PH² #11 - Don't Argue / Why people punch down / Vibing in the Gym [E5Y25]

Hey Folks!

Video Transcript

Hey folks, it has been a while. I was trying to get one video out every Monday, but seeing as today is Monday, it's possible that we won't. I'm going to be right back. As I was saying, good to see you. It's been a bit, and we're going to clean up a little bit. We're going to be going for 250 for what I believe is 9 on the deadlift, and I believe we'll be doing zero squats again as well for nine. This will be three sets of whatever I just said for nine. I think I said 250, and then zero squats for nine. We're going to start up warming up with my favorite little diddy: the face pull. We'll go from there.

The topic for the day is something I'm going to try to keep brief. I really don't think you should argue—just basically, in general. Debates are cool, and we'll go over the differences, but I think given how finite life is, and I mean you don't know, you could go to sleep tonight and die. Every minute spent arguing is just guaranteed a waste of your time. So basically, when you're arguing with someone, there are three fundamental outcomes from that experience. There are three ways it will end, and that's kind of it.

The first outcome is that the thing you're talking to isn't even a person. It's just a bot. Previously, they used to be very simple chatbots, but now obviously you've got the generative chatbots, and they're pretty prolific. There are more bots posting every minute of the day than there are people, probably by a wide margin at this point. But it's only going to get worse, which is kind of fine because I think that's going to completely devastate all these major companies like Facebook, and I don't really care about them.

The second possibility is you're going to be arguing with a troll. Basically, you're having a conversation with somebody who's kind of bored, they've got nothing to give to the world, they lack any sort of skills, and so they spend most of their time online posting and arguing with people just because that helps them feel like they matter in some way, even though they don't. That group is actually quite large. I mean, it goes all the way up to Musk. Look at most of his posts: good old Elon is just a troll, completely smooth-brained, has nothing to give to the world.

Then there's the third group: fanatics. These are people who there's nothing you could say that would change their mind. At that point, just by definition, you're wasting your time. You're trying to convince somebody who believes that gravity doesn't exist—basically, it's a stand-in for whatever insane thing they're arguing. The way I've always described it is that I respect myself too much. When I see somebody dig this incredible hole into the ground, just well below sensible conversation, it isn't my responsibility to fill that hole back in before we can have an actual normal conversation. If they want to be in a pit, leave them there. That's just how I feel.

You'll notice that none of these options were good faith discussions because I don't think modern arguments are ever in good faith. People are saying things and doing things because they want to get a rise out of you. For them, this is a sport. The sooner you recognize that and the sooner you're able to pull away from that whole malarkey, really, you will feel better. In fact, the more people that do this, the more they will die on the vine because these kinds of people and these tools only work because people take the bait.

If you went out fishing with soda cans and fish never bit the cans, you would probably pretty quickly learn that maybe you should use something else like worms or chicken. Each time something doesn't work, you're not going to keep doing it forever. The reason that they do this is because it works. It gives them that serotonin boost. So for that reason, I would say just don't argue. There's no value in it. Try and find people that you have shared interest with, even if you have disagreements in some things. Those are the conversations where actual change could happen.

I started doing this—avoiding arguments—not a super long time ago because I realized I was wasting my time. Here's the thing: that's not the same as giving up. When you don't argue with somebody, it is not going to make them look smarter online. When they post something and you just block them and move on with your life, a bunch of people aren't going to see their post and think "oh, that's how I'm supposed to think." They're going to see that post and they're either going to think this person is psychotic, or they already agree with them. There is no crossroads where somebody comes in sensibly from the center and forks off from there.

Here's the big secret to beliefs: if you can say something has two sides, if some argument has two sides, the conversation's too simple. Nothing in life that truly matters that you should be discussing has two sides. This is an illusion basically that was created to keep people busy. When somebody says "yeah, no two sides, huh?" well, is it okay to kill people? That is an absurd question. In what context? Self-defense? Is it somebody who is currently on fire and begging you to put them out of their misery because they're so terribly wounded that they'll be through a lifetime of pain? There are so many different scenarios where something like that might happen, going from likely to increasingly absurd. That's the thing: a lot of these conversations are made intentionally simple.

Topics like pro-life and pro-choice are inherently absurd because the implication here is that if somebody is pro something, then somebody is anti something. The idea that any reasonable amount of people are anti-life, although maybe these days more and more people are falling to that side, is absolutely absurd. The actual conversation most of the time is talking about things like how to make being a parent an affordable thing, raising the safety level for having children, reducing mortality rates, and all of these sorts of social safety nets that help reduce the need for that sort of procedure in the first place. But that all gets pushed to the side, and it simply becomes "we believe in life, you don't." That's intentional because there is no real debate to be had otherwise.

If you don't have a bombastic, hyperbolic viewpoint to pitch, there's not much to really discuss because it becomes a lot more boring. But when you can put up a picture of a baby on a billboard and talk about how their hearts beat in like three seconds after they're born—those billboards are almost always actually lying, which is even weirder. You don't have to do that. You can make pretty simple arguments without doing that. However, that's not their intent. They're trying to rile people up. In some cases, these are just simple operations to try and keep people heated because it makes it a lot easier to manipulate people for politics and similar operations.

The reason I bring this up is to bring it all back around: when you're arguing with someone, these are moments where those binaries are presented, and these are always erroneous ways to discuss these topics. If a topic is binary, there is something missing. You can be very hyperbolic and say, "Well, what if I'm debating that we shouldn't kill literally every human being?" It's like, well, that's an absurd conversation. There is nothing to gain there. You have to go to the absurd in order for these conversations to actually work as a discussion.

If all you're looking to do is to be sarcastic with other people or rude or anything else like that, you don't do that. You just take a complicated topic and you make it simple. The reason you want to make it simple is you want to have simple soundbites. You want to have something that TV pundits can understand. These are not particularly intelligent people, so you have to keep it really simple for them to be able to run with it and have arguments. I don't know for sure, but I think the reason that this happens so much is that life fundamentally is hard to control.

There's a lot of things that we just don't have control over, and people end up feeling helpless. The best way to reduce that feeling of helplessness is to give them easy wins, very simple ways to feel like they succeeded. If you can provide them with many easy wins, they will see you in a very positive light. So then, what easier win is there than to tear down people who do not have the resources to fight back? I think that is the main reason, or at least a big reason, why we see these constant movements every five to ten years where this particular demographic blames this particular minority group for things like global warming or expensive eggs or high gas prices.

The actual reasons are fairly complicated and involve a lot of different pieces all working in tandem in varying levels of positive and negative ways. Nobody wants to have that conversation. Nobody in this target audience just wants to scream. They want to feel like they've won. If you can just take a group of people who can't fight back and strip things away from them, not only do you win, but in relation to them, your life improves.

I had an experience at my last job where we were split into two teams. The team I was on was frequently pretty far ahead, and the other team was not, so they didn't have the luxury of leaving whenever they wanted. Our boss was incredible—he still is. We disagree on a lot of things, but he's a great guy, probably the best boss you could hope for in a lot of situations. He knew that as long as we were getting our stuff done and we were waiting on other people, what's the point of having us around? So he would just let us work like that. Over time, they got more and more jealous, and they had two paths to go down.

The hard path was to ask their leadership for better processes, more people to get the work done, and more freedom to live their lives. The easy path was to complain to everyone they could, demanding that we lose those freedoms. They ultimately failed because our boss basically just told us to make it less obvious. But that was the path they had to choose from because, if you think about it, either way their relative position in life improves. Either they get the freedoms that they want and they have a literal increase in quality of life, or they lower our quality of life, which then makes their relative quality of life even, or you could think of it as theirs raising up to meet ours. This is a really shitty way to look at life, but a lot of people do it.

Right now, if you're in the US, that's exactly what's happening. A lot of people are pretty miserable for various reasons—many valid, some invalid to me at least. Maybe to them they're valid. And so they have two options. One is the really hard path: looking at these incredibly wealthy and powerful people, any one of them could just literally self-eliminate right now in every business that they manage and be totally fine. Their stocks would maybe dip for a week, go back up, and everything would run as if it was completely unharmed, which is what makes that whole social parasite thing pretty ironic. A group of people who literally don't matter are the ones calling everyone else parasites. But I digress. Working against that is very hard.

Conversely, what you could do is take these people who are not at the absolute rock bottom and find a way to basically kick out their knees. Because if you do that, their quality of life will tank, which then makes the delta between their life and yours larger, which then feels like your life has gotten better. Again, this is awful, very foolish, and it is a reason why things are so rough in the US. Everyone always turns to this. If life gets hard, they look for an easy group to beat into the floor because then the relative delta will feel better.

When you start to look at life and actions of people as altering the delta between them and the people around them, it starts to make a lot of things make sense. You start to realize why right now people are going buck wild on women and LGBT folk and all that sort of stuff. Historically, it always happens. They find a group that is acceptable to beat down. By acceptable, I mean it's not cultural suicide, even though it probably should be. It's not currently in vogue to be outwardly racist, but sexism and other kinds of bigotry are currently still vibing, although maybe you shouldn't listen to me because I'm the kind of guy who plugs his iPad into an extension that's not plugged into the wall anyway.

So they've got to find the most culturally acceptable group of people to beat down, and in doing so, they will feel like they've accomplished something. It's kind of ironic, or maybe poetic. There's that old saying, like a poem or something from that era, I believe: "First they came for so and so," and whatnot, and then eventually they come for you. When I was younger, I needed financial aid in order to eat for elementary school and junior high, even high school. I needed free lunches or discounted lunches depending on the year so that I could eat because that makes learning a lot easier.

At that time, my father was very against people getting food stamps because he was always frustrated that they could use it on things other than the cheapest food. Why we think people should suffer when they're already kind of struggling is weird to me, but that's beside the point. What I find kind of poetic in a very sad way is: you fast forward thirty years, and now the current actual president, who's going around doing things while the sitting president just exists, I guess, is going on his social media website and saying that people who use social services are parasites. I find it very poetic that this group of people that my dad used to see in fairly high esteem have turned on him and they call him a parasite.

It upsets me a little bit because I also know some people I care about who are fans of these folk, and I just don't know how you can be a fan of people who call your brother a parasite. It's a hard thing to square in my mind. It's kind of the same mechanism, I think. It's there, hits a certain point where when you're super wealthy, you can't really go up anymore, but you can always send people further down. The further down you send them, the more that observable delta grows. So I think that's part of what's going on at the moment. Some of it's just good old-fashioned greed.

If I could implore you to do anything, just bless and block. You will find more power and joy in your life by finding people with some common interests and having conversations off of that. Anyone who is far gone enough to say things to you that would elicit a desire to have a heated argument is too far gone to be helped. It has to happen naturally for them. They have to have a close friend or a family member basically slap some sense into them. There is no other way. So you're better off just building a society that finds it disgusting so that they are kind of forced into it.

I've definitely known some fairly racist people who just kind of have to deal with it. It's just your option, and you can't win. It's that old line: if you argue with an idiot, they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience. So definitely don't do that. You're better than that.

If you're somebody who made it this far through the video and you don't like what I've said, well, such is life. I would hope that you didn't comment about it because the big defense of this whole nonsense is that these people who are being disassembled are fragile. It seems to me that it would be an exceptionally fragile thing to do: to hear words from some stranger on the internet and write either a sarcastic or snarky comment about it. Clearly, it affects you. If words are just affecting you, and maybe I'm inspired by the snow outside, but I believe there's a kind of weather that may describe you well.

For everybody else though, people who just come, don't like it, and leave—it's nice to have the little chat. I don't expect anything. Any view of yours will change, but at least you'll possibly look at things and think, "Is that all I'm doing? Am I that simple?" Probably not though. Nobody thinks they're simple, or I should say most people don't. There's a lot of people in psychology that probably think themselves quite simple. It's kind of the humor in life, really. The more somebody knows about a topic, the more they realize they don't know much at all.

The biggest red flag when you're talking with somebody about anything is their level of confidence. If they wrote the book on that topic—like, if it's literally Gerald Sussman, the C++ guy, the inventor of C++—sure, they know what they're talking about. Steve Wozniak, for instance, is brilliant. But if they didn't write the book, their level of confidence is even with how full of it they are. That's something you should always remember. Any rando, famous or otherwise, that sits up on a TED talk or whatever and talks about how the world works with weird confidence, you should be very suspicious of them because with education does not come confidence. If anything, you breed caution. A really good carpenter is never lax around a table saw. Put it that way.

Health is a weird thing, right? Out here lifting, not at once but cumulatively thousands of pounds, and yet still feeling fragile in the end. It's kind of funny how that works. Life in general is just a strange beast. I think that's what makes it interesting, right? All the variables keep you guessing, keep you interested. I could probably relive my current life a thousand times and I don't know if it would ever feel repetitive. There are so many people I didn't have conversations with that I wish I had, so many conversations already that I missed and will never have.

One of the reasons I like to come out and work out, even as my fingers are turning a little blue, is that it's just really good for a sense of control. I think a lot of people turn to maybe not necessarily evil but very destructive habits because they're desperate for control in their life. Everything's out of their control: how much they're going to pay for healthcare, how long they're going to have their job, how long anything really is, whether their friends and family are going to love them, and so on. But in the gym, you kind of have full control over the experience within reason and hopefully with your safety in mind.

You can lift whatever you want in whatever style you want in whatever order you want, and nobody can take that away from you. I mean, you could get hurt—that's why I try to avoid these days, he says with a bad shoulder—but even then you can work around it. You can do different exercises, have different experiences, and it's kind of amazing that just across the board, it reduces all sorts of negative things for you and improves so many other things. The line I've been using a lot recently is that it puts my depression under compression. Yeah, even if I'll be sad in a few hours, for now we're just in here having a moment. I think there's something beautiful there, something simplistic: just me, some rubber, and some steel.

I'm sure a lot of hobbies are like this where you just kind of have nowhere to go but up. Because even if you lift the same weight every single time—kind of to that relative thing I mentioned earlier—you're doing more than the majority of living people, and that's cool. It doesn't even have to be all that impressive, and in the end, you'll be healthier, you'll be some level of happier, and you'll be stronger. It's cool and neat because you think you pick up knitting or something like that and you get those repetitive strain injuries. Knitting's still really cool, don't get me wrong, but there's so many hobbies where if you do them for a long time to peel yourself away from whatever is haunting you, unfortunately, they tear away at you.

You can kind of get the same in the gym as you get older if the weight's too heavy. You can start to wear down cartilage and stuff. I already started with pretty bad joints, so it is what it is. I found out from my doctor recently that I had unbelievably low calcium on the chart—where it's like good, too much, too little, and dead's over here. I was somewhere in the middle there. They were asking me, "Do your bones break? Do your teeth crack? Do you have any issues like that?" I said no. I mean, I've broken some teeth, but not a lot. So we did some tests, and it turns out I have, I think, my thyroid. The organ tells your body to steal calcium from your bones. Mine doesn't do that. So not only was my calcium super low, but my body wasn't trying to steal it from anywhere. The good news was bones are all good. The bad news was I was starving a lot of the rest of my body for calcium when I needed it. Things are looking better now.

This is just sort of a PSA: if you have any sort of conditions and you think "well, I'm healthy," keep in mind you're healthy because of your current age. As you get older, your body is going to get less and less good at managing those extra stressors that you're putting on it. So it is a really good idea to try and improve your health situation now before it's a problem. Think of it a bit like saving for your retirement. The earlier that you work on these things, the more likely you are to have a pleasant part of your life. You might say, "Well, what if the entire economy collapses?" Similar is true with your health. You can be the world's strongest person but your heart could stop at thirty-eight, you know? So it's a gamble, like so many things in life, but you're better off trying to be healthy.

Try and find things that are fun: DDR, Beat Saber, walking. I love weightlifting. It's highly recommended. The cool thing about weightlifting in my experience, and I have been in the gym with my wife before and just been around other women in the gym too, so I recognize that what I'm about to say is like, "Well, yeah, you're a man, but I have at least anecdotal experience of being there with people who weren't men in the gym." Most gym people fall into one of two categories: either they are so caught up in their own vanity that you don't exist—which is not a critique, by the way; good, whatever works for them—or they are incredibly nice and super excited that you picked up a hobby they love.

I've met so many incredibly nice people in gyms. It is unreal. I think that's one of those sorts of misconceptions that gyms are just full of a ton of judgy people. But when you think about it, a gym is full of a lot of people who want to be better than they are. If you want to be better than you are, you usually don't get there by belittling others. Now, are there going to be weirdos? Yeah, I mean, there's eight billion people in the world, thereabouts. If even one in a million is like Stalin, I think that works out to about a thousand Stalins. Same thing within your town. If you walk from one side of where you live all the way down to like your grocery store and back, you'll probably pass a thousand people or more. If even one percent of those people want to punch you or try to punch you in the face, that still works out to about ten people every single day trying to hit you in the face. So it's still basically nobody.

When you have enough people, even nobody's a lot of people, or functionally nobody. So yeah, try out a gym. See if a personal trainer is there that will give you free coaching. They'll teach you how to do various weightlifting stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with machines, by the way. I shouldn't hold back on that. Just don't get too scared. Don't work yourself up and be stuck on a treadmill. A treadmill is better than nothing, but when I first got into the gym, I was scared to look stupid. I didn't want to make a fool of myself around all these people who would never even know who I am. Humans are weird like that, right?

It wasn't until I met a few of the trainers there that I discovered the beauty in free weight exercises. Again, machine work too. You just have this simple moment with this thing that can't be really taken away from you. There's no DRM on it. It doesn't have a subscription. I mean, I know the gym does, but the equipment doesn't have a subscription. It's just simple. You go to these companies and you say, "I need a bar. I need some weights. Maybe a pad." They sell you a bar, they sell you some weights, they sell you a pad. They don't try to trick you into all sorts of other stuff.

This was a me thing. They didn't tell me you should buy this. It was on their website, but when I get into a hobby I really like, I get really into it. I have complaints about this we'll talk about it sometime, but for the most part, it's pretty cool. There's just something pretty about it, something authentic. I like purchase experiences where a company says, "I have this cool thing. Would you like this cool thing?" You say yes, I would, and that cool thing is exactly to the letter what they said it was. To me, that's the one time that business is kind of a beautiful enterprise, especially with small businesses because they tend to do that more often than not.

If you happen to be somebody who's watching who knows a little bit about gym stuff, if you meet somebody new who's trying to get into it, don't overwhelm them. Don't make it seem like this is super complicated or impenetrable. This is a very simple operation. You find exercises you like to do. Try and hit as many muscles as you can, but even that's kind of whatever. Do what you vibe with. As you notice that you can do more reps with something, find a comfortable cutoff point. Every time you hit that cutoff point, add a little more weight. That's it. Rest. Your life is now set up for you. You can make it any more complicated than that if you want. You can do what I do: watch a lot of YouTube people who make it seem really complicated and have a good time. Treat it like Star Trek or something. Treat it like Pokémon. Find your favorite exercise.

The best part is when you're done, you can go eat a little bit and veg, and you feel amazing. Sure, I'm on the couch watching nonsense, but I feel like I did something today. It's like you awaken something primal in you. I think with any interest, just don't get lost in the sauce unless that's something that makes you happy. If getting really, really into something to the point where you're thinking about it constantly, if that fills you with joy, you're doing it right. But if you've only got a passing interest and you just want to know enough to do the thing, that's cool too.

At the end of the day, we all got that ticking clock. Currently, you never know when somebody's just going to drive into a Target parking lot. If I could get you to do me any kind of favors, just chill. Be nice to your friends and family and strangers if you can. Don't argue. Find people with shared interests and live your best life. Because if you get eight billion people following that advice, the problem is convincing everyone. That's not me being an expert. I don't even think it's realistic, but that's just the hopeless romantic in me, I guess.

Life wants you to think that it's harder than it actually is. It's got those fake tattoos, pants around its ankles. That's a bit low for sagging, but listening to music that doesn't relate to its life at all. Grow up pretty privileged, actually. Just give what you got to give and nothing more. I believe in you.