You've Been Lied To! - Kelce Brothers Controversy, Olympic Vegan Diets, & Elon Musk - Matt Bilinsky

The Kelce Brothers’ Cereal Controversy I think a cool place to start would be the um the controversy surrounding the Kelsey Kel Brothers Kelsey Brothers um and the the endorsement that they made the mix that they've created for I believe it's General Mills I don't know for sure but they came under Fire recently they were called out by Cali means who is a whistleblower within the um the food and pharmaceutical space having been a consultant for both big food and big Pharma who called them out for um endorsing what is essentially dessert for breakfast for children they created the their own mix of cereal which combines their favorite uh is it Kelsey or Kel um we'll go with Kelsey that's with Kel that's theal they family lineage is going to take second is going to take the backseat to just how people pronounce it these days they seem to be saying Kelsey great okay so they've created the Kelsey mix which combines Cinnamon Toast Crunch Reese's Puffs Lucky Charms they obviously have a ton of followers a ton of uh adoration amongst young adults children and the like and so they've created what is arguably uh you know this um not that they've created it they're endorsing something that is very bad for kids in their nutrition there you go absolutely well let's kind of look at this historically right and because now looking from our perch of 2024 where a society for better for worse despite so many people being in ill health we have the knowledge right our knowledge the the marginal increase in knowledge about nutrition and health from 1994 to 2024 is just Monumental um and then you look back and there's so many things from even the late 20th century the 80s and 90s that we were being pedal to us or our understandings about nutrition and diet that almost look as wild to us as leeches to bleed out to bleed out so or bleeding into a cup you know to solve illnesses like you did in the 17th century or God knows when um and one of those is wait they were telling us to eat cereal for breakfast and that it was a health item um which is completely insane I me zero protein content um high high sugar high carbohydrates and really not many minerals whatsoever I mean one of the prominent some of the cereals like Special K and Cheerios were definitely Being Framed as well they're healthy because they're not as unhealthy as Frosted Flakes right so of the really strange just wild orthodoxies of late 20th century nutrition that have been exposed in the 21st century cereal absolutely one of them um so the Kel brothers and I like C I think Cali provides a ton of value um in terms of him calling out the Kel Kelsey Brothers for endorsing essentially you know dessert based cereals and that's what they're trying to do right you're trying to take sweets and dessert based products and create some sort of um cereal concoction that can be pedal and resold as a breakfast ad and that's what happened yeah and him calling out the Kelsey Brothers for putting their name on it I understand where he's coming from although at the end of the day I'm going to go with transparency in that if they're not trying to pedal it as a health item then I guess I can't really be that critical of them um and sure there's a little bit of hypocrisy between them you know holding themselves out as advocates uh as Wellness advocates in other Realms and then also endorsing this stuff but you know I see one once he called them out and their response was listen there's there's times for health and wellness and nutrition there's times for to and life also involves having treats and these are treats um I can't get too mad M at them if they're being honest that listen this isn't good for you this is a treat and at that point it's a little bit more of a parental issue and if parents are trying to raise healthy Fit Kids and other than just very rarely as as a reward treat you know Indulgence allowing them to have something like this for breakfast I I'm a little more you know my eye is is aimed a little bit more towards the parents than towards the celebrities who might be endorsing it Without Really claiming that this is a health food item that's fair part of the controversy I believe has to do with the fact that previous to The Today Show segment where they revealed for the first time that they were you know doing this collab uh Jason Kelsey said to his brother on a podcast he he said it was ridiculous for parents to give Reese's Puffs to their children calling it candy yeah so it it seems like a bit of a flipflop you know like a little bit of hypocrisy but then he his argument was that what he says to his brother you know out of a sound bite that he might might have passed to his brother you know out of a larger uh longer form conversation on a podcast doesn't necessarily you know negate the fact that you can in fact have these Foods in moderation and still enjoy Health nonetheless Kelly means tweeted athletes should stop sponsoring food that destroys kids metabolic Health MH yeah I mean I want to of course I'm going to uh I'm going to air on the side of of health and leaning on the knowledge that we now have of understanding just how bad some the carbohydrate and sugar based you know treats are and items and particularly in the morning right when you're supposed to be trying to get you know that you're not supposed to be indulging too much during the morning right uh particularly when uh feeding young kids at school age and not getting them hyped up on sugar um I don't love the fact that the Kelsey brothers are are pedaling are endorsing products like this um I just but once again when when it comes to these items the cats out of the bag everybody knows they're bad for you cigarettes sugary fast food social media I kind of lean on the lean in the same direction on the social media conversation with a lot of people wanting to blame social media platforms for uh the ill effects of of you know social media use by children or the youth and I'm sorry that's like blaming uh whoever invented the printing press for M comp um it's you're you're the parents you're there these are tools that are going to be developed social media uh and and digital tools are not going to go away you're not going to be able to remove access to them um from the childhood experience unless you're monitoring it as a parent so I I don't like the I don't like Shifting the blame all to the companies that are providing products that might have pluses and minuses and taking the responsibility away from you know for children from their parents or from adults who at this point uh either know or have no reasonable reason reasonable stance not to know that some of these things are harmful yeah I I really uh appreciate the perspective because it is true that you can enjoy these Indulgence Foods now and then in moderation so to speak um and see no Health consequence whatsoever yeah um and in fact you know if you are a busy parent sometimes you know unfortunately that is it's better to be fed than to allow your child to go to school hungry sure and so if you don't have time to cook the eggs and the you know um the steak and eggs or whatever you know whatever the so-called optimized breakfast might look like you know it is great to have uh so-called cereal at your disposal but have you tried any of these newer high protein cereals that are on the market now unlike when we were children now I think one of the amazing things about the awareness of you know the potential harms of ultra-processed grain-based foods and the value of starting your morning with protein we've got cereals like magic spoon on the market that are fantastic magic spoon came on actually they're one of the sponsors of the of the podcast but I've been a fan of magic spoon since I first tried their cereal I don't know something like six years um prior to now they you know their their whole goal has been to bring back the nostalgic Vibe of the cereals of our youth but imbue those cereals with you know super high quality protein we have other cereal brands like three wishes which are amazing and you can now find these like Target carries them yeah yeah and that's fantastic and think you know you look back on it and it there was kind of a standard American that you have the steak and the the eggs and bacon breakfast and then you have the cereal slice of toast and orange juice breakfast breakfast and look once again looking back on that it's pure lunacy that that's what most American children were being fed for so long now if you can replace that you know you may you make your few um switch out the orange juice for something you know non-glycemic beverage um maybe a different type of toast and you have a a protein based cereal fantastic um and the fact that that is now an option for people is definitely a great thing and I think also speaks to how we're so much more informed about these types of items um just the inherently um yes I think the Kelsey Brothers probably need to choose one side or the other and say listen either we're going to be health and wellness Advocates or we're going to be guys who kind of are looking for a paycheck and because there's others who don't right there's others who don't hold themselves out to be health and wellness Advocates they say like I might do a McDonald's commercial I I might do I might endorse something that is a bit of a vice right um so I'd like to see them choose a lane um however you know I think as long once again as long as everybody's informed I just don't think the fact that there are 70 different types of cereals on the shelves anytime you go into a grocery store I think it's strange but I don't think it's going anywhere yeah I would agree with that all right moving on we've got uh you you How Trigger Warnings Treat Us Like Children uh brought to me an article about trigger warnings um apparently trigger warnings are not all they're cracked up to be possibly fruitless maybe anxiety inducing absolutely and I think this is pretty much obvious to anybody who looked at things through a clear lens once again looking at the historical trajectory of these things Society survived pretty well without trigger warnings for the 99.998% of of our Western Civilization we were moving ahead and that people were able to encounter material that was potentially uh potentially you know troubling or might trigger the trauma of a very small cross-section of people out there and we didn't know he needs to go ahead and warn them ahead of time other than the basic kind of categorization of our movies PG-13 movies PG movies figured all right these are perfect rating systems but they're better to have than not to have but we're not really treating people like children other than the PG movies and saying or G-rated movies trigger warnings I'm sorry right off the bat on their face are treating people like children like oh my God because uh because one out of 275 people might feel distraught or might be triggered by something that they might see that we have to stop and kind of put this warning in front of everybody and it's going to have an effect an anticipatory effect to everybody else who's going to be f with seeing it and yes trying trying to lean on a notion of resilience as opposed to safetyism and safe ism is the prioritization of emotional safety over everything else which is definitely where society's been leaning the last 10 15 years I don't think it's helping anybody um and yes some studies came out recently showing that trigger warnings don't help anybody they do not help anybody okay uh they don't create the the people that it's supposed to be protecting they don't avoid the material they don't handle the material better once they encounter it and everybody else is just creating anticipatory anxiety right so literally zero for three there's no positive benefit to trigger warnings other than for some people to get to pren and and kind of uh uh give a facade that they're compassionate sympathetic sophisticated evolved people because they support trigger warnings that's the only benefit that there is to trigger warnings and it's not much of a benefit at all so virtue virtue signaling essentially 100% you know I think virtue signaling unfortunately while a very while it does it is an accurate way to describe a lot of things you know the the meanings unfortunately been kind of squee it's been squeezed of all meaning so I'd like to come up with other ways to describe this but you know Hollow symbolism or kind of phony compassion how you know whatever you can say in that yes you know I I think that we need start leaning towards treating people like adults as opposed to kind of blanketing society with the types of things that you might see in a Kindergarten class that you really until about 2015 never saw in the adult world yeah and why does every single piece of content need to be rated you know I you brought up the movie movie rating system which is an artifact of a bygone era I mean we saw with I'm not going to I'm I'm actually going to disagree with you on that one because I think that there are some things I was listening to a Pulp Fiction a podcast about Pulp Fiction Bill Simmons and the rewatchables went deep into Pulp Fiction one of the great pieces of art of the the last 50 years right um I was probably 12 13 like yeah man I'm not going to say like that male rape scene yeah kids under 15 16 shouldn't see that shouldn't see that stuff I'm sorry yeah you're that's a disturbing thing you cannot process that is a thing that absolutely from all the knowledge we've built up over the decades and the centuries of modern civilization we can make a pretty good assessment that a a 10 11year old child is not going to process seeing that as soundly as a 20-year-old or 30y 40-year old person is going to so keep some more sexually explicit and disturbing and deviant uh stimuli away from children so I think it makes sense in that regard but that rating system had been pretty well tested over the course of decades and then all right you know we're not we're not making Society too prudish by making certain things are rated and we're not being too um permissible by making things PG rated So within we're may not have a perfect rating system but it's definitely not we're definitely not too far off the Mark um and that rating system existed for 50 60 years I'm talking about the types of things that you really have only seen as of the kind of since the Adolescent phase of social media in the digital age so I'm talking since the late 2000s who would have been who would have been shame Shameless enough to try to mention the notion of a trigger warning in 1997 or 2005 nobody you'd get left out of a room and rightfully so and this whole thing uh once again you know somebody I think it was Freddy Deo um who's a journalist who I love uh coined it safetyism is the prioritization of emotional safety and comfort over everything and that seems to be everyone's bending over backwards and walking on eggshells to support that to support safetyism and Trigger warnings is one of the is kind of one of the facets of safetyism and yeah it other than making people feel better that it shows that they get to signal to be more compassionate sensitive people it has no benefit no well why do you think it's acceptable these rating systems are acceptable for movies that you have to opt into and buy a ticket in order to uh in order to observe whereas on social media social media is like the Town Square where you know any can be exposed to pretty much anything on social media I mean X is now you know has come under Fire due to I mean I think it's it's a net positive that it's now it's it's become so free and open but there's porn on x there's you know all kinds of things that you know children are on are on that platform as well yeah I think I think people really knew the categories before right sexually explicit and violent those are the two categories of things that we may need to warn people about right um other than that you know hey hey there might be a lie misinformation nobody ever was some people are going to some people are going to lie right and if it meets the standard definition of defamation and slander then they could get sued for it but other than that people are going to lie and we don't have to warn people about what may or may not be truthful because the people that are giving those warnings aren't that good at deciphering what's true from what's false right um so once again I think the standard is like all right material that's sexually explicit or that is Gory or violent um might get a higher rating and anything else uh pretty much you know is not we're not going to make that the criteria for determining the different ratings social media and the internet of course more you know uh the delivery mechanism and trying to guard and trying to put up uh trying to be a gatekeeper for Content it's just more difficult you know by the inherent nature of the delivery system right um and so I don't you know if you were to give a trigger warning because children might see you know uh dead body like someone with their head cut off that is just beheaded like okay maybe but we're not doing that we're giving trigger warnings over something that you know you might have been yelled at when you were a kid and here's a dad yelling at a here's someone raising their voice and this might trigger your trauma which leads to the over def you know the expanded definition of trauma which is another topic we could totally get into yeah what do you make of the fact though that um you know as as an entertainment industry expert um and as an expert in IP you know there is some argument to be made for the fact that you know our you know movies have been essentially to some degree suffered under the constraints of this rating system and we saw recently with Deadpool and Wolverine you know it like hit records box office records for their weekend opening and it's a Marvel movie it's owned by Disney but it's rated R and it shows I think this you know a desire for um content that is uh you know that that that younger people in a way are um you know I think ready to uh you know and will Embrace content that's a little bit more edgy yeah but once again that's not a new rating system those are those these are these are controvers these are issues uh or or distinctions that people had to deal with for a long time and all throughout the 70s ' 80s 90s 2000s um producers and and creators were dealing with ratings issues of whether or not they have to cut you know a couple f-words out of the movie or a little less Blood and Guts and I think it was might have been either Tarantino or Oliver Stone who said they put in a couple extra [ __ ] and a couple extra murder scen just because they could say okay I'll cut that and then they end up just where they were you know anticipated where they wanted to be in the first place and they've been able to throw a couple bones to the sensors um so but I like the tension of I like this tension this tension of the artists being libertine and there being some counterveiling Force that's trying to pump the brakes on that and out of that tension leads to the right answer right um once again as to the traditional categories sexually explicit material and violence um I think that one once you start dipping and trying to censor stuff based on pure content on point of view on uh on whether or not on the notion of misinformation I mean that's when you really the the train starts to go off the tracks because that's not something that we if a documentary came out the rating uh for the documentary wasn't based on whether or not someone thought the documentary presented true or false information right yeah if somebody if it if it met the definition of defamation if it portrayed or asserted uh a a a factual inaccuracy about a specific person in that documentary that person can sue yeah yeah well said from that that Harvard study that was published in the clinical the journal clinical psych psychological science there was evidence that trigger warnings sometimes caused anticipatory anxiety but they did nothing to relieve the distress of viewing sensitive material nor did the warnings deter people from viewing potentially distur content in fact they sometimes Drew folks in wow so fruitless indeed yeah what was that study uh everybody don't think of a pink elephant so everybody in the room thought of a pink elephant it's how it goes unfortunately there you go there you go all right so another big uh controversy Pushing Vegan Diets at the Olympics over the past couple weeks has been well the Olympics has been a source of many many different controversies I don't even know where to start but um for one they tried to be the most quote unquote sustainable Olympics yet and in in so doing they have committed to over 60% of the food um being plant based for the first time and this has caused quite an uproar within the Olympian Community um with many uh clamoring for higher quality sources of protein like meat and eggs to the degree that the catering company in fact um has subsequently I've read allegedly placed a massive order for steak and eggs and the like what are your thoughts well going back to Virtue signaling being a very accurate way to portray it but maybe not a a word this people some people tune out now because it been used so much but it's it accurately describes this there is no the the marginal distinction in these so-called carbon footprint from serving meat to the athletes at the Olympic Village versus not when you put that up against simply the carbon footprint created by people flying from all over the world into thee that's where it all falls apart 90% of this so-called sustainability stuff falls apart when all the people uh all the people advocating for it or trying to apply these policies all are utilizing modes of transportation that creat in exponentially a larger carbon footprint than anything they're saving that's where it usually falls apart and it clearly is here um if you can and the problem is they always try to get anyone who opposes this on the back foot by making it look like you don't care about the environment or global warming I was like no I just like to run a cost benefit analysis I just like things to make sense right and that we have to we have to just accept that some aspects of modernity like being able to get on a plane and fly in 10 hours to another continent these are things that people these are advancements in in Civilization and society and they're not going anywhere and people are going to keep on using them so to the extent that we can uh reduce our carbon footprint or uh support sustainability initiatives without giving up the basic vestages of Modern Life and and human advancement like air travel or higher quality food I mean we're going to run that cost benefit analysis in what universe is the cost benefit analysis of disrupting the diet of Olympian Olympic athletes who have literally been training their entire lives of which nutrition is a basic component of their training how on Earth is disrupting that to reduce the carbon footprint of the universe by 000000000000 Z 0 0 1% how does that cost benefit work out in a million years um and so you look at it and you're like okay this is an organization and institution that simply wants to look like they're obeying the orthodoxies of modern Progressive institutions that's it there's no other benefit other than compliance and Conformity yeah absolutely I mean it feels like gaslighting I mean these are the world's Elite athletes yes who have had their nutrition so dialed so as to be able to perform at the level that they are able to perform at and here you have whatever Authority is in charge of determining the the the the food on site at the Olympics um limiting options to highquality Source animal Source foods to me just seems absolutely insane yeah kind of yeah what what's the rest of Paris doing right now do you think steak fre stopped for the week for two weeks because the Olympics I think nobody's serving ham or Stak fre in the rest of Paris that's going to dwarf any any marginal you know benefit from supposed sustainability um so yeah that that's it I mean it's not that people are necessarily anti-environment or want to be dismissive about concerns or want to but we're not dealing with Mr Burns and the Springfield power plant you know dumping toxic waste in a river for drinking water for children that's not what's happening here but they want they want to assert that that's the casee that if you oppose if you oppose any sustainability initiatives that you're simply being dismissive of any concerns about the environment no you just have to balance out people's ability to function in a modern society with sustainability initiatives and look for where it makes sense and where it doesn't and in this case it absolutely did not yeah yeah and also it's a very ethnocentric um first world privileged position I mean these these athletes are coming from all over the world there are no Hunter gather tribes that are vegan um you know I mean it's humans are incredibly adaptable and you bring together the world's the world's most prized athletes and um it just seems like they were it's almost like they were trying to piss people off I don't think they're trying to P I think that overestimate gives too that gives them too much credit I'm telling you the people involved at the heads of these organizations and this is where people I think go a little stray in a lot of the criticism around the world's economic forum and that they a lot of stupid ideas come out of the world economic Forum these are just powerful people who gained power for being good at one thing and are now trying to do another thing that are not good at that have stupid ideas about this other thing right this is not they're not some mustache twirling clou swab uh super evil villain who's plotting and scheming to ruin Society they're just very out of touch wealthy rich people and like one of the benefits of growing up in Los Angeles is that I got used to I got exposed to a lot of really out of touch wealthy people as as a young person I was like oh wow these people are really really good at trading stocks or really good at making movies and they're really stupid about everything else so people the types of people at the world economic Forum or the types of people involved in the intern uh the ioc or that making these decisions they're just trying to get claps on the back from other people in their Social Circle that's it and so they will they'll get some people oh my God we're so proud of you for uh uh for furthering this sustainability initiative and they'll think that that means that they're on the right track cuz all that social proof and all that social signaling in their own Social Circles supports that and they're not thinking it through beyond that and then they can go vilify and demonize whoever disagrees with them as a meany toxic toxic reactionary you know knuckle dragger yeah now there's no doubt that you can gain as much muscle on a plant-based diet as on an omnivorous diet but you have to work the levers of you know appropriate protein intake in order to be able to do that and now the the Olympics and the food in the Olympic Village is not the time to do it disrupting all the the nutritional PL of all these athletes like what that's really is they I don't think they did it purposefully but it's really spitting in their face do you think there's an economic incentive um I mean some PE I also think people overestimate that I think I'm telling you it's the social signaling proof it's the desire to want to portray yourself as the good guy or sure virtue signaling right uh these once again I got exposed to a lot of these rich powerful out of touch people at a very young age they want to tell themselves they're the good guys absolutely if they said that the um that evolved Savvy people are in favor of sustainability initiatives and want to reduce carbon footprint and that's going to be their North Star that's going to drag them um the whole idea that they went and spend all this money and then you know um were wanted to replace more expensive meat with cheaper vegetables I don't really think that moved the needle too much on their budget I think they really wanted to look like they just wanted to signal that they're in favor of sustainability initiatives at the expense of everything else yeah it feels really good when you're on a moral high horse yeah it's it's a great Sugar High yeah it's a great Sugar High absolutely wow I love that another big controversy was the uh the maybe you can speak more to this um the the boxing match it was Female Boxers With Y Chromosomes like one of the earliest controversies to come out of the Olympics sure um there was a u one of the um two there were actually two two there were two yeah so unpack this for us okay so there were two female or supposedly female boxers who are participating in the female boxing competition at the Olympics these are two boxers that had been disqualified by the international boxing Association from the world championships in 2023 won a gender test not necessarily a hormonal test but a gender test revealed that these two boxers have Y chromosomes does that mean necessarily they that they are men or what that means one of two things either they were transgender and were born strictly men with XY chromosomes and male genitalia and they were men and got transitional surgery or that they fall in that kind of strange very unique intersex category it appears that these two boxers fell in the second that intersex category they at least currently do not have male genitalia but they did they portrayed themselves as female through throughout their entire lives at the 2023 uh world championships for the international boxing Association performed a gender test and was revealed that chromosomally they are not women okay they may not be strict they may not be fully men but they do fall in between they are intersex individuals and most likely they have either some remnant or of gonads or other testosterone producing internal glands that most other women do not have and they were disqualified the ioc used to look to the IBA the international boxing Association is as one of the regulatory bodies that informed their standards about gender distinctions and determining who gets to perform in the women's competition and the men's competition about three months after the IBA disqualified these two boxers the ioc uh uh released the IBA as one of the regulatory bodies that it looked to little suspicious is it not so I have some friends that you know so some people in reaction to this came out and were like oh my God these are men fighting women in these transgender boxers and I was like okay they're wrong they were not necessarily transgender boxers however they absolutely did fail a gender test and it was revealed that they have Y chromosomes by one of the regulatory bodies that literally was one of the ioc's regulatory bodies until a year ago okay does that seem like something that is ground for controversy I certainly see I certainly do if if you listen because there's backlash to the initial backlash the initial backlash is how do you let these two non- women perform a box against other women the backlash to that was wait a second they've these people have boxed their entire life in the female category they're not transgender what are you talking about okay then the IBA because the IBA was like listen we disqualified them for valid purposes said these two people have Y chromosomes okay you should not be letting people with Y chromosomes box in the female category that's not okay and that's why we disqualified them this is clear-cut science and we warned the ioc about it and the ioc disregarded our warnings and so people I had some people say I I think this is only a scientific issue it's not a culture wars issue really really then why did the ioc after years of having the IBA be one of its regulatory bodies that it looked to 3 months after they disqualified these two intersex boxers uh uh get rid of them as a regul as one of their regulatory advisers that sure seems like a culture War item once again the ioc from these sustainability issues uh or or initiatives that don't seem to have any valid basis to being certainly seem to be falling in favor of gender fluidity when when there are edge cases when there's decisions that could fall on either side they seem to consistently fall on one side so if I'm going to look at that you have to ignore a lot of stuff to Pretend This is an a culture War item and then this was just a goodfaith decision based purely on the science that the the ioc scientific standards now now uh still count these purely as women you have to disregard that you have to essentially say that the IBA the international boxing Association well-regarded and completely validated boxing boxing Association disqualified these two people that they were wrong and the ioc based purely on the science was right do you think there were any cultural concerns anything about the cultural Wars that informed that I think you have to be pretty naive to believe the answer is no so biologically they they possess XY chromosomes making them biologically male but some have argued that they you know that they have female genitalia so that makes them biologically female on the other hand you know if you look to the culture War and what the culture wars have said about possessing you know male or female genitalia genitals do not Define one's gender yeah which is odd yeah well they get twisted right and but once again for hundreds of years nobody ever questioned these things about who should go in which bathrooms about who should be housed in which jails about who should participate in which sports was understood that hey I'm sorry if you are if you do possess male qualities okay like a y chromosome if you happen to be interex you have Y chromosome but you have female genit tell you uh sorry the the activity of getting to punch women who only have XX chromosomes is not one you get to participate in yeah that should be clear so what do you think is the solution creating a new category like an open ceg I'm sorry they're not the priority the priority is the are the women with the with XX chromosomes they are the priority we do not create policy we do not create societal standards around 0 one% edge cases that's no way to run a society yeah I would agree with that um there were a lot of people that did come out at the very beginning and I think it's it's more reflective of the times that we live in you know cuz we have seen so many cases of you know trans women competing in professional sports against um against women and um and so you know I think many people did jump the gun and that was kind of unfair yeah but you can't blame them for jumping the gun because all the institutions have been pushing the wrong policy here make the ivy league making female swimmers change in a locker room with a male that still had male genitalia they Leah Thomas still has a penis they were making female swimmers female college students CH change in the locker room with a male who just happen to get a little hormonal surgery and get a couple things chopped off and pretend that he was a female and swim against them okay so I don't blame people for jumping the gun because other institutions have pedal uh policy athletic policy based purely on gender fluidity and and transgender ideology which is wrong you cannot do that so so the fact that people then jumped the gun and assumed that this was another instance of that while it was still but here's the thing they weren't fully wrong there's no these the IBA was right if you have a y chromosome sorry you don't get to participate in competitive Sports of punching other women I've read reports that there were uh hormonal tests do we know whether or not that's true um I think there were some hormonal tests and I think like based on pure testosterone they didn't even fail the testosterone test but that doesn't matter right because there could be men with low testosterone there could be men with low testosterone or clearly have penises XY chromosomes have low testosterone technically could qualify um within the testosterone guidelines for female boxing do you let them box females inter wow you do not yeah wow makes a ton of sense yeah I try to have empathy I mean I I I I try to ask myself like what would uh you know yeah Max I'll ask you this question who what should be the goal who should be the target of our empathy normal women who just want to participate in their sport or the 0 one% edge cases yeah I think the I'm sorry everyone yeah and everyone can say well you should try to have empathy for everyone in some circumstances either one or the other has to take priority either the empathy for the the contr for the control group of females who are entirely female who don't get want to get punched by people who have male genetic uh uh male genetic characteristics I'm sorry either they're the priority or the 0 1% edge cases are the priority there you got have to choose one or the other yeah yeah and I don't think we have all the answers um as to whether or not people with differences in sexual development DSD I think is the the term that intersex has been um supplanted by um I don't think yet we fully understand all the advantages that they may potentially have compared to XX women sure well also they're not necessarily consistent right they don't necessarily have consistent advantages but once again if you're trying to create guidelines that count can account for every bespoke characteristic of every situation and essentially trying to create well here's the women's category and here's the men's category and here what our guidelines are to determine who can't participate in the women's category you have to come up with some clear guidelines and I think in coming up with some of the clear guidelines you're going to you're going to take out you're you're going to exclude some people that maybe you could make an argument should be inv included in the category but I'm sorry once again they're not the priority the protection and the sanctity and the Integrity of purely women sports should be the priority yeah I would agree with that I would agree with that um all right moving on wow I love this covering so many leaping from one topic to another and uh and dude I just I just love the the the passion and the veracity you bring to these issues by the way Matt Matt you're a fantastic follow on social media Instagram I love your Instagram account appreciate that very much yeah yeah it's super fun always tackling a different hot button topic um in the sociopolitical Spectrum super fun and others you know trying to keep it's a it's a broad world everyone's like oh it's a political you have a political podcast or a political account like not really it's like that's that's one subcategory you know the what you're trying to do is understand and synthesize the world around you and that's a lot of different varied topics and you also have your yeah you have your own podcast as well yeah for sure well you know go give that plug right now the prevailing narrative is the name of the podcast typically every Thursday social accounts are Matt balinsky mat a ttb i l i n Sky um if anyone wants to follow along but you know you will get the cornicopia of topics that me and Max are are tackling today yeah that you're definitely one of my favorite social commentators thank you very much yeah yeah I I I very much appreciate your perspective on things um all right so Evolution of Psychedelics Culture how psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture this is one that you brought to me that I thought was uh was an interesting choice so why do you want to discuss this article this is another yet another vesage of really contemporary culture that I don't think people are talking about enough like what what you right under sub barely subconsciously understand that okay great 2024 there's this weird dichotomy that we have so much more knowledge about nutrition and health yet people are generally more unhealthy than they were 30 years ago odd little odd right and I don't think people talk about that that Quirk very much another one is the revolution in psychedelics over the last like I said 10 15 years and its cultural place that a lot of the a lot of the a lot of the culture around psychedelics that we remember from the 20th century was from the Baby Boomers experience in the 60s where this whole generation of people that you know not didn't even smoke weed all of a sudden from 1962 to 1968 went from barely having a drink and had skirts at their ankles to running around naked in fields and pumping themselves full of lstd right and it was thought about as very psychoactive hallucinogens and okay great we put we we put that in the drawer and folded that nicely into the 60s and 70s and then people stopped doing it in the 80s and 90s and even into the 2000s 2010s and 2020s there's been a psych psychedelics Revolution people are doing this both more recreationally and in social activities it it's more you know uh of the party drugs people do psychedelics and like 1995 like the big partyers weren't doing oh great let's do some ketamine that's not what they were doing um but it's also intersected strangely with achievement culture and the most prominent names are people that are very much you know uh uh entrepreneurial focused and and some of are more notable entrepreneurs are kind of advocating and been part of some of the Advocates of Psych the Psychedelic Revolution and that Cas you know micro doing or casual use of psilocybin or ketamine or LSD or even some stronger stuff is now kind of threaded into the kind of hustle bro entrepreneur Tech Guy culture and I don't think people talk about that it pops up every once in a while when uh you get a tragedy story like Tony Shay who uh and this is happening a lot right like person gains independent wealth is freed from all material concerns has a big exit it and then starts wearing uh uh beads and you know male uh male robes and going to music festivals and doing way too many psychedelics and gets lost in the sauce Burning Man Burning Man culture exactly burn if you want to call it music festival culture Burning Man culture but a lot of it's okay the the the kind of reputation in the 60s is that the Slackers did that now the most type A achievement based people are embracing this culture and I think that's that's what that piece was about and I think that's really interesting in that you know the the the real high Achievers the only one that people ever really looked to was Steve Jobs the only guy who was super successful in business but was also kind of associated with psychedelics with Steve Jobs and you know that's why he was at least the story was that he you know he he was so unique in uh design respect and that he had this these experiences doing God knows what in you know in ashram in the Himalayas for a couple years before he came back and became a computer developer um and now it's everybody it's most guys you it's once again you go contrast to recent eras in 2004 someone gets Rich do they become the berning man guy very few of them did these days go see who becomes the Burning Man guy who's doing all psychedelics or who's advocating for micro doing and you know um and and kind of incremental ketamine and psilocybin use or okay great let's all go do a psilocybin we'll take the team for a retreat and go do a psilocybin ceremony like you're seeing that a lot it's not it's not an it's it's not a fringe thing anymore yeah it's super interesting now these compounds are not without without their their respective risks but what are the purported benefits of some of the more commonly used ones like psilocybin for example sure um you know that people may have blockages in connecting with themselves uh I mean if you want to get really woo woo about it that you can't connect with your heart you're too that you're too M you know you're stuck in your own head on materialistic uh and you know you feel senses of appreciation love and connection that you hadn't in your that in your day-to-day existence it's almost like when you haven't meditated for a while and you like oh my god I've been clenching my jaw for the last 36 months straight um and and similar benefits of of that regard that there's aspects of your brain that were lying dormant and are now stimulated um so they definitely I'm sure you've you've had people on these well you've indulged I'm sure um both yourself personally and had people on who have discussed you know some of these topics yeah yeah well I personally I've been I I've always been extremely conservative with mind altering substances um and it wasn't until my mid3 that I decided to experiment with lowd do psilocybin me too I'm glad I I was in my 30s when I started doing that cuz you're you your prefrontal cortex is fully developed you I think at at that point you kind of have you know hopefully you've you've there's you've been able to assess your relationship with addictive potentially addictive substances I don't think psilocybin actually has that much addictive potential but um but yeah so I started to um dabble with with lowd do ibin and um and I found it to be an incredible creative uh lubricant for lack of a better term you know in fact the when I first my first my very first experiences with lowd do soloc cybin that was around the time when I began writing genius Foods um which I think is you know it's a book that uh you know it's a it's a it's it's a book that obviously has it's an achievement it's an achievement in that field of study and creativity it's achieved material success but it it also is a book that I think um you know part of the success that it's achieved is due to the fact that you know it talks about these ideas in a really easy to digest um way and a lot of I credit um many of the passages in genius foods to um when I was dabbling with these substances for the first time and I was out socially uh doing so and I was talking about the science which I love to do I'm a I'm a big evangelist for the science that that I write about and um and I would find new creative ways of articulating the science that I was like later that night going back to my word document to write about and um some of those metaphors and analogies that I came up with while under the so-called you know the the influence of lowd do psilocybin have made their way into the book yeah and PE lots of people point to those types of experiences and similar to other you know other drugs that people some people advocate for a weed just sometimes just chills you out sometimes just gets you in a more relaxed positive frame of mind and let some stuff bubble to the surface um or cleans out the subconscious and I think a lot of people and that's part of what has been driving this revolution over the past once again everyone that people were not doing nearly as much psilocybin chocolates ketamine LSD until about 10 12 years ago there's absolutely been a revolution in this regard yeah what do you think has uh been the the driving force for that I mean I've been trying to think this through I mean a little bit of it is the music right and the drugs and we've seen from throughout the ages drugs and music have a bit of a symbiotic uh relationship and as music became more electronic and less vocal and more instruments and you know electronic based that works better with some of these psychedelic drugs that all this music festival culture the music festivals had to happen right the ACT yeah the EDM um that funnels these drugs funnel into that and that music funnels into these drugs and there's better symbiotic uh uh relationship there than classic rock or hip-hop right yeah um so that's one factor that's for sure right um I think the way that the economy works that yeah a lot of people got richer a lot quicker this this Century than previously I mean Gary Gary vaynerchuck is like listen I was coming up weren't any startups in the 80s and 90s like there were just a couple people who are really technologically oriented there was no internet you weren't going to just come up with uh uh a new brand and launch it off the internet and you know go go raise a $700,000 seed round and go launch your business that was not possible um so a a lot of people were freed from Material concerns at an earlier age and were then looking for higher you know higher attainments of Consciousness and a lot of looked in this direction so once again that's also chicken or the egg um is the is the hustle culture and the business culture in the digital era more conducive to do you know uh uh more conducive to doing psychedelics um once you've already achieved something or does just make more sense if you're not sitting behind a desk all day and you know you're out there being adventurous and creating something that you're more likely to do psilocybin than than to not do it um so but I think it's those two factors are definitely at play um and from there you know who knows I mean the fact that people stood up music festivals all over the world and we live in a more globalized connected Society where the option to go and travel to a far off land to a cool music festival and these are probably drugs that you want to be doing if you do that it's just more opportunity I I think those are all factors do you think that all that these drugs might One Day become we might see the like what what's happened in the Cannabis industry the fact that now like they're it's essentially maybe not at the yet at the federal level but um here in California and certain other states Oregon I believe yeah you can buy cannabis products super easily yeah I mean it's it's certainly headed that way I mean it's drifting into from Black Market to gray Market um will it get as white Market as as as cannabis I think probably not quite because it's more impactful you don't want people going around you know on ketamine and cocing all day long um and and something we haven't talked about is just like the benefits and a lot of the people that are at that's the only Pro I don't deny the benefits the problem is some of the people that are advocating the benefits are denying the burdens and the risks and it's coming back to bite some people because there's a couple people that I know that have got caught caught up that thought they were doing a real positive on you know found a real discover y uh uh in doing psilocybin and ketamine who got lost in the sauce and then started spinning out and you know it's more than a couple people and once again if you don't if you believe it's nothing but potential benefits the Chan of you getting getting lost in that increase exponentially um and so I think it's going I think there will probably be you know kind of natural and societal antibodies to it becoming as widely used and widespread as cannabis um but it's going to incrementally become more prevalent more legal for sure I also think a lot of people possibly mistakenly uh see them as a shortcut to through the real work that often needs to be done with regards to mental health you know absolutely seeing uh therapist for example working through issues a lot of people now will you know you you hear reports of people even in our peer group taking trips to Peru to go on these like iasa Journeys and they come back and they claim to have had you know the veil lifted you know from their eyes but um of encounter the same people 6 months later and they're same exact yeah or doing it again or they're the they're essentially the same people you know yeah you you see a lot of that um and maybe and you know I'm just noodling here is that the positivity or the the high from some of these discoveries are getting reconnected with an emotional Center might Elevate them temporarily and it's not false it's not bad but it might distract you from some stuff that you're keeping Under Wraps um and that going you know you you don't have it all figured out maybe you have a little bit of it figured out so like don't throw out the baby with the bath water um and be like okay great you know I'm going to be a little more attuned to my emotions and a little more sensitive and not get lost in the minutia of day-to-day life anymore but you can't ignore the things that are happening you know over here a bcde e f and g issue that you know is is going to catch up to you one of these days yeah they're not a repl for doing the real work they could be an an adjunct therapy and certainly like in the right set and setting I mean there's all kinds of really crazy and and super positive research coming out of sites like John's Hopkins University NYU I know is is using these compounds in the setting of PTSD major depression even um helping people get off their addictive Tendencies like smoking alcoholism and the like so it's it's super exciting but they you know but again a lot of this all of this research is being done in a very specific setting setting which I don't know is being replicated in these more sort of offshoot uh experiences yeah um and you know going back to the the original topic I mean it's like strangely now strangely now intertwined with business culture and I mean me and you you know we're talking about it here a little bit as kind of passive observers of hey this is interesting but I don't know we'll have to see how that story ends I mean this could be uh uh however many you know some of the people that are might be advocating for a corporate retreat to go out to the woods and you know take some take some mushrooms I don't know that could go very wrong we'll see it could it could all right let's talk about social media a lot of people now How Meta Has Ruined Instagram are I think are frustrated and this is Illustrated in an article that came out in the Atlantic why I hate Instagram now the site has allegedly pivoted made a pivot which I think is fairly uh plain to observed to entertainment putting loved ones in competition with ephemera so transitory um you know essentially fast food style content which uh I think betrays the original purpose of Instagram um and social networking in general which is to again you know to to to be social sure so um meta Facebook always been the best second movers no nobody in the history of business has been better at being the second person to start doing something copying another function that somebody else began with and then leveraging it and leveraging that up um they did it with stories with Snapchat they're like oh wait whoa this whole SnapChat thing where you can do a sequence of posts is getting very popular oh my god let's find some space for that at the top of everybody's profile and now everybody can do stories and share more things than just whatever they wanted to post on their main feed that went well that went very well for for meta and Instagram um it was purely additive it didn't seem to to cannibalize any of the main functions and you know loud CH SN loud people like to chitchat like me got to overpost okay fantastic um then Tik Tok comes along and all of a sudden okay wait a second people want to see comedy entertainment and category experts and be more in a traditional sense of choosing professional or premium content from creators they like as opposed to seeing just stuff from their family and friends and people that are connected to them first or second order in the social graph um and so Instagram and Facebook went ahead and tried to replicate Tik Tok with reals not one not just by offering reals but now prioritizing reals four or five years ago on Instagram even when stories was already jamming you didn't see oh here's this really funny clip from six weeks ago that just came through my feed right you saw only stuff from your friends within that were connected to you on the social graph and now you know you don't necessarily see stuff from your friends and family you see a lot of stuff that was otherwise boosted and that's what that's Tik Tok it was boosted elsewhere because people you know it got a lot of likes it got a lot of Engagement over here so now we're going to go boost it over there and that's we're do what they're doing with reals um they've tanked a lot of people and you know I'm no no exception they've Tanked people story views because they don't want people they're trying to uh drive drive people away from stories towards posting reals um and that's what Instagram is more so now it's not that you don't see any content from your friends but the share of content that you see from third parties that you have no connection to but put out popular post is going to be a higher share of what you see um I don't love it I understand why others do and you can't really deny the numbers and we can't really deny the results that Tik Tok exploded in growth and engagement and Instagram is it's just what they do they try to replicate others success and they've been very good at it um and so it would be great if there was almost like if there was a choice and I don't think Twitter did this well but at least they had the right idea in mind it was like uh it was like what's it your content people you follow and then for you so one feed is from you know what you're engaging in from people that you follow and another another phase is them Rec recommending stuff to you I don't think that was executed well by by Twitter I'm not calling it X okay Twitter did not execute it well but they had the right idea maybe Instagram needs to do that say hey here's here's your algorithm from 2019 just based on seeing stuff from people that you follow people that you're friends within you know the first or second order of the social graph and here's your Tik Tok feed of here's funny Andor interesting stuff from really popular creators that went viral that we think you're going to want but like in the marketplace of ideas how on Earth can your friends family loved ones the people who you you know initially followed when you signed up for the app presumably an app like Instagram how can they possibly compete with professional content creators who are clamoring for cloud eyeballs likes views on they're not going to um I guess what Instagram would retort is that you're still seeing some stuff from it's like Hey My My Story views didn't go to zero you know they went down 30% um and that's the experience that I've seen from a lot of other people who have palpable but not massive followings I'm also not putting out a lot of reals um so they're saying yeah you know you've got a percentage of it is going to be people that you just happen to follow and a perent you know within that we're going to thread in here and there some other popular stuff that we just think that that went viral that might be people that you want to start following yeah now I do believe there is a way to switch your timeline on Instagram on the main Instagram feed from your from the algorithmically um to just time based to just time based to like those that you follow but I I Believe by default when you open the app it defaults to this like to this algorithm yeah that makes sense yeah yeah interesting I thought it was the only Twitter that had that option but yeah I mean that but also in 2019 it wasn't strictly time based they were also editorializing a little bit but they were editorializing mostly around your friends and your your family and people that you followed so um yeah I mean do I have a final conclusion as to which one is better um not necessarily but it's definitely some some people like Conor fedis dorf who's uh who wrote that article in the Atlantic he's got you know his views on it and it's it's definitely turning some people off but it's clearly a change and it's clearly going to be impactful as to how people encounter the world because let's be honest your average person spends a lot of time on Instagram yeah from an IP standpoint how does a company like meta get away with like so blatantly ripping off other Tech comp well because it's not not cut it's like uh the way they taught us in law school do you can you do you have copyrightable protection over the notion of a game show no or a dating show no other people can other people can create and produce a game show uh a dating show can you start can some if you do a a dating show that's one female contestant being romanced by 15 male contestants okay can someone replicate that entirely uh maybe maybe not that's a little bit more on the edge if your game if your dating show is one female contestant goes on a date with 15 guys all at the Cheesecake Factory okay you're getting pretty specific you can't go do another show where it's one female contestant who goes on 15 dates to The Cheesecake Factory like that's too much that's that's mimicking it to to too much of a a specific degree that that makes a lot of sense basic functions like the notion of stories like that that's you can't you cannot you cannot assert a monopolistic domain over that just like you can't insert a monopolistic domain over the notion of a a a photographs and and video-based uh social media platform somebody else can start an Instagram competitor they're just going to lose what do you make of X or Matt’s Thoughts on Elon Musk’s X Twitter yeah I mean listen it's it's the more permissive platform now it just is it's what I don't I'm fine with more permissive as long as it's uh as as long as it's um imposing its rules consistently that's all I'm looking for out of it okay a lot of people particularly friends in the Jewish Community because there's some uh there's some very loud influencers who are clearly being paid by somebody to ex exposee any number of anti-Semitic views it's like how do they allow all this anti-Semitism on the platform was like well it's allowing everything else too yeah it's like there's a lot of bad people on the platform and it's saying we're not going to try to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys because anytime someone tries to do that they do it really badly and the last regime in Twitter before Elon bought it did it really badly so if you're looking at the the track record and the data points as supportive up should platforms try to editorialize and distinguish morality other than a very narrow sliver of community guidelines like hey you can't you can't you can't uh uh engage an activity that would be illegal off the platform like if you go and say Hey I want to hire someone to kill this guy you're committing a crime you can't go on Twitter and say hey I'm taking submissions who wants to murder this person for me that's illegal it's illegal off Twitter it should be illegal on Twitter beyond that you know a certain Nar like I said kind of a narrow selection of community guidelines that generally match what community guidelines have been for other websites and social platforms over the past 20 years other than those items these sites should be generally permissive you've got other people that say oh now under under Elon it's all anti-Semitism and hate what where the [ __ ] were you what what do you think these people just hopped on on Twitter in 20 2023 I assure you all these people were on Twitter beforehand you just didn't hear about them because you weren't paying attention Okay all the ha you think you think Twitter was all rainbows and sunshine before Elon came along Twitter was a hate-filled hostile toxic environment top to bottom even before only with some like really strange sensuous liberal progressives running the show who might ban you because you called Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner that's it that's the only difference okay so the whole idea that all this started when Elon took over is just a complete fantasy yeah I mean I'm I'm Jewish and I I've definitely come across anti- semitism on X but I'm much I'm I'm I'm so grateful that we have a platform where it's not being censored by you know the so-called fact Checkers I'm I'm I'm happy that such a platform now exists as as horrible as anti-Semitism or any other form of racism sure you know you're more likely yeah there's more likely to be some uh some kind of flagrantly anti-Semitic people who have large followings on Twitter you know what else they're not going to do they're not going to go ban you from trying to retweet the story about the hunter Biden laptop which was entirely true okay they're not going to try to ban you from uh making claims about the vaccine which were entirely true or for uh uh or for expressing your grievance or opposition to mask policy like people were getting banned for those types of activities under the prior regime so you know something with that trade-off I'm going to take Elon absolutely 100% man so fun well love getting a love getting to do this with you brother same Where to Find Matt here man D way overdue yeah way overdue um one last question for you but before we get to that where can I guess you've already dropped your social Handles in the podcast but just remind listeners yeah everybody's social primarily Instagram and Twitter M tt b i l i NSK y um podcast is the prevailing narrative so if you want more of this basically go follow Matt on all the on all the platforms very entertaining thank you very much if you want to dive in swim a little bit in the deep end come follow me I love it brother uh well Living a Genius Life I don't know if you know this but the last question that I asked everybody on the podcast what does living a genius life mean to you got it um you know genius life is consistent engagement in the search for truth and understanding of the world around you and whether it be nutrition or some of the the understanding of cultural stimuli that we discussed on on this episode um or just what your personal relationships are is just consistently you know testing your testing out your beliefs your assumptions about what you see around you and to try to get you know just a little bit closer to the truth love it amen hey if you like that video you need to check out this one here and I'll see you there [Music] [Music]