You said you protect the inner landscape, but certainly you're not averse to high-intensity stimulation. Last night, we went to the AEW, and by the way, thank you for taking me. That was such an incredible experience. It was really fun. It was really fun. It reminded me of early punk rock shows, some of my first punk rock shows, where I went and just was like, "Oh my gosh, this is exciting and scary, and I love it." And it felt loving, too, which is also the community of punk rock that I observed and have been blessed to be a part of.

It's like, yeah, there's aggression, but there's also love, and then there's romance, and then there's also betrayal, and there's all the elements. But there's still a sense of like everyone wants to be here, and there's a sense of goodness behind it all, even though some of it was bloody and violent.

So for you, what does wrestling allow you to feel in those high-intensity environments? It completely relaxes me because there are no stakes. Everyone's working together in the show to protect each other. No one's trying to hurt anybody, regardless of what the storyline is. It's like a ballet where there's a fight in the ballet.

There's no actual aggression of people towards each other. It's just the opposite. But you get to experience this wildly dynamic, exciting, surreal theater piece where people are doing these gymnastic and acrobatic things that are truly death-defying. And it's fun, and the storylines absorb you in a way where you never know what's true and what's not.

We know wrestling's fake. We're told wrestling's fake. But there's something legitimate about it that seems to me more legitimate than anything else, the most legitimate, because it's the closest to what the world's actually like. People don't always tell you what they really think. And when someone tells you a story, it might not really be the true story.

They may think they're telling you the real story, and that might not be the real story. We don't know. We know so little. We experience something, and then we make up a story to understand it ourselves. And then forevermore, when we tell that story, it was our version of an experience.

But we don't know that's what happened. That was our take on it. Wrestling is like-- that's what the real world is like, because when you watch wrestling, you never know what's true. If you watch the news like you watch wrestling, and you never know what's true, it would be more accurate.

You'd have a better sense of the world if you took it all in like it was pro wrestling. I think we're in a place in human history where people are starting to feel that way about the media. It's also why wrestling is so popular. It's more popular than it's ever been.

Yeah, that's interesting. Things like UFC, the kind of gladiator-like octagon fights, and wrestling are increasing in popularity, despite the fact that supposedly we're evolving. So I think it reflects something both primitive and evolved about the human brain. Primitive in the sense that, yeah, there's some violence. It's physical. That's down in the hypothalamus, as we'd say.

It scratches that itch, but they're actually protecting each other. It scratches that itch of seeing the gladiators, but it's like watching a movie. They're not really hurting each other. They get hurt, but only because the things they're doing are so crazy. I think in order to be able to thoroughly enjoy wrestling, one has to be able to give up narrative distancing just a little bit.

Narrative distancing is this sense that this is a story, it's a movie, it's not real. But there were moments like yesterday, the jump off the top rope onto the guy who's splayed out on the ladder. The ladder breaks. This was right in front of us. It couldn't have felt good.

He walked away. He seemed fine-ish, but that and then there was a match between two women where a woman put a metal plate into the bottoms of her suit and then ran and then jumped onto the other woman and hit her with the metal plate. Then the metal plate slipped out.

She was walking around and everyone knew she had cheated because you're not supposed to use the metal plate. It was exciting because she had done it, exciting because she had gotten away with it. Then at the same time, exciting and upsetting that the referee saw it, but then didn't call it.

This is like Twitter X, this is like Instagram, this is like politics, this is real life. Seeing people get away with things is so frustrating if you feel they shouldn't have. That's all part of it. It's a very accurate representation of the world.