Pop Psychology
HOST
Bang, bang. And we're back. Everyone's taking a hack at the. The Horosi Pinata.
Huh? That's the fashionable statement of the day. Taking a swing at the Horosi Pinata. And it's really cringy in a lot of ways because all these guys are slinging these cliches.
I hate cliches with all my heart because there's always a countervailing argument that can come in and maul the out of common consensus. And, and the bottom line is what this whole event, what it boils down to is, are a hundred percent taunted. Taunted and harassed by the notion that there's a motherfucker out there who can do whatever the fuck he wanna, right? Ice Cube said it.
Ice Cube said it. It's one of the most famous lines cemented in the fucking human pantheon. Ice Cube said there's nothing like a man who can do what he wanna. And we all viscerally know this to be true.
And then when you see a guy with the actual freedom with you money, which is what all you guys are chasing and can finally say you to anything that he damn well pleases, you shriek and quiver. Funny how that works. Funny how the true symbols of freedom make real uncomfortable. Because I'll tell you something.
The most important aspect of building your identity as a male, by far, hands down, there is nothing that will come close to this. One thing is getting to a point in your development where you no longer are leashed and chained to doing anything out of guilt or obligation. The most suffocating suppressive force in the known universe is motherfuckers who get mired in these little games, these little games that we play. And most of you are unaware that you are involved in these games in these spin cycles where you say yes to things out of sheer self pity, self worthlessness, obligation and guilt.
Slave morality. Slave morality. And most of you have never wielded the true sovereignty and autonomy to do whatever the you want, when you want. But that's, that's the path, you know what I'm saying?
And what Hormozi has done, and I will tip the hat, is he's, he's handcrafted this entire Persona, his entire empire was built off the back of his terrible upbringing. And I see, I see cultural events happen every day, watershed moments in culture that corroborate all my fucking theories. All these high achieving type A, they're all spearheading based on the significance of these micro traumas and that they experienced as a kid that they just absolutely it's way too abhorrent to go back and reface it. It's a pyrrhic victory for the guy is what it ultimately is.
It's a pyrrhic victory. He doesn't want to go back and, and peer into that abyss that he, that he crawled out of. And I understand it completely. Valid.
Very valid. I mean, his muscle, everything the guy has done has been a, an artistic response to the pain that he suffered as a boy. And it doesn't matter what archetype you look at. They all share this thing in common.
They all share this thing in common. And the day that you can wake up as a man and have a genuine conversation with yourself in your head and come to the conclusion that you are no longer operating from a place of guilt and you don't show up to parties because you want to appease people, my friend, that is the equivalent, that is the analog to parting the red seas. That's what it is. That's when all the benevolence and all the divinity comes your way, because that's the only way you can actually carve the path that is true to your own nature.
And, and, and hey, let's look at the flip side of the coin here. Most of these guys criticizing this guy for not eating Aunt Peggy's lemon meringue pie, these are on the other end of the extreme, which is arguably more destructive. These are the same guys who are telling you that they've run up a bag because they want to buy their mom a house, they want to retire their mom. Criticizing a dude who, who don't want to fly home on the holidays out of guilt or obligation.
The jokes write themselves. Now, I do want to take a detour because this is pop psychology. And I do want to do sort of a cultural commentary on the Van man thing, which I don't know too much of the backstory. I don't really give a.
And I have zero personal vendetta towards Van man whatsoever. Don't know him. Could be a great guy for all I know. But I do want to give you guys a time tested lesson in branding, and I want to walk you through the park and share some insights that I have on just the situation itself.
So what we're going to do is we're going to look at this critically and we're going to separate the art from the artist. Okay? This has nothing to do with Van man as a person. Let me tell you something.
The first thing that came to my mind when I heard about the Van Man Controversy was that every story, the end of every story is written truly in the very beginning. It's just factually true. The end of every single story is written right there in the very beginning. Van man, Van man.
The brand always rubbed me the wrong way. It always, it always did. The, the van man, you know, the, the build it out of your garage story. I understand it.
I get it. I understand the appeal. I understand what's, what's happening here. However, a van, for those of you who are Americanized, you will, you will understand readily that a van is truly the American symbol of serial killers and assailing pedophiles.
A van. Vans are symbolically an American horror archetype. They've always been categorized this way. You know what I'm saying?
They always strike. They always have a mystique of fear and subterfuge and skullduggery like no one. It reeks of poverty and it's just a terrible branding symbol in general, okay? And that is why personally, it just never really appealed to me.
But here's the fucking point, okay? I just told you. The end of the story is written in the beginning. It's the van man.
So the story could only end by him going back to the van, you know what I mean? And apparently when he opened the van doors, when those van doors slid open, everybody ran. Everybody ran. And with that kind of physiognomy, let it be a lesson in leaning into your true nature.
I kid you not. I kid you not. You cannot go into the health space, okay? And this is where I think self sabotage occurred.
And it occurred in a public domain. If you are running a health brand, you can't look like that. You can't look like that. Or you can, but you have to run it back door.
And I'm telling you for a fact that if you do look like that, this dude would have crushed it. If he was like in the soda pop business or like gourmet candy. Not even joking. Think about him doing a gourmet candy company.
Like he, he's literally a candy man. He should be slinging like high quality Coca Cola. Would have slapped way better rather than like bee pollen paste, you know what I'm saying? It's, it's, it's a, it's a true lesson in leaning into your true nature.
Because again, the contradictory nature of running a health brand, I mean, the guy doesn't look like he uses his own products is the point. Right? So for the pr, would have been way more effective. Should have hired some brusque Fitness model to get on camera and, and share that story would have sent that thing to the moon.
And, and the, the whole end of the story thing is written in the very beginning is literally true. It's all blur and darkness ahead. But like when you actually the, the very attitude that sets a light, any movement that you begin it, it just. There is something about life where it has to end the very way you go in.
And that's true with everything. The meteoric rise always falls just as fast as it goes. It's just how it works in life. The aggressive gambler who fucking turns 10 GS into a million in 24 hours is gonna lose it the same way he got into it, you know what I mean?
So the, the way that you acquire anything, the way that you go into anything, the, the mode, the mode that you toggle to and that you land on ultimately is actually what creates the destiny. And the whole point of me telling you this is the name is destiny. The name, the name Van, man, it's going to end of you back in your fucking van. Why do you think I chose the moniker Brute the Force?
It's a powerful fucking name. You expect a motherfucker named Brute the Force to bulldoze the fuck out of any obstacle in his fucking way. The name is the Destiny itself. You know what I mean?
The name is that loose leaf little bow tie on the dusky tome. It sets a light, it sets ablaze the very destiny itself. And I guarantee you, if I really wanted to put my mind to it, I could sit down with a bunch of different brands and give you the character Destiny and trajectory arc based on the naming and the proclivities and the taglines associated with it. It's that powerful.
These things end up taking a vehicle and a life of their own. And it's a classic textbook tale of you not being able to outperform your self image. You understand you can never outperform your self image. Your true deep down beliefs that are inscripted in the marrow of your bone about who you are.
It doesn't matter how high you climb past that. That is the trough. That is where you will eventually rest. You will always rest at the focal point of what you believe yourself to be.
Deep down. There's no escape from it. There's no escape from it. You could make 200 billion.
You could be the greatest fighter in the world. You could be the most respected architect known to mankind. You will find a way just like that game Snakes and Ladders, which is a very apropos metaphor for life. You will find a way to drop down that slide and go right back to what your genetic code tells you to be.
There's no escape from it, and any escape from it is temporary. And this explains the extremes and the highs and lows in life. It explains it perfectly. The highest of highs is a temporary euphoria because you just know the come down.
You're gonna go back to baseline eventually. And the lows are no different. The lows are temporary too, because eventually you'll climb a ladder and you'll find that resting point, that Archimedes lever, and that's where you'll usually be chilling. And that's where you'll usually be chilling.
And there's one single hack around this one life hack. One. There's only one. And it's the Tate method.
It's the Tate method and quite frankly, it's the Hormozi method of building a Persona that is so overpowering that you literally cannot rest or take your eye off the curation of that mythological Persona because you're just going to slide all the way back to baseline. You know, I have a theory that if I sat down with a lot of these very powerful figures in some wood paneled cigar lounge and smoked a cigar with like a Tate or any of these guys, any of these big media influencers, I've always asked myself, do I think I could get them to drop the veil, like at 2 o' clock in the morning if we were shooting the, on a balcony somewhere, do I think I could get them to take off the mask for a second and fucking joke with me about like the game that they've played? And I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is 100% yes.
And I think that's why you see a lot of these very powerful profiles. They cannot escape the world that they created for themselves. Because there's a night, there's going to be an identity leak. You guys understand what I'm saying?
There's going to be a severe identity leak. They know that they have to become a massive control freak. And they have to be very careful with who they associate with now, because that mask can slip very fast and very easily. Like sometimes I look at these, some of these bishops or pastors or, or like let's, let's use a hypothetical example of someone who claims that they're in direct commune with Jesus Christ, right?
Some guy gets up on a pulpit and he tells you that he's actually channeling dictation from Jesus himself. And it's effective. Let's say he's running a mega church and people are tithing and people are donating. People are flowing massive money through this slush fund, right?
But this guy's obviously a con artist, and he's got everybody on the hook thinking that he can commune with Jesus Christ himself, Right? I always wonder if guys that pull this off, like, do they have a confidant that they actually laugh with at 2 o' clock in the morning when they're drinking or smoking weed? And they're like, these dumb. Don't even understand the ruse that I'm pulling on them.
And I think the answer is no, because here's. Here's how powerful. Here's how powerful these Personas are. These people that grasp this vast amount of influence.
What you have to understand is that their job, they don't. They're not trying to convince you of anything. That's the opposite mentality. Midwits, average people, losers, always take the approach of, I have to convince other people of what I am.
And it's literally the exact opposite. These people have spent their entire lives convincing themselves. They've convinced themselves that what they're doing is so real that it actually becomes real. That's the whole game.
As a man, by the way. Because as a man, ultimately, you do have to pick a Persona. You have to choose. I've said this before, and I stand by it.
As a man, you have to pick up some kind of weapon, and you have to pick up a mask and you have to pick up some armor. And these are the stories that you tell yourself. Tate never had to convince you of anything. He only had to convince himself.
And then by osmosis, everybody buys in. You guys understand. It's the OJ Syndrome. You have to understand this mechanism is so powerful in men.
Men can actually begrudge themselves and submit themselves emotionally through this type of mental domination that it actually becomes true for them. We talk about creating reality. I don't think there's ever been a time that O.J. simpson snickered in like a back room and acknowledged the fact that. That he killed Nicole.
I don't think that's true. I think O.J. to this day truly feels like he was falsely persecuted. I think deep down he feels like there was an immense injustice that he had to go on trial. And I think he truly, truly believes in his core of cores that he didn't do it.
That's how powerful delusion can be. That's how powerful. And Hormozi's pretty much done the Same thing. Which is why he ain't going back.
Because he doesn't want the veil to slip. Because here's what happens, okay? You get some of these big time performers that are phenomenal on camera, that can serenade a fucking room. Here's the deal.
If they let the veil slip off and joke or jostle with someone and they're laughing about how their, their Persona has captured the hearts and minds of the world, the performance will then suffer going forth. Because that's how tightly interconnected those mechanisms are. If Tate went to a back room and laughed at all of you with his brother behind a private wooden door and said, hahaha, I totally bamboozled these, these guys don't understand. I'm just an average regular guy.
His performance would shatter instantly. Instantly. It'd be over. It'd be over.
Because that molecule, that tiny modicum of acknowledgment in his own mind that he just verbally acknowledged, that would absolutely decimate his ability to perform in the future. These people, all of them in their evolution, the delusions that they have become reality. Delusion is simply the gateway to reality. And it's really the only definition between a loser and a winner.
A loser is basically just someone who couldn't make their delusion reality, do you understand? Because all men start every endeavor very delusional. And a loser is just unable to bring it to life. And a winner makes the delusion real.
So the crazy thing is, and the most interesting part about this is if someone DM'd me and they were like, you know how Tate bashed crying? They were like, do you think Tate actually has like cried behind closed doors? Like, do you think this is all him trying to be like Tough Guy Rambo? And do you think he's actually shedding fucking crocodile tears off camera?
And I said, fuck no. And he said, why? And I said, because these people, these types of personalities, are extremely disgusted by their own weakness. It's not for you.
They don't cry because they're embarrassed. If you saw them cry, they don't cry because it would change the way they look at themselves. That is a massive distinction. They don't show weakness behind closed doors when nobody's around because they couldn't bear to stand in their own filth.
Do you understand? So behind closed doors, these guys end up being the same exact way they are on camera. It's a 24 hour performance. The lights never go off because they literally cannot bring themselves to acknowledge their humanity.
It's the extra terrestrial terrestrialization of man, they extraterrestrialize themselves. They make themselves alien. You could use this as sort of like an adjunct to, to Nietzsche's philosophy of the Ubermensch. It's in a very similar vein.
It's in a. It's under a similar umbrella. The male psyche is unbelievable in its power. And a lot of these journeys to, to success, to the highest peaks, to the highest of the highs, where men get the most accolades and laudation requires boatloads of self denial.
Self denial, self denial can be extremely powerful. Denying your weaknesses and blocking them out and pretending they don't exist and going all in on your strengths. That is a. Of a police system.
It'll take a man very far. There's almost. There's a lot of times in life where it's very impractical to want to understand your flaws or your weaknesses. It's just extremely fucking impractical.
You never have to even touch those domains. And what's funny is when you turn a blind eye and you snub and you turn your cheek at your own deficits, that's when the actual real self improvement begins. Everything is paradoxical. The more that you hone in and do the deep work going in the.
The treacherous Thonian catacombs of your unconscious mind, trying to pick apart your history and understand your life story and why you think the way you do and why you behave the way you do, that is the gateway to self, to absolute self annihilation and self destruction. Because as we've discussed these mechanisms in play, the bad habits, the good habits, they're synergistic. They're extremely synergistic. And when you start with these things and you start removing flaws and trying to get rid of bad habits, you don't know what good habits you're vitiating right alongside it.
That's the problem. That's the biggest problem, is you're tampering with the entire system itself. You're contaminating it. And so all these guys, you know, like my biggest critique of all this hormozy bashing is that this is a guy who's just leaning into his edge.
And. And when people lean into their edge, it makes the world horrifically uncomfortable. To see a guy actually wielding their power just makes everybody recoil because everybody wishes they could do it. Everybody wishes they had a edge that razor sharp.
Everybody does. You take a fucking question. I need a smoke break. Yo, Hilltop, I wanted to contribution.
CALLER 1
Yeah, so I wanted to ask about the, the Tate and how Tate finds himself in a position where he has to emotionally dominate himself. Like, how does he arrive there? Does he get to a point where he just decides to show the middle finger to his nature and just decide to emotionally dominate himself? Or how does one take that route, actually?
And how does one decide if he should take that tape route?
HOST
It's not. It's. That's the pro. That's the thing, dude, is.
It's. It's. It's. It's pathology.
It's pathological. So it's actually like a mutation in the. Or in the. In the human organism.
What I'm telling you is these guys don't have a choice. Their. Their past is so haunting and so horrifying, whether they had a horrible fucking childhood that they literally just do not want to recall, they don't want to look back into their history. It's just too fucking bloody painful.
They had a fucking abusive father. Whatever the fuck the circumstances are, they ha. They don't have a choice. They have to.
They have to promote and curate this Persona because the Persona ultimately protects them from ever experiencing that pain again. And that's the whole thing, is it's not by choice. It's necessity. It's so fucking painful to them to look backwards that they have to create this superhuman character that's indestructible.
And so you cannot choose your pathologies in life. And that's the biggest problem on Twitter is you got all these with Tony Montana profile pictures, Baitman, all these glorified violent figures, but they don't have the edge to ever become those guys because you. It's. There's no artificial way.
You, like, you can't put that. You cannot put that in a vacuum and isolate it in a test, in a test tube and nourish it. It's a total pathology. And people are very attracted, by the way, to pathology, very attracted, because that's where all the outliers are birthed from, right?
It's in the pathology. It's in people's. It's in people's quirks. It's in the fracturing and fissures in their personality that people are drawn to like a moth to a flame.
And so what you're seeing in all these high profile figures is the reconstruction of a broken person. You're seeing the complete reconstruction, the refashioning, the reimagining of a personality that has been harmed. And the animal kingdom is that powerful. I mean, look at animal adaptation.
Look at what animals do in the wild and in the animal kingdom to flex, to show strength, to. You know what I Mean the stripes, the patterns. I mean, there's. So this is, this is, this is endemic to just any animal species.
Animal species have an incredible way of dealing with weakness. Whether it's a fish in the fucking sea puffing itself up to ward off predators, whether it's a fucking striped tiger, whether it's a poisonous frog chilling on a fucking branch in a steaming hot jungle. Humans are no different. And what I'm here to tell all of you is that every strength, every talent that is recognizable in yourself is a defense mechanism.
All of it. Your intelligence. Some people, for whatever reason in their environment growing up, had no choice but to become smart. That was their survival strategy.
Their body literally had to give them ultra hyper awareness to navigate life as a survival strategy. That's why some people are way smarter than other motherfuckers. It's a total fucking defense mechanism. Now obviously there's genetic layers to this and there's genetic baselines.
Blood is king. But these pathologies get bootstrapped on top of that genetic baseline. You cannot show me any extravagant human talent that was not born as a defense mechanism, meaning to protect the individual from pain. Do you understand?
Every talent, every fucking thing that you excel at is simply a defense mechanism to ward off predators and pain. It's that fucking simple. And once you look at it like that, you understand why once you get engroved in these certain paths, it's almost impossible to reverse course because you, you kind of just have to let the dam rupture and let these personality traits express themselves. And that's, that's really the classic definition of leaning into your edge.
Right? You, you, you are, you are given an edge when you experience some kind of pain or horrific trauma that might not even be known to you. And then you're. The human organism gives you a weapon.
It gives you a weapon to make your way forward in life so that you don't have to experience that again. And that is your edge. That is your edge. It's the thing you do.
It's the thing you do. For some people, it's cage fighting. Some people, when they get in the fucking cage and they fight, they are so present. All their faculties are channeled in such a tight bundle.
Their nervous system is so fired up, the engines are cooking. They're firing on all cylinders. They're so present, there's no insecurity. They're not thinking about the outside world.
The outside world for the first time in their life actually gets drowned out. There's no second guessing. They're primal. They're in nature.
And they spend their entire life trying to recreate that present feeling. For me, it's betting when I gamble, the entire fucking world gets drowned out. And the presence that I feel is not replicable. We all have this thing, we all have this one activity that we do that makes us so fucking present that it's impossible to hurt us when we're in this frame of mind.
You know what I'm saying? And that's why they say junkies for anything. Could be an adrenaline junkie, could be a fucking business junkie, could be a workaholic. That's why they're so attractive to people, because they have a mission.
They have something that displaces everything else in their life. Their woman takes a back seat. Their kids take a back seat. Everything takes a back seat to this one thing that they do.
And what is that? Fundamentally, that's the opposite of neediness, right? That's why people without a mission are the most needy on the planet. Needy little children, ankle biters, always biting at your ankles, always need something because they don't have a mission.
Mission kills neediness, which is why having a mission makes you the most attractive man. It's that simple. Squashes, extinguishes neediness.
CALLER 1
That's beautiful. So would it be fair to summarize it as the cope? It's almost like the cope overpowers the nature. Is that a fair statement?
HOST
10,000%. Well, the COPE becomes your nature. The cope becomes your nature. Look, the reason why people point out cope in other people and they, they use it as like a pejorative, they use it as a derogatory term.
People will tell you're coping. What they don't understand is that whenever someone tells you're coping, they're actually pointing out your gift, they're pointing out your strength. And like I just said, whenever you flash your edge, whenever you flash your fang or you show a talon, right? You have a razor sharp talon and you flash.
That makes people very nervous and uncomfortable. So people are always going to attack your strengths, which is the irony. No one really ever attacks your weaknesses because no one ever really truly knows what your weaknesses are. People will try to reframe your strengths as weaknesses.
And that's where people get lost. Because then people start to try to eviscerate their natural talent. Like, if people are always coming at you and trying to criticize you and tell you need to do things a certain way, or you could do this better, that's a huge sign that you're turning people on people are very enamored by whatever it is that you're doing, and they're trying to get you back in the crab bucket. It's the ultimate form of flattery.
If you do things a certain way and everyone wants to pitch in and give you unsolicited advice. Unsolicited advice is very powerful because it always shines a spotlight on your strengths. Always. Those people who are trying to change your behavior and tell you to do things a different way, they're spooked.
They're mega spooked that you got an edge and they wish they had it. So that's the best sign is like, when you're doing something unconventional or unorthodox that works for you and it makes everybody else uncomfortable. Quad. That's when it.
That's when you know it's time to quadruple the down, when everyone's trying to tell you to do it differently. And the ones who dedicate themselves to that process and don't fold their cards when they get pushed back from the public or friends or family, those are the guys who make it. Those are the guys who break out of the local minima and end up with all the power, respect, money, and influence. It's the guys who literally can dedicate and persevere through those social games that we play.
It all ties in back to what I just said about not doing things out of obligation or guilt. There's people. There's people that are terrified to really be who they are around certain people because they just feel guilty, so they diminish themselves. And that is extremely effeminate.
Extremely so. Good question, man. I'm gonna keep it moving. Thank you.
CALLER 1
Appreciate it. Thanks.
HOST
Yo, Yo. Hey, Brute. What's up, bro?
CALLER 2
Nothing much. I just wanted to talk about how you always say, you know, you meant to follow your. Your compass. You know, you talk about following your instinct.
I just want to know, is there any signs that you can actually sort of confirm that you're on the right path?
HOST
Yeah, it's fun. Fun is 100, the true lodestar, and it's the true. The only north star you need in life is a man. Is fun.
If you are having fun and you are enjoying the process, then you are 100 on the right track.
CALLER 2
Sort of. Like you say that winning is meant to be natural. So, like, if you're doing the right thing, it's probably meant to be fun and natural 10,000%.
HOST
But here's the. Here's the. Here's the twist. For winners, everything's fun.
Winners will get. Will tie themselves in knots, kind of like Houdini. Like, winners will find clever ways. Ways to shackle themselves and walk into one in a billion traps.
This is something that I've noticed recently. There are traps in life that very few people are unwilling to put their hand in because they're scared. Winners will put their hand in a trap and then figure out a way to get out of the trap. And in that process, there is a tremendous amount of character development.
But there's also opportunities that will come to that individual's way that are unwarranted and unbound for the common man. It's. It's. Life is very much a product of this.
It's like, you got to be willing as a man. This is part of the. The difficulty like this is why money can't solve all your problems as a man. Because there are certain quests inside, things you have to do to become a complete man.
And if you avoid them, you pay double down the line in blood and tears. And what I'm talking about is, as a man, sometimes we have the impulse to go into dangerous situations just to see if we can unweave ourselves. You know what I mean? And so very unique opportunities will spurn out of going down dark alleyways that other people are afraid to go to.
And that's fucking metaphoric, obviously.
CALLER 2
Gotcha. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
HOST
Yep. My dinner's here. Sam.