 So, Joe Rogan will oftentimes say things that are controversial, especially within lefty circles, and I disagree with a lot that he does. Sometimes I give him credit where he'll challenge Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro. I mean, to me, I'm not necessarily a Joe Rogan hater, but I'm also not a fan. For me, I don't get the appeal personally speaking, but if that's your cup of tea, then fine. I think that in my mind, he needs to be more responsible with his platform. But it's really rare when his controversies actually penetrate the mainstream. When he endorsed Bernie Sanders, it was a soft endorsement that made national headlines. And that was controversial, and I defended him in that instance, because if you're going to use your platform to promote a pro-worker candidate, that's a good thing. But he made headlines once again for something that he said that is controversial. And it has to do with video games. And I think that, you know, as people talk about this, there's a lot of gamers who are offended by what he said. I consider myself a pretty avid gamer. But I'm actually taking away a different conclusion. And what he's doing is kind of catalyzing an interesting conversation. And I think ultimately he does miss the mark. But the mindset that he kind of displays inadvertently by speaking about it in these terms, to me, says more about our economic system than it does the actual subject itself. Take a look. Mediogames are a real problem. They're a real problem. You know, why? Because they're in fun and you don't. Yeah, well, I have a real problem with them and you you do them and they're real exciting, but you don't get anywhere. It's like you could do like like martial arts, right? You could learn jiu-jitsu. You get obsessed by jiu-jitsu. And then three years later, you're you're like an elite jiu-jitsu athlete. Like you're entering in competitions. You're a purple belt. You're moving up. Yeah, you're doing well. You think in like I might be able to open my own school one day. You got confidence. Yeah, if I have 100 students and those 100 students are paying me X amount of dollars per month, I can make a living. Holy shit, I can have this would be amazing. And then you see your jiu-jitsu school and your jiu-jitsu instructor has all these students and drives him Mercedes and he's got a nice family. And like that's the future. This way you're doing something exciting and fun and you don't or you could just be playing video games. Three years later, you could be that same kid just playing video games, waiting for the next whatever the game is, you know, next Xbox game to come out and you're going to waste your time. So I apologize for not playing you the video. Unfortunately, whenever we play Joe Rogan clips, there's copyright issue. So, you know, you get the audio, unfortunately. But basically, you know, his fear as an avid video gamer himself is that it's too addictive. And by video gaming, then you're not accomplishing anything. Now, to me, what this speaks to, honestly, it's a capitalist mindset because that capitalist mindset is as follows, time is money. So while you sit around wasting your life away, you could be doing things that make you more useful, make you more valuable to society as a whole. And that is that capitalist mindset, right? Every minute that you spend not trying to make money. That's apparently a bad thing. Like, we've become so entangled with capitalism and this, you know, mindset where we have to keep going and going and going and be, you know, more and more productive that we don't even realize when we're doing it. First of all, he's wrong to only use video games as an example of something that can be addictive. I mean, you can apply that same logic to his podcast. If you sit around and you listen to three hour podcasts every single day, then you're not being productive. So what's the takeaway? Should we stop listening to your podcast? What about people who watch movies? Like gaming is just a form of entertainment. And the thing about them is that they're intrinsically valuable if they make you happy. See, what we've done with our capitalist society, our late stage capitalist society is to modify every single aspect of our lives where something isn't actually good inherently, unless it yields some sort of value monetarily, right? So if you're just sitting around and you're enjoying something that makes you genuinely happy, that's not a good thing, unless it's going to lead to you being more profitable or, you know, productive and we have to get out of this mindset. Like it is genuinely good if you play video games and they make you happy. Video games are intrinsically good in and of themselves, even if they don't lead to you being more productive or more profitable. They are good if they make you happy and they relieve stress or they even, you know, help you combat depression. I mean, for me, games are therapeutic in the sense that like when I was grieving, you know, with the loss from my father, animal crossing helped distract me. And it really, you know, it genuinely made me happy. And action games, you know, they they allow me to kind of have fun that I don't have because of like, I'm not a very adventurous person. Like I don't ever leave home. So like being able to experience adventures in a video game or in a movie, you know, these are things that are important. Like they create happiness. And what makes you happy isn't less valuable if it's not making you more productive or more useful as a human being to society as a whole. What human beings have to do is reject this capitalist mindset that we have to be doing something that contributes. We can do things that make us happy without feeling guilty, without feeling like shit. And the fact that Joe Rogan, you know, as a gamer himself feels bad about playing video games, he feels like it's, you know, addictive. Like you've got to get out of that mindset, right? And I don't think this is something that you should promote. Now, having said that, is he like genuinely addicted to video games? I mean, I don't know. Like there are people who have addictive personalities to where when they like something, they really go all in and, you know, they do nothing. But that one thing like I'm not saying you should indulge yourself and just play like, wow, for 19 hours a day. That's not what I'm saying. But I mean, sure, it can be an issue. But why is it only video games? That's the target. Like, why aren't we talking about people who are addicted to movies or podcasts? I mean, that's the thing. Happiness is a good thing. Like it's OK to be happy. It's OK to do things that make us feel happy for some people that's riding a bike or going for a hike for other people that's watching a movie or playing video games. That's OK. Capitalism has got us all into this mindset to where we literally feel guilty if we're just happy, right? And you could say, well, you're kind of, you know, you're reaching too much. You're trying to make this about capitalism. But in actuality, I mean, when you commodify every single aspect of human life, we we don't derive value from being with our family or just being happy. We derive value based on what we're able to produce, you know, what we can do for society. So if I can't, you know, use my hobby to propel me to open a business that contributes to society or whatever, then it's just inherently bad because that's that capitalist mindset, right? When everything is a commodity, then human happiness itself isn't something that's part of the equation. When we have to recenter ourselves and acknowledge that we're human beings and we have short lives, we have to be able to at least derive some joy from that. And if that means playing video games for, you know, several hours per day, that's not a bad thing. That doesn't make you an evil person. That doesn't make you, you know, lazy. It doesn't make you a piece of shit. It just means that you want to be happy. And guess what? As a human being, you do deserve happiness. You deserve to derive happiness from whatever, you know, you're able to so long as you're not hurting anyone else. And video games is, you know, a hobby where you're not hurting anyone else by participating in this hobby, like it's fine, like you're overthinking it. So that's my message to Joe Rogan. He's overthinking it. And what he's showing here is that he really is in this capitalist mindset. And capitalism, it really controls more aspects of our lives than I think a lot of us are willing to admit it. It controls everything, right? Like everything that we do in life, essentially, is in service to capitalism. So much so that if we step out of bounds even a little bit, we start to question whether or not what we're doing is valuable. But the answer is if you're doing something that genuinely makes you happy and you're not like overdoing it, I mean, you could do or do anything. If you're doing something that makes you happy, there's nothing wrong with that. It's fine. So, I mean, I don't think this is the most controversial thing that Joe Rogan ever said. But I wanted to talk about this because I think it does highlight a way that capitalism has kind of warped our view of the world. Like we are allowed as human beings to be happy. And not only are we allowed to be happy, we should be actively encouraging people to be more happy, take more vacations, do things that make us happy because life is short. And there's more than just like doing things to serve capitalism and the economy, like just being happy in and of itself is a good thing. Remember that.