Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. I took the glasses off. I was hoping you were going to keep them on. You want me to keep them on? You can pull them off. Some dudes can't pull off douchey glasses. You think these are douchey? A little bit if I didn't know you, but I'll tell you. I'm not douchey at all, so you can wear cool glasses. Well, these are requests by you, so I can wear what I want.
You've been wearing them a lot. I like them. Yeah, yeah, I do. It's like having an Instagram filter for the entire world. Right. Everything feels just a little rosy. I had a pair of rose-colored glasses before, and I got it. I was like, oh, I get it. It is better this way. It is nicer. Yeah, yeah, it's like a full line.
I need to show you this. Okay, what is this? Have a little open of that. So you'll remember that I sent you a photo on iMessage a couple of months ago of a friend of mine who was in Antarctica. Yeah. And he flew a comedy mothership lighter out to Antarctica. I've been reliably told that that lighter was used to smoke weed.
In Antarctica. Yeah, and it's touched. It was dropped a number of times, so it's touched ancient permafrost. Fuck yeah. What kind of laws do they have in Antarctica? I don't know. Apparently very liberal. Do they have any laws? Fuck knows. I don't know. There's nobody there. Have they established laws? They were 400 miles in. Whoa. So this was part of the final experiment, which was this attempt to try and disprove Flat Earth. He went as a part of that.
Did he bring flat earthers? Is that the deal? So, four flat earthers, four globies, globe earthers, get flown to Antarctica. It's $35,000 per person. Oh, my God. This guy called Will Duffy put the... project together, flew everybody down there. Did he pay for each person? Yep. Wow. I think maybe a couple of people chose to go self-funded, but they were trying to get the open offer to all of the biggest Flat Earth influencers.
commentators on the planet. I don't know what to call them. How many went? Four of each. So four roundies, four flatties. And uh... Don't you want to see their search histories? Maybe the FBI do. I don't know. The flat people, I want to see. So they do this in the middle of our winter, their summer.
They observed the sun above the horizon for 24 hours. So there's no explanation, apparently, with most of the models of flat Earth about how the sun could stay above the horizon for 24 hours. So they flew down. They had drones flying in the air. They had... 24-hour 360 cameras. They had live stream of iPhones, all of this stuff. And then they had the people that were on the ground. And the guys that were there observed the sun. Did the flat earthers switch stances? So three...
Three did and one didn't? This is just the drone footage. Oh, this is drone footage? Yeah, so the final experiment. So those are apparently mountaintops. But they're submerged? It's just all ice. That is so fucking hardcore. Because, you know, there's a bunch of things up there that look like pyramids. And what it really is is just an unusual peak of an enormous mountain.
Have you seen the Antarctic pyramids? Yeah, you got to go all in on that. Okay. We have hard launched this episode. People that believe wild shit about Antarctica. So, you know about the direct energy weapon theory, right? Yes, I did see that on Sean Ryan's show. Yes, I did as well. I was like, okay. That guy's fucking really interesting. Yeah, it's like, he sounds really interesting. But if I want to sit him next to Eric.
Weinstein. You know what I'm saying? Is anything... this guy saying make any sense because i've done that before with eric with one guy who was a fraudster i sent him a video and i said tell me if this is gobbledygook or if this is real physics eric to stress test some guy's ideas of course he loves it
He loves any sort of intellectual stimulation, especially if it's like mathematics or physics or something where it's his wheelhouse. And, you know, he's great. Because someone can sound really good to me. You know, they could start quoting thermal dynamics. Finessing you through whatever their problem is. Like chiropractors do. You know, chiropractors use all these crazy, weird terms for musculature and different insertion points.
to let you know that they have a comprehensive understanding of the body that's far beyond yours, Chris. And this is the same thing like a lot of fraudsters do. They'll use enormous language and very verbose you know, phrases and it's like they're just trying to get you to think that they're smarter than they are. Yeah, I think people use sort of complex language and fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insight. Yes.
And especially when, if you're dealing with a truly brilliant person, that's a pyramid. Holy fuck. Yeah. Oh, this is just on Google Maps? Yeah. Jamie, you've just gone to Google Maps to find this. Yeah, I didn't want to go to any, I went to the source. Any kooky websites? But it does look like a pyramid. Well, it also looks like all three. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. But the reality is that's probably under a couple miles of ice.
Yeah, so this Final Experiment thing sent the world into a spiral. There was this dude, Jaron Campanella, who was one of the biggest influencers, and he said... I saw the sun above the horizon. I think the Earth's round. The Flat Earth Society has just gone into a head spin. They're saying they didn't really go to Antarctica. They went to the sphere in Vegas was one of the accusations. They did it at the sphere in Vegas.
And they were tracking it around. The sphere's not that big, kids. It's not that big. I've been there. There's seats everywhere. You would know you're there. I don't know. I don't know. They had a bad time. But yeah, it's... That's been pretty wild. Talking of pyramids. Dude, this new Pyramid shit that's just come out? Oh, this is insane. Yeah, I was going to send this to you as well, Jamie. I'll send you one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of it on X because it's quite stunning.
So apparently, through the use of LIDAR, they have discovered that there are enormous structures underneath the Great Pyramid that go... kilometers deep into the earth with coils so enormous pillars and then these coils They don't understand what it is because they're just looking at LIDAR images. But whatever this is, is a uniform structure. There's several pillars.
And all of this is like very, very, very weird. Yeah, 600 meters descending down those cylinders, and then there's more stuff below it, and then there's additional structures inside of it. Yeah, that was crazy. It's really crazy. There's a guy, Jay Anderson, and he did a breakdown of it. Maybe this would be good. We could play this. It makes a little more sense.
when someone's explaining it to you. Yeah, I mean, we need somebody that's an expert here, not me and you. Zawi Hawass, by the way, has said it's nonsense. Already? Yes. According to Graham Hancock. This is the wonderful thing about having Graham Hancock. I texted Graham yesterday. I was like, yeah, what's going on with this? Yeah. So click on that and go full screen, please.
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. There are times in life when it's better to make that big purchase, like buying a car for job opportunities or a home to build equity. If you're smart with your money, it could pay off big time in the long run. Those aren't the only things. you should be investing in, though. It's just as important that you take care of you and your health. That includes your mental health. And you can be smart with your money here, too. Use BetterHelp.
Traditional in-person therapy can cost between $100 to $250 a month, but BetterHelp Online Therapy can help you save an average of up to 50% per session. Plus, this March, they're giving you an even bigger discount on starting therapy. One of the biggest I've offered on this show with 90% off your first week.
Therapy can help with a lot of different things. It can help you work through trauma, develop positive coping skills, mindfulness, and more. Everyone can benefit from it. Whatever you want to work on, BetterHelp has you covered. They have a network of over 30,000 therapists, one of the largest online therapy platforms in the world. And since everything is online, it's easy to work it into your schedule. With just a few clicks, you can start a session.
Your well-being is worth it. For a limited time, visit BetterHelp.com to get 90% off your first week. That's BetterHelp.com. of a discovery this is. Dun, dun, dun. I love the music. And geometry, so you know it's real. You've got to appreciate the dramatic intro. Project Unity. What has just been announced in relation to the pyramids at the Giza Plateau and the plateau itself is so incredible, so awe-inspiring and...
narrative shattering that I have been sitting here for the last hour trying to wrap my head around the implications of what we were just told. So this is pretty much breaking news because the new findings were announced on the 16th of March at a press conference. held by the team who were studying the Great Pyramid of Giza with a non-invasive technology that was first developed by Filippo Bionde and Corrado Malanga called Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography.
Fuck, that's a mouthful. Chiropractic talk. and this method leverages the analysis of micro movements typically generated by background seismic activity to achieve a high resolution
full 3D tomographic imagery of the pyramid's interior and subsurface components. The recent findings from deploying this technology are nothing short of mind-blowing because what's been discovered is that there are huge structures coming down from the base of the pyramid deep into the bedrock in fact over 600 meters deep
which then connects to structures that extend up to two kilometers below the surface of the ground. Two kilometers. Massive internal structures connected to the base of the pyramid and extending deep. deep down this is what we know so far what what does your friend think about it which friend the one that you said it's
Oh, that's not my friend. That's Zawi Hawass. Okay. Zawi Hawass is the head of antiquities in Egypt. He's like the head guy that talks to the archaeologists and gives the official narrative. In the past... He's been extremely hostile to Graham Hancock, but Graham Hancock and him have now become friends. Oh, yes. I do know this guy. And they're coordinating. Graham is a lovely guy. People that, like, are enemies with him.
You just need to get to know him and hang out with him. He's a genuine, real human being who's trying to find the truth. He doesn't have fake narratives. And he's so sensitive, too. Like, he's so upset. Like, when people smeared him, like the Atlantis thing, they were trying to say it's a white supremacist idea to look for Atlantis. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you talking about? Like, we had this guy Flint Dibble on. who, in an article, and he was...
talking about Graham and he's connecting Graham to white supremacy and all this crazy shit because of the Atlantis theory. It's the way they dismiss it. Pedestalizes white heritage. Because some people in the past, some people in the past.
who have theorized about Atlantis had white supremacist ideas but also most people didn't like Plato didn't like the people that talked about this place it's in sub-saharan africa i mean it's like the least white supremacist discovery of all time as are the pyramids this is africa It's the least white supremacist notion of all time that this incredibly advanced ancient civilization had reached some sort of proficiency that's above and beyond what we attribute to them. I think Graham is right.
And I think there's a lot of other people that are right, too, that are chasing this down. Christopher Dunn had long ago theorized and wrote a book that he believes that the Great Pyramid of Giza is a gigantic power plant. He thinks it generates power and he has a very like an like a working theory of why it's built the way it's built.
that totally coincides with the ability to produce hydrogen, the ability to utilize the rays of space and try to find some way to generate electricity through this. Yeah. The association of other people that we don't like talked about this thing, therefore anybody else that talks about this thing is immediately attached to them, just seems like a very lazy way to sort of smear people. It's lazy thinking.
It's gross. It's beyond lazy. It's not lazy. It's really cheap. It's like they're cheap insults. And it's also from academia, which is so disappointing. You know, I mean, academia has been so captured by this mind virus of leftism that it's just... It's so bizarre to watch the brightest minds and the people that we lean on for rational, reasonable thinking and an objective understanding of the world.
We lean on the experts. And when they're calling someone a white supremacist for talking about an advanced society that lived in Africa. There's a lot of ways that you can put your foot in it. There's this woman, Corey Clark, who sent a survey to every. psychology professor in the U.S. and ask them questions like what is more important, the truth, or ensuring that equity is promoted. And a lot.
of professors basically said i self-censor i would prioritize making people feel good over necessarily telling them the truth there are certain uh opinions that people should be reported for there are certain uh topics that basically shouldn't be discussed usual suspects, stuff like behavioral genetics, so heritability, evolutionary psychology, as in anything that kind of relates to sex differences. And yeah, it really is retarding the progress of...
And you think, well, trickling down from this, what sort of educated society are you going to have in future? That's not going to be particularly good. Well, I think it's going to encourage independent education. I think you're going to encourage people like University of Austin, which is they're aiming to do just that and to kind of bypass all this nonsense and just teach people reality. And I also think that.
It's most likely, I mean, I don't even want to say most likely. It's most certainly influenced by other countries that want to degrade our ability to develop meaningful minds. that come out of universities, like intelligent, useful people. Distract them with... Not just distract them, but destroy society with them. It's Yuri Besmanov's prediction from 1984. It's like you could pass that off as a ridiculous conspiracy theory if it wasn't totally accurate.
amazing how people don't want to believe that maybe there's been subversion and that maybe our universities have been overrun for years with both funding, which we know is true, particularly from China. China funds a lot of American universities. They give a lot of grants. They spend a lot of money. And this was a part of the whole thing with George W. Or not George W., excuse me. me, with Joe Biden's bizarre job that he had, where he was a professor.
That he never showed up for classes and he was teaching and he got a large salary. Like a mob teaching job. He got a mob no-show job teaching. As a professor. Yeah, as a professor. And I think he got a million dollars a year to just do nothing. You know that...
Question that people ask about... Find out how much you got. I don't want to get sued by a dead man. Allegedly. He doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't know what's going on. Well, he might auto-sign the legal papers. There's that question about... There's two options about...
um life in the universe that either we're alone or that we're not and both are equally terrifying right right i feel like it's the same when it comes to western anti-westernism yeah and you say either we're doing it to ourselves or we're not. And both are equally terrifying. You're being puppeted by this nefarious foreign power. Or you're just turning around and kicking the ball into your own goal over and over again. Well, I think people will turn around and kick the ball into their own goal.
but I also think they're being helped. I think there's a substantial amount of this that just works automatically. It preys upon... really weak minds and particularly bullies and mean people who want to find other people that they can hate to justify. like whatever virtue they believe they have above those people, and they'll use it to hate. And John Cleese made a great video about this, why extremism is so interesting. It's on my Instagram.
I reposted it the other day. Someone posted it. We'll give them credit for it. But it's a great clip from John Cleese from 30 years ago. From 30 years ago. Prophetic. Pre-social media. There's no social media at this time. And he essentially nails what's going on with both the right-wing extremists and the left-wing extremists. It's the same thing. They're the same people. They're finding a thing. Click this.
This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. When it came time to make a website, there was no question that we would power it with Squarespace. From the intuitive design intelligence that helps to create a bespoke digital identity to the seamless payment options that can help
give your customers more ways to pay, or the fact that you can measure your end-to-end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics. The reasons to power your website with Squarespace are endless. So if you're looking to build or even up... We've heard a lot about extremism recently. larger atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother-boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents. All right, but what we never hear about extremism is its advantages.
Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn't it? So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway...
and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time. So, if you want to feel good, become an extremist. Okay, now you have a choice. If you join the hard left, they'll give you their list of authorized enemies. Almost all kinds of authority, especially the police.
The city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors, and, of course... I bet the moderates are in there again. Welfare sponges, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, strikers, social workers, communists, and of course, moderates. And upstart actors. Now, once you're armed with one of these... super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behaviors morally justified.
So you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are. Seriously. Brilliant. Brilliant. That's so good. Brilliant. Yeah, I remember. Pre-social media.
But the dynamic is still the same. Right. It's just amplified now so much so that it's a part of everyone's life. So many people's morality stands on the shoulders of somebody that's fallen behind. Right. It's look at how much look at how bad that person is. Don't you don't need to look.
Look at me. And I think that if people start pointing at out groups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an out group, that's usually an indication. I'm like, I should look a little bit closer at you. It might be a good example. Lizzo. Didn't think I was going to go there. Lizzo, talking about how she was in support of these bigger girls and she was going to help their careers and give them a platform, presumably a structurally reinforced platform.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, she's body shaming them. She's starving them. She's not letting them have water, apart from when she makes them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers. Douglas Murray said that she thought that she could outsource eating fruit to somebody else. and meanwhile you think she's portraying nicey-nicey out front
What's happening behind the scenes? Right. I remember this. This was pre... One cigar? Yeah, please. This was pre... Thank you. Pre-Trump Elon. Really pre-Trump Elon. and um he was saying thank you very much and uh he was saying what i care about is doing good not the appearance of it
And he's discussing performative empathy in this way, this sort of sense that what's most important is to protect people's feelings. And I think that this really is a point, it doesn't matter whether you're on left or right. this is a point that you should care about because you want people to have some sense of transparency, legitimacy. They want to be telling the truth. You want to trust that what someone is saying to you is actually what they believe. And he said,
what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are lots of people who are doing evil while proclaiming that they're doing good. And that's the same that you're talking about there with John Cleese. You're saying... these people's morality will stand on the shoulders of others who have fallen behind. It's the same reason why if somebody's in the middle of a scandal, look at who comes out and twists the knife a lot. Do you go, huh?
i wonder what's in your it's the classic congressman that's got the anti-gay bill oh yeah who's just gay as fuck yeah yeah glory holes and you know check his hard drive that's the person whose hard drive yeah so Yeah, it's just such an obvious warning sign to me that what's happening inside of someone is probably not that good. Yeah, I mean, if you're looking to destroy someone.
particularly like you're you're attacking someone online particularly almost all of those people are deeply broken there's there's always some creepiness that lurks behind the scenes that you're trying to cover up for with your actions Almost always. You're trying to put the light on this person. You're going to put the eye of Sauron on this person to keep it off yourself. I've seen that a lot of...
You know self-proclaimed male feminists. Sneaky fuckers. Yeah, that I know to be creeps, you know. And I'm like, ew. And I'll see them attacking some other guy, and I'm like, oh, God. I don't dive in, but I want to sometimes. Sometimes I want to just burn the boats and pull the fucking pins on the grenades. You know what I don't like about that sort of level of aggressive criticism? I think I'm...
You could describe me as a criticism hyper-responder. I'm someone for whom it probably impacted me more than it should do, certainly more than it should do for someone who gets the level of attention that I've managed to get myself to now. Right.
And what I don't like about it is it causes people like me to be way less confident in their own positions because you think, oh, well, most people, if it was me, I would only give feedback if I was really certain and if I had this person's best interests at heart and if I wanted them to do better and if I actually knew what I was talking about.
Then I would tell this person what I think about them and what I think about what they're saying. And if you apply that rubric to everybody else that gives you criticism, you give undue, unfair expertise and legitimacy to people who don't have your best interests at heart.
They don't understand what you're trying to do. They don't care about you. They don't get it. And it causes a lot of people... Basically, I think that criticism killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did because people are just... I'm worried about pushing these boundaries too much. This person, all of my friends tell me the truth. Why isn't this person on the internet? There's this idea from Ethan Cross called criticism capture.
So you'll have heard of audience capture, right? Where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience, becomes very predictable. Criticism capture basically says it's not the compliments, but the criticisms that are more warping. that over time what you end up doing is changing the way that you speak. You become a flaming sword-wielding, card-carrying member that's as aggressive as possible to push back against it.
Or you go the other way and you begin to caveat very aggressively. You start to dampen down all of your opinions so that nobody can take offense to them. You have these unnecessarily long sort of diatribes, sort of weird land acknowledgement. Well, we must remember that women are struggling with the thing and we have to remember. But now we've got that out of the way, let's talk about men's problems or whatever it might be. And yeah, I think I...
I just wish that the internet was a little bit more positive some as opposed to negative some. And I understand that people bind together over mutual hatreds of outgroups. But the oldest story in human history is that group of people are different to us. Yeah. Let's get them. The oldest story in history.
I mean, it's tribal genetics. It's like baked into our DNA, literally. And it can be manipulated. And when people are doing it, and they're doing it with a very obvious... distortion of your actual position just to label you as the worst possible least charitable version of you that could ever be remotely considered do you see that
all the time, where people are just trying to distort a narrative. You're seeing that right now with Elon, right? You're seeing people justify violence and extreme vandalism. And you're seeing people cheering on. And it's very strange. There was a thing on The Daily Show where the host was talking about... the attacks on tesla and people keying people and the audience starts clapping and cheering it's so strange it's so fucking strange
And it also just shows you how positions just completely flip-flop. Like the Tesla used to be the car that you drove to let everybody know that you were environmentally conscious and you were a good leftist. That's a good question. Do we care about the environment or not? Because those fumes that are being kicked out. It's like a thousand jet airplanes flying overhead for a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's wild. You're lighting batteries on fire. They're so toxic. Lithium and all sorts of shit getting pissed into the environment. Oh, it's all going to come down in rain. It's going to pollute the water. The fish are going to be polluted. You're not going to be able to eat them. But we're doing good.
This is for a righteous cause. Yeah. It's all funded, too. It's funded by NGOs. That's where it gets really creepy. The Tesla fires are funded by NGOs. Yeah, people are uncovering exactly what's going on. And this is where... This is where it gets fascinating because all the stuff is operated
pretty much with impunity in the past, before Doge, before Elon and his crew of hyper-spectrum psychopaths started to... Fucking teenage mutant ninja turtles. Super wizards started diving into... this data and this is something that Ted Cruz talked about, he said, we had always known that there was these problems. But until Elon came along with these algorithms, we couldn't expose them. We didn't understand what was going on. And now they've used AI to create this.
understanding of the net of NGOs that is all funded by USAID and by similar type programs where, you know, you kind of have these open-ended checks that get written to the other side. Other side. That's the top. Yeah, right there. How often do you smoke cigars, fella? A couple of times. Well, I fucking turned this around the wrong way. All right. No worries. Keep going. But this is...
This is essentially the way Mike Benz describes it. He's the very best at it. I don't know if you've ever seen his breakdowns of... USAID. I love his episodes on here. Incredible. I think that's so interesting. They're so interesting. Because you realize this has been going on forever and ever and ever. And this is the... arm of the government that is about regime change a lot of the money gets funneled into these other countries and it's under the guise of you know
air quotes, aid, but it's not aid. It's Agency for International Development. And it's all about influence and power all throughout the world and also at home. And one of the things that it does at home is they organize these protests. They organize protests, different NGOs do, all funded by the government, all funded by taxpayer money. in this weird way and when they do it they pay people to show up at these places uh i've got pamphlets that people have given me that they've taken from these
These locations are gotten from email lists. Is that purposefully no digital record? I think probably, but I don't think they care. I mean, I think as long as they're saying they're going to pay you to protest. I think that's legal. I think it's legal to pay someone to protest. So they're paying people $1,000, and they're giving them food and snacks, and you can get a lot of people to just show up for $1,000. And then some of them are going to get a little vandal-y.
You bring enough people together and they get vandal-y. How crazy is it that the left are the ones who are painting swastikas on cars? Just understand how crazy positions can flip and flop. The left is upset that we're not continuing an endless war in Ukraine. The left is upset that this guy is uncovering fraud and waste.
And so in order to stop that, you must light cars on fire and put swastikas on them because he's a Nazi. Because he said, my heart goes out to you. Even though there's countless videos of... AOC doing that gesture, Tim Walsh doing that gesture enthusiastically. Many, many people. I do think if you're in that position, if you've got this heritage coming in...
Just be careful with where you put your hands. Do you know what I mean? Don't do that. Like, just fucking think about where you put your hands. He's, you know, he's on the spectrum, man. He's not normal. You've seen that video comparing him and Trump's son.
There's two different types of autism. Have you seen this? No, I haven't. Oh, my God. It's so good. I think it's at the inauguration. And they're both stood next to each other. And Elon's sort of fist pumping and loving it. And Trump's son's just like.
staring off apparently Trump's son went up to Biden at the inauguration and said it's on now what is this a fucking UFC fight I mean that's literally apparently lip readers of like read what he said when he went up to because there's a moment where he goes up to Biden and Biden looks confused and he doesn't smile he's like but he walks up to him it's on now
Well, they need to do, you know, how football coaches have got, they put the play thing over the front of their mouth like this and they talk into it. That's how it needs to be done now for politics. Lip readers everywhere. That kid knew there was lip readers. I don't think he gave a fuck. I think they tried to put his dad in jail and he wants to kill that guy.
that's what i think he's like you because imagine your dad's getting that close to put in jail for for the rest of his life like if he got put in jail for 25 to life he's dead he's dead he dies in jail He's going to get no food. He's going to be no nutrition, no sunlight, depression, intense fucking anxiety. You're in jail. You're dead. He's 80 years old. He's not going to last to 105 in jail. There was a video from Forbes recently.
that got a million plays in a day talking about Trump getting, like, bopped on the nose by a boomer. Yeah, by a little boomer. He just did a little boop on the nose. Yeah. I have to say, I have such fucking news. politics fatigue already well what two months into the the sort of presidency and it is the velocity of bullshit if you can get a million plays in a day because trump got bopped on the nose by a fucking boom mic. It just, the appetite is, it seems endless for it.
It just feels it's very it's exhausting. I'm kind of having to check out. And I know that people say, oh, well, it's a luxurious position. You don't need to pay attention to politics. It's a luxurious position for you to be in. People at the bottom, they do need to pay attention to politics. It's an interesting stat because actually the most.
educated wealthiest people are the ones that spend the most time consuming news and talking about politics to people at the bottom rung of the ladder that don't so that's not true i'm just fucking exhausted i'm so you're allowed to be exhausted it's ridiculous Newsweek wrote an article about how one of the names of one of our podcast guests, who's a good friend of mine, Michael Costa, his name was misspelled accidentally. On the feed? On the feed.
And so Newsweek. Is that you, Jamie? It wasn't even misspelled. I don't know. It was miscapitalized. The second letter had a capitalization, too. The defense rests its case here. It wasn't even misspelled, right? It was M, capital I. Michael Costa. Like me, Kyle Costa or something. Okay. It's a fucking article in Newsweek. You ever think that your career would result in you having typos for a headline, Jamie? Newsweek. I don't even know which ones we've missed. I'm sure there's been other ones.
That's just the first one I've seen. 100%. Well, it happens. It happens. People make mistakes. You're typing things in. Yeah. But the fact that it's an article that we're being called out for a typo. But it's just anything for clicks, man. Slow week for news. When it comes to college basketball and March mania, one thing is for sure. Nothing's for sure. Upsets.
buzzer beaters cinderella's advancing top seeds going home early it's all gonna happen bet the unexpected every upset every day with draft king sportsbook with live betting exclusive content pro We'll be right back. instantly bet the unexpected with DraftKings Sportsbook download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use the code Rogan that's code Rogan for new customers to get $200 in bonus bets when you bet just five bucks
Only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 877-8HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY-467-369. In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-777. We'll be right back. Anything for clicks. That was something that I noticed, a trend that I've noticed over the last couple of years. Legacy Media is really struggling to...
garner attention itself. It seems like fewer and fewer people are listening to it. We saw that over the last election. It seems to me like the best way that legacy media can gain traffic is to talk about independent media. Yeah. How many times are we seeing headlines about Andrew Huberman or about the right wing manosphere pipeline and how it's getting people to do this or the other side? Like, why is there not a Joe Rogan of the left? You know, whatever that whatever the headline is.
More and more, the way that legacy media is able to achieve traffic is only in reference to independent media. Yes. So as opposed to us being downstream from them, they're now downstream from us. And anything masculine is right-wing. Anything. You cannot be masculine. Like, you cannot be interested in physical fitness, anything. It's a pipeline to being right-wing. Yes. You can't, like, fast cars. Nope. You're not allowed to.
You're not even allowed to like Teslas anymore, which are the fastest cars. Yeah, you're a misogynist. You're probably racist, maybe a Nazi. I'm going to put a swastika in your car just to let everybody know. There was a really fucking stupid graph that someone put up of how right-wing social media and new media people dominate. That was the Media Matters study. This is interesting. I was at the top of the list.
I was at the top of the list, and I was like, I feel like the way Caitlyn Jenner must have felt when she won Woman of the Year. It's so quick I got to the top of the list. I'm not even right wing. Just because I support Trump, I support him over the rest of the fucking nonsense that was going on when you're trying to push through someone without even a primary. There it is. This is it. I'm number one, bitch.
It's kind of funny. They're putting Theo Vaughn in there. Lex Friedman. Yeah, Lex Friedman. That's hilarious to put him in there. Who else do they have in there that's ridiculous? Piers Morgan. Well, Piers Morgan is kind of light right leaning, I think. Light right. But I think he's pretty reasonable. I think he's far more of a centrist. Kill Tony 3.5. I still don't understand how that's a political show. It's not. But Tony, you know, was at the White House or the... Flagrant 2.8.
Flagrant is not a right-wing show, you fucking idiots. You have a bunch of red dots, too, with no names on them. You're allowed to. Shut up, Jamie. I managed to thread the needle of avoiding this. You're going to get on there now. put you on now. Jamie, those red ones are real. Just shut up. No, they're real. They're all real. There's a couple blue ones that are real, too. Fuck the name.
They're too little to give a name. Too small. No one cares. No one gives a name. Yeah. It's hilarious. It's very funny. What do you think of the – have you got a proposed reason for why this – is it just a judgment criteria that they're judging?
shows that aren't right-wing as right-wing or is it genuinely that for some reason the left is struggling to make progress in independent media well they're struggling to make progress in independent media for sure they're trying to figure out why they're trying to figure out why these what they are calling right wing i think if you looked at all my positions
I think way more of them are left wing than right wing. What are the left wing positions that you still hold? Well, the big one is having some sort of a social safety net. I was on welfare when I was a kid. My family was on food stamps. We were fucking poor as shit. And I remember that helping us a lot. We had food where I don't know what we would be doing.
I mean, we were in a bad place, and there's social safety nets for people. My family got out of that, and my stepfather and my mother wound up doing well. They did really great, and they got— Out of debt and bought a house and great job and the whole deal. But when I was a little boy We were fucked and I think social safety nets are very important for people
It's very important for society. If you care about people, you care about the whole society. You don't want people starving when there's ways to develop government programs to make sure people have food. I think that's this idea of pull them up by their bootstraps is horseshit.
Some people don't have boots. They don't have straps. They don't have nothing. They're fucked. They're fucked from the moment they were born. They were born into a bad family environment in a bad neighborhood and crime and gangs and drugs. And it's not.
even playing field where are you at with healthcare i think healthcare 100 should be socially funded um i think that Medicare and Medicaid, having programs where people who are hurt can get an operation and it's not going to bankrupt them for the rest of their life is another thing that I think society should be... It should be a part of our agreement to take care of each other as a community, that we chip in money.
for what people would think of as socialist positions. And I always bring up the fire department because the fire department is one of the best examples that everybody sort of agrees. It's a socialist sort of thing.
Give your tax dollars. The tax dollar supports the fire department. The fire department fairly puts out fires for everybody. They don't not put out your fire if you don't have any money. It's not like the fires don't. It's such a good example. But when you compare that to the way that. Medical access is done, at least in this country. But I also...
Believe in competition. I've said this before I'll say it again. I want my doctor to be a bad motherfucker who drives a Mercedes I want my doctor to like be really good. I wanted to be an artist You know, I want to go to the guy who fixes the Lakers knees, you know, that's the guy you want you want that guy
has a nice watch and he lives in a nice house and he kicks ass and he knows how to fucking fix people really well he's the best at it and you go to him and you get an operation and you're fucking golden that's what you want when you you want competition because competition inspires excellence you know being rewarded for your hard work is a giant incentive for people to get amazing at things and you need that you need that too but there's also a lot of
Very good doctors who would be very happy to do something that helps the overall greater good of the community. Just like you have really good criminal defense attorneys that are... assigned to you if you're getting unjustly tried and you want a really good one that can help you. state-appointed attorneys that are just good people that want to help people. Bill Murray was talking about his daughter. His daughter does that.
And there's room for that with the amount of money that we spend on so many things that we all agree are fucked. And maybe some of that could be freed up with some of this USAID money that they're pulling. There's nothing wrong with giving people health care.
Like if you know anybody that's been injured and was bankrupt because they didn't have insurance and then they had to get some crazy operation and now they have this enormous debt and they wind up going bankrupt or they're getting chased down for the money for the rest of their life. It's horrible.
One cause of bankruptcy in America, medical debt. I mean, coming from the UK where we've got the NHS, it feels fucking barbaric. It really does feel barbaric. I remember I went to New Orleans and I was getting... ghost tour on an evening time. It's like fun tourist shit to do in New Orleans. I do those. The guide was so good. My mother was a Wiccan. I don't know if that was true, but the tale was lovely. Anyway, Anna...
He was telling me I've got a chipped wisdom tooth and my girlfriend got into a car wreck the other day. And he basically said he was explaining to me about how you can get bankrupted by this stuff. He's like, if you get hit by a car, you don't have insurance. You better fucking walk it off. Because if you don't, that could be the end of essentially the beginning of the end of your life.
And that really, I mean, that was six, seven years ago now. And it's still like, that was the most haunting thing about the fucking ghost tour. Him telling me about the medical debt. And then I think the reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO killing as well, for me. me, somebody who didn't fully understand how many of the claims are denied. I think that there was an increase by about 30% in denial of claims over only the most recent period. And I just thought, guy shoots person.
Typically, the guy that shoots them is in the wrong. And the reaction on the internet just, I wasn't ready for it. And it really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has. with the healthcare system. Yeah, I think it's a quiet epidemic. I think there's been a lot of people massively affected by it and they're just... just sitting there seething, just angry. Waiting for some righteous person to come in and do.
But then you see the fucking revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug corporations where these people leave and then all of a sudden they have these amazing jobs at pharmaceutical drug companies and they're making millions of dollars. How is that legal? How is this whole thing? thing legal like when you realize that doctors are incentivized to medicate people they're financially incentivized to give people certain medications whether it's vaccines they get bonuses if they're
vaccinate more than 60% of their clients and they lose those bonuses if people don't get vaccinated. There's like a lot of creepy shit that's involved in medicine. The FDA ban. on compounded Ozempic started yesterday. It's a ban. So you have to get it from the big companies. Correct. Brigham taught me about this. I didn't understand how it works. If there's a shortage of a drug, compounding pharmacies are kind of allowed to just...
bypass patents in some way. It's like you can produce it and you can make it cheaper and more widely available because the supply chain's fucked or something like that. That would be a good thing for society. Well, to make more drugs more widely available for cheaper. If it's good, if it's a... very important pharmaceutical drug that can save people's lives. Imagine not letting compound pharmacies make it.
for people that can't get it. Yeah, or can't afford it, or don't have the insurance for it. So yeah, I mean, that came into effect. I think tizepatide got popped yesterday, and then partway through April, semiglutide is going to go as well. Yeah, that's all just eliminating competition, right?
Well, we need to think, you know, all of the people that are using these drugs, that are losing weight with them, whatever, we need to think about who the real sort of... people suffering from this situation are who are the stock owners of telehealth companies if you own hymns or whatever yeah the stocks declined by a lot but dude i've been thinking so much about ozempic recently and um I think the introduction of Ozempic...
proves how much of a scam the body positivity movement was all along. You look at the Golden Globes and all of the women that were supporting their bigger sisters, as soon as there was an easy route... to being able to become a skeleton. They look like this. Look like this guy here. They all get those sucked in cheeks and the eye sockets suck in. It looks really creepy. It was... It just shows how flimsy your principles are, that it was easier for you to say,
I can't win this particular game, therefore the game is rigged. Like if you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get and then proclaim to everybody else that they should get it too. Yes. And yeah, the Golden Globes, you just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking. Yeah, I mean, women of Hollywood are now facing the same dilemma that dudes who go to the gym have had for decades because it's pointless losing weight naturally.
Why would you lose weight naturally? Because everybody's going to accuse you of having used Olympic in any case. Same thing as a dude. If you gain weight as a guy and you get jacked, really jacked, if you really discipline yourself, you know, multiple years. progressive overload, time under tension, hitting your protein goals, getting enough sleep. What your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take trend alone. And it's the exact same.
What is the incentive for anybody to lose weight naturally? And apart from I have some concerns about the drugs and the side effects and so on and so forth. So socially, there is no incentive for you to lose weight naturally. Remember when Adele lost all that weight? I think I'm mad at her. She did it in the before times, dude. Right. She did it hard. Yeah, she did it the fucking, yeah, exactly. The hard way. Yeah, exactly. Extreme difficulty. Yeah. But yeah.
Now she's hot. Do you remember when she did that Jamaica thing? She came out and she had all of her hair done like this. There's this odd Pascal's wager that you have to make where you think, I can either lose weight. normally, or without assistance, it's going to be more difficult, and people are going to accuse me of using Ozempic in any case, or I can just take it, and it'll be easier, and they'll accuse me of it. Nothing changes. Yeah.
I'm in favor of Ozembic for people that are morbidly obese. I think anything that can get you on the path. And I think if you can combine that, if you can say, okay, this is what I'm doing. So I'm going to do this. And then I'm going to start an exercise program. And then you wind up losing 30, 40 pounds. You feel better. or you look better, if you can continue this exercise program, you've at least put a healthy thing in your life along with Ozempic.
I think that's critical because also that can mitigate some of the negative effects of one of the things that we're seeing is that people are losing a lot of muscle mass and a lot of bone mass. As much as 30% of the weight that people are losing is muscle and bone.
That, I think, could probably be mitigated with regular strength training. You know, you're only hearing about this from people that aren't strength training. Do not have a fitness regime. Right, but which is the majority of these people that need this drug in the first place. That's how they got fat in the first place. Right, right. So Johan Hari did a really great book on this.
You had Johan on a bunch of times. He wrote this book called Magic Pill. And he's got just a really nice takeaway. He says, if you're under BMI of 30 and you're trying to lose weight... go fuck yourself. If you're between 30 and 35, there's probably a value judgment you need to make. And if you're over 35 BMI, the cost benefit analysis seems to sort of work in your favor. Yeah. Yeah. People are losing more. muscle and bone mass from using Ozempic than you would typically.
if you were not using that. But I think that that's just largely a selection criteria for the sort of people that are using Ozempic to help them lose weight, that they're so heavily calorie restricted that they don't need to have a fitness program. They don't have to really change their diet. diet. I learned this. Johan taught me this thing. It's super interesting. Gastric band surgery, after people have that, the suicide risk is pretty high. And sometimes it's because of these...
surgeons that leave the gauze in or leave a scalpel or a fucking cigar end in. There's complications that can happen physically. But the other thing that happens is these people used food as their coping mechanism. for how they would feel better. And their ability to eat and their appetite has gone away, but their psychological issues have not.
And they don't have a coping mechanism anymore. They've no longer got this outlet. Right. And then there's the issue also, you're not going to feel as good because your body's not absorbing nutrients correctly. You're missing some of your stomach. You know, it's like your stomach fills up quicker because they removed part of it.
Like that can't be good just for overall metabolic health. Like you've diminished your body's ability to break down food. That just can't be good. And there's other ways to do it. There's other ways to do it. It's like there's a gambling term that you got to get better the same way you got sick. So, like, say if you and I were playing pool and we're playing for $100 a game. Okay. And you're up.
five games, you're up 500 bucks. And I say, next game for 500 bucks. And you go, no, you got to get better the same way you got sick. Oh, that's interesting. You can't just win one game and now you're even.
And they're like, come on, what are you, pussy? Are you scared? Like, no. That's not how this works. You lost one at a time. You're not getting it all back. You went down a dark road and you missed a lot of shots and now you're fucked. And I'm not going to let you off the hook with one easy thing. I might do that if it's like, okay, you put up 1,000 and I'll put up 300.
We'll see that. If you stack it in my, yeah, if you reflect in the odds where we're at financially at the moment. Yeah, you got a jacket in my favor while I'm willing to make a risk. Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it's a strange, I think another thing with Ozempic. I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudiced against people that use Ozempic than fat people are. So typically you would say – stay with me. I think you're right. So you would have imagined – and this did happen.
Some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, you know, that you're losing your bigger brothers and sisters. I don't know.
But they're not actually threatened in the same way as in-weight people are. So I'm aware that losing weight through a Zempick is not the same as getting... in shape especially if you don't do the health and fitness regime if you don't do the resistance exercise you end up gone skinny fat you know jowls big cheeks all that stuff but
The signal of being in shape, let's just take that as being in shape, right? Like a normal BMI. The signal of being in shape is usually a reliable indicator of what you've done to have to get that. Right. Disciplined, reliable. able to do hard things, self-motivated, consistent, stick to a routine, conscientious, industrious, all of these things. So you look at somebody who's in shape and you think, I can infer from your body.
a lot of things about who you are beyond just your body. I actually think that this is one of the huge benefits that most people don't realize about getting in shape if they want to attract a partner or whatever. Sure, the body looks great when you take the clothes off, but what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values and what you do? Now, the problem with the introduction of easier routes to being in shape is that...
It's completely derogated the signal. The signal is now no longer reliable. Right. Because previously the signal said, I've had to jump through all of these different hoops. Well, now, how do you know if they've jumped through all of those hoops or if they're just shooting a Zempic once a week? Right. And I think that this explains why a lot of people who are in shape have a real visceral reaction. Now, sure.
Lots of people are concerned about the drugs. Fen-Fen was this thing in the 90s that fucked people up. It was speed. Yeah. I mean, it's a good way to lose weight. I knew a girl who was on it. She was a very pretty girl that was a little heavy. And then got on the fen-fen and just wanted to talk to everybody. Couldn't stop talking. And got real thin. I was like, this is crazy. And then she developed a heart problem. Oh. Yeah. That she kept for the rest of her life, I believe.
I don't know her anymore, but I ran into her a couple years later and she was telling me she has a heart problem. There's been no free lunch in weight loss ever yet. No. And I think that people are looking at...
at the GLP ones and thinking, where's the side effect? When's it coming? What's it going to do? Well, there's tons of side effects. It depends upon the person because obviously people are very different biologically. Everyone has a different tolerance to alcohol. People have different tolerances to foods.
have different tolerances to medications. And I have good friends that have had horrible side effects from Ozempic. They tried it. They got on it. Terrible. Pancreatitis. Yeah. I got a buddy of mine. He was in bed for two weeks.
He was really sick. And I know several other people that just... feel terrible when they take it and they had to get off of it it was really fucking with them and then i know other people that have taken it like uh a buddy of mine that works at the ufc we ran into him the other day i'm like dude you look fucking great and he's like yeah i got on rozembeck fuck it i just went for it
I said, hey, man, and he had a whole plan. He's going to get down to a certain weight, and then he's going to taper off. Transition. But he looked great. He looked great. You seen Alex Jones? Yeah, but Alex is not on anything. I know. He's not on his epic at all. He works with my friend Sean.
On it. I've been watching him train. I've been watching him train on a Tuesday. Not watching him train. He trains when I train. I'm not following Alex Jones around. Likely story. Getting after it. I know. That's exactly what someone from the deep state would say. Do you know him? Did you see him there? I spied him over the far side. You never had a conversation with him? I once saw him when I did Tim Pool's show in the RV outside of the Infowars.
car park oh yeah i did that yeah it was the same week that was the first week i was ever in austin three and a bit years ago i remember that live stream that was fun alex is a lovely person he really is he's working really hard in the gym if he just had that one thing that he didn't talk about. That's it. It's that one thing. Everything else has been mostly right about. You know what I should have said? Alex Jones is like the fucking patient zero for...
If you lose weight by going to the gym and working out and changing your diet, people are just going to say it was a Zen pick. No, people think he's a totally different person. They think they've replaced Alex Jones with someone else. Did David Icke have a pop at... alex jones recently did he who did david ike get in trouble with jamie was that
I feel like there was some, it was somebody else in that sort of a world. But yeah, I mean, if the reptile people, it gets a bit reptile-y when you get down to the lower body fat percentages. David, I saw something, he got upset that I've never had him on the show. And it's just the reptile stuff. It's just the shapeshifter stuff. I would still have them on. I think fascinating just to try to pick some of those ideas apart or listen to them. Even if you don't...
believe in the ideas. What's interesting is how does somebody arrive at them? That's what's fascinating to me. When I do my show, I speak to someone and I'm like, I want to understand the psychology of how you have arrived at this particular position. Well, imagine if it's real. I mean, if shapeshifters were real, if there really are evil reptilian aliens and they've infiltrated our society and they've been pulling the strings forever and only a couple of people knew.
How ridiculous would that idea be? How ridiculous? It would be so ridiculous. But is an alien, shapeshifter, reptile person... Is that any weirder than the most recent theory that our entire universe is taking place inside of a black hole that's in another universe? Yeah, there's recent calculations that are leading these... I guess it would be astrophysicists. Like, who would be studying this? See if you can find it, Jamie. It's the most bizarre headline.
Because you're like, what the fuck are you saying? Like the whole universe is inside of a black hole? New NASA data hints we could be living inside a black hole. Great. Now is that, isn't that weirder than reptile people? Those are the two choices. Reptile people is not that weird, right? Octopi have the ability to completely transform their appearance and instantaneously adapt to an environment.
Why wouldn't we assume to some super advanced species from another planet that we would be horrified if we saw their real face? They just transform and look like the Queen of England. Yeah, and go sideways like that. Yeah, fuck. Do you know what a Boltzmann brain is? Have you ever heard of this? No. Okay, so in an infinite universe, infinite.
There is only, let's say, the size of your brain. It's like, whatever, 20 centimeters cubed or something, maybe 30 centimeters cubed. Inside that space, there's only so many ways that you can put matter together so that it creates. There's a limited number of ways that matter can come together with different elements, different structures, different everything like that. So Boltzmann brain suggests that across an infinite universe, there will be a brain.
the exact same as yours, the exact structure as yours that comes into existence for a moment and then goes away. And the reason... that you could be experiencing the world that you are now, all of your memories, your past, your history, the person that you think you are, is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just comes into existence and then goes. Ludwig Boltzmann. Why do you come into existence and then go away? Why don't you just exist somewhere else? You could exist somewhere else, but...
This brain appears just spontaneously because in an infinite universe, there is only so many different ways that you can piece matter together. Right. And it means that if you, it's the monkey's typewriter thing. It's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is concerned.
It's basically like a brain in a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain it. The way it was explained to me is that if the universe is truly infinite, not only is there another version of you somewhere. but there is another version of you that did the exact same thing you have done.
Every step of the way, every time you sneezed, every hesitation before you spoke your mind, every time you almost went into traffic when you didn't realize their light was still red. All of those things have happened in the exact.
same order an infinite number of times and every possible conceivable variation that you want red instead of blue yeah that you turned left instead of right yeah went trans instead of straight all of it all of it that you live in a totalitarian environment that you live in a utopia that you that you know the the germans won the war that yeah all that everything
Everything that could possibly be different would be different in every possible scenario That's what infinite means. It means it's so vast like the craziest one to me was the concept that Inside every galaxy In the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole, and that supermassive black hole is approximately one-half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy. If you go into that supermassive black hole, so there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, right?
Inside that supermassive black hole is in entirely another universe, filled with all sorts of different galaxies that have supermassive black holes in them. You go into one of those, another universe, filled. Supermassive black holes another universe filled all supermassive black holes each one another universe
It's just a WinZip file all the way down. But why is that weirder than the universe is infinite? Why is that weirder? I mean, just the weirdness of what it is is so fucking insane. The idea that it's infinite or that there's... An infinite multiverses and infinite versions of these things inside black holes and in all sorts of ways that we haven't even.
really figured out yet that's that's not that much weirder than what's real what's real is insane what's real is that the whole thing was smaller than the head of a pen and for no understandable reason It expanded instantaneously and became the universe that you see in the sky today. Okay. Okay. What the fuck are you saying? McKenna had a great line about that, that science requires of you but one miracle. The Big Bang. It's a miracle.
What is it if it's not that? I mean, it's a thing of science. Yes. Okay. So if you can study all of the matter and you study all of the forces and all the energy and all the reasons why matter... coalesces or matter expands yes you could probably given enough time and enough quantum computing power figure out what's causing everything to compress down smaller than the head of a pin and then explode but
It's still crazy. Even if you had some scientific explanation for it, it's fucking insane. I got into super voids. So there's the Buettas super void. So areas of the universe that have big absences of matter way more than there should be. Thank you. The Buetta's super void is the biggest one. I think a ton 6118 or something is one of the biggest stars or one of the biggest black holes. And then this Buetta's super void is because you would expect homogeneity. Yeah.
across the universe things can be distributed pretty evenly no so what's this big hole here jamie can you try and find a I love the videos that show you the size of Earth and the size of our sun and the size of other suns. You realize just how fucking insignificant you are. You get to suns that are as big as our galaxy. What the fuck?
Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. I don't know if there's suns that big, but there's definitely suns as big as our solar system. Well, looking at the night sky gives you a really wonderful... piece of perspective right it reminds you just how puny and insignificant you are i think that's a giant problem with our society is that light pollution keeps us from seeing that all the time and the mysterious hole in the universe that's billions of times larger than the milky way
So go one left, a list of voids, Jamie. Yeah, that one. Just big holes. Yeah. So you should not have, it should be more evenly distributed. Yeah. And yeah, the buettas void, you know, this. huge lack. Yeah. In the middle of... It's so cool. Imagine you take a left turn in a spaceship. Fuck! Not here. Not the Buetta Supervoid. Not again. God damn it.
You can't land for 100 million years. Yeah. Dude, I had Matthew McConaughey on the show toward the back end of last year, and we talked about Interstellar's 10th year anniversary. That show is still, that movie is still... My favorite movie of all time. It's an amazing movie. I just saw it again a couple weeks ago. Me too. It was incredible. It's so good. It's so weird.
Such a weird movie. Nolan's a fucking king. He's a wizard. Everything that he does? Yep. What's the new one? What's his new movie? The Odyssey, I think. Oh, yeah. What is the Odyssey? Like the Homer. Oh, God, really? I don't know that story either, so I'm kind of... Yeah, I don't either. Part of me knows that I should have read it, and part of me is glad that I didn't, so I get to... I don't know how it finishes. I don't know how it ends. Yeah.
I think I probably read it in high school, but I don't remember at all. This is all we got, I think, is this picture of Matt Damon in this outfit. Oh, he's going to kill it. There are already complaints that it's not historically accurate.
Why, because of Matt Damon? No, because that's not what the armor would have looked like, apparently. He wouldn't have been able to see his face, apparently. Oh, really? Makes for a shit movie, though. Do you know what I mean? They're complaining already. Yeah, you can't.
always be historically accurate i guess yeah but that's all i got so far cast and tom holland robert pattinson nice absolutely stacked did you see uh matt damon do schultz's trailer yes i did yeah so fucking good yeah i have to say man that uh schultz's most recent special is one of the best things
I've got to shout out Andrew Schultz. That was one of the best things that I've seen in so long. I thought it was fucking phenomenal. It made me cry when I saw it live here in Austin. Twice. I cried twice. Wow. And then I saw it again before I had him on the show the other week. In the back of an Uber.
I like trying to not let the taxi driver see that I'm welling up. He's talking about his wife says something to him where she says, the thing is, honey, you don't have problems. We have problems. I was like, oh, it's just so lovely. And. Him talking about his experience trying to get pregnant and all of that stuff caused me to go and get sperm count done. I'm not trying to get anybody pregnant at the moment. How old are you? 37.
Do you have a number where you'd like to start breeding? Breeding? Within the next few years, I want to start a family soon. Do you have a gal? Yeah, the moment. Yeah, I do. How long have you been with this gal? Six months. Do you ever go on a trip with her? Yeah? Yeah, you've got to go on a long trip with them. Well, I think six months might be a little bit early just yet. No, if you want to find out what's up.
You got to go on a trip. Oh, you mean to work out compatibility? Yeah, you got to see how they deal with travel, how they deal with stress. How they deal with restaurants. Can they keep up their act when you're with them 24 hours a day for weeks at a time? It was when I actually did do a week-long trip in Jamaica.
and had to go from Montego Bay to Kingston twice to get my visa renewed. Now, traveling through Jamaican traffic with somebody will really tell you an awful lot. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, you're talking about like a Navy SEAL hell week of trying to throw difficult shit in that. So that worked. Well, you just need to see...
what people are like when they're with you all the time because people put on a show they put on a show you're a handsome guy you're successful they want to impress you they want to pretend there's something that you would love And then maybe they have ideas of morphing you and changing you over time. Like you get a car.
I think it's pretty good, but I like to update the engine. I do some shit to the tires, maybe change the way the interior looks. You start changing it, and then all of a sudden Chris is wearing different clothes. What's going on, Chris? Gotta be careful. I put these glasses on, that's why it happened. But yeah, I decided to go and get... sperm count thing done. You know what a varicocele is? No. Okay. Dude, this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about. So it's basically...
When you go through puberty, the way that the veins sort of form that blow heat off from your balls, they can form in a way where they just don't... get rid of the heat that efficiently. Not enough. And it's in 15% of men, so it's super, super common, but 50% of men that go to urologists have got this. And I go in and...
I've had these balls my entire life. I've had these balls. Thank you. They're not transplants. I've had these balls since puberty. And I found out at the age of 36, oh, you've got a medium varicocele. So the mad thing about this is... You'll know this. If you take testosterone, it plummets your sperm count. So typically testosterone and sperm kind of work against each other in that kind of a direction. This is the one thing where if you get it fixed, both go up.
So the mean change in testosterone is 180 points. How did they fix it? They just, it's surgery. It's a small surgery where they do an incision in your groin and they just fix the vasculature. Balls and surgery are two things that I don't like together. I like both of them. I don't think they should be. Never the twain she'll meet. Ball surgery is scary. Do you know that you can get a dick transplant if you lose your dick, but you cannot get ball transplants. You know why?
No. Because you will carry the DNA of the original person. So say if I die and you get my balls, you will have my DNA. You will have my kids. So why can't I have your balls? Well, you could if I gave you permission, maybe. Why don't we swap one ball each? It's like tossing a coin. See whose kids make it. Oh, it was Lefty that day. Lefty was the one that came out that day. Goddammit, all my kids are Chris's. What the fuck?
Come out speaking bread would be funny if we both like if you had an elective surgery to swap balls with a good buddy Like I love you so much. I want to swap a ball with you. Yeah We both don't know which one is gonna know it's like cuz I had a gay couple that were friends that lived down the street from me, and they had a kid with a surrogate, and they shot their jizz into a cup and mixed it up so they didn't know who's going to be the one who has the kid. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Two men, one cup. They had to do it twice, too, because the first time, the lady kept the kid. They paid her. They did the whole thing. At the end of it, she decided she wanted to keep the baby. Dude, the ethics of surrogacy are really interesting. It's weird. It's a weird thing. You're hiring someone to have your baby for you. And then wealthy people are doing it so they don't get their cooch stretched out.
That was the Kardashian approach. Allegedly, that's why she did it. Well, maybe she didn't want to carry babies anymore. She had a couple of them the normal way. But it's like so much of what the child experiences in the womb. it like leads to this, I would imagine, this bonding thing with the woman. The baby's inside of you. You remember feeling the baby inside of you. It grows inside of you. Then it comes out of you and you raise it and it breastfeeds. It's like...
This bond is – I understand surrogacy if someone can't get pregnant, if this is the only way you can have kids. I'm not saying don't do it. But I'm saying it's fucking strange because this other person is – Whatever anxiety they have, fear, their cortisol levels, if they have domestic abuse in their house, all that information is being transferred to the child. Pregnancy doesn't just make a kid, it also makes a mother.
Yeah. And it's dangerous. I'm so confused. I mean, test you babies. What happens if we can just create artificial wombs? You know something that's weird? I know that people don't get, they don't choose to be born. But somebody chooses whether or not these two sets of DNA are going to come together. If you've just got sperm donor after sperm donor and egg donor after egg donor and artificial wombs, it gets to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing.
who's coming into reality that much anymore. Well, that is definitely the future. I mean, look at plummeting sperm counts. Look at rising miscarriage rates. Look at the problems that people are having with microplastics and the disruption of the endocrine system. pesticides and herbicides and all these different ubiquitous chemicals that are affecting people's sperm counts and fertility it's it's a real factor and it's plummeting if you look at the if you look at like
human beings from the last 60, 70 years, and you look at males in America, where their sperm count used to be and where it is now, it's rapidly decreasing. There's a lot of factors, sedentary lifestyle, processed foods, but there's also environmental factors. seem to be altering the actual way a child develops in the womb. And this is Dr. Shanna Swan's work. Calm down. Yeah, which is an incredible, just, it's an incredible book, but it's just an incredible...
fact that the plastics that we use from microwave foods and water bottles and all that stuff is literally changing the development of children. It's changing the size of their testicles, the size of their penises. A no genital distance. Yeah, yeah, the taint shrinks. It's really crazy stuff, and it's... It replicates what happens in mammals when they do these studies with rats and hamsters and same things happen. A third of all children globally are going to be obese by 2050. Jesus.
That's the current trajectory. And 1 billion people worldwide are obese. So the number one... form of malnutrition globally is obesity not starvation there's twice as many people that are obese than are starving that's crazy if that's not a comment on problems of abundance as opposed to problems of scarcity yeah it's not even abundance though it's the food is so calorie rich and filled with
You know, you get so fat so quick. Like if you're eating nothing but junk food and drinking nothing but soda. as I sit here with a large Diet Coke, which I usually don't drink, but I do occasionally. That is, like a Diet Coke at least doesn't have the calories, but if you're having a large Coke like that, like if you have a Coke like this, what is this, a liter?
This is probably a liter. 750 maybe or a liter? Yeah, it's a liter. So how much sugar is in one liter of Coca-Cola? Let's find that out. Well, there's nothing in that one, right? Which is why it's a diet. Yeah, it's just brain cancer. Donald Rumsfeld approved brain cancer. 94.7 grams of sugar. 94.7 grams. And people polish these things off every day. Someone's polishing off a two liter of Mountain Dew.
into this as we speak. So that's probably double that. So that's hundreds, hundreds of grams of sugar. The big gulps. The average American is fatter than the average American pig. Now, it's true. It's true. Average American man, 28% body fat. Average American woman, 40% body fat. Average American pig, 15 to 25% body fat. Oh, my God. Yep. I would have thought it would be higher than 28%. I think we're doing pretty good.
For guys? Yeah. Well, I guess it's offset by like Brian Johnson and all of the Olympic people that are just super shredded. Yeah, exactly. And then there was that other thing about you talking about kids. It's some huge percentage of 18 to 24 year olds. couldn't join the military. Like 70% because of mental health or obesity or drug use or something. And half of them had two or more of these excuses for why you couldn't do it. And I think if you track over time.
The amount of military service that people have had, so much less. It's so much less. And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing, even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal. Again, the same as going to the gym, reliable.
orderly, conscientious, I can be on time, I can do hard things. This is one of the proposed explanations for the baby boom, was that a lot of men that did come back from war were signaling their eligibility, signaling how reliable they could be, and it made it easy. for women to be attracted in that way.
That makes sense. I mean, imagine a woman, you're going to get pregnant. And so you're going to be, you could work for a little while, but towards the end, you're not going to be able to work. And then after the child, it's going to be very difficult to work. So you're reliant on this other person.
How well do you know this person? Did you do that 10-day vacation in Jamaica with that guy? Did you drive from Montego Bay to Kingston twice in bad traffic? Do you know what happens when he makes mistakes? Does he blame other people or does he apologize? Who is he?
You know, because all that shit's going to come up when you get four hours sleep because the baby's crying. And then, you know, maybe he doesn't like his job anymore. He wants to quit. And you're like, you can't quit, motherfucker. You have to feed us. You have to take care of a family now. going to just quit what are you talking about you don't like your job show up and I can't imagine relying on another person like that I mean this is why women are so picky like when you see that
80% of the women are attracted to 20% of the men. And that's what that is. What did you expect? What did you expect? It's hard to have your shit together. It's hard. to be kicking ass in this fucking complicated, bizarre world that we live in. It's hard. So for a woman... Of course. What about personality? You're a fucking lazy bitch. That's part of your personality. Part of the reason why you're not successful at 40 years of age has to be you.
Has to be. Some of it has to be. I mean, it could be a fucking avalanche of bad luck, one thing after the other, but... I would like to see that you're making progress towards a better direction. But if you're stuck in this mindset of, you know, the world fucks me over, it's like never going to...
No one's going to want to be with you. No one's going to want to have children with you. No one's going to be willing to rely on you to support a family. You have to get your shit together. And you have to also be attractive, which is just dumb luck. Like you have the dumb luck of genetics. You got a good face. Ooh, you know, you got a good body. A lot of that's genetics too. You know, like what they like and what they don't like is mostly about breeding.
It's mostly about is this person reliable to breed with? It's interesting to think about the – you mentioned earlier on about – Going to the gym is right wing and liking fast cars is right wing and all the rest of it. The number of liberal women that are struggling, I think, to find an eligible partner is going up because they just can't find a guy that will hold the door open for them, that will treat them like a lady, that will try and be the...
protect a provider, procreate a thing. You go, you're talking about a conservative. You're talking about somebody who's more traditional in that way. And I get worried. sort of talk a lot about this stuff on the show and I get worried about not helping men to improve in this sort of zero-sum view of empathy that if you give some attention to men... and the way that they're struggling, that it takes it away from some other more deserving group.
So a lot of the time, if someone's falling behind, 50 years ago, Title IX gets introduced, right, for women. It's not enough women in higher education. It's not enough women expediting them through socioeconomic status. 50 years later, they've... blown the fucking roof off the glass ceiling. It doesn't exist. Two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030. Women earn way more than men do in their 20s. Way more. And now...
How are you? It's going to be difficult for you to find an eligible partner as you begin to climb up your own socioeconomic ladder as you get higher and higher up. You look across and there are fewer and fewer men over there. And what you think is, OK, well, typically.
If a group is falling behind in society, we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. We spend billions of money in taxpayer-funded charities and think tanks to try and work out what's going on and to try and bring them along for the ride. That's not happening with men because vestigially for so long, men had it so good. And now it's, I don't know, it feels like twisting the knife in some sort of karmic retribution in a way. Like this is penance.
that you're paying. But a lot of guys, you can look at the number of CEOs and sure, guys that outperform on the top end, yep. But that's not necessarily due to privilege. It's because putting yourself in that position to do what you need to do to get yourself to the position of being a founder, being a CEO, running a successful company is so fucking insane that most women would just choose to not go and do that. You're talking about outliers.
Evolutionary psychology says that men are nature's playthings, that there's more variability. There's more male geniuses, but there's also more male retards. And it's all well and good, pointing to the number of CEOs and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and all the rest of it.
doesn't help the guy who is really struggling and has had that run of bad luck and has been really struggling trying to work on himself. And yeah, if women have a problem, a lot of the time we say, what can we do to fix society? Any other group.
But if men are struggling, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? And in some ways that's inspiring. Like guys want that sense of like, I can fucking do this. I can do this. But it denies that the structural problems, I think the education system.
For young boys, it's really, really tough getting them to sit in a classroom still for six hours a day. It seems like females are just better at doing that. Young girls are more effective at a sort of brain-based economy. highlighting and planning ahead of the homework that they've got to do and the assignments and stuff like that. And you just roll that forward. Two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree.
I'm not saying let's rip women out of the classroom and out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen. Like, obviously not. Obviously, that's not what either of us are saying. What do you think is the cause of it? Like, what do you think is the reason why more men aren't? succeeding and getting college degrees and more men aren't going out and making as much money in their 20s? I think that the current environment does not necessarily lend itself to the disposition that men have got.
They're less conscientious than women from a personality standpoint on average. That means that it's really difficult, comparatively, on average, for you to be able to remind yourself that you need to do this sort of homework. Men are more predisposed to addiction. They're more predisposed to using recreational drugs. They're more predisposed to being in jail, to all of this sort of gangsta.
that people get drawn into it's just more likely for guys there are more roots that men can be pulled away in that sort of a manner and on top of it i don't think that there is a particularly inspiring uh vision for what But you said earlier on about fitness right wing, fast cars right wing. There was this thread on Reddit, I think, in a left-leaning forum that said, people of the left.
Can you give me a good example of who you think a positive male role model would be? The top voted one was Aragon from Lord of the Rings. What about Fabio? You've had to go. to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure. And I think that this is one of the issues that we see on the left, which is...
There is no level of purity or the level of purity you need to be able to get to is so high. It doesn't exist. How many people have gone from left to right? I left the left type thing like that. Quite a few. How many people have gone from right to left? Very few. Why? Because if you have got a slightly fettered past, if you maybe said things in the past that didn't agree with where we are at now, the right will welcome you with open arms.
But the left one. Why do you think that is? I think that there is a level of puritanism on the left where they are unprepared to accept people who have had... positions that they don't agree with, there seems to be this odd purity spiral where they're constantly trying to point out people who are no longer agreeing with the ideology du jour of the modern world.
What do you think? Why do you think it is? I think that's probably a factor. I also think that corporate America, the whole structure of it with human resources and people working together, it's just like... It's not necessarily what men want. What men want, if you want men to work in the best environment possible for men, they would work with mostly men. And they would probably...
be able to speak and communicate in a way that they did on Mad Men. You know, they'd act like men. Like men like to act like men. Most men that are involved in corporate life act like some strange character. That is what a man is supposed to be.
especially if you're supposed to espouse all the latest social justice, you know, whatever the mantra is that you have to repeat. If you have to... rigidly adhere to an ideology in order to fit in with your corporate environment you're going to do that and you're going to be trapped in that and you're going to just
desperately want some escape that's why ceos wind up going to dominatrix and getting ball gagged and kicked in the balls and shit like what do you think that is it's like they need something something wild to escape from them the mundane existence that they have in the corporate world. That's the person that's in control all the time, so privately I need to be out of control. It's just not compatible for most men, like that type of environment.
A work office environment, it's not compatible. Nobody wants to do that. What you want is the rewards of that. You want the money. You want success. You want status. You want all those things. You want the corner office. But what you don't want is to work in that environment. If you could choose to make the same kind of money, doing things that you love to do, having fun.
all these corporate CEOs could make as much money playing golf. I bet they would play golf. I don't think they really want to be doing that. They're doing that because it's the way in order. It's the way to succeed and the way to make money. And it feels like hell. It feels like hell. You're stuck in traffic every day.
You're stuck in the office. You're not working eight hours a day if you want to really make it. And this is like why the wage gap between men and women was such an insidious lie because they were always saying women make 75 cents to every dollar a man makes.
that without understanding what it actually means. It's job choices and hours worked. Those are the primary factors that lead to men earning more money than women. It's not a man and a woman are doing the same job and someone rips off the woman.
by only giving her 75 cents to what the man works. If that was the case, and the woman does just- Everybody would employ women. Yeah, you would only employ women, because women, you'd pay them less, they'd do a better job anyway, right, ladies? So there you go. It's nonsense. But that thing that Obama repeated on television, I remember watching him say that, going, he knows better than this. This is bullshit. This is a bullshit statistic. But it's a heartstring statistic. Good headline. Yeah.
plays on what you want to believe rather than what's true. Women have to take time off for maternity leave. If they get pregnant, it's going to significantly impact the amount of hours they're willing to work. They might not want to do the job anymore once they're raising their children. If their husband's making enough money, they probably want to quit. They want to be at home with their kids.
kids it's a normal thing and then a lot of women who are career corporate women are shamed for wanting to stay home with their children yeah oh you've been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic prostitute oh so um I was talking to, was it Schultz that said this? I think it was. He was telling me on the show. He said that...
His wife used to work at Google, I think. She's like super high powered, real smart lady. And she used to bump into her old colleagues in the supermarket when they were together. And the classic question that somebody that's in the career trenches asks somebody else is, oh, so what are you doing now? You left work. What are you doing now? And Schultz said this sentence that his wife...
replied with would fucking kill him. She says, oh, I'm just a mum. He said it's the just that really hurt. I'm just a mum. Well, that's how you feel like you're supposed to admit. that you're just a mom. That fucking hurts, dude, to derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation. Yeah. That's another point, actually, about sort of men falling behind. I think it seems like...
Young boys are more negatively impacted by fatherless homes than young girls are. So any boy that grows up in an intact, a non-intact household is more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college. Yeah. In the US. Yeah. Any non-intact, that's adopted, step-parent, single parent, any non-intact home, they're more likely to end up.
in jail or in prison than they are to complete college. And the same statistic is not true for girls. And this, again, the zero sumness of the, so what are you saying? Are you saying that we need to hold girls? It's like, no.
You do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up. And we spent 50 years really pedestalizing and helping take the reins off of young girls so that socioeconomically they can look after themselves. They're no longer financial prisoners of their partner, which is a big deal.
You look at the divorce statistics from the past and proclaim it as some amazing cultural outgrowth. And you go, how many women stayed in those relationships because they fucking couldn't afford to leave? Right. They had no other option to do that. That's scary. That's scary. That's why women are so picky. And they should be. Yeah. It's also crazy that...
We put value in our lives on money above everything, including above doing a good job raising your children. You put the money that you earn above that. And you just get daycare during the day. I'll be home at 6. That's fine. That's plenty of time to be with my kid. And there's a lot of people that live their life by that. And their ledger, when they look at the amount of money that they've earned, that's what...
That's the reward. It's the greatest metric in the world, though. It's the most easy to optimize thing. I can tell you the size of the house that I live in. I can tell you how much money I earn. I can tell you what the car is like that I drive.
I can't tell you how much peace I have when my head hits the pillow at night. I can't tell you what the quality of the relationship between me and my wife or me and my kids is. I can't tell you how much time I got to spend in a hammock last week. You know, these are the things I think that... if you were able to metric it, if you were able to make it a game.
people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it yeah but the money's the best game in the world it's literally transferred currency exchange you can exchange it i know what your wealth is compared with that guy in japan compared with that dude in russia compared with this person that's australian
Whole world. It's the best game I ever created. And it's the game that so many people use to show their value. I mean, it's not just the richness of your life, the happiness that you have, the fulfilled... feeling that you have when you do whatever it is that you do we feel like you have a sense of purpose no that's not can't
Can't quantify that. Can't measure it. Can't put it on a scale. It's useless. Meanwhile, it's the most important thing. The most important thing is satisfaction. Satisfaction in your life, community, love, friendship, happiness. A sense of purpose. Like you enjoy what you do. That's so important for life. If you are just doing something you don't want to do just for money, you live in hell. And that's most people.
Most people live in this like dull hell and they try to have fun while they're at work. They try to, you know. have people that they talk to at work, hopefully make some good friends at work, and you can enjoy your chitter-chatter at the water cooler. But the reality of that life is just mostly suck. There's a lot of problems, I think, that people that are driven face that don't get that much sympathy. So I had this idea that type A people have type B problems.
And type B people have type A problems. So insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and lazy people need to learn how to work hard and be more disciplined. And, you know, most people that listen to shows like yours or mine are...
probably some version of type A, like a kind of walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity. That's a great definition. It is. It's really accurate. I think the thing that... type a people realize is that if you're type a you get very little sympathy because a outwardly successful but miserable person is way less always appears to be in a much more preferential position than a
content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy one right you know what i mean right right so problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity like
one feels like a choice and the other feels like a limitation. One is like a bourgeois luxury and the other is like a systemic imposition. You know, I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax feels... dopaminergic and opulent and addicted and privileged I need someone how to teach me how to work harder feels noble and upward aiming and like you're supporting the downtrodden like every
underdog movie in history has a training montage of some guy down on his luck that gets saved by the right woman or a Japanese dude that teaches him to wash cars or whatever it is, and through grit and spit and sawdust, he sorts himself out and he fixes his life. No movie explains how to log out of Slack at 6 p.m. right or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty right and so yeah i think in that sense type a people may objectively have better lives but subjectively
They're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough. Right. They wake up every single morning feeling as if they... already trying to repay some productivity debt. And only if they dance through the day completely perfectly, nail every single task, can they go to bed not feeling like a waste man. That's where they're at. Congratulations.
You might be very successful. You also might be very miserable. You're most likely going to be miserable. That's the cold, hard reality of most CEOs. Most really wealthy people, when you see them pull up in the yacht. They're fucking living hell. I think when you look at people that are super outlier performers, your first emotion should not be envy. It should be pity. You should think, what's that person?
What's it like inside of that person to drive them to do what they did to themselves, to put them in that position? What's their background like? What happened in their childhood? What do they think about their own sense of self-worth? Or how much Adderall are they on? The old performance enhancer. The testosterone for the businessman. It's not just performance enhancer. I think it changes the way you approach things.
Have you ever taken it? No. No, I'm scared of speed. I'm scared of anything that I think I would really like. Yeah, you haven't done cocaine for the same reason, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was very lucky when I was in high school. I knew some people that had problems with it.
Big warning sign. Yeah. Well, and back then I was very driven. I didn't even party, really. I only wanted to get good at martial arts. I was so driven that I didn't want to do anything that would interfere with anything else. What was it that... drove you why why why this drive for so long ah
There's probably a lot of factors. I mean, I got into it because I didn't want to get picked on because I didn't know how to fight, and I would be nervous around bullies. I didn't know what to do. And I'm like, I don't like this feeling at all. So I will become what everyone's afraid of. So I'll do that. And then when I got into it, I realized that, first of all, I realized that I could get really good at things. I realized that whatever...
Drive that I had and whatever thing about fighting which was so scary to me Why was so appealing to me at the same time and I realized that it was like a vision quest I was on this quest to try to figure out how to harness my potential and what better way than to do something that's very difficult and very scary. And then if you could get really good at something very difficult and very scary, you could probably master life.
So you had this gateway drug through martial arts that was a proof to you that you could self-author? Yes. Yeah, a proof that I wasn't a loser. For me, it was like that I could be successful. I've heard you say that before about the... The loser thing. Where did that fear come from? Did you feel powerless as a kid at some point? Yeah, I'm sure it comes from broken home, moving around a lot, a lot of factors. There's a lot of various factors.
But it's also just the existential angst of being a young man. They're looking for purpose. Who am I? What do I do? Am I good at anything? What gives me value? And for me... When I started doing martial arts, it was the first time that I was respected. And not just respected, like, I remember the first time I realized that people would gather around when I fought.
I was like, whoa, this is kind of crazy. Like, they specifically want to watch me fight. And that was a big deal to me. It was like that I was so good that people were gathering around. Really, it was like. They wanted to see something horrible. They wanted to see someone get head kicked. And they knew I did that a lot. Reliably, you could kick someone in the head. I was pretty good at it. And so that changed me.
It changed my self-reflection. It changed who I was. I wasn't a loser. Now I was an extreme winner and really good at it and super disciplined. And driven beyond anything that I thought was possible before I'd done that. I never had like that kind of focus before I got into martial arts. But martial arts demanded that kind of focus because you can't.
pretend. There's no pretending you're good. You have to be good. There's no pretending you're fast. You have to be fast. There's no pretending to be technical. You have to be perfect. Your technique has to be perfect. Because you're fighting against other trained killers. Your weaknesses will be revealed. You're going to get hurt.
And I saw so many people get hurt. It doesn't matter about what you tweeted. It doesn't matter about your beliefs stepping onto the mat. Your fucking rainbow flag that you have on your T-shirt. Nobody gives a shit. So on that, I think that's a very common pattern, especially for... young people who feel a little bit helpless in their life, I find a vector that makes me feel worthy.
You know, the most common story of high performers, I think, is that I needed to do something to get the world to recognize me. One of the problems, I think, as people grow up is that they internalize this belief.
that the only way that the world will value me is if I can continue to perform at this high level. And I think that there comes, some people can imbibe a type of insecurity in that if I stop doing... these things, if I stop being as impressive to the world, it's going to deny me its love, that it is, I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy.
And I think that this, talking about the high performer thing, talking about the pity of the CEO, go, how much are you running towards something that you want and how much are you running away from something that you fear? That there's not enoughness. Right, right, right.
The way I looked at it and the way I was taught was that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential. And that through the incredible struggle of training and competing, you will learn more about your ability. to excel at anything. This is the Miyamoto Musashi path. And I think that the problem with anything... Anything extreme but also fleeting. And athletic performance is fleeting. If you're...
At the very best, you have a couple of decades. At the very best. If you're really lucky, you have a couple of decades to define you as a competitor. But then your body will give out. Your age will win. The beating that your body takes from all the training and all the competing, eventually you're not going to be able to perform at that level anymore and you're going to fall off. And you see it with fighters.
It's really hard with professional fighters where their whole identity is wrapped up in being a champion. Their whole identity is being the king of the hill. And then they're no longer the king of the hill. And sometimes it happens very rapidly. Sometimes it happens over the course of just one or two fights. You go from being the pound for pound best in the world to a guy who nobody thinks is going to win the title again.
Like that. So six months later, you're in a totally different reality. You're in a depressed reality. And then maybe you are physically depressed because maybe you got really hurt in your last fight. So you're probably suffering from some brain damage. So you've got endocrine disruption. Your pituitary glands probably fucked. Your cortisol levels are through the roof. Your hormone levels are all fucked up. You might have a hard time losing weight.
You know, you're tired and depressed because your levels are all fucked up and your hormones because you basically got your brains beat in six months ago. Your capacity to fix the very problem has been taken away from you. Yeah, and you see it sometimes with one fight. With a fighter, you see...
Tony Ferguson is my favorite example, who was the boogeyman in the lightweight division of the UFC for years, for years. He was the guy who was like this unstoppable force that had bottomless cardio, never... stopped coming after you and was just hell bent on destruction and beat the fuck out of everybody beat the fuck out of everybody for years until he fought justin gaethje and justin gaethje
beat him so bad, he was never the same again. He was never the same guy again. He went from being a favorite in the Justin Gagey fight, I think he was a slight favorite going into that fight, to after the fight was over, he got stopped in the later rounds. Never, never recovered. You think that was a physical thing or a mental thing? Both. More physical than mental. Because I think Tony's mental...
His fortitude is unstoppable. He's just got this mindset, but I don't think his body responded the way he looked different. I saw him on a stair machine with David Goggins, and Goggins is screaming at him to keep going. He gets off, throws up in a bag, and gets back on the stair machine. No, he's an animal.
His mind is unstoppable. But at a certain point in time, particularly when you're being tested, right? So you're doing the USADA protocol at the time, and now it's a drug-free sport. So there's no peptides. There's nothing that... can aid you in recovery there's uh you know you can't supplement your hormones you can't
recharge your hormone development you can't there's there's so many things that you can't do because they are in fact performance enhancers that would help you recover you know if a guy like Tony Ferguson after that fight got on hormone replacement got into
testosterone got his levels up pretty high got to a point we could train as hard he probably wouldn't have had the slide that he had I think part of the slide is that everybody has to be natural and when you're natural and you get beat up a few times you're not the same person anymore. And I've seen it many, many times. One bad beating and the guy's done.
It's a big thing in boxing. In boxing, everybody points to Melchor Taylor is one of the best examples. Fought Julio Cesar Chavez. Chavez broke him down in the fight and then stopped him with a couple seconds to go in the last round. and the referee called the fight with a couple seconds to go in the last round. And Meldrick Taylor was never the same again. And he did interviews after the fight and the interviews after the fight, like a couple years later, pronounced slurring in his words.
A very clear deterioration of his reflexes and his speed. Very clear deterioration in his ability to take a punch and even avoid punches. His reflexes were off. Have you ever felt any TBI stuff from your heritage of doing striking? No. not really i'm sure it made me impulsive i'm sure i probably got the right amount of brain damage to succeed in life i think so because it made me uh not i'm not very risk averse i like risks
I enjoy them. I get a thrill out of taking chances. I'm not afraid to fail. I don't mind because I know that failure produces some of the best results. Every time I've ever failed at anything, the humiliation and the pain of it has always forced me to work so much harder. Failure in comedy is a gigantic blessing. If you have one good bombing, it sucks like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother.
When it's over, you realize that that can happen. You fucking tighten up your battleship. Some of the biggest growth leaps that I've seen in comics and even in fighters is a humiliating loss. Yeah, there's a... A special category of lesson that I've been thinking about, it's one that you can only learn by sort of having gone through it. And I think that bombing on stage or having a poor performance, I think that that's one of them. I think most of them you only learn by going through them.
something from watching other people's mistakes, which is why I've never done cocaine. But maybe if I did do cocaine, I would have been sober a long time ago and I would have had a much better understanding of the abyss. Cocaine is a performance enhancer. It's strange, you know, no matter sort of how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out these things for ourselves. For some reason, we insist.
on disregarding the mountains of warnings that we have from our elders, historical catastrophes and public scandals, and film and TV, and we think some version of... yeah that might be true for them but not for me but it's the like watch me do this mom mentality and uh yeah we decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again and unfortunately always seems to be the big things you know it's never about
how to charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party or put up a level set of shelves. It's never that. It's always we spend most of our lives learning firsthand. the warnings that previous generations gave us over and over again. And then one day you're like, I'm going to throw all my money in crypto. And then you will...
No, but that's one of them. Money won't make you happy. Fame isn't going to fix your self-worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You will regret working too much. worrying isn't aiding your performance nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it like over and over again you should see your parents more all your worries are a waste of time like these
It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. These are so trite. They're such basic bitch insights because everybody has heard them before. But if they're so basic, why does everyone who ends up arriving at them talk about them as if they've just had religious revelation? You know what I mean? Like they have this fervor to them about...
And why it is so important for you to listen that we couldn't have seen this coming. How could we have seen this coming? It's like it is in every single fable and story from the rest of time. And I think that. And one of the reasons this happens is if you don't have a thing, looking at somebody who has that thing, they have the solution to your problem. If you don't have money, you believe that by having money.
all of your problems would be fixed. If you don't have fame, you believe that fame is the thing that's going to get. If you don't have the goal, you think that getting the goal is going to do those things. And it is only by getting there and looking back and going, The issue that I thought would be fixed by getting the thing wasn't fixed. Fuck, I need to look deeper. So...
Not only do we refuse to sort of learn the lessons, if you talk about this on the internet, if you have a rich person on who says, you know what, man, I earned a couple of billion dollars and I'm still... I'm still pretty miserable. You bring some actress on. She says, you know, all of the fame and stuff like that. It really didn't fix my self-worth. The internet hates that. Yeah. It's a very contentious point to bring up.
I think that we believe our particular mental makeup would allow us to dance through this minefield. Yeah. Right? No, no, no. My unique inner landscape would be solved by this problem. Especially men. watch me dance through this minefield, avoid all of the tripwires, do a couple of pirouettes, and I won't kick any of them. Yeah. And then you kick one. And you realize, oh, fuck, this...
This worry of mine was so much more deeply rooted than the thing that's from outside. But I genuinely believe that you kind of need to learn it yourself. I don't think you can. I've got Naval on the show on Sunday. He's great. He's fucking phenomenal. I think that, by the way, the one that you did with him in 2019 is the best podcast episode of all time. Really? That two hours. Yeah, it's just one I've gone back. Maybe it's just like personally meaningful to me.
I must have listened to that, I think, more than any other CF. He's very wise. He's awesome. Very wise person. Although he did tell me that if he could invest more money in Clubhouse, he would have. And we were talking on the phone. I was like, dude, I think this is just bad podcasting. I don't think...
I don't think there's, but Clubhouse took off during the pandemic because people found themselves at home. And, you know, it's kind of cool to be able to hop on to a call with a bunch of other people. And you're basically sharing ideas of people you've never met before and intellectually. sparring and people loved it.
But I was like, bro. When the world reopens. I did it with Tim Dillon. We did an episode once. And he was like, yeah, it goes out there. And then, you know, no one ever has. I go, bullshit. People are recording this right now. I go, it's going to be online. And he was online immediately. Immediately. I go, this is not.
Yeah, it's like the mothership, making people put their phones in the bag, but you can reopen the bag. If you could reopen the bag. Yeah, but you can reopen the bag. It's like, oh, I'm allowed to do this and just take it. It's like, wait, everything's... Yeah. It's a real interesting one, but he's got this quote where he says, it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them. It's much easier for you to drive a beat-up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari. Sure.
Because you've closed that loop. I wonder if it is the money. I wonder if it is the fame. But it depends on the circles you're keeping, too. Because if you're keeping circles that are valuing those items that show you've achieved... milestones. There's a bunch of people. You don't have a Maybach? You don't have a this? Keeping up with the Joneses is a hell of a fucking joke. Your house is not in the best neighborhood. I was thinking about...
why I'm attracted to some of my friends, like why I like to spend time with some over others. And I sort of realized this interesting dynamic that I hadn't really heard get talked about much, which is... We think that we want to be charismatic. Like we think we want to step into a room. Our stories are electric. Energy, the aura, everyone's super impressed by us. I didn't actually notice.
that that was the sort of people that I was choosing to hang around with. There's this story about Jenny Jerome, who was Winston Churchill's mother, and she gets to dine with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister and the opponent. one night after the other. And she says, after I left the dinner with Gladstone, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in England. And after I left the dinner with Disraeli, I felt like I was the smartest woman in England. And I think...
this really helps to explain why we gravitate towards certain people. Some people feel interesting. And around some people, we feel interesting. Yeah. And that's my favorite sort of person. I think charisma, being charismatic, being energizing, it's the sort of thing lots of people are seduced by. They love the sound of it. But it's kind of like...
developing real charisma. Like Matthew McConaughey, sit opposite this guy and he's fucking oozing charisma. But it's way easier to be interested than it is to be interesting. And it gets you probably 80%, 90% of the way there just by caring.
And asking questions. Yeah. I want to know what you think about this. Right. That's cool, Joe. Tell me more about that. And why do you think that you're built that way? Right. And it helps. I mean, people just love to talk about themselves. And the other thing is, you know everything that you know. You know barely anything that the other person knows. Right. And I mean, this is why our job is largely the most selfish one that we could do. We've, hey...
Smart person, come on here and tell me about your entire life's work. Tell the least educated person in the room about what it is that you've spent your time doing. And it's also... It's very beneficial for the people that are listening, which is another service that it provides. You get to be you. The person listening to your podcast gets to be you as you interview these spectacular people. So they get to like, oh, yeah, why?
Why did you do that? And then you say, why did you do that? I'm like, yeah, good question. Good question. You know what it feels like? It feels like watching a sports game sometimes. I think the best conversations, whether they're around a table or a podcast or whatever, it feels like watching a sports game.
match and the two teams are kind of working together to get the ball in the goal. And you get all excited and you're like, oh, he's going to do this. Oh, the head kick. Whoa, that's what I wanted. And yeah, if you're ever listening to something, I'm sure that this maybe happened to people listening to this.
They go, fuck, I hope he asks him about the thing. He asked him about the thing. Yeah. And yeah, there's this sense that there's a third participant, not just Jamie, in the room. Where's Carl? I just realized there should be a fourth participant. Carl's at home. Carl snores a lot. He's chilling. Okay, he's a sound risk? Sometimes he gets a little loud. And while the podcast is going on, you hear, and you're like, nudge him.
Roll him over. Make him shut up. It depends on who I'm talking to. If I'm talking to a theoretical physicist and there's some very difficult thing to grasp and you hear Carl snoring, it becomes a little bit of an issue. If it's coming through the headphones. He's loud. Sleep train. Sleep train that dog. No, you can't. He's gotten older. He can handle it. He needs a CPAP. Doggy CPAP? Fuck. Have you seen what their faces look like? The skulls?
French bulldog skulls? No. Oh, it's horrible what they've done to them. Through selective breeding? Yeah. Just slowly, slowly. They just shove their fucking skull. It's all twisted where their sinuses are non-existent. Their whole face is just smushed in. So we can't really complain about the snoring. Well, I mean, we did it to them. They used to be wolves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They used to be a wolf. Yeah.
I told you about that man crush that I had last time, that unkillable soldier guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it sort of sent me down a rabbit hole. I fell in love with stories of crazy bastards from history. So I found this other dude called Eimo Koivinen. Oh, I've heard of that guy. The Finnish soldier. Yeah, so he is out on patrol with a bunch of Finnish soldiers, small group, and they come upon a Soviet force way bigger than they are.
They can't fight them, so they have to flee. As they're fleeing, they're skiing away through the snow, and the force is way bigger. Emil is at the front. He's trailblazing, trying to break free from this group, but he can't go fast enough. If they get caught, they're going to be captured or killed or worse. He needs to speed up. He doesn't know how. He's carrying the entire patrol's supply of Pervitin. Now Pervitin...
was a German miracle drug that was used to keep soldiers awake during the war. Meth. It's otherwise known, yep, as methamphetamine. He decided, I mean, you might think this wasn't just any normal meth, right? This was pharmaceutical grade wartime human horsepower, right? It was the most intense. So you might think.
Tolerating the dose could be a good idea. There's a rumor that apparently it had melted in his pocket, but whatever he did, he took 30 people's worth. He took 30 soldiers' worth of meth. The entire packet, just ate the entire packet. Whoa. And unsurprisingly, he manages to break away from the pursuing Soviets and he leads his group away. So they chill out on the far side once they're finally free. And they notice that Amo's behaving a little bit.
oddly, and he seems to be a danger to himself and to them. So they take his ammo out of his rifle and they take his knife off him and they're sort of putting stuff away in the pack. They turn around and he's gone. Like, fuck, where's Amo gone? He skis for 63 miles. On his own. Just skis away. Doesn't really know what he's doing. He's in this sort of fever dream thing. Lays down. Goes to sleep. Wakes up the next day. No idea where he is.
doesn't know where his group is, doesn't know where the squadron is, doesn't know where he is, immediately sees a Soviet soldier over the far side, raises his rifle, click, fuck, they took my ammo, hurls the rifle at this Soviet soldier, and he explodes in a cloud of white dust.
Turns out that it wasn't a Soviet soldier. It was a tree branch with snow on it and that he's actually hallucinating. So he's in a full-on fever dream now. Whoa. Imagine this Soviet soldier throws the gun at him. He explodes. He's like...
Fuck, okay, I need to find my squadron. How am I going to get back to them? So he decides to just try and navigate around for a couple of hours, and he sees them over the far side. He sees a fire, and he sees his group over the far side. It's way far away, so he skis for another two hours.
Turns out that it wasn't his squadron. It was more Soviet soldiers. So he just skis straight through the middle of the camp. All of these guys immediately chase after him. But there's no chance. Like, he's the fucking LeBron James of meth, right? You're not. You're not catching this guy. So he goes straight through again, second night, finds a hut, finds a wooden cabin in the middle of the snow, decides to set a fire, but he doesn't set it in the fireplace.
sets it in the middle of the wooden hut. And throughout the night, he sort of shuffles himself further and further away. For some reason, his back's getting a little bit warm and he keeps on sort of shuffling himself further and further away.
He wakes up the next morning on the outside of the hut, and it's completely burned down. So he's burned the only bit, the only structure that was going to give him any safety. He's managed to burn it to the ground. And as he wakes up, again, sort of... may have noticed that this is a recurring theme a wolverine attacks him 65 pound wolverine fucking fangs yellow eyes attacks him so amo uses his knife kills this wolverine fight to the death kills it
But then he realizes, I don't have a knife because my soldiers took it from me. It was his compass, which was the only thing he could use to navigate himself. He'd smashed his compass to bits. And then he looks down and it wasn't a Wolverine. It was a tree log. So he smashed his compass on a tree log thinking it was a 65 pound Wolverine. He's still just deep, deep in the hole.
continues to ski around. He's trying to find someone, trying to find any way marker that he can. Now, with no way to navigate, he's got no compass, he's got no weapon. I mean, the rifle that's got no ammunition in it. He finds a Soviet forward operating base. But... You'll know this. A lot of the time when armies left these behind, they booby trapped the fuck out of them. They booby trapped everything. So he walks onto the middle of the forward operating base.
immediately gets exploded by a landmine. Foot gets blown. So he's laid there in the snow, kind of waiting to die. And one day later, he's not dead. So he's like, well, fuck it. I might as well try and get into the forward operating base. Gets up, continues to go forward, opens the door. He has no foot? It's damaged. It's severely damaged. Gets toward the front of the operating base, opens the door. There's another booby trap there that explodes him and the door.
like 20 yards backward. He just lays there in the snow waiting to die. He lays there for about five or six days waiting to die. He's melting snow in a little tin can. thing like melting it so that he can drink a little bit of water. He's got this door on him. He thinks, well, someone's going to find me. It's going to be the Soviets. They're going to kill me or I'm just going to die. So he waits. Death doesn't come.
Three Finnish soldiers come upon him. Of all of the different nationalities, of all of the different people, three Finnish soldiers come upon him. And he thinks, finally, for all of this time, after being confused, after getting lost, I'm going to be saved. They say, it's okay, we can take you back. We can save you and take you back.
And the front guy of the three fins steps on a landmine, blows himself up. And the other two are like, hey, man, there's kind of a priority list here. And you're at the bottom and he's at the top. So we're going to take him back. But just hold on for another couple of days. We'll come back and we'll save you.
They go away and he just thinks, they're not going to find me again. They're going to forget. They're not going to be able to come back. Someone's going to kill me before they do or I'm going to die or whatever. But they do. They manage to come back. They manage to get him and they take him back to the medical bay. 14 days. was how long he'd been traveling around. He'd moved 250 miles in this time. His resting heart rate was 200 beats per minute. And he weighed 98 pounds.
He'd survived this entire time on meth, water that he'd melted down into a tin cup, a couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to, and a single Siberian jade that he beat to death. with his ski pole and just ate raw. And he lived until he was in his 70s, died in like 1989, and just lived a great life.
I fucking love that story, dude. This meth-fueled Finnish maniac just, like, skiing through everything, setting shit on fire, hallucinating, getting blown up twice. Survived it. Meth's a hell of a drug. Maybe you should have done it. Maybe I should try now. It's amazing what was accomplished on amphetamines. I mean, Norman Oler's book Blitzed. I loved those episodes that you did with them. Yeah, incredible. It's just an incredible story that they literally went through Poland in three days.
just methed out of their fucking minds. And the most meth was given to the people at the very front, the people that drive in the tanks. They were the most cranked up. Because they'll drive the rest of the group forward? Yeah, and also they have to be the most psychotic. because you're going to be the first people to encounter resistance. So you need to be the most risk-averse. Yeah. The least risk-averse. Least risk-averse, the most maniacal and murderous.
I wonder, you know, it's kind of a debate around how much of Hitler's behavior was because of Hitler and how much was amplified, worsened by the drugs that he was on. That Theodore Morrell, that crazy kooky doctor that he had, is injecting him with bull semen. fucking cocaine everything yeah a lot of it had to do with that it had to i mean it had to it's a factor it's a giant factor
Just how much of it? What would have been like? What would the wars have been like were there no meth? I mean, that's probably the first amphetamine-fueled war, right? Was World War I fueled by amphetamines? Did they have amphetamines back then? I mean, I don't know what you do to get people to go over the top to certain death. I mean, you motivate people by everybody else doing it. I suppose it's sort of crowd behavior in that way. Well, they know that meth was given to the kamikaze soldiers.
Which makes sense. I mean, it's a great way to just going to fly that plane right into that boat. You're like, what? I'm having a great time. Sure. Yeah. No, I'm going to fly to a fucking island and hide. During World War I, militaries used cocaine and other drugs for medicinal purposes and to enhance performance. So, cocaine. The British Army sold cocaine-containing pills under the brand name Forced March. That is the best branding.
In the world. Increased endurance, suppressed appetite. 1960 British Army Council banned the unauthorized sale of psychoactive drudge. I wonder why they did that. They didn't want to win? You don't want to have fun? What, are you the fucking fun police? Wow, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, is it go pills? Is that what they give to fighter pilots? Yeah, they give them something. British Army's pill number nine. What's that?
Pill number nine was just a strong laxative. This is AI. Lies. What was in there? Specific medication used by British Army during World War I. Primary ingredient, pill number nine was Colomel. mercurius chloride, a mercury-based compound used to treat intestinal infections and other ailments. Oh, okay. Just massive diarrhea pills. I don't know how that's a performance enhancer. Yeah, I don't think it is.
If your stomach, maybe just clear it out. Feel light on your feet. I don't know. It seems like the cocaine would be more effective. I mean, cocaine will make you go to the bathroom as well. We'll accomplish our goals. Yeah. You know, you said... You said before about sort of that self-authoring thing, like taking control of my own life. My friend George has got this great question where he says, you're stuck in a third world prison and you get one phone call to ring somebody.
to get you out? Who'd you ring? And that idea I love because it helps you to identify who the highest agency person is in your life. Who is it that can think on their feet? that doesn't need permission to go and do anything, that'll overcome obstacles, that is this sort of, yeah, permissionless reality bender. Right. Who would you call? I don't know, man. That's a good question. That's a really good question. I'd have to really think about also. I don't know anybody's number
That's true. That's a problem. Can I Instagram DM them? Is that all right? Can I log in? Actually, can you give me my phone? Because I've got two-factor authentication on. This is going to be really awkward. Is that all right? I need to do that. Yeah, I mean, I'd be tempted to ring Tim Kennedy. I think he would probably be quite high up on my list. Yeah, he would help you a lot. If I had access to my phone. Yeah, dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
Correct. Yeah. I mean, it might be a bit gratuitous. I get the sense that he would take more pleasure in getting me out than would be necessary. You know what I mean? Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. That's got to be the worst place to be in the world. Foreign prison with no way to call somebody. You know, this is the criticism about these illegal aliens that have been shipped off to El Salvador. Is it El Salvador that they have the super prisons?
Yeah, I think we spoke about this last time. That was just as they'd been created, these football stadium-sized monstrosities. They essentially got all the gang members off the streets and locked them up and dropped crime radically. Dropped violence radically. They essentially said, enough of this. We're just going to go after all these gang members and lock them all up. And the criticism about these deportees.
that we're sending people over there. We're sending plane loads of people over there. What if you're in that group and you're not guilty of anything? What if you're just a guy who came over here from Mexico and you're a tattoo artist? U.S. deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights. Yeah, there's a court ruling to halt the flights. But here's the thing.
If they are gang members, if they are Trendy Aragua or those gang members that took over, if that's real, then this all makes sense. But the fear is that there's going to be certain people that are rounded up in this.
that are not guilty collateral damage right and then these poor people are going to be trapped in this el salvador prison and no one's going to believe them that they're innocent it says it all that el salvador has got a reputation for being so good at prison law enforcement that they're fucking importing people over there
It's like, oh, we need to, you said before, if I've got a bad knee, I want to go to the guy that looks after the Lakers. It's like, you're the Lakers PT doc of the rehabilitation world. It's not even rehabilitation, I suppose, just incarceration world. Yeah, it's just incarceration, and there's probably a financial incentive. We probably pay them to house these prisoners. But the question is, are we sure?
Like, how many of these people are being accused of being gang members because maybe they tattoo gang members? You know, maybe they were caught up in a raid and maybe they are... Friends of gang members. Maybe there's an artist who happens to be an illegal or maybe they're... someone who's working on a construction site, and they get rounded up, and they get shipped over there. That's a legitimate question.
When you're arresting people and prosecuting people and your goal is to arrest people and prosecute people, you do your best at that. The question is, how many people get arrested and prosecuted that are innocent? Well, in the real world, what we know is quite a few.
I mean, I do a lot of podcasts with my good friend Josh Dubin, who's spent a considerable amount of his life helping innocent people get out of jail. That's his main... thing that he does is work with unjustly prosecuted people and you find the levels of corruption to be horrific. The prosecutors, DAs, the amount of corrupt judges, it's shocking. It's shocking when you lay the facts of these cases out, like the Ohio Four, these people that were in jail, proven that one of them...
Could not have possibly been there when the crime is committed and still is in there for 30 years. The actual guy who is the informant. came out and said that he was told to say all these things, it's all lies, then was told when they were going to bring it to trial again, you will be arrested for telling lies now.
You will either be arrested. You will either be arrested because you're lying now or you'll be arrested for telling lies previously. So then he won't. This is like that thing, you know. if she sinks she's not a witch and if she floats she is right right right right yeah yeah it's crazy it's crazy and then there's the good the game aspect of it
The game aspect of it is victory, right? If you're a prosecutor, your job is to arrest people and prosecute them and convict them. That's your job. That's what your self-worth, who you are as a prosecutor, your reputation. is based on success. Yeah, your record, your perfect record of this many convictions. It's the same with cops, unfortunately. A lot of cops, their whole thing is making arrests. Making arrests. It's a shame, isn't it?
You talked about the fire service earlier on, three emergency services, fire, police, and ambulance. When the fire service turns up anywhere, I don't think that there's any issues. I don't know how often firefighters find themselves up against a crowd that's unhappy. Maybe, I guess, if it was a riot of some kind, perhaps. But for the most part, it's...
A hero that's coming to save the cat stuck in a tree, the house that's on fire, the baby that's upstairs. Like, hooray. Well done for you. A medical service turns up. Somebody's really badly hurt or somebody's broken. Some kid at a sports match has broken their leg. Thank you so much, please look after them, look after them. And then the police turn up. And the reaction could not be more different. yeah and i don't know i i understand that there's a particular type of control that cops have
Firefighters and EMTs are doing stuff exclusively in service of others, whereas cops are doing something that sort of subtracts away. But it must be tough. If you're a good cop, especially now, especially after the last few years. It must be hard because you want to feel proud about your job. It's unbelievably hard. It's also very hard to get people that are good people to sign up for it now because they don't want that abuse. I wonder if that's been reversed.
Over the last few years. I mean, I bet it has in certain jurisdictions, in certain areas where they've valued cops. And, you know, this whole defund the police thing was just so wild. It was so crazy to see. that people would think that that would be a good idea. And even to espouse it publicly, to erode public confidence in law enforcement, just writ large. You notice that that's largely dropped off now. Yeah. No one's really talking about defund...
work. It had the opposite effect. Crime escalated and the people that lived in the communities wanted the cops back. in the areas that were the worst affected as well. It's a luxury belief. It's something that's held by the upper classes that only impacts the lower classes. Yeah, and it's also a thing that the political establishment will use as a...
tool to align you with them. You know, people will say it like Kamala Harris in 2019 was saying, I mean, defund the police. We should defund the police, which is just crazy to say. You need to fund them more, train them better. You know, they need training the way military groups need training, constantly, consistently. And, you know, they're encountering horrific things. I mean, my friends who have been cops and...
You know, and have served overseas. They'll tell you, most of them will tell you that they suffered more PTSD as cops than they have even in the military. Yeah. depending upon your service, depending on what you had to do. But a lot of them, it's just like every day you're seeing some nightmarish situation. Horrific violence, domestic violence, child abuse, murdered kids.
You're seeing so much horror and then your version of reality is based on your experiences. Your experiences are horrific every day. Do you think you'd be able to switch off if you had a job like that? You'd be able to partition, compartmentalize. I wouldn't even ever guess that I could pull it off. I wouldn't even guess. I don't think anybody even understands what that even means unless you've shown up and seen some guy's brains blown out all over the curb.
for nothing, for some stupid argument about nothing. When you've seen some woman get shot in front of her kid by the husband, you have no idea. No one has any idea. You don't know unless you experience it. Then you have to go home to your own children, go home to your own wife, and your brain is on fire. Your soul is just in agony.
We were watching a video the other day of this guy who had to shoot this guy, this cop. This guy was, something was wrong. It was clearly mentally unstable, was yelling, was, you know. telling everybody what he was going to do they tased him that didn't work then he's charging at this cop and the cop shoots him and then the cop's sobbing and shaking and his partner's telling him to breathe how to breathe and he's just
probably the first person he ever had to kill. It's horrible. It's horrible. And that's, that's, he succeeded. He's, he stopped a threat and he. You know, it was justified. This person was trying to kill him. What about pulling people over and the windows were all tinted?
and they won't roll down the windows. You're standing there vulnerable. It could be a shotgun inches away from your face, and you have no idea. And they've all seen all these videos where people get gunned down. You pull people over, all of a sudden the back window explodes with machine gun fire. I mean, they live with that every day. They live with that fear every day. And then they have to hear this rhetoric everywhere of defund the police and calling cops pigs. And it's crazy.
It's crazy and it ultimately destroys the fabric of our society. And, you know, there's plenty of evidence that cops have done bad things. It's not excusing the bad cops. bad plumbers there's bad car mechanics there's bad everything and there's people that shouldn't be cops and when you see a video of someone who shouldn't be cop shouldn't be a cop and is
on their last nerve and snaps at someone or overreacts at someone or brutalizes someone totally unnecessarily. It gives you a very distorted perception of the average encounter that a person has with police officers. Because most of the interactions that people have with police officers are fine. Most of them. The vast majority. No one gets hurt. No one goes to jail. Most of them. But you see the ones that go sideways and then you think,
This is what cops are doing. They're out there trying to kill people. That's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way the algorithms work, that edge cases that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire. Right. And what it creates is it moves the fringe to the middle because most of what you see by design is the stuff that's the most outlandish. And then it gets used as a political tool. Correct. You mentioned about Biden and Kamala.
What do you think you do if you're either of them now? Like Trump's just running ragged, flying high, having all of this fun. What are they doing? What do you do when two people have lost a campaign in the space of six months? I don't know. Tim Walsh is out there talking again.
Did he say he could fight any Trump supporter? Yeah, he said he'd kick their ass and they're scared of him because he could fix a truck. They're threatened by his masculinity. I know how to fix a truck. That's what he said. I'm like, do you? I bet you don't. The lady doth protest too much. I bet you don't. I fear. I bet if I bring a broken truck to you and a bag of tools, you're fucked. That was kind of the redress, right? That was the attempt. It was like, we're going to...
symbol of masculinity on the left is going to be Tim Waltz. It was Aragon from Lord of the Rings and Tim Waltz. Yeah, it's so crazy. I think they're lost. I mean, they're also lost in that they can't control the narrative anymore. I think when they had control of Twitter and they had control of essentially all of social media and pre-Trump, they had the reins.
like firmly held. They were in control of the public narrative. If you strayed from that, you will be kicked off social media. You'll be banned from YouTube. And for things that were factually correct. Like the lab leak theory is now finally being embraced by the New York Times. The New York Times, I don't know if you saw that article the other day. They said we were misled.
Like, bro, you misled us. We were misled by ourselves. There was a big op-ed in the New York Times that has people up in arms because they're like, fucking duh. Do you know where it is? I can send it to you. I saved it because it's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. I was like, what are you saying? How are you saying that? It was you guys. It wasn't just some random people that did that.
Do you find it anywhere, Jamie? I know I saved it. Which was it called? It was the New York Times saying that we were misled. There was a big op-ed in the New York Times. I saw people spreading. I never saw the link. Yeah, I read it. I read it for, like, the first couple chapters, but it's all duh. The whole thing is just fucking duh. God, where did I save it? I saved too many things.
I'm a hoarder. Digital hoarder. I'm a digital hoarder. Do you know why that happens? You know why people hoard stuff? The interesting way that their brains work. So looking around this table, you're able to discern between stuff that is useful. and stuff that isn't there it is we were badly misled about the event that changed our lives who are you badly misled by do you think you guys had a factor in that
Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus. had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people
started speculating that a lab accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic. They were treated like kooks and cranks in this newspaper. Many public health officials and prominent, by the way, not by this person. Blaming this person. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory. I wonder why they did that. I wonder if there's an email paper trail that's already been established. There is.
insisting that a virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a great grant, lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world.
fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization. Yeah, they defend themselves. I mean, it's appeal to authority. And they fucked us. And you guys were a part of it, by the way. That newspaper was a big part of it. Big part of calling the lab leak theory racist, which was really kooky. It's strange that everything is concretized on the internet for the rest of time. Yeah.
I mean, people can go back and try and retrograde, remove stuff that happened, but there's always Internet Archive is fantastic for this. Yeah, for the most part, you can find it if you're inspired. So how is it that so many U-turns... regardless of what it is, regardless of which side it is, the sort of permanent state of amnesia that everybody's in. There was this...
WhatsApp message. You ever have one of those WhatsApp messages where it says forwarded many times at the top? And you're like, oh, this is going to be good. It's just an advert. It's just a banner. Forwarded many times. And it was a single squaddy, a guy in...
fatigues walking down the street in London and a screenshot, I think, of a text saying that someone had said that the army was going to be deployed on the streets of London to keep everybody in the house through martial law, that this was how intense that the lockdowns were going to get.
And it was going to happen on this particular day. It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp. Never happened. And like all of the people that shared that, that were adamant, that created all of these stories and theories around it, like no one ever actually. went to go and call those people out about what it was that they'd pushed. All of the people that were adamant, global health passports, the vaccine passport, that's going to come, that's going to happen.
I mean, the unfalsifiable version of it is because we knew that it was going to happen, they weren't able to do it. So actually, we were the righteous resistance in doing the thing. And the same with whether it's lab leak theory, whether it's Joe Biden's mental decline, no matter what it is.
Put this position out there. It's fucking fortified on the internet for the rest of time. And after a long enough, you're like, I don't remember that. You know, you're like fucking the most gaslighty partner that you've ever been with. Are you sure? I don't think I did say that. I'd do this fucking fugazi switcheroo, some lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And I don't have to atone for my previous sins anymore. Well, I think in this case, you have an individual...
journalist who wrote this story. I do not know the history of this individual journalist, but what they said is accurate and important. So it's good that the New York Times has this come to Jesus moment where they lay out, hey... The conspiracy theories were all true. That's what the title should be. The conspiracy theories were all true. Yeah, the shot wasn't effective.
Yeah, there were therapeutics that were available that were dismissed and that bad studies were created in order to make sure that people weren't taking these drugs because we needed the emergency use authorization. And the only way you can... get that is if you have no treatment so you had to rely on one thing and that one thing was the vaccine and they all participated in it
How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this sort of balance thing that he's got going on at the Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent sort of pivot with regards to fact-checking on meta platforms?
How many of those do you think would have happened if there hadn't been a Trump victory in November? How much of this is blowing with the wind, do you think? Most of it's blowing with the wind. It's the society. Society has decided we're done. This was Trump getting elected. This was Elon buying Twitter. And this is the blowback that you're seeing, these organized protests and vandalism on Tesla dealerships.
They're encouraging people. There's so many videos of people just smashing Teslas, carving swastikas into the side of Teslas. Because sentry mode, these cars all have sentry mode. So you could leave your Tesla parked and it has HD video of everything.
everything that's happening all around it. And it uploads it so you can just see who did what? Yeah. Yeah, you can watch it. That's why all these videos are out. All these videos are out. It was people who extracted them from their cars. The video isn't published by the rioters. The video is published by the victims. Exactly.
Fuck. Yeah. There's tons of people that have been arrested for this now. Tons of people. I don't know what... I mean, I guess it's a way of trying to... protest against some person that you don't like but it's funded that's what's crazy and it's all because what Elon is doing
with USAID and what he's doing with DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency is finding a lot of inefficiency, waste and fraud. Most of it he believes is waste. Some of it is fraud. And it's a lot of, there's a lot of money.
that's going in directions it shouldn't be going. And then there's stuff that's legal that probably shouldn't be legal, like non-government organizations doing the bidding of the government because they're funded by the government. There's certain things the government is not allowed to do, but a non-government organization... What's an example of that? Well, regime change. Like, a lot of what this money is...
going to, it goes to foreign countries where we have an interest in having the people that are running that country on our side. Or we don't like them and we want to fund the rebels. And so you can fund the people, you can fund them through all sorts of organizations where you hide and mask the money and you move it around and you have essentially blank checks and you can just funnel billions of dollars.
all over the world with no accounting. Mike Benz is like the most prophetic person of all time. Oh my God. I mean, he talked about it on this podcast before Doge and before USAID. And everybody's like, oh, conspiracy theorists and this and that. This guy, so he used to work for the State Department. What the fuck does he know? Apparently he knows everything.
He knows all of it and he can spit it out. His recall is incredible. And, you know, that guy's got to be fucking terrified because he's out there exposing. He's essentially... the guy who led Elon to the coffin where the vampire sleeps. Like this is where it is. It must be an odd situation to be in because most of the time, the level of scrutiny that you're under and the level of security threat.
that's likely is kind of it goes in line with status of fame and that also goes in line with maybe some resources too so as people get more likely to be a target They're also more able to perhaps be able to protect themselves with living in a nicer house, gated community. Security, like Elon. Yeah, having security and stuff like that. But this is one of those weird situations where your knowledge...
your particular insight makes you so uniquely vulnerable or such a heavy target, but it hasn't come with the concordant increase in status and resources that would allow you to be able to actually protect yourself. And this is, I guess... The crisis of a whistleblower. Yes. Yes. Whistleblower and investigative journalists. Yeah. I mean, this is why Julian Assange spent so much time in jail. I was just about to bring up Ross Ulbricht.
Yes. You guys must have tried to reach out to him. Yeah, we reached out, but he doesn't really want to talk to anybody right now, which is totally understandable. He's got an open invitation. If he ever just says, okay, I'd like to talk. Whenever. Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk to him. You know, I'd love to find the real story because the narrative and the...
you know, the documentary, the docudrama that was made about the Silk Road and what he did. You know, I'd like to know how much of that is bullshit because I think a lot of it probably was. You know, I think they were trying to set him up for sure. And I think there's probably some things that he was accused of that aren't accurate. You know, I'd like to know. Isn't it funny that we always think about conspiracy, conspiracy theories, all of this stuff as always being in the past?
and that when something is unfolding right now, I wonder how much stuff is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians. I wonder. I wonder what would be. That's one of my friend's favorite questions to ask. What is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? I certainly think that smartphone use will be one of those.
Five deathbed regrets of the dying. I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I wish I hadn't worked so much. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived the life I wanted and not the life that other people had for me, blah, blah. Yeah. I would bet.
Everything that I'm worth, that within the next couple of decades, I wish I'd spent less time on my phone would be one of those. No doubt. 100%. Well, your time is so valuable. And how do you have five extra hours a day? Well, look at your screen time. It'll save five hours. We were talking about this before we got started, that you have the same number of hours that somebody did 100 years ago.
But the average amount of time that Americans spend on screens is eight hours at the moment. Is it eight? Eight. On screen, all screens. The average time they spend asleep is 6.5. So people are sleeping. for one and a half hours less than they spend their time on their phone. And what are you getting out of it? Nothing tangible. It's so hard. It's so hard. It's so addicting. It's designed to be addicting. I mean, you've had Tristan Harris on here, you know.
The way, the variable schedule reward that tempts you, that keeps you there, you don't know what's going to happen. This is so interesting. I had the guy who wrote... Stuart Russell, he wrote the original AI textbook. It's translated into 70 languages around the world. And he taught me this really interesting thing about how the algorithms work. So we know the job of the algorithm is to predict what you want to click on, right? So what it wants to do is get better.
at working out what Joe likes on his YouTube feed or on his Instagram feed or whatever. There's actually two ways that it can become more accurate at being able to predict what you're going to click on. The first one is to be better at providing you with things that you'll select.
The second one is nudging your preferences so that you are more easy to predict. Because if you just give something the optimizing function of cause Joe to click on a thing and stick about what like click through and watch time. If you get it to do that, it'll just find any route. It's not bounded by, and you must make sure that it's his existing preferences. You can't change his preferences. But this is one of the reasons, I think, why polarization has increased. Not just that...
edge cases get used, it pushes people further apart, they get put off into their silos, echo chambers, recursive stuff, blah, blah, blah. I think a big part of it is just the algorithms find it easier. to be able to predict you, which gives them an incentive. Now, it's not like a conscious incentive, but it gives you this incentive to be pushed out to the sides. And there's this worry about, I learned about this idea called knowingness. So polarization.
Everyone thinks it's a big deal, and I think it is. It's a big problem. But knowingness is like an uncurious intellectual insulation. So people believe that they know the answer to the question. before the question has even been asked. I know what the outcome is. I know what the answer is before you've even asked me the question. And what's interesting about this epidemic of knowingness we have at the moment is if the problem is poor information,
You can fix it typically with better information. I will give you a better quality of information, but if the problem is knowingness... You are insulated from ever updating your beliefs because no amount of existing new information is going to actually help you. There's this really cool quote that said, most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.
And I think that explains why the culture war is so boring. Culture war is largely super boring because both sides act as if the facts are already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts. You know what I mean? Yeah. So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's, their prejudices just get moved around until they can come up with the outcome that they already wanted before you even ask the question about the thing that you're talking about?
that's the situation we end up with. And I think it explains why, I think it explains why the culture was feel so samey and nothing really ever seems to move. Like it's not moved forward. It goes at such a snail's pace. News is operating at light speed, and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at a snail's pace. How are these two things happening together? Well, it's technological advance.
Right. Technological advance is so much greater and faster than biological advance. This is the scariest thing that leads us down the road to AI is that as. We are so limited in our biological ability to evolve biological evolution takes so long cultural evolution takes so long whereas technological evolution is almost instantaneous and We are being overrun.
by this thing that's captivated our attention. I was talking about this the other day. I was like, imagine if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day. He'd be like, keep me the fuck away from that drug. But that's what your phone's doing. mostly you're getting nothing. Occasionally you get a funny meme. You know, if I looked at the amount of time that I spend online on a given day and how much of it is really fascinating to me.
Well, every now and then you get a story like that story about the whole universe might be inside of a black hole. And then I'm on a rabbit hole. So there's this interesting insight about that. There's a few things you'll get. But I kind of feel like you will get those if you're offline just by other people being online. They'll send it to you. You're almost better off. You don't need to be the one doing the first pass scouring. Exactly.
Your resources are better utilized by not doing that. Did you see that? It was a guy who removed people's phones from their hands. The photographer who went around, I think it was maybe New York City, and he took photos of people and then...
CGI'd the phones out. You know, you're talking about, imagine if there was this thing and it made you stare at your hand. He actually did it. So it shows just how absurd it is. You know, you've got an entire train carriage on the subway on the underground. And everyone's staring at their hand. And it's just people staring down at their hands.
Like this. And it needs that to sort of throw the absurdity into it. But then on the flip side, if you don't live with your parents, you're in a different city, you work a job that you're not that enamored by, maybe your health's good, maybe it's not so good, you're a little bit worried about stuff, you're kind of bored a lot of the time.
You need to be sedated. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Oh, wow. All those people just sitting there staring. Oh, that's so crazy. Jamie, go back up to that one of the kids. Wow. It wasn't that long. This was 2015. In 2012, I started trying to take pictures of people in public looking at their phones, and it wasn't that common then. So it wasn't that. Well, that's like when social media kicked off.
In the beginning, no one was on it. You'd see it. It's like most people weren't even on Twitter. They're like, why would I be on that? And, you know, people were using it to promote things, and then they started using it to elevate their profile, and then people became influencers. And once people became influencers, and once people, like a regular person, get a couple of million followers, then all of a sudden you get sponsors.
That's your job now? Notoriety, respect. Yeah, and fame. I remember when I was living in L.A., it was right around the time that a lot of these... God, what was it back then? What was the thing that was like... It wasn't TikTok. Vine. Vine, yes. Yeah, it was Vine. Vine influencers were the first. And they were famous. So they'd go to restaurants and be like, that's blah, blah, blah. Like, who's that? Like, oh, he's got 35 million Vine subscribers. Like, what?
It was bizarre because you've seen just regular people that would do antics or cause scenes or do something to get attention. And they developed large followings. Wasn't – isn't it the number one job that – Primary school kids want is to be a youtuber or an influencer. Yeah. Well, they all watch them They all watch people eat food and open up toys and it's like very weird
It's very weird stuff because no one would have ever predicted that that would be something would captivate people's attention on a television. Right. There was no unboxing shows on television, but yet unboxing shows on the Internet are huge.
Like people get sucked into the most mundane thing. Someone opening a package. Oh, look at this. Here's the new phone. Yeah, unboxing in some ways I actually think is quite satisfying. I quite like watching the people that have got the new MacBook M4 thing and it's shot all nice.
Yeah, he does a great job. Watching him do his stuff is really great. But he also does a comprehensive analysis of the tech. It's not just, here's me playing with a new MacBook. No, he's doing a review of state-of-the-art. Like where is technology currently and what's the best version? I think when it comes to desiring a life.
looking at, okay, what is it that I want? You need to be very, very careful about what the process is in order to get the outcome that you want. Because if you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to live the life needed to get it, you're just asking for disappointment. Yeah, well said. My friend talks about Call of Duty versus war. And he talks, you know, you think about this is what going on holiday to a place is. And this is what having to live there is like.
And you can go to somewhere and you go, it was lovely for a week. We were in the Congo. Yeah, it was so nice. But you go, what's it like if you can't leave? It's literally the difference between going camping or being homeless, right?
One is an imposition and the other one is a choice. And I think that more young kids need to realize what the reality of being an influencer is like. It's not just going to the Seychelles and uploading a selfie or getting... i don't know what they do like play-doh fucking jelly new video games that's not what it's like look at the twitch streamers look at most of the twitch streamers they have got they are like the fucking grunts of the content creation they are
factories of content eight hours a day five days a week just straight just fucking stream of consciousness someone put something in the chat and you go let's watch this thing let's watch that thing it's like yeah it is it's not If you do not want the life that you need to get in order to get the outcome that you're looking for, you need to be very, very careful about...
because the reality is war. It's not Call of Duty. It's the same thing with being in a band. It's like, I love the idea of traveling the world and playing to these big crowds and doing all the rest of it. It's like, okay, you're going to have to live in a van with four other sweaty dudes.
for like half a decade first. If you're lucky. And that's if you've managed to break through. You're going to have to spend so long, a decade learning to play guitar. You're going to have to write songs that never see the day of light. You're going to have to do all of this stuff and you have no idea if it's going to work. I think about the gap from where people are in a place that they don't want to be until they get to a place that they do.
And I think of it like a lonely chapter. So everybody that has got from a place where they don't want to be to one where they are, there's a point where they're so different that they can't resonate with their old set of friends. Right. but they're not yet sufficiently developed that they've created their new set of friends. And there's this temptation to go back to the old patterns, the old ways of thinking. And this, I did this live show.
in London last year, my first big headline show at the Eventim Apollo in London. It was pretty cool. And this idea, I think, was one that really resonated with a lot of people because everybody's trying to grow. And there is an incentive for you to stay in the same place because not that many people grow. Most people don't change. They make little changes. They'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or they'll switch from one.
company to another how many people do you know that have lost 50 pounds or moved to a different country or have genuinely changed the way that they see the world it's pretty rare it's not that common and we are such mimetic creatures we're so shaped by the people around us that we can't help but be tempted you know you're going to have to do something if you want to go from where you are to where you want to be you're going to have to do something that makes you more different
More weird, more easy to be mocked, especially if you come from a country like the UK where I'm from. Being different is not particularly celebrated in that way. It's the sort of thing that's quite easily mocked. There's a big culture of piss-taking. And if you start, what are you talking to people on the internet for?
It's fucking weird. Like, that's stupid. That's not going to work. Why are you going to do that? So if you don't have that level of enthusiasm, there is no support around you to tell you that the thing that you're trying to do, taking up the martial arts, why are you...
Why are you training this Taekwondo bullshit like, you know, fucking six nights a week? Why are you coaching all of these moms and all of these like old guys and how to do Tai Chi or whatever? Why are you doing that? Well, because maybe I'm sort of pulled to it and there is this.
temptation to go back to your old ways of thinking go back to the road that you already know how it's going to end and i get the sense that this is not a bug it is a feature It's a part of moving from a place that you do not want to be to one that you do.
And for the most part, you actually need to live through this lonely chapter. And you look at it and you go, well, the fucking Rocky montage was 3.5 minutes. For me, it's been five years. Where's the championship ring? You know what I mean? I haven't won the fight. Where's Apollo Creed? None of this stuff.
happened the thing that I wish more stories talked about if you watch it in the movies yeah sure there's ups and downs in the journey of the athlete that's going to change his life around and get the girl But his self-belief never wavers, right? He makes the decision, and it's one straight shot, typically. And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there. His self-belief never wavers. I don't think that that's what the experience of doing personal growth is like at all.
In my experience, you're just swimming in uncertainty and fear and a lack of belief that it's even going to happen. You don't even have the promise of glory. on the other side of it i don't even know if this is going to be worth it and i'm fucking doing sam harris's waking up meditation app and i'm journaling on a morning i'm going to the gym why am i eating meat and fruit does this even work like you know you're doing all of this stuff trying scrabbling like a guy in a fucking well trying
to find a handhold. And if you don't have a good community of people that are also doing that, you're on your own. Yeah. Yeah. And this is most people, I think, most people's experience because if most people don't change, you are going to be an outlier if you're somebody who does change.
I think about personal growth kind of like a rocket ship taking off. And as you take off, you've got a particular velocity that you're moving at. And what you want is to find other people moving at the same velocity as you. But the quicker that you move, the fewer people are going to be like you. Right. So some people will be ahead of you and you're in this lonely chapter and then you catch up to them. And then, oh, no. And this isn't, you know, some comment on people that.
work on themselves or like morally better or worse than anybody else. But it's just a stark sort of fact about you talk to people and you resonate with people that are at the same level of life as you are.
And that kind of makes sense. You have things to discuss. You're encountering the same sorts of challenges, whether it's in terms of your self-worth or your wealth or your relationship status, all of these things. Birds of a feather, right? And, you know, one of the, I guess, difficult realizations of...
people who want to change their life is that if you do it well you might have to go through a period where you let go of all of your friends but the really bad realization is if you do it really well you might have to do that multiple times throughout your life You find a group of people, finally, I've landed after, oh, that period where I was on my own and I didn't really understand. Oh, fuck. I'm still going. And I now need, you mean I've got to do it again? I've got to do it again.
I just thought that I'd found my group, and I've got to do it again. This lonely chapter thing is a big deal, and I think that it explains why so few people make big changes. Because the temptation is always going to be to just go back to what's normal, go back to what I know. And it's why, you know... America, for all that it's a horrible cis-hetero-patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everybody down, it's an enthusiastic and sort of excitable country.
You guys have kind of got permanent first-line cocaine energy about everything. And for me, it seems to be a... A real enthusing environment encourages me to do things, helps me to take risks. Either that or get kicked in the head a lot. And I just love it. I love the fact that it makes me feel confident in doing difficult things. Yeah, I wish that
more people had that community around them. I think largely Reddit is just a website filled with people who couldn't find other people to talk about their niche in their hometown. Like this particular Warhammer 40k version. whatever. But yeah, it's difficult. And when you get to the stage where you're faced with some personal growth decision, you're always going to have to make this value exchange of, do I want to move forward on my own?
Or do I want to go back with my friends? That's a good point, man. Chris, always great to talk to you, brother. Really appreciate your insight. You're a very brilliant guy, and you're always fun. Fun to talk to. I appreciate you too, man. Thanks for having me. the courage to put all your thoughts out there. And I love what you do. I love your show.
You're awesome, man. You're awesome too, dude. Thanks for being here. Every time that you bring me on, every time that we get to speak, I really appreciate it. So thank you. My pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody.