I started listening to the JRE a few months ago, and dropped in here hoping for some intelligent discussion on the points raised during the podcast. There aren’t a whole lot of places where the conversation can swing naturally from jui juitsu to low carb, intermitent fasting to shrooms, quickly and naturally.

Instead, well …

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what exactly it means to be a powerful, higher primate, and I decided to put those thoughts down here, see if I could spark a little discussion. If you’d rather talk about Rogain being cunty, feel free to tell me to fuck off.

Physically powerful

This is why I started listening to the JRE. Rogan should be a stereotype. He’s a pot-smoking, shroom-munching comedian, and he should be a fat shlub who never gets off the couch. Instead, he’s a black belt jui juitsuka with a six pack. I was really interested in hearing from a guy whose public persona is based around not giving a fuck, but who has achieved things that very clearly require focus and dedication.

If you want to be a powerful primate, you need to take care of your body. You don’t need to tap black belts, you don’t need to have a five hundred pound deadlift, and you don’t necessarily need to see every shredded ab. But you need to push yourself. You need to strain and struggle. You need to make your body uncomfortable, you need to make it adapt, you need to make it evolve.

I’m only in my early thirties, but I’m pretty banged up. My left clavicle is an inch lower than the right, because of a bad judo fall. My knees are screwed up from squatting six hundred pounds. My waist is bigger than it needs to be, because it’s a lot easier to stop for pizza on the way home. There are things I can’t do anymore. There are things I can’t do right now. But fuck it if I’m going to give up.

I’ll never be the guy I was when I was twenty, but I’m going to wake up tomorrow stronger than I was today. I’m eating keto again, and the pounds are already coming off. I bit the bullet and went to a physical therapist, and I can finally squat two plates again. And maybe, once I’m all put back together, I’ll visit that BJJ club down the street.

But I’m doing all of this the smart way, because:

Mentally powerful

The thing that really sets us apart from other animals, besides our thumb, is our intelligence. We have an unmatched capacity to learn and then to do. The problem is, we don’t often use it.

That’s one of the things I love about podcasts, and not just the JRE. I can plug in my iPod and listen to a discussion on the paleo diet, High Intensity Training, the genetic bias towards promiscuity, or how the one percent is fucking us all in the collective ass. We have never, ever had more access to information in the history of our species.

And we have more opportunities to be tested, too. I don’t always agree with Christopher Ryan, but I listen to his podcast every week, because it makes me think. It drives me nuts when Rogan talks about shrooms as if they’re a spiritual experience and not just a chemical reaction. When Adam Kokesh talks about being an anarchist, I want to pat him on the head and tell him that’s cute, but also deeply stupid.

The thing is, I’m not afraid to be challenged by opposing viewpoints. I like having to defend my views, having to test them and make sure they hold up in light of new evidence. Far too many people surround themselves with yes men and the like minded, and the whole conversation turns into a circle jerk inside an echo chamber.

Fuck that. Put your opinions on the line. Let them be challenged. Let them change. That’s why I have a ton of respect for Rogan’s willingness to invite skeptics onto his show, and why I respect him for admitting when he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. We’d be a lot better off if more people were that confident in what they don’t know.

Socially powerful

Here’s where I think this subreddit goes off track. Rogan is a socially powerful person. He’s successful, he’s rich, and he says whatever the fuck is on his mind. That’s the position a lot of people aspire to.

And you’ll never get there by trying to become a Rogan clone.

When Rogan says someone’s being cunty, it has an impact precisely because he’s not supposed to do it. Society, culture, good manners all say that that word is off limits, and Rogan says no, fuck you, I’ll talk how I want to talk.

But a lot of people on /r/JoeRogan seem to toss “cunty” and “powerful” around like they’re looking for approval. Like Rogan himself is going to read your comment, notice how daring you are, and give you a cookie.

It doesn’t work like that. If you want to be powerful, find your own fucking voice, and use it to proclaim your own fucking opinions. And if your voice involves calling someone a cunt or a twat, great. But if you’re just trying to sound like your idol, well, the rest of us can tell.

That’s the problem with personalities like Rogan, or Tim Ferris, or a bunch of others. They should serve as an example to strive for, but a lot of people are content to just follow them around and pretend.

But still just a primate

The thing I like about the “higher primate” concept is that it’s empowering and humbling at the same time. On the one hand, look at all the shit we can accomplish if we put our minds to it. We can lose weight, fall in love, fuck and fight, succeed, fail, and get up to do it all over again. There isn’t another animal like us on the planet.

But at the end of the day, we are just animals. We aren’t God’s special creation, we aren’t the apex of evolution, we aren’t the center of the universe. We’re just apes with a haircut and a few tricks. And that should keep us humble. It should remind us that, no matter what we’ve accomplished, we can always do more.