I don’t care about wrestling at all, so I’m not going to talk about wrestling while we watch this wrestling video.
What I’m going to talk about instead is the state of the world right now, and I feel like the state of the world is:
We are valuing the wrong things in society. And specifically, what I mean is, we are valuing a versus mentality where we pit people versus people, and corporations versus corporations, brands versus brands.
It’s a very versus culture that we’re in right now.
And on top of that, we have elevated stupid things over smart things.
I’m not saying anything that people haven’t said for a long time which is:
We live in this anti-intellectual society, currently, where if you’ve got a big brain, then you know what? You should be at the wrestling show!
Yeehawwww!
Now, I went to this wrestling show. I took this footage. And I will say I enjoyed the first two hours (it was four hours long), and it was the first time I ever went to a wrestling event.
And what I found out is that it’s all sort of kitschy fun for a minute.
But anybody that goes regularly, I don’t understand that. Anybody that’s into wrestling generally speaking, I don’t understand that.
I’m also not against you if you’re into wrestling. Because this is what I’ve always said:
Life is pretty hard … and great!
I love life, and life is amazing, but life is also very, very hard.
So I don’t believe in guilty pleasures as long as they’re not hurting anybody.
So if you’re into some Milli Vanilli songs from a million years ago, or some garbage music now, or some terrible TV shows now, or whatever, and if that gets you through life, then that’s great!
However …
I do feel like there are repercussions for society at large continuing to just pile on a bunch of very stupid villain entertainment, full of verses and violence and bad messaging.
I think that’s a mistake that America (and maybe most of the world) is making currently.
I’m not one of these people who’s, like, “Hollywood’s the problem.”
I just think everything is the problem!
That’s the problem. The problem is everything!
It’s not just Hollywood, and it’s not just politics, and it’s not just Alabama, and it’s not just anything.
Everything is terrible!
Or to be more accurate, we live in the best of times and the worst of times.
The best of times is like:
If you’re lucky, you’re living in a house with a roof and you’re not living in a cave or out in the woods, like hundreds of years ago.
Hundreds of years ago, you were in the woods with no electricity and no toothbrush.
You have a phone, and that technology that’s in your phone is more technology than Orson Welles had when he made Citizen Kane.
It’s just incredible what you can do with a phone. You can have an entire career on it. I mean honestly, you could start your own business on a phone. You could make movies on it, you can trade stocks on it, you can literally become a billionaire just using your phone.
At this point, you could become the world’s greatest artist or the world’s greatest writer. You could be anything, and all you need is this phone!
Anyway, you know what a phone is, so I don’t need to go into the phone stuff further.
And even though we have inflation, and all this other stuff, we also have access to the most incredible amounts of food ever, and the most diverse amounts of food.
So if you’re a fetishist, like look at all the foodie culture that’s going on in America, you can have any food fetish that you could possibly desire — desserts and entrees and appetizers.
My God, have you been to Trader Joe’s lately? They have 800 gazillion new items all the time and they’re all delicious.
So if you have any kind of access to money, which is probably most Americans, then you could live an incredible life.
You’re living better than kings used to live, as you know if you’ve ever seen this old movie, one of my favorite movies, called Lion in Winter with Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, and a future James Bond (Timothy Dalton) and the future Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).
Anyway, so this movie came out a long time ago, Lion in Winter, and it is about a king and queen a thousand years ago, and their sons.
And they’re living in a castle, and there’s lots of violence and intrigue.
But the thing that’s amazing about Lion in Winter is they filmed it in a way so you can see how people lived back then.
So the king and queen didn’t have heating, they didn’t have lights. They didn’t have any comforts. Even though they’re the king and queen and princes, they walk around covered in giant furs standing in front of giant fireplaces, because they’re freezing to death, and the castle is not opulent whatsoever, because people who used to live in ye olden times, they struggled! Even kings and queens!
I’m sure that people who have watched old fantasy shows or movies or read historical fiction or historical nonfiction — they know what I’m talking about.
We’re in a very spoiled moment in a very big way in this world, where we can you have a toothache and you go get it fixed, instead of having it pulled.
If you get a wart on your eyelid, you can go get it burned off, unlike the old days where it would just keep growing up your face and you would die of a big giant wart all over your face.
What I’m getting at is:
We live in the best of times, technology-wise, and in terms of access to food and clean water and all this other stuff.
But on the flip side, we’re living in the stupidest time ever, because we are so spoiled with all this stuff, and we are hoarding it!
We’re stopping people in need from getting just basic necessities.
We have trains derailing that shouldn’t have derailed and that are destroying people’s lives, and then the corporations offering them nothing much.
And then we have politics. We have idiots calling for civil war.
And we have just a tremendous amount of fear-based media going on.
As a member of the traditional media, as a journalist, I’m not trying to dump on journalism as a whole.
When I say media, that means all media.
But that does mean people at Fox “News” who are, in my opinion, not actually journalists, or even some people at MSNBC or CNN who I don’t consider real journalists.
I think a lot of media people are making the world worse, whether they’re media people in so-called journalism or outside of journalism, from YouTube to Tick-Tock and Hollywood and blogs and social media.
There’s just this constant use of fear to get us all to fight each other.
And the end goal of that versus culture is to get us to click on advertisements, so that advertisers will get a penny, and then a collection of pennies over time.
And that’s the end goal.
We are literally killing each other for advertising dollars, and for political and business people to get money and power and to sort of just keep becoming more egotistical and malignant.
I’m not here to say that I think that we are headed to doom. I don’t think we’re gonna maybe blow ourselves up.
Like a lot of people, I’m hoping everything gets resolved in the world, internationally and domestically. There’s a lot of dangerous stuff going on.
I am an optimist and I am a cheerleader. So I am pretty hopeful everything’s going to work out.
I also minored in history in college and almost majored in it. That doesn’t make me the biggest smarty pants in the world. I’m just saying that I have context.
And in context, the world is always on the brink of disaster, and that’s just how humanity is.
Humans are constantly fighting over everything. So it’s not like it’s a new development that we have a lot of stupid people trying to cause strife and violence for some evil purpose, like to gather more money and power and to just win.
You know, I have watched my fair share of motivational speakers, and my favorite is this guy named Jim Rohn. He’s the alpha-omega of speakers who would give people confidence with speeches.
Other motivational speakers went to his speeches. Tony Robbins went and started his own thing using a lot of Jim Rohn’s words, or a lot of the same ideas at least.
Anyway, Jim Rohn said in one of his speeches, he goes:
Here I am talking to all you millionaires, and a normal person would say, “Why are these millionaires in attendance at a motivational speech by Jim Rohn?” When I walked in here, I walked by Mercedes and Rolls Royces and BMWs. And here you want more advice and more wisdom on how to get more stuff. But I’ve talked to a lot of rich and powerful people, and it’s not just the stuff. The main thing that rich and powerful people want is to win!
To win!
That’s what rich and powerful people desire.
In my life, I’ve thought like:
How much is enough? How much is enough for some very rich person to own!
But that’s not the question.
The question is:
How much do they need in order to feel like they have won?
Look at Elon Musk, he’s the richest person in the world, he won. He did all this stuff that objectively was helping the world. Like, electric cars.
And then he goes and becomes the world’s biggest troll, and now he’s awful and he’s become a 50-50 person. He did half good things. And now he’s bad.
I don’t know him, and I don’t know enough about him to say what his psychology is. But I always just think about this Jim Rohn story where he says that rich and powerful people need to feel like they’re always winning, winning, every minute of the day, every day of the week, they’re winning!
I’ve also been around a lot of rich people. And I know people that have been around rich people. And if you’re at a party with a bunch of rich people, the thing they’re always talking about is:
How can they get their taxes lower? Like:
“I’ve hid money in some secret fund in some weird country, so my tax rate is actually only like 1 percent … but I want to get my taxes down to zero!”
They’re obsessed with winning, and I think that’s the way we need to think about the main problem in America.
And it’s not just rich people.
It’s everybody!
Everybody’s like:
How can I win? How can I win? How can I win? How can I win this argument? And how can I win this versus? And how can my side win against the other side? And how can my show win the ratings? And how can my stocks win? And how can my favorite musician win more awards? And how can I win more people in my DMs?
It’s all just win, win win, win win.
I feel like the most specifically relevant quote I can come up with is this quote by this guy who was the coach for the Green Bay Packers, who won the first two Super Bowls. He said:
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s THE ONLY THING.”
That is the motto of America right now. The motto of America is not:
“Let’s be better people.”
The motto of America is:
“The land of opportunity.”
Which means:
How can I screw someone over to get more stuff?
And the other motto is:
“Win at any cost.”
Because winning is the only thing.
To me, the answer to all this is we have to stop thinking about how we can specifically win ideologically or politically or culturally.
I mean, I don’t want to give up my politics or my culture. I’m not saying I want to give up. I’m not saying that we should not vote. I’m not that person. I’m not Russell Brand, who is also one of the worst people in the world.
I’m saying what we need to do is we need to start focusing on morals.
Not just ethics.
But morals.
I love you very much.
I hope you’re having a great day.
dougable 