 I'm not gonna lie to you. I got my supplement stack wrong today I made the same mistake twice in the past week and I'm paying the price and I cannot tell a lie Medaffinil is a wonderful medication But for whatever reason you don't want to take medaffinil with white mulberry leaf extract Which is good for your blood sugar levels supposedly But don't take medaffinil and white mulberry leaf extract or oevee I've got a got a moderate headache right now and Then you don't want to take it with with rehydra Okay, so it's fine to take your rehydra and it's fine to take your medaffinil But don't take them at the same time So I've made this mistake twice no more taking my rapid rehydra maximum performance electrolyte supplement At the same time as I take my medaffinil it oof Moderate headache, but I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the best I got anyway, so I get emails and one guy emailed me Where can I learn more about the quote? You shouldn't feel bad when you do wrong because you're not yourself at all times and your low meme your low moments Don't define you. Can you point to any articles books or videos? Well, this is a concept from 12 steps originating with the the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and you can find a handy bite-sized essays on this theme at a terrific website thefix.com or just any 12 step program 12 step materials that can elaborate on this So just to boil it down you didn't choose to be a porn addict You probably didn't choose to be a debtor probably didn't choose to be a sex-a-holic You probably didn't choose to be a food addict or a sports addict but you didn't choose to be an under owner didn't choose to be an alcoholic but These processes which started out as adaptive like they gave you energy and joy They eventually became maladaptive and you formed certain neural pathways in your brain That made it easier for you to keep acting in maladaptive ways So you don't have to hate yourself for being a sex addict Just right you didn't choose to be a sex addict You were doing the best you could at the time to meet your needs with the tools that you had available to you So you may have learned to deal with your frustration your humiliation your anxiety You're you're feeling unloved and unwanted through masturbating to pornography Not that I know anything about that. Well, actually I do and When I was doing that and when you were doing that you're doing the best you could at the time with the tools that you had at your disposal So you don't have to hate yourself for that you don't have to loathe yourself for that You don't have to beat yourself down for that. Let's recognize that you formed maladaptive habits and you can seek help From programs like sex-a-holics anonymous sex addicts anonymous sex and love addicts anonymous They're the government doesn't different sex related addiction programs So you didn't ask for addictions which if they they develop in full force or will gradually take over your life so that Pretty much everyone you interact with and everything you do will be to fulfill your addictive needs That was one one interesting email I got today and then Other friend said Luke because of your introduction to the thought of Carl Schmidt who said the essence of politics is the friend enemy distinction Thanks to your introduction to Carl Schmidt 40. I no longer believe in democracy human rights or the Constitution you should be compelling You should be compelling with pride and then this a Heredity Jew told me you have influenced my thinking and behavior towards trying to understand and accept reality as it is or trying to learn and to understand other people's thinking and perspective and Moving away from lecturing preaching presuming to judge instead merely and merely seeking to have my views and biases Confirmed and corroborated. It is a constant challenge. Yes, so I like to Attempt to let go of everything that I think is true because when I do that Like my face frees up my headache lessons my back frees up everything comes more easily so as part of this Process I've been reading a book on the sociology of sports talk radio and you're thinking like how the hell is the sociology Of sports talk radio. How on earth does that have any relevance to me? I'm a deep thinker who spends his time with play doh era startle and Socrates. What the hell do I want to know about the sociology of sports talk radio? Well It's a terrific little book by Robert L. Kerr. He's an academic in Oklahoma and There's just some good insights into life. So he talks about Oklahoma State University head coach Mike Gundy He's used an analogy at a press conference in late 2016. He said Sports talk radio is about as accurate as a North Korean test missile so he wanted to dismiss the validity of the talk on sports talk radio by referencing to the The test missile efforts by North Korea when they were at a time when North Korea was lucky to even launch much Let's accurately strike a target. Now North Korea got its act together right so North Korea became much more effective with launching missiles, but Gundy's few words express an essential social dynamic of commercial sports media that will not change and That is how much effort we invest into constructing narratives All right, so I came down with what some doctors called chronic fatigue syndrome Between age 21 and 27 and I have constructed all sorts of narratives and stories to try to make sense of how that happened And how I can let go of hating myself for whatever role I may have played in precipitating that crisis Okay, I'm a 55 year old bachelor and if I'm pressed to I can come up with all sorts of stories about why I'm a bachelor and Why my dream of getting married and having kids that has not come true I've never earned more than about $90,000 in a year and so I can come to you with all sorts of narratives about why I've been a lifelong under owner And so What is with the candy man promotion? I don't know almost anything about candy man except it looks like a horror movie It looks quite distasteful to me So we all develop all these stories about Why we are the way we are and why other people are the way they are So you could say oh this person's an atheist Because he lost his mother at an early age and he prayed to God to heal his mother and when God didn't heal his mother therefore he reacted with rebellion against God and father and Community by rejecting them all and becoming an atheist, right? And so that's a narrative that we can spin to try to make sense of how someone close to us was raised in a religious home has gone on to become a an atheist and then I converted to orthodox Judaism But I know many atheists who are far more ethical and upstanding people than I am So I can then come up with stories about you know why these atheists I know are better people than I am So Robert Elker this professor of assumed communications published a similar 2015 book It was called how postmodernism explains football and football explains postmodernism So the fundamental assertion of postmodern theory is that the stories we tell fail to reliably explain what's going on and So he takes football as an example. So football began in the mid 19th century. It's always been a brutal game and I think President Teddy Roosevelt he venerated football because it made people develop their character. He said so So there were the some people are opposed to football in the 19th century because they thought it undermined America's physical intellectual moral well-being Then people like Teddy Roosevelt said now it built physical moral and intellectual well-being And so we got this Frank Meriwell model of the football player as the honorable hero someone who's honest healthy street shooter always on the side of truth and honor inspired by a fictional character they proliferated in all sorts of novels and magazines But eventually as we move into the 60s and 70s, we get a much darker picture of the game So then we get like the Billy Clyde pocket model. So that's from from semi-tough the 1977 movie starring Bert Reynolds. He played the Billy Clyde pocket character so much darker model of the football player so Frank Meriwell was a hero Billy Clyde pockets the anti-hero so We want grand answers, right? We want grand answers to Why the Cowboys haven't won even been to a championship game in 25 years We want grand answers to why Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. We want grand answers for why we've all been Negatively affected by COVID and COVID restrictions over the past 18 months. So we particularly people like me I devote my life to trying to find grand answers All right, but They're not really up to the job So because the grand answers that we come up to are really up to the job Therefore, it probably behoozes to become both less emotionally attached to our grand answers to our stories about how the world works Why does Cowboys haven't won a Super Bowl in 25 years and why Trump lost the 2020 election? It helps us to be somewhat more detached from our own stories about how the world works and how we work and how Why other people are the way they are so we benefit from some detachment from our own narratives and We also benefit from opening ourselves up to to the truth to whatever extent there is truth in competing narratives so Why is football for example such a big deal in American life because it inspires stories and narratives that we That we talk about with strangers and with friends and listen to on the radio So how post-modernism explains football It analyzes the narratives that have been built up about football and how they've been challenged and deconstructed over the past 150 years So sports talk radio is this vibrant social milieu With all why is there all this endless talking all this endless listening to sports talk radio because what what's happening on sports Talk radio is we're manufacturing stories and we're trying to match stories to reality and we're hearing competing stories so People come together in sports talk radio to frequently insistently colorfully emotionally and often with stunning ferocity Share stories and try to knock down other people's stories so sports talk radio is a Rich source for considering how we create stories so political talk radio It's probably less tolerant of diverse perspectives than sports talk radio So sports talk radio functions for men as a socially sanctioned gossip forum Like gossip is okay because it's about sporting events rather than social events, but it's a social activity nonetheless So sports provides Stories that are more compelling to many of us than any other type of stories So that's why men in particular love sports because of the compelling nature of the stories that it gives us And then we can talk about them and argue about them And so postmodernism is is a interesting theory to apply to sports talk Because it's interesting in sports talk how devoted emotionally attached people get to a particular story so Postmodernism reveals that so much of what we believe to be true and what we articulate to be true is not true Now extreme postmodernism says nothing is explainable. There is no truth, right? That's an extreme version of postmodernism, but a moderate version of postmodernism Says of the stories we tell and not fully adequate to the realities that they describe so he looks at some of the major sports talk shows on the radio and examines them and In his previous book how postmodernism explains football He focuses on the 2016 Oklahoma football team and how its coach Bob Stoops became so skilled at using his weekly Press conference to take on all the questions of sports reporters who all have their own stories or all narrative agendas and How he would reframe their stories on his own terms thus advancing his own story and rejecting their story So if he pulled off his feet so consistently impressively That his method can be understood as a postmodernist grounded model for coaches in the hyper mediated age So in this age of unimaginable narrative profusion Football coaches have to spend much of their time constructing and promoting their own narratives and deconstructing the narratives of Competitors so the first sports talk radio station was not launched until the mid 1960s Now there are more than a thousand stations in the United States that focus on sports talk and two-thirds of those broadcasts Nothing, but sports talk and so this one book focuses on sports talk from late August of 2016 into early 2017 so the first First chapter is on the smooth talk of national sports radio. So it analyzes the Dan Patrick show So on a national show It tends to be less ferocious because you need the show to speak to people all over the country So the more local the show the more ferocious that show Right the more partisan people become the more chauvinistic people become But the Dan Patrick show is syndicated on about 300 radio stations Simulcast on the Fox Sports radio network and on direct TV so It It's a fairly Urbane Show It's it's not It's not among the more ferocious shows It's a friendly show that's open to to anyone So it's not deeply political. It tends to keep a light tone So it's a chummy venue. It's a little bit wonky So sports talk radio tends to encourage and instigate high levels of interpersonal ferocity but The Dan Patrick show maintains a relatively mellow vibe. It's engaged intellectually, but only at a mild emotional level What about those who don't follow any of these sports? Well Analyzing sports talk radio. It's just a way of understanding how we all Construct stories and how we get emotionally attached to our stories and none of the stories that we construct about reality Again, it'd be fully adequate to the task So this would be similar to any other types of stories we construct whether we're constructing stories about God About religion about politics about social cultural trends about about movies, right? We I just heard yesterday We all have something like 60,000 thoughts a day and 95 percent of them are the same as the thoughts We had the previous day So, yeah argue tainment is Political talk radio where you know people argue for for dominantly entertainment reasons Livestreaming all right blood sports is is Argument for entertainment reasons so national show tends to be chummy a little bit wonky and The callers and the host Their friends that there's a familiar vibe. It's like good morning, mr. Patrick. I'm doing great I've got a best of the best for you. Just got back from Nashville. I got to watch my Minnesota Vikings win on defense and Then Patrick will wish the caller a happy birthday talk about the game you referenced So when a particular narrative on the Dan Patrick show is promoted in ways that completely disregard the overall tone of the Dan Patrick show it stands out in stark relief and so there was this one caller right shea from Irving in Dallas, Texas and He wound out with more cumulative airtime than any other caller for the fall of 2016 And the consistency of the framing he advanced regarding the Dallas Cowboys was rivaled only by its ferocity so He would come on like regularly on the show and he'd say look the Cowboys are severely handicapped by an awful head coach Meaning Jason Garrett who does not understand what shea in Irving Clearly understands and that is that the team is airing egregiously when it's failing to rely more heavily on its running game Then on its passing game. So the 2016 Dallas Cowboys began a run of remarkable and unexpected success All right, they're expected to go 5 and 11 they ended up going 13 and 3 They won 11 straight games at one point at one point in the season. They're 11 and 1 All right, but despite the Cowboys winning week in and week out shea from Irving is calling You know to ferociously Promote his story that the Cowboys need to run the ball more You know put the ball in Zeke's hands and less in the hands of its rookie quarterback Dak Prescott and As the season builds shea from Irving builds to ever greater levels of aggression and Ferocity so that starts eventually unknowing Dan Patrick and the rest of the guys on his team So in mid-october Dallas had just upset the heavily favored Green Bay Packers on the road and Shea from Irving calls up and He says I don't know which way is up like they they ran the ball 32 times All I know is the Cowboys keep winning by running the ball So he calls up to assert his validity of his overriding narrative that running the damn ball is what Dallas must do to succeed It's like my lips to God's ears. I don't know how it happened, but it's happening and He also condemns any deviation from his narrative. He says man some of the play calls in the fourth quarter They were making that rookie Dak Prescott throw out of his damn Enzyme and they could have just run the ball and ice the game had me worried they were getting way too comfortable with the arm of that rookie and So yeah, it's Russia shan in a few hours, but this is how I'm preparing for Russia shana So then the host tries to you know calm down the frosty of this call and say yeah But what does it say about their confidence level in their rookie quarterback that at the end of the first half with 55 seconds to go They were trying to score and they did eventually score a touchdown. I mean, that's great confidence in the Dak Prescott, but Shea from Irving isn't buying it like that's goofy. That's crazy You know if mr. Botox referring to Jerry Jones comes in and screws this up by bringing back Romo I'm gonna lose my damn mind So the host Dan Patrick You know tries to follow up on other matters in this caller's life Now he wants to elicit other themes that might be among his priorities. So he asked him about his new baby So his wife just had their second son, but the caller Firmly maintains his narrative that the Cowboys need to run the damn ball and everything else in his life compared to the Dallas Cowboys Is of minor importance? So when the host asked him about his kid he said yeah, I had that kid and Patrick says well, where are your priorities? You know at your priorities with your kids, not the Cowboys and the call goes. Oh, yeah, of course, duh And then Patrick says how do you tell your significant other that you love her? So Si refers to his wife as his roommate and he says that he shows that he loves his wife Usually by coming home Usually in an argument I will apologize. I'll say put the knife down. I won't do it again. I love you We don't need to do this again. That's what I usually say as I put the phone down with my hand on the 911 speed dial Now a couple of weeks later after the Cowboys beat Philadelphia top division rival and a good team in overtime Shea from Irving calls back, you know more tenaciously than ever advancing his core narrative his meta narrative So Patrick says let me bring in Shea so he can move on with the rest of his day. I Don't give a damn that it was overtime Dan You let Dak Prescott the rookie throw the ball 39 times and that running back that you spent a number four draft pick on You should get slapped in the mouth. Thank God. They won. Thank God. They pulled it out So it emphasized Alice won despite contradicting the fundamental dictum of Shea from Irving's narrative that to win the team must run the ball more and pass the ball left and He insists ever more fiercely that his narrative must prevail. Why the hell they keep refusing to run the ball in the red zone This team was built to run aggressively. Why tell me why and His comments tend to get louder and louder as the call proceeds and his turn reflects more and more anger that the Cowboys aren't running the ball and so Patrick is trying to calm him down and It's not working and and Cy from Irving calls the Dallas head coach Jason Garrett ginger or the ginger and Says this idiot this Ivy League ginger because Garrett went to Princeton You got a $200,000 education. He thinks he's smarter than everybody else on the football. He ain't he doesn't have to be smart Just look at that. Oh line. Why are you throwing the ball in the red zone with a rookie quarterback? So week after week Cy from Irvine reasserts his meta narrative. You just run the damn ball and Then why are you having Dak Prescott throw the ball 35 times against the Vikings? You're putting him in a position to ruin his confidence unless the ginger is sabotaging Dak Prescott Sabotaging the rookie quarterback to get his boy back in the game Tony Romo just like he sabotage Wade Phillips when he was the head coach So his theory was that Jason Garrett under performed as an offensive coordinator under white Wade Phillips so that he could get Wade's job The only reason that ginger is the head coach because he sabotage poor Wade put a knife in his back with his play-calling duties So that's the Dan Patrick show and the next chapter is on notes There's much more intensity on regional sports talk radio. So this chapter analyzes Mike Francesca on The fan which is a New York radio station and it also analyzes the Paul Finebaum show Which is a sports talk show in the south of the United States? so Mike Francesca used to be known as as the as the brain The brain for Brent Musburger, so he got his start as a Statistics analyst for CBS so Mike Francesca is on in New York City and he Yeah, he was called Brent Musburger's brain by the New Yorker and his analysis goes way beyond The random commentary that typifies most of sports talk radio So his comments are grounded in a long-term perspective based on his decades of experience So his turn reflects the level of all-business seriousness that you get from a Wall Street analyst dissecting financial developments and trends, but you also get a strong sense of how much he cares about sports and getting the narratives right and He's cordial, but he's rigorous. So he won't allow callers to take him Off-topic like callers are welcome to advance their stories But they will find that Francesca offers very little in diplomatic compromise and he'll always be prepared to dismantle and reconstruct their stories so Typically in his role as a host Mike Francesca provides callers with insights and perspectives that that he concludes that they lack So there's a caller who complains that Giants do not seem to know how to call an audible at the line of scrimmage and Francesca says look, it's not possible to know if it was an audible or not, but don't get hung up on that It's all about execution game of football comes down to blocking and tackling so Francesca has a cerebral and philosophical and historical and the statistical approach to sports so he tries to advance a more philosophical understanding of the role of sports In the lives of the individuals who populate his audience. Okay, we've got a question Look, can you give me a quick comment at some point on Larry Otter versus Gavin Newsom? I expect that Gavin Newsom will not be recalled and that it won't even be close so I think Republicans only account for about 20% of Registered voters in California. So it's quite hard to believe that that Gavin Newsom won't easily survive this This Recall attempt So when a caller seeks to win Mike's support for an interpretation of a recent baseball game Like he resists like that silly. Don't give me if the outfielder had caught the ball, you know, let's just talk about what did happen Bounce of the ball changes lives. That's the way it happens. Somebody wins. Somebody loses lives are changed Sometimes it changes lives dramatically and when a caller wants to talk about who will be in the Super Bowl two months later Francesca says You got to heed the lessons of history, right? It's a long way until January Right, so there's a lot of football to be played until now so he was asked about Rick Bettino who is the basketball coach at the University of Louisville whether Rick Bettino should take more responsibility for a recent recruiting scandal which cost the school and C2A penalties and Francesca says look Rick Bettino is not the CEO of Louisville Right, he's not the president of this university. He's not the athletic director. He's in charge of the basketball program So if something happens with the basketball program He's in charge of that So if there's something his team does That's responsibility of his head coach because everyone in the basketball program works for him He hires them. He revels in the success. He's paid handsomely for their success, but he's not responsible for the rest of Louisville. So Francesca essentially takes a postmodern perspective that we're better off seeking a multiplicity of narratives than pretending that grand resolutions are possible So for Francesca, this compliments is running meta narrative The sport should be understood in terms of the most factual interpretations possible So in other words the Pashat, so there are many ways to read Jewish texts There's the Pashat, which is the plain meaning of the text and then you can read the allegorical meaning of the text and the mystical meaning of the text and the All right, there are all these different layers, but let's not forget the plain meaning of the text So is there still free Afghanistan because the Taliban says that they wiped out all All their competitors So Francesca says that we should understand we should interpret reality in the context of History historically sound perspectives and not short-term guesses So he wants to bring his show back to the level of fact and history wants to avoid or minimize interpersonal drama stays focused on his efforts to respond to call us with fact-based pronouncements So Taliban's in the capital of Panshir fighting today. So I don't see how the Taliban can lose All right, then there's a high-profile southern regional show the Paul Feinbaum show Jewish guy based in Birmingham, Alabama talks mainly about the SEC and he figures prominently in an ESPN documentary Roll Tide War Eagle about the rivalry between Alabama and Auburn and he had a call caller who said that After Auburn defeated Alabama The caller went to Alabama and poisoned two Two major Trees to ancient beloved live oaks So this was an Alabama caller went to Auburn after Auburn it upset Alabama and He poisoned two beloved ancient live oaks where Auburn University fans have gathered for generations to celebrate their football victories Chat says Taliban cannot run Afghanistan. They have no plan. They look to Pakistan for help Well, there is no Afghanistan Afghanistan is just a geographic area But Afghans have no sense of national identity. It's just a place. It's a geographic area where there are various tribes but any Afghan feeling is quite weak so Maroon says India and other nations are giving the Tajik some support and Panjshir is easier to defend and to fight an occupying army. It's in a valley Soviets and the Taliban in the past never conquered Panjshir interesting so the poor fine bomb show features southern civility with a heaping mixture of intolerance and ferocity so poor fine bomb the host tends to always have the The edge in facts over virtually all his call is he's better informed but he Contrasts to Mike Francesco and Dan Patrick. He enjoys and encourages heightened interpersonal drama Do I think that China leaned on Joe to abandon Afghanistan? No, it was it's completely in America's best interest to get out of Afghanistan when Soviets went into Afghanistan in 1979 most American elites were Thinking oh, this is a disaster for America John J. Mearsheim immediately saw in 79 This is a disaster for the Soviet Union. They're gonna get blood dry in Afghanistan and almost all the realist foreign policy thinkers were opposed to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 They're opposed to nation-building such as what we try to do in Afghanistan the past 20 years They were opposed to intervening in the Vietnam War. I Don't listen to Dennis Prager I mean it's entirely possible that There may be some clip that will be talked about but haven't listened much to Dennis Prager really in the last six years and Almost not at all in the last six months Iran is telling the Taliban that they need elections So I assume the Taliban are the opposite type of Muslim that the Iranians are. I'm sorry. I'm blanking on that What are the what are the two types of Muslims? Sunni versus Shia, so Iran is Shia and I assume the Taliban is Sunni So Yeah, Sunni Shia. Thanks. I just totally blanked on that So the more syndicated the show the less emotional intensity and the less ferocity in sports talk So it's small talk where you get the most intense Ferocious clashes of narratives. It's on the local show So we're a devotion to what's going on with the local team is going to be most intense So what you'll hear in intense ferocious local local shows is how devoted people are to a particular narrative they become completely obsessed with one particular story and They stake everything on this story like they stake the meaning of their life around stories that they construct either about God religion or their favorite team and they'll stop at almost nothing in their efforts to promote their story and Tend to have a complete inability to understand the stories of other people and so they will both both caller and host will be arguing about about the truth and so The host may be talking about the literal truth of what the coach said and the caller might say Hey, but you have to understand what the coach said in a particular context. So there is the existence of the game There is the existence of reality All right, and then there's the meaning of reality. There is the meaning of things that we can't see and So meaning is socially constructed and contested. So what we're doing right now is we are constructing and contesting Meanings about what's going on in the world today. And so this is why media and YouTube play such a huge role in the development and construction of meaning and then the last chapter focuses on one of the rare National talk show hosts sports talk show hosts by a woman Amy Lawrence So she was doing a show between 2 a.m. And 5 a.m. Back in 2016 That's the the final chapter All right interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal a generation of American men give up on college I just feel lost So the number of men enrolled at two and four year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels So we've got this widening education gap But there are some educators who want to do something about it, but they are overwhelmingly opposed Like why should we do something for the most powerful group in this country men or white men? So generally speaking if you talk to teachers and professors, they will tell you that their smartest students are men but women are much better at coloring between the lines women are much better at following directions and Regurgitating to teachers and to professors what they want to hear. So women are more More attuned to pleasing their teachers and professors Well men are more attuned to challenging their teachers and professors so so women are more likely to get good grades and Promotion from from professors because women are more inclined to try to please those in authority. That's it. Bye. Bye