ANALOGUE HOURS: A Guide To Getting Your Life Back

How are we doing? Today I want to talk about what I've been focused and fixated on for probably the last 6 months. You've probably noticed I haven't been as autistically fixated on health topics, and that's because I kind of covered all of my bases. But not only did I cover all my bases, I realized that there were areas where I was majoring in the minors. And more importantly, I realized there were areas where this entire space was majoring in the minors. I mean, that's what this whole space is, right? It's these guys that are obsessively fixated on one component of health and and they think it's the end-all be-all, and they dedicate their life to that small little component. And that's great if your objective is to be an expert, but if your objective is to be the most well-rounded individual possible that's just trying to pursue the best life possible for you and others, then you can't be that binary and modular into one section, right? If you fixate on light, if you fixate on diet, if you fixate on exercise of whatever variety and flavor, you're only gonna get so far. You can only tweak that section so much. It's never gonna give you the holistic oneness that you're supposed to feel as a human. And this is something I realized really early on before I started a lot of the stuff that I do now. And just when I was creating content in the beginning, I did it because I was an obsessive health researcher. Like I just obsessed over the details, over the studies, and that's what I like. That's what I was good at. And that's what I wanted to do. But I had the foresight to look at people that I aspire to be like and really assess them objectively and realize like, this is not a good path. This path is not ideal for becoming a well-rounded and holistic individual, which is so ironic because it's called holistic health. I saw a lot of these people, they knew so much about health, but they weren't healthy, right? They knew so much about optimizing their biology, but they didn't really have much to show for it other than their followers and other than their clout and other than their knowledge base. And then they start getting bitter because that's all they know and they keep on fixating on it when the world keeps on moving around them. People are lapping them. They feel like they're underappreciated. They feel like they know more than others, but they really only know a lot about a little. So this is something I continue to realize to this day. I see some of the smartest people in their respective spaces spend their days fixating on arguing with Anons on Twitter, and it's ridiculous to me. So I definitely took a little bit of a step back, and it was good. I used that time to go and make up for the areas that I wasn't focusing on as much, right? The component of mindfulness, going back to my anthropological roots and looking at how humans are supposed to live and figuring out how I can parlay that into this modern world. And what I came to were assumptions and knowledge that I already had. The modern world is just so mind-bogglingly different than what the world should be given our biology, right? What our biology expects. Remember, evolution took 100,000 years, however many years you want to put it. I don't care if you're even a creationist. Regardless, the world that we lived in for the majority of being human, whether it was 2,000 years or more likely 150,000 years, is nothing like it is today. We made generations and generations of advancements in a matter of 100 years since the Industrial Revolution. So everything's so unnatural. The problem is that unnatural nature created a void. It created a void that enabled certain people with a proclivity for narcissism and a proclivity for, uh, ill-intentioned pursuits to take advantage of everybody else because our brains couldn't keep up, right? Especially after the attention economy. We figured out how to trick all of these underlying mechanisms that humans have to get them to continue to consume. The same thing that we did with junk food in the mid-1900s, where they started allocating a bunch of money towards food sciences to trick your natural satiety pathways to think that their garbage cardboard and petroleum byproducts actually taste good. The same thing is happening to our minds, but it is on a much worse scale. And I think everybody who focuses on becoming a better person focuses on health because they have to. That is the base level of the hierarchy of needs, is having a, a like healthy body and a healthy brain. But what happens is you reach a certain point of health where it's not worth over-optimizing at that point. You know what works, you stick with it, you slowly refine because it's a constant pursuit and it's enjoyable. But once you get the message, hang up, move on. And that's kind of where I'm at right now. And I think the biggest thing that I'm really struggling with and I see is this generation's greatest problem, Aside from the fact that we have a culture that completely wants to emasculate you, that wants guys to act like girls and girls to act like guys, so there's no adherence to culture's values or norms, and that's why everybody's depressed, and that's why everybody's on antidepressants, and that's why some of the most civilized and prosperous nations have the highest rates of suicide, they have the highest rates of depression. This has gotten exponentially worse with the advent of social media, with this post-COVID isolationism that's occurred, because the few figments of society that lingered on, right, were community, were spending time with your loved ones, and spending time in the real world. Now we don't have to do any of that. Kids and even adults can stay in their house all day. They can date from their phones, they can order food from their phones, they can socialize from their phones, they can have a sense of competition from their phones or like video games. These are enough to scratch the itch, this primal itch that we have to accomplish these needs as humans but it's not enough to meet the true core need. So what do we have? We have a bunch of people that are depressed. We have a bunch of people whose brains are literally deteriorating as every minute goes by, right? There was a lot of studies, like a few years ago, everyone was fixating on the studies that showed how porn damaged your brain. Well, we have to think like the constant consumption of social media isn't really that different. It's all the same thing. It's you getting the most mind-boggling amount of stimuli from this little black box in your phone. This is a huge problem, and I think about how big of a problem it is when I think about what life was like 20 years ago. I was watching a movie last night from 2001, and there are a bunch of people in a bar. Not a single person on their phone because phones didn't exist then, right? They're little flip phones. They were boring. Everyone was talking. The people that weren't talking were just sitting there and looking or reading or writing. It was such a different world. It was so much more of an analog world, and I really think it's important for us to get back to that analog lifestyle, right? To make time for analog hours where we abstain from these constant time sucks, and not just time sucks, but mind sucks that we're exposed to on a daily basis. We aren't meant for a 24-hour news cycle. We aren't meant to go on Twitter every day and see if the world's ending. That puts us in this constant state of fear, right? Of fear and stress and anxiety. That's not how we're supposed to live. Think about way back in the day, like, you wouldn't know that there was a civil war going on in America until John Revere like took his little horse all the way from New Hampshire, wherever he was, down the coast and reached like your local news printing press with the Gutenberg press. Like, information is supposed to be slow. And I know that it's tempting now that we have AI and that we have literally all information in the world at our fingertips to want this constant feedback loop and consumption loop. But what I realized, this girl, Michaela, who I know posted on Twitter the other day something very profound. That this constant consumption of information is gluttony. It is the sin of gluttony. And I, and I always, I knew how bad doomscrolling was and I knew how bad constant consumption was, but it wasn't until it put it into the frame of it being like the sin of gluttony, which sins are just problems that all humans have that keep on coming up regardless of what environment we're in. This sin of gluttony of just constantly consuming. And we have guys that are so good at keeping their diet super dialed. At keeping their training super dialed, but then when it comes to phone or internet, they have no guidelines and no frameworks on how to use it effectively without rotting their brain. So what do you have? You have a bunch of really smart people that are wasting their potential, that are wasting their gift that they could give to the world because they're busy arguing with anons on the internet. Think about how many kids in this generation have wasted the opportunity for them to become the next Da Vinci, the next Einstein, the next Darwin, Napoleon, whoever you want to be, because they're spending their time upgrading guns in Call of Duty. I'm guilty of that. And playing Fortnite, right? And Goonies and scrolling social media. Like, if we do not give ourselves space for boredom, if we do not give ourselves space to process this constant bombardment of information in our brain, we will go crazy. I realized that the last 6 months I got to a point where it's like I can kind of do whatever. I don't need to be as strict as I used to be. And it wrecked me. All of the traits and skills that I acquired getting to where I got The amount of work it took for me to get control over my brain to be able to actually accomplish and create anything was so difficult. I got there and I stopped doing that. And what happened when I put my foot off the gas? I got sucked right back in. I'd open my computer, I'd go straight to Twitter. I'd open my phone, I'd go straight to Instagram. If I didn't have Instagram, I'd go to Gmail. I'd go to whatever thing I could get that next hit from. So one, it's a sin. It's gluttony, right? And I'm not even saying it from like a religious standpoint. You don't have to be religious to understand like there are these core components that are not good for humans. And it just so happens that the Bible put them down pretty effectively in the form of sins. And like all religions have some idea of like, these are bad things that are gonna tempt you, right? That you have to fight against. It's a daily battle against these things. This gluttony thing is a rat, and it is so detrimental to individuals. It's so detrimental to society, and it's so detrimental to humanity. And it's only getting worse. Things are only speeding up. So it's hard because there's, obvious utility with all of these tools. I'm one to talk. I mean, my business is pretty predicated— it's entirely predicated on these platforms. It's entirely predicated on content and social media. And a lot of my operations are now predicated on AI and tools. So it's something that you have to carve out time for and you have to create a relationship with. You see, this constant use of social media and information and cheap entertainment is an addiction. But unlike other addictions like alcohol or like marijuana or gambling, there's no structure to go about removing yourself from said addiction because it's not like alcohol where it's like, if I'm an alcoholic, I'm going to go through the 12-step program. I'm going to not allow booze in my house. I'm going to not go to bars and I'm not going to hang out with friends that are drinking every single weekday, right? I can do that. You can't do that with social media. You can, but then you're kind of out of the loop and you're potentially losing your potential. So that's really difficult. It's same with junk food, right? Like, I don't eat junk food because I don't let junk food in my house. It's easy. I just don't do it. But it's not as binary with these platforms. Like, technology gives me the ability to learn from anybody that's ever existed in a very rapid feedback loop. I'm able to absorb information so rapidly. I mean, it's truly a modern marvel. Same with social media. I'm able to reach hundreds of thousands of people with things that otherwise I'd be preaching on a corner on top of a milk carton to like maybe 15 people that walk by. So there's clear utility. You are the only person that's gonna be able to build those frameworks and to build those boundaries. And the best way to do it, the best way to put yourself back in control is to identify that, hey, listen, I don't do this. I'm not a constant consumer. I'm an intentional consumer. Before I go and I consume anything, I'm gonna identify what is it that I'm consuming? Of what is my objective that I'm trying to get out of it. That's step number 1. Step number 2 is focus on if you wanna be a creator, say that you create on these platforms, you don't consume. That's what I try to do with Twitter. I still get sucked into the news. I still like wonder if there's gonna be a nuclear bomb that's gonna drop off tomorrow or if I'm gonna have to go fight for Israel or some bullshit like that. But I try to abstain as much as possible and I use tools to help me with that, right? I use Cold Turkey, which blocks social media. I delete social media from my phone. I have one like dumb phone which has nothing on it. Then I have my other phone that has social media on it. I do all of these tools, but a lot of it starts with the analog hours component. Every day I allocate at least 30 minutes, ideally 30 minutes to an hour of no technology, analog stuff, books, pen and paper, and silent walks, like those three. And I make it where I have no other choice. Just like I don't bring junk food into my house during analog hours, I don't bring any technology with me because I know if I have it in front of me, I'll use it. What this does is it puts me back in the driver's seat. It reminds me how good it feels to just sit and read a book or even just sit in a park and do nothing, to let my ideas flow. And it makes me feel human. We live in a world of bots. We live in a world where a lot of people are basically cyborgs. Having this phone on your hip 24/7 makes you basically a cyborg. We are becoming transhumanist. I don't want that. I like being a human. I want to be the most fulfilled version of a human possible. And a lot of that doesn't— like, it's the opposite of what we think it is. It's not progress, it's regress. It's going back to our roots. This is the Paleolithic diet, but from an information and lifestyle standpoint. So I do believe that's really important. I think that's something that's very overlooked. It's something that I focus on more than my diet, more than my nutrition, and more than my training, because I've got those dialed. I've got enough. What am I gonna do, get 1% body fat leaner, get 5 pounds more muscle, like, like trim 15 seconds off of my mile, there's not much more for me to do. I'm happy, I enjoy it, I'm gonna continue to do it, I'm gonna continue to share what I learn, but I'm gonna have that set so I can focus on the real important needle movers and the secondary component of health, focusing on relationships, focusing on community, focusing on alignment with my environment. The biggest thing for me is environment design right now. It's not just what I'm doing in my like immediate surroundings, it's where I'm living, it's what I'm doing on a daily basis. This is so important, and you can't out-physical the mental, and you can't out-mental the physical. There's some of these problems that a lot of people have that manifest themselves as physical ailments that are really problems of the mind. It's really because they are having needs that aren't— they are having needs that aren't met, and their brain is sending them alerts. There's alarms going off saying, this guy's not listening to us, right? Let's go put some pain in his shoulder. Let's go make his gut hurt. Not only that, being in that constant state of stress, which is what it is, is a chronic stressor, right? I say that I fixed my health when I stopped doing all the biohacks, when I moved to a beach with a really good community, with an awesome lifestyle, with an abstinence from all of the annoying stuff that I was doing in the city, right? The, the, like, the, the whole thing. I mean, the work, the lifestyle, the bullshitness of cities. I mean, you're not meant to be surrounded by 100,000 people and not know anybody. Like, that's so isolating. You're surrounded by people, but you're lonely as ever. So that's something that just really clicked with me, and it's been a hard journey because everything in this world is just meant to keep you in this learned helplessness state, because then you're more susceptible to other programming. It's to detach you from your roots and to detach you from what it means to be human so you can be molded into whatever they want you to be. If you want— like, they is just anybody who's in power. It's this globalist movement, whatever you want to call it. It doesn't matter. The thing is, the only person that's gonna save you is you. The only person that's gonna bring you back to like how you're meant to think, how you're meant to feel, and how you're meant to live is you. No one's gonna do it for you. Those days are gone. So what I'm trying to say here is just take the reins, implement these analog hours, get back to being human. We live in a world of bots. Get back into being human. That's gonna give you the frame and positioning to go and leverage these tools for good and not let them use you. All right guys, have a good one.