conflict probably don't understand either. So it's, it's the worst case scenario is you become very informed and you have the same opinion.
Best case scenario, you, you learn so much that you're you, you change your opinion or you realize that like, oh, this is just how the world is, right? This is just what. Happens. OK. So do you have any recommendations then for, for news as well? Like for me, I, I actually do, I subscribe to there's, it's called Espresso. It's from the Economist and it's just like, here's five stories for today. It's like a paragraph of each of them big things going on. It's The Economist.
So it's very like, you know, vanilla. It's not, it's not taken a sign a side either way. I do that. Then, like I said earlier, I also subscribe to my local newspaper, which I read almost every day as well. There's a thing called 1440. There's a newsletter. Yeah, there's a newsletter called 1440. And like they really just prioritize like. This is what happened. This is what happened. And like, these are the most important things that happened. And like, they give no take.
There's no angle, there's no like whatever. It's really funny. Like I did this for a lie for a long time. I stopped a few years ago, but for a number of years, I would actually just read the the front page of Wikipedia. So Wikipedia has a in the news section with that has current events. And you know, Wikipedia by design is apolitical, right?
So when an event happens, you just click on the article and then the article has been like highly edited and you know, there's like dozens of editors who are like arguing all the time of like how, what, how things should be worded or whatever. So you not always, but you generally get a pretty apolitical telling of just the events without any sort of editorialization. I think it's really important to find smart people who whose
opinions you trust. And I would say there's a certain class of thinker online who is really good at not getting sucked into narratives. Those are the people that I look for. So like Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, I think he's a great example. He's more libertarian than I am. I've been reading him for like 10 plus years. I've never seen him get sucked into a narrative ever. I've never seen him get sucked into a political. He's a real original thinker.
He's super, super original and he, his commentary is almost always meta commentary, right? Like, so it's like, you know, these are why these narratives are being created and these are why these narratives are being discarded, right? He's never like jumping into the middle of the fray and like arguing for Team Blue or Team Red. No, for sure, for sure. Yeah. And we'll post the article too that you wrote several years back why you should quit the news.
I took that one to heart. And I have really like way, way reduced my my news conception since then. And I cannot tell you how much just on a day-to-day basis that has helped my. Me too, man. Just overall well-being me too. It's insane. So if you're somebody who's getting sucked in the news just. Yeah, fun fact, I I was brought on to the BBC had this show. I forget what the show was called, but the BBC had this show. It was like a debate panel or
whatever. And it was about the value of the news media and they they brought me on as like the Anti news voice. It was me and three journalists so. I don't think I ever saw this. It was, it was, they basically just shat on me for 20 minutes and the like, there was one guy in particular, I have no idea who these people were, but there was one guy who was like in hysterics of like, but how are people going to know what's
happening, right? And I was like, I don't know, like Google, like, like there's like, you're not the bastion of, you know, dispensing information that you were, you know, 80 years ago, Sir. Sorry. Well, and. That's the thing about the news media is going to self preserve. They're going to try to self preserve. And so they're going to tell you, of course, that are the most important. It goes back to the manipulation thing. They're pushing this narrative and do you want to get sucked
into that? Like really ask yourself. That well, I think there's also a very logical explanation for the deterioration of the quality of news, right? Because if you look at like, what was the news media's value, say in previous generations, it was they were the ones who actually had the the resources and means to go get the information. So they primarily just provided the information. Now, the information is everywhere. The information is a commodity.
It's it's not scarce. You don't need to pay for it. You can find it literally anywhere. Now, what the news media specializes in is packaging information into narratives. And some news media is really good at packaging into blue team narratives. And some news media is really good at packaging in the red team narratives. And if you don't realize you're consuming a narrative, then yeah, you're just, you're the fucking mark. You know, you're being conned.
So that is what they're selling. They're selling the packaging, not the information. Yeah, and I've, I've noticed too, when it do get sucked into something that's going on, you know, where you just can't help it. I, I've, I've checked myself and I'll, I'll check different source. I'll check one from the left, one from the right, see what the narratives are being pushed.
And I usually come back and I'm able to step back then kind of like, you know, Tyler Cowen does and take a more metal, metal look at it. So I think if you do just intentionally expose yourself to both sides and be like, oh, OK, there are, there are narratives being pushed here. Which one do you give credence to, if if any at all? So yeah, that's a that's a good way to do it too. That's what I found anyway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, well, that's the episode. I'm a big fan of the the wisdom
of the week this week. There were a lot of political quotes we could have used my favorite one. And and and this is this goes back, this Harkins back to the point that like nothing is new. So Aesop the the Roman poet, he he wrote close to 2000 years ago, he wrote we hang the petty thieves, but the big ones, we elect the public office. That's all for a show. Please like and subscribe, follow the show everywhere, leave a review.
If you want to submit a question to Drew and I, you can send it to [email protected] or you can simply leave it in the comments on YouTube. We will be back next week and I guarantee it will not be about politics. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Bernie, edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.