Comedian Joe Rogan joins Jemele to discuss his latest stand-up set at The Comedy Cellar in Los Angeles. They talk about the importance of being off-the-cuff, how to get people to laugh, and what it's like to be an introvert in a world where everyone else is loud and opinionated. They also discuss what it means to be "introverted" and why it's important to have a good conversation with people you care deeply about. And, of course, there's a little bit of politics and a whole lot of other stuff that's not much of a joke. It's a fun, lighthearted conversation that's a lot of fun to be a part of, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The theme song is "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, which you can stream on SoundCloud here. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a rating and review on whatever you're listening to this podcast! Thank you for listening and reviewing! We really appreciate it. -Jon Sorrentino. Jon & Sarah -Jon and Sarah - Thank you so much for all your support and support, Jon and Sarah, you're the best friends in the world! -The Besties in the universe. Cheers, Jon, Sarah and Sarah & Sarah, and Jon & Jon, and all the rest of the crew at The Good Morning America. <3 Jon and Kyle, and the rest in the Badger Crew. --Jon & Kyle Sarah and the Good Morning Goodfellows Jon and the Crew at The Badger Podcasts Joe Rogans -- & the Good Life Crew and the Bad Ass Crew at the Good Ol Ol Olio Podcast And so much more! -- Jon & Kyle at the Bad Olio Project Thank You, Jon & The Good Olie Thanks Jon & the Crew @ The Bad Olie Project at The Cheers @ . Kyle @ The Good Life Project at at The Bad Ass Project @ , -
00:00:29.000We were talking about it afterwards, and we were trying to put our finger on why I think it was the best, and I'm interested to hear what your thoughts on this are.
00:00:38.000But I think you said at the beginning of the show, I am fucking high as balls right now.
00:00:46.000We'd probably put you in the moment a lot more and then makes it so that, like you said, you were exercising some things and going down some paths you wouldn't normally go down.
00:00:55.000And I think that was one of the things that made it great because I know that whenever I'm less coached myself when I'm about to do a segment and talking about politics, it always comes off better than when I'm very rigidly Going through the motions, you know what I mean?
00:01:10.000So there's something about the off-the-cuff thing, which it felt like you were very off-the-cuff, that really the room was locked into you and you were doing a great job.
00:01:18.000Yeah, I think I'm working out stuff, so I have bits that are already formulated, but some of them I'm not really happy with, so I was trying to figure out different ways to do them, and that's what I was doing last night.
00:01:29.000It's just fucking around and trying to figure out new ways to talk about things.
00:01:33.000Yeah, it was, you know, comedy is an interesting art.
00:01:58.000One of the things I noticed yesterday is that...
00:02:02.000I'm curious, what percentage of comedy do you think is just delivery?
00:02:06.000Because there were a couple people who had good material, like if you write the jokes down, the jokes are good, but then with the delivery, there was something off about it, and they were either rushing through it, or there wasn't confidence behind it, and it just fell flat.
00:03:11.000Yeah, I feel like I learned that lesson the hard way when I was the loud mouth annoying kid in college talking about politics and debating the teacher.
00:03:27.000Like I've always been that guy to some extent.
00:03:29.000But what's interesting about me, and people are always surprised when they hear this, is that I'm actually probably the most introverted person you've ever met in your life.
00:03:45.000I do talk for a living, but the thing is, I get more energy and more happiness from just being alone than I do when I'm with people.
00:03:53.000When I'm with people, it's like a drain on my energy and I need to get away and relax.
00:03:56.000But when I'm by myself, I have endless amounts of energy.
00:03:59.000And that's, you know, according to some psychologists, that's the definition of an introvert.
00:04:03.000Even for my show, I mean, I have two different shows, Secular Talk and Crystal Kyle and Friends, but for Secular Talk, which was, you know, the original, all I'm doing is monologuing for two and a half hours.
00:04:12.000And if you're able to monologue for two and a half hours, you actually need to be somewhat introverted because I have nobody to bounce off of.
00:04:18.000So I just got to go in my own mind and like branch off of other things I say.
00:04:22.000And so it surprises people when they hear that.
00:04:24.000But yeah, I know how to talk, but I'm very introverted.
00:04:26.000I have thoughts on that because I think that's like a special kind of muscle that you develop, a special type of endurance you develop.
00:04:33.000Like, Bill Burr is the best at that because Bill, his entire podcast for years is just him ranting.
00:04:39.000And it's an amazing way for him to create new material too because he's always got fresh new bits and I think It's like a farm for his material.
00:05:37.000It's funny because for me, it feels like the opposite.
00:05:40.000So when I'm talking on my own and monologuing, I could just go.
00:05:43.000When I have one other person I'm talking to, like us right now, that's still pretty comfortable and relatively easy.
00:05:49.000Then when I get to three and you actually have to talk for one third of the time, I struggle with that because there are times like, I want to jump in here, I want to jump in here.
00:06:23.000Yeah, there's a lot more to it than people would guess.
00:06:26.000So, yeah, when I do my podcast with Crystal and we're interviewing our guests, it's sometimes, it took me a while to get used to it before I could, like, sort of relax and know when to talk.
00:06:36.000Whereas when I'm on my own, I just go.
00:06:39.000Or when I'm talking to you, it's relatively smooth as well, you know?
00:06:41.000Do you guys have headphones when you have more than one guest?
00:06:44.000Even when you have one guest, like you and Crystal, do you wear headphones?
00:06:48.000No, we don't, but most of our guests are also not there in the studio with us.
00:06:52.000But even if they're not there in the studio, you should wear headphones because headphones put your voice volume at the same level as mine.
00:06:59.000So when I'm talking or when you're talking, if I talk over you, I hear it and it's like jarring and it lets you know how the audience hears it.
00:07:08.000Because if we're doing this like this and we're talking at the same time with no headphones on, that's how people talk in normal conversation.
00:07:18.000But when it's all condensed into one sound at the same volume, it's really annoying to the person listening or watching.
00:07:26.000That's interesting, and I never thought of that before.
00:07:28.000Yeah, because if you're at a conversation to dinner, and there's three folks talking, and you occasionally talk over each other, it's normal.
00:07:34.000But if you were all in each other's ear at the same volume, it would be like, oh, it'd sound terrible.
00:07:40.000Yeah, and I noticed that, generally speaking, people are terrible at the whole wait until it's your turn to talk thing.
00:07:48.000Everybody wants to get in over everybody else, and then nobody can hear anybody, basically.
00:07:52.000Well, I feel like when you think about late night talk shows or any of the things in traditional media that we've been exposed to that were people interviewing people, they didn't have to develop that skill.
00:08:03.000Unless you're talking about maybe Charlie Rose or someone who did fairly...
00:08:08.000Diane Sawyer or some of the people that did like longer form, Barbara Walters, longer form interviews.
00:08:26.000I don't know how that format ever really took off, because through today's eyes, it just looks like an inferior product and viewing experience, where you have, you know, two people sitting there, like the way David Letterman or Jay Leno used to do it,
00:08:42.000and that's not a knock on them personally, it's just the format of the show, it's a contrived conversation in a three or four minute soundbite, and then, you know, you cut to the fucking band, and then you cut to the audience and see grandma like, ah!
00:08:55.000It just seems so contrived and so fake.
00:08:57.000And when you compare that to today with podcasts, even if I don't necessarily agree with whoever the podcaster is, whether it's political or comedy or whatever, you still get something that's more raw.
00:09:07.000And just the fact that it's more raw lands more because it feels more real.
00:09:11.000And so it touches on something that's important.
00:09:13.000Yeah, it's more, it doesn't feel unusual.
00:09:18.000Like, it's a normal kind of a conversation, whereas a Tonight Show type deal, where someone's at the set, I mean, all that stuff is really stolen from Steve Allen.
00:11:20.000Ernie Kovacs, he started in 56. So Steve Allen started The Tonight Show in 1954, and it went on until 1957. Then Ernie Kovacs only did it for a couple of months.
00:13:09.000Black poles white holes like that kind of shit and it's like that's what was on the marquee You know the boys of summer and you know you'd have like all these guys like wearing Bikinis like hugging on each other and you would drive by it like I would always laugh at the different titles of the So here's a question.
00:13:26.000Who in today's day and age, if anybody, actually goes to those giant, like, porn stores?
00:14:44.000But it's funny to me that like, and they also have those porn star expos, and there's people who follow these porn stars in a way that's like, they base their identity around it.
00:14:55.000Like there will be porn stars who are very niche famous, and they have a line of dudes who are like a thousand long, who are just waiting to get their one moment.
00:15:04.000Imagine if you're that gal and you got to take a picture with these guys and they put their hands on you and grab you and some of them probably have jizz in their hands.
00:15:30.000I wonder how big they really are, though, because it's, I mean, still, you feel socially like a lot of that stuff is underground, but is it really underground?
00:15:47.000And people don't feel, you know, I mean, credit to them, but people don't feel, like, weird going in there and being seen at them and being around other people who are like, hey, I'm fucking horny.
00:16:48.000He was very cranky, cranky old man status in this.
00:16:51.000I think it's from Fox News, Jamie, if you want to show Joe that.
00:16:54.000He's legitimately falling apart, and it's really sad.
00:16:57.000You know what's really weird, though, is the media is, first of all, the left-wing media completely ignoring how odd it is the way he behaves.
00:17:06.000Like, the one nine-year-old girl that was sitting there with her legs crossed, like, look at her over there, look at her.
00:17:11.000Like a 19-year-old girl with her legs crossed.
00:17:30.000Putin and Biden shook hands and then how Putin looked away and then Biden's looking him in the eyes as if he's trying to say that in any way Putin It's scared of Joe Biden.
00:17:45.000That Joe Biden is like dominating Putin.
00:20:03.000So it's interesting because this is why people hate the media, right?
00:20:07.000Everybody feels like they're arguing more from a narrative than they are just sort of objectively describing what's happening.
00:20:12.000And with Biden, it's particularly weird because early on in the Democratic primary, when the media was convinced it's not going to be Biden, it's going to be Pete Buttigieg, or it's going to be Kamala Harris, or it's going to be, you know, whoever, fill in the blank with whoever imploded and was terrible.
00:20:27.000They actually were open and honest about the fact, for example, that Joe Biden's sort of sundowning and he's not all there and he can't really complete full sentences.
00:20:34.000So they actually were the ones who brought it up in debates with him, for example.
00:20:39.000Julian Castro very famously was like, do you even know what you just said like five seconds ago?
00:20:55.000Even though, you know, I was the biggest Bernie supporter out there and I was like, here's a compilation of Joe Biden clearly having some mental issues.
00:21:03.000And so it was just incredibly dishonest.
00:21:51.000Which is a pipeline that's going to greatly help Russia because it makes it so that Russian oil and gas is going to be used in Germany now.
00:22:02.000So he's basically giving Putin something that Putin wants, which again, I actually agree with that.
00:22:06.000I see no problem with the pipeline, but they're framing it as if like, Joe Biden, he's so weak and he's, you know, Vladimir Putin, or excuse me, Joe Biden is so strong and he's dominating Vladimir Putin.
00:22:18.000Yeah, I don't understand why they think that they can do that and that people won't be more hesitant to believe the news.
00:22:34.000When it came to Donald Trump, it was like over 70% of the time they talked about him, they would talk about his, like, Yeah.
00:23:04.000So there was this huge dichotomy in how they discussed the presidents, and obviously the ones who they liked, they'd go a little softer on when it came to Trump and they despised him.
00:23:15.000And the thing that drives me crazy, Joe, is that there are a lot of ways to go after Trump that are actually very intelligent that I would agree with.
00:23:21.000When you stick to policy, I disagree with him on almost everything when it comes to policy, but they didn't do that.
00:24:11.000They had to, and I said this too with the Bernie debate as well, I really, and this is all speculation, I just want everybody to know, I have no facts on this, I'm talking out of my ass.
00:24:18.000But yeah, I think he was on some sort of upper that allowed him to be sharp.
00:24:22.000I feel like it had to be more than that.
00:25:14.000You know, it's interesting because I always sort of...
00:25:16.000Even though I'm on the left, I always sort of had a...
00:25:19.000A wide variety of media stuff that I took in.
00:25:22.000And so I remember when I was younger watching Bill O'Reilly and being like fascinated that his delivery was so compelling, but the substance was fucking dumb and terrible.
00:25:33.000Arguing for war, making shitty points, but I'm like, this guy's a fucking compelling speaker.
00:25:57.000And you hear this argument from a lot of people, this idea that there's so much complexity in the universe, but there's so much order as well in the universe, that like, well, how can this come out of nothing?
00:26:07.000It's impossible for this to come out of nothing.
00:26:09.000You know, there's plenty of people who believe that.
00:26:21.000And we know that if you follow the Big Bang Theory, they can literally find the signatures for the radiation that cause it.
00:26:30.000They kind of have a map that they can piece together if you want to follow it.
00:26:33.000Anybody that would say that there's no way, well, not only is there a way, they can show you all the steps.
00:26:41.000They can show you the transitionary fossils.
00:26:44.000They can show you single-celled organisms.
00:26:45.000They can show you how these organisms exist in these cruel and difficult environments, and that they slowly adapt to different environments.
00:26:57.000Yeah, there's a great counter-argument to that that I found really compelling, a counter-argument to the God point.
00:27:03.000Like, if God created everything because everything's so complex and needs to have a creator, then that God who created everything would need to be infinitely more complex than the thing that they created.
00:27:14.000So then you're just passing the buck and saying, well, now was there a super God who created the God?
00:27:18.000And then was there a super, super God who created the super God?
00:27:32.000I mean, I don't know what your thoughts are on this stuff, but I'm just humble in the face of all of it, and I always say I have no fucking idea.
00:27:45.000I don't think it is, just like he's saying with Bill O'Reilly.
00:27:47.000Like, there's a representative asking if the...
00:27:51.000The Forest Service or land management can change the orbit of the moon so that climate change can be alleviated.
00:27:59.000The Forest Service and the BLM, you want very much to work on the issue of climate change.
00:28:07.000I was informed by the past director of NASA that they have found that The Moon's orbit is changing slightly, and so is the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
00:28:19.000We know there's been significant solar flare activity.
00:28:25.000And so, is there anything that the National Forest Service or BLM can do to change the course of the Moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the Sun?
00:28:39.000Obviously, that would have profound effects on our climate.
00:28:47.000He's my favorite Republican congressman.
00:32:07.000One of the theories as to how we started to exist is some sort of meteor or whatever coming from Mars and landing here in some primordial soup, sparking some sort of biological organism.
00:32:18.000So that would mean we're all technically Martians, if that's true.
00:32:43.000Paul Stamets explained it to me in a way that I will not be able to recreate, but that the psilocybin mushrooms, maybe it was Dennis McKenna, psilocybin mushrooms in particular are so unusual that they're not connected to any other life form on Earth,
00:33:23.000I mean, so there's a lot I want to ask you about psychedelics.
00:33:26.000Because, you know, I was telling you before the show that...
00:33:29.000The last time we spoke, I told you I'm notorious for getting way too high and feeling paranoid, and I would say that 50 or 60% of the times in my life that I smoked weed, I didn't do it a lot, but, you know, whatever, 20 or 30 times, and at least half the time, I felt really paranoid, to the point where I'd be, like,
00:33:44.000curled up in the fetal position on my bed, afraid that something's gonna happen, and it's like, what am I fucking afraid?
00:33:48.000I'm totally fine, I don't know why I'm afraid, but I was just afraid!
00:34:13.000Yeah, so what I would feel is the most prominent thing that happened every time I did it is I would forget everything that happened in the day previously to that point.
00:34:24.000So whereas previously I'd have some sort of subconscious map of my whole day and where I was throughout the day, it made it so that that was all gone.
00:34:31.000And now I was just in the moment in the here and now.
00:34:34.000The other thing it did is, I describe it as heady.
00:34:37.000It made me very analytical, but analytical in the moment, where I was thinking of things I wouldn't normally think of.
00:34:43.000And other than that, it's sort of like, Relaxed me.
00:34:47.000And it also makes, I feel like it makes touch feel different.
00:34:50.000It makes touch feel like more intense.
00:35:26.000You feel a little calmer, a little more connected to things.
00:35:29.000You feel like a little alleviation in anxiety.
00:35:33.000There's some work that's been done in the past.
00:35:37.000God, I can't remember the scientist's name, but McKinney used to bring him up all the time.
00:35:41.000That showed an increase in visual acuity and edge detection, meaning when people were on low doses of psilocybin, you can detect, like you see I have two parallel lines and one deviates slightly, you would be able to tell quicker with psilocybin than you would in sobriety.
00:36:24.000Because if you were talking to a neuroscientist and you describe the effects of psychedelics, they would probably say something is severely perturbing your visual cortex.
00:36:32.000It's involved With all these chemicals and you're getting this distortion, you're getting this hallucination, and it feels amazing because, you know, you're going...
00:36:41.000It seems real because it's like these compounds are affecting the actual visuals that you receive, especially when you close your eyes.
00:36:50.000You see these wild, crazy, like, Egyptian iconography and weird, crazy stuff, but...
00:36:57.000A hardcore cynic would say, this is just because a chemical is perturbing your consciousness.
00:37:03.000And it's just whatever exists normally that interprets the world around you, now it's interpreting through this stuff that's not supposed to be there, and this stuff has a wild reaction.
00:37:14.000Now, if you were more, I would say open-minded, but really the word is probably like true believer.
00:37:35.000If there was a thing that you could do, like a doorway you could go into or a pill that you could take, like imagine if, you know, angels came down from heaven and they said, listen, we have a pill that you can take any time you want to experience divine wisdom.
00:37:56.000You'll be in the presence of God and pure love.
00:38:00.000And all of the souls from all of the people that have ever lived will caress you with wisdom and honesty and knowledge, and then you'll come back down to normal and exist in normal life.
00:38:12.000The experience you would have is exactly the same as the experience you would have if you're on a heavy dose of psilocybin.
00:38:20.000So whether or not it's real is super subjective, because you're talking about an experience that's absolutely happening.
00:39:17.000It's almost like you're splitting hairs.
00:39:19.000Whether or not you're actually encountering wise entities from another dimension, or whether or not you're just out of your fucking mind on mushrooms.
00:39:29.000And when you come back, you do have this sense that you have been in the presence of something far wiser than you.
00:39:38.000It's exposed all of the things about you that perhaps you're ashamed of or maybe you're lying to yourself about or shielding yourself from Or maybe you're too hard on yourself and it wants to embrace you with love.
00:39:53.000Maybe it allows you to look at some of the anxieties maybe you're carrying around and say, these are unnecessary.
00:39:59.000And maybe it allows you to look at the impact that the world, the human beings are having on the world.
00:40:06.000That's one thing that comes up over and over again, particularly on psilocybin, is that people have this Sense of that humans are destroying the world.
00:40:17.000It's almost like you get these visual images of pollution and strain on the Earth's ecosphere and strain on all the ecological environments, whether it's the ocean or the jungle and people, these wild visions of the horrible things the Earth is doing.
00:40:34.000Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me because you talk to some people, I talk to a lot of people, and they're like, this just flat out changed my life completely.
00:40:42.000Like, I used to feel like this, now I feel like this.
00:40:45.000I used to have this outlook on life, my outlook has totally changed, you know, it helped me shed some anxiety or depression or whatever it might be.
00:40:56.000There are people who've had, like, bad trips on various psychedelics, and so I wonder what, does it really just come down to the comfort level of the setting that you're taking it in that would determine whether or not you have a bad trip or whether or not you have, like, a profound life-changing experience?
00:41:36.000And so going into it with an intent and going into it and experiencing it in the right setting can have a profound effect.
00:41:44.000But I think another part of what affects people when it comes to bad trips is the ego and whether or not you choose to try to control it.
00:41:53.000You know, it's kind of the same thing with weed.
00:41:55.000But weed is a much more mild example of it.
00:41:58.000When you get too high and you're like, oh my god, I'm so high, and then you start freaking out.
00:42:02.000If you can stop yourself from freaking out, you can control your anxiety during those experiences, especially if you have a lot of experience doing it.
00:42:13.000If you've gotten that high a bunch of times, you can like, oh, been here before, know what to do, just relax, you're going to be fine.
00:42:20.000But those mushroom experiences and DMT in particular, they're so bananas that if you try to control them, you're fucked.
00:42:43.000But I guess there is a little bit of a fear that if I go too deep on any of these psychedelic substances, that I'm gonna dig something up that perhaps is like really buried deep down that I don't even know that I'm hiding.
00:42:56.000So let me just give you a random example here.
00:42:59.000There was one time I had a dream, and every, like, the dream was, you know, I don't want to get gross or anything, but it was a particular kind of dream.
00:43:30.000And I remember being so scared that I woke up in a cold sweat, and I was scared for like an hour in the conscious world, and I kept thinking to myself, How the fuck was that buried in there?
00:43:48.000I don't have anything like that, right?
00:43:50.000So I guess the thing I'm afraid of with the psychedelic substances is like, am I going to get the equivalent of that bad dream if I uncover, if I go too deep and I uncover something that actually is bothering me?
00:44:09.000But to just go into a different dimension is like a really scary thought.
00:44:13.000Well, I'm not a dream analyst, but if I was, I would analyze that and say, you're probably worried about getting really close to someone who turns out to be a fucking nightmare.
00:44:26.000That you may have some, like, either some memories or some experiences with people in the past where, you know, like, sometimes in a relationship, a person presents themself as one thing, and then the relationship gets intense and hot and heavy,
00:44:44.000you move in together, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, I live with a psycho.
00:45:09.000But anyway, more people have had experiences where you think this relationship's gonna go one way, and then as time goes, how many people...
00:45:26.000You know, like that's that old Billy Joel song, The Stranger.
00:45:29.000You know, it's like kind of based on that, like that you get close to people and as you get close to them, you know, they take off the mask and you find out what they're like.
00:45:39.000You're also a very ambitious person and you're very involved in your work.
00:45:43.000And I think most people that have a very involved career and they have a There's a lot going on.
00:45:49.000They're terrified of some massive distraction, some massive monkey wrench that gets thrown into the gears and fucks up their life, and it happens to people.
00:46:01.000Yeah, believe it or not, I'm actually not that ambitious.
00:47:12.000Not only was I not with anybody, I wasn't even looking for anybody.
00:47:14.000And so for that dream to hit me at that time, that gets back to the point about psychedelics, which is I'm afraid there might be something there if I go too deep that I'm going to uncover.
00:47:53.000When you're single, you like looking, right?
00:47:55.000And when you're looking, you're like, God, I hope I don't meet a psycho.
00:47:57.000Well, I wasn't looking, because I'm, like you were saying, I'm sort of obsessive about my work, and that's all I really cared about.
00:48:03.000And maybe you were worried that one day they would find you, and you would be so busy with your work that you wouldn't be paying attention to all the signs, and then they would, getcha!
00:52:31.000Yeah, it's funny, because I had that same thought with my friend's dog one time, because it just felt like there was almost like a weird connection, like, he was thinking like a human.
00:52:39.000And then I remember the day after that, I'm sitting in the living room, and the dog, like, brings me a fucking dead, decapitated raccoon and puts it at my foot.
00:52:49.000And I'm like, I was a fucking idiot for thinking you're like a human.
00:53:34.000And it's interesting how generally cats have a very different disposition than dogs.
00:53:37.000Like, your average dog is much more, you know, outgoing and jovial, and your average cat is much more, like, independent and, like, pessimistic, you know?
00:58:18.000It's not domesticated like the way, you know, a fucking, an actual dog is, but it's more calm than a wolf you'd meet on the mountain because it has a relationship with you.
00:58:29.000Yeah, that is an interesting question.
01:04:11.000It says right there, only the blue light makes it out.
01:04:13.000Baboon's butt tissue is arranged somewhat like the illustration above, so that blue photons are reflected and all of the other photons, like the red ones, are absorbed.
01:04:20.000Only the blue light makes it out and gets into our eyes.
01:07:39.000It was kind of funny because we just assumed he was an expert on like everything involving sex.
01:07:43.000No, but he's an expert in a lot of things, but his main course, main specialty is he believes that in earlier tribal societies, before we understood lines of paternity, that human beings engaged in polyamorous relationships.
01:08:03.000And then as soon as a male recognized, that's my kid, then it became a problem.
01:08:08.000And then they wanted, you know, this is my woman, that's my baby.
01:08:11.000But before, people just mated with each other and bred with each other.
01:08:14.000And it also is a way that they bonded together.
01:08:17.000And he cites some pretty interesting statistics and some pretty interesting facts.
01:08:23.000about human beings in general like fighter pilots like a lot of fighter pilots would wife swap and they think that one of the reasons why they did that was not just they were bored or they're kinky but there was this real recognition that perhaps they could die And they love their wife and they wanted someone to love her the way they love her.
01:08:43.000And the way to do that, to ensure that, was to have these sort of open relationships.
01:08:49.000So he also says it's tied to like agriculture, I believe, and property rights as well.
01:08:55.000This notion of people being able to own property as opposed to back in the hunter-gatherer days.
01:09:00.000They would share everything in the same way that they share mates.
01:09:03.000And so, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting...
01:09:05.000That's probably the root of where we're fucked up.
01:09:07.000You know, I don't know because I don't know to what extent how we are now is nature-driven versus nurture-driven, specifically in the realm of sex.
01:09:15.000Like, it's possible that modern society functions the way it does when it comes to sex and marriage because it's really just all social convention and these bullshit rules we made up and it's tied to, like, Christianity and property rights and all that.
01:09:27.000But it's also possible that, you know, maybe there were people, even when they were having sex with other people's wives and whatnot, maybe there were people in those tribes who were like, no, I sort of want one person, and I want that one to be my own.
01:09:42.000The funny thing is, I feel like human beings have both instincts.
01:09:46.000And so it's really like, almost like pick which one wins out, which one is more powerful, which one do you feel like is the correct one for you.
01:09:54.000Yeah, well, even the idea of, like, what is nature, if you look at cities, they must be natural because they're everywhere.
01:10:17.000The way human beings decide to congregate and build communities and then eventually make some fucking crazy mess of structures and highways and roads.
01:10:31.000That's why it's a tough conversation because, you know, I remember I brought a similar point up in class one time, you know, a long time ago.
01:10:38.000And the response from the professor was like, I mean, by that logic, a cell phone is natural.
01:10:43.000Yeah, because everything is natural because it has naturally come about, even though it took a lot of time.
01:10:48.000Marshall McLuhan had a great way to describe it.
01:10:50.000He said, human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.
01:11:12.000I have to admit, I've never thought too much about this stuff, but my instinct is always, especially when it comes to people's jobs and people's well-being, it's like everybody pump our fucking brakes, and let's have some regulation around how much these robots and these machines can take over.
01:11:27.000I mean, isn't, like, truck driving the number one job in the United States of America, and now we're getting to the point where they could just have a fucking robot do it?
01:11:36.000I mean, we're going to be at the point, eventually, where, like, 70 or 80 percent of the economy It could just be overtaken by AI and overtaken by robots, and there's no way we can do that and have it go smoothly unless we do the thing that Stephen Hawking said,
01:11:51.000which is, you have to do a radical redistribution of wealth, because you can't have 80% of the population with fucking nothing, and then the robots doing all the work and giving all the money to the top 1%.
01:12:05.000Yeah, Hawking said, before he passed away, he said something along the lines of, We can either have a utopia or a dystopia in the future.
01:12:13.000It all depends on what we do with this technology.
01:12:16.000So if we take the technology and harness it for the well-being of everybody...
01:12:20.000So in other words, if you have robots assigned to people and they do your work for you and then you get the benefits of the robots' work and you have a relatively equal distribution...
01:12:34.000That'll make it so we avert a worst-case scenario.
01:12:37.000If you don't do that, if you don't do a radical redistribution of wealth and have good rules and laws along with the technology coming along, then you're gonna have...
01:12:46.000I mean, we already have worse income and wealth inequality than the fucking Gilded Age right now, and it's only gonna get worse.
01:13:14.000And by the way, I think most people believe in meritocracy to one extent or another.
01:13:19.000Like, they want it to be that, okay, everybody starts at the zero-yard line and we're running a hundred-yard dash and wherever you end up, you end up.
01:13:48.000I wonder if, ultimately, I mean, we're really attached to the idea of competition.
01:13:55.000We're really attached to it, you know, because it's what propels It's what propels the genome, right?
01:14:04.000It's what propels human beings in terms of like their ability to secure a successful mate, or to secure a great income in their job, or in their ability to transcend the current state of their existence in terms of like their Financial situation or where they live and you can you could actually work hard and you can actually get a better existence So we're really attached to this idea and it's also It's
01:14:35.000the way we separate from the pack But as we evolve, and we are clearly evolving, something's going on, and I think our real steps of evolution are going to come in the form of some sort of embracing of technology, some sort of an integration with technology,
01:14:51.000whether it's a Neuralink-type deal or something along those lines.
01:14:55.000But we're so rigidly connected to the idea of competition, like that is life.
01:15:02.000But isn't life A lot of things, but the competition thing seems- Yes, that's the point.
01:15:07.000And this is coming from a person who's very competitive and have been involved in competition my whole life.
01:15:12.000I'm not knocking competitive people, because I think that's what a lot of people do.
01:15:16.000A lot of the knock on competition and a lot of the knock on meritocracy comes from lazy people, and that's a real problem, because their knock on competition is that they suck at it.
01:15:57.000I wonder if human beings are going to get to a point one day where all breeding is done through genetic engineering and that all of our sex and all of our whatever emotional connection we have with each other,
01:16:15.000whatever compassion we have and affection we have for each other is all going to be enhanced by technology in a way where we're willing to give up this idea of a woman Carrying a baby inside of her body and and then it coming out like that I wonder if we can get past the point of where we're at now with You know like it's kind of whatever we're doing now It's working in terms where Life is better than it was 100 years ago,
01:16:44.000and it's better than it was 200 years ago, and we're getting better in so many ways, but we're still plagued by so many of the primate, dominator instincts that we've had from the beginning of time.
01:16:58.000You know, it's funny because if we are able to eliminate all of those things that you just described, I mean, I think there's a good argument.
01:17:04.000We're not even really fucking human anymore.
01:17:26.000I think you need some semblance of competition because obviously people, to one extent or another, have innate preference for competition in many respects.
01:17:42.000Everybody wants to be part of something bigger than themselves.
01:17:44.000So the thing is we're a walking contradiction.
01:17:48.000We have a lot of these things naturally within us.
01:17:51.000So in my opinion the best thing you could do given that reality is create a system that allows All of the things about you to thrive and you harness those things for good and so that's why you know for the longest time on my show I've been a big proponent of social democracy because social democracy is this idea that you set up a system where you take the basics off of the table So you say,
01:18:13.000you know what, if you're in the society and the society is sufficiently wealthy enough, you're gonna have healthcare.
01:18:19.000You're gonna have paid vacation time by law.
01:18:21.000You're gonna have all these things which will make it so that you're not just living to be part of the economy.
01:18:27.000You're not just living to serve some sort of fucking corporation.
01:18:29.000But after that, after people have their basics met, do I have a problem with competition being part of the engine that helps drive humanity forward?
01:18:37.000That might be where we're doing it wrong, right?
01:18:40.000I am 100% with you on that, that I think that if our country really looked at itself like a community, and we really wanted everyone in the community to have their needs met, and we all agreed on that, Because there's this idea that some people are lazy,
01:19:07.000I remember it being a part of our life.
01:19:09.000We got out of that, and we stopped living in poverty because my parents worked hard and they got out of it.
01:19:16.000But that is what we're talking about, like where someone steps in and helps people get by.
01:19:23.000If everyone's needs were met when it comes to food and shelter and education and healthcare, I think people that are competitive and people that are ambitious would still be so.
01:19:38.000You can't have a quality of outcome, because you're not going to have a quality of income, or excuse me, you're not going to have a quality of effort.
01:19:45.000Or talents, or natural talents, right?
01:19:47.000Yes, especially if there's things, like there's some people that want to be good at something, but they're just not physically capable of it, right?
01:19:54.000I think that we have to think of the other stuff.
01:20:51.000Because of crime, because when they're on the street, sometimes they have to go to the hospital, they have to go to all these different places.
01:20:56.000If you give everybody a roof over their head, it doesn't have to be a fucking mansion or a big house for all these people, but if you give homeless people a roof over their head, studies show it saves the taxpayer money in the long run.
01:21:05.000So you're doing the right thing, not only morally, but you're also doing the right thing economically.
01:21:09.000So it's an interesting thing when people argue against that.
01:21:12.000But yeah, I want to get to the point where if somebody doesn't make it, I can blame them.
01:21:28.000Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say why someone makes it or why someone doesn't.
01:21:32.000I think if you look at how someone did make it, you could draw a pretty clear assumption.
01:21:37.000But if you look at why someone didn't make it, that's when things get complicated.
01:21:41.000Because you're dealing with, like, emotional trauma, and you're dealing with abuse, and you're dealing with, like, maybe their father always told them they're a fucking loser, and they're, like, shell-shocked, or maybe they're beaten up by their older brother.
01:21:52.000Weird shit can fuck with people, you know?
01:21:54.000You never really know why someone is inferior.
01:21:58.000That's very true, but under an ideal system, I think those people would still be able to survive.
01:22:08.000You made a great point about welfare there, because you reminded me of this new study that came out not that long ago about universal basic income, and there's this mayor in Stockton, California, that did this trial run.
01:22:17.000He gave a bunch of people $500, and they have some really good data on this now.
01:22:21.000So they found that the percentage of the money that went towards what people view as vices, so like drinking or gambling or whatever it may be, 2%.
01:23:24.000I mean, that's where we're wasting our money.
01:23:26.000They pumped trillions of dollars with a T into the stock market at the height of COVID because they were afraid that COVID was grinding the economy to a halt.
01:24:26.000So, this is what our money goes towards.
01:24:29.000And, you know, all the Wall Street bailouts, think about all the money we spent propping up Wall Street.
01:24:33.000And this was under George W. Bush, this was under Barack Obama, and this is under Donald Trump in the form of his new tax cut bill, where he gave a...
01:24:40.000Corporate tax cut to these massive corporations.
01:24:42.00083% of the benefits of his 2017 tax cut bill went to the top 1%.
01:24:46.000If you're worried about where your money's going, look at that shit first.
01:24:49.000That's the stuff that it shouldn't be going towards.
01:25:08.000They turned around and they paid bonuses to the same motherfuckers that just crashed the companies.
01:25:13.000So in other words, all those people failed up.
01:25:16.000In 2008. This is 2008 I'm talking about.
01:25:18.000Wasn't the problem with that is that they had to give these people bonuses and if they didn't they would have left and went to other banks and they were worried about losing their top criminals.
01:25:30.000That's like you have a basketball team and you never made it to the first round of the playoffs eight years in a row and you say we got to keep them exactly as they are.
01:25:53.000They turn around and do favors for them.
01:25:54.000I mean, there was a great Princeton study that came out.
01:25:57.000Shit, probably a decade ago now, that found that there's a direct correlation between what the corporations want and the top 1% wants, and policy, and there's almost no correlation between what the bottom 90% wants and policy.
01:26:09.000So regular people don't get what they want, but the corporations do and the billionaires do.
01:26:14.000I wonder what it would really cost to give, like, legitimate healthcare for everybody, free education in terms of college-level education.
01:26:24.000If we decided to subsidize all the universities and if we decided to give people a universal basic income, what would that look like in terms of the restructuring of people's taxes and how much money would have to go to that?
01:26:38.000I mean, we've gotten really accustomed to the idea of war, right?
01:26:43.000And spending money on war is just, well, that's what we do.
01:26:48.000To make people have this monumental shift in where the money goes and the way it gets allocated in our country would require people to kind of rethink things.
01:26:57.000And we'd have to accept it and there'd be a lot of debate.
01:26:59.000But I wonder how much would be involved.
01:27:01.000So I'll answer that, but funny enough, the polls actually show the people are already there on this issue.
01:27:06.000The people are there, but of course the government is not there because they're corrupt.
01:27:15.000Medicare for All, I think that's an easy sell.
01:27:18.000Harder sell is universal basic income.
01:27:20.000Well, actually, there was a poll at the peak of COVID. Now, this number may have dropped since the peak of COVID, but at the time, it was 55% that were in favor of UBI. Because everybody was struggling, nobody had money, and they were like, fuck, that sounds like a great idea.
01:27:33.000Well, that's when Andrew Yang's ideas about universal basic income got revisited.
01:27:38.000A lot of people were like, oh, he was right.
01:27:41.000See, it wasn't automation that made us first reconsider it.
01:27:57.000They did a great comparison in The Intercept showing that that same year that he proposed it, I think it had to be like 2017 or 2018, Just the increase for the year in military spending was $80 billion.
01:28:48.000Is it only kids that are getting out of like, what if a guy is like maybe 35 years old and he wants to attend night school after work twice a week to try to better his education, to get a better job?
01:29:14.000But also, to answer your question on Medicare for All, because you said this is an easier sell, definitely is an easier sell.
01:29:20.00060% of the American public is already there.
01:29:22.000There was even a poll that came out a while ago that showed more Republicans want it than don't want it.
01:29:26.000Now, to be fair, yes, that's before the massive propaganda effort where they do the, how are you going to pay for it and it doesn't work and all this stuff.
01:29:32.000But there was a study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that Medicare for All saves $5 trillion.
01:29:39.000That place is the biggest lefty Propaganda spot.
01:29:44.000Well, it was a study based on comparing world systems.
01:29:47.000University of Amherst, that is a socialist hellhole.
01:29:50.000If you want to look at the study, we can look at it.
01:29:51.000I shouldn't say hellhole, but it's not.
01:29:53.000It's just like, even in the 80s, when I was doing stand-up and I would go to Amherst, I was like, this place is crazy.
01:30:00.000I'm not defending the college campus idiots, just to be fair.
01:30:04.000I probably would agree with you on how dumb the college kids are there.
01:30:08.000In terms of the academic study coming out of there, I'm pretty sure, because think about it, Joe, the way the system works now, you have a giant, rapacious, for-profit middleman who is, they're just a mafia in between you and your doctor, and they take their cut.
01:30:21.000The whole idea of Medicare for All is just get rid of the mafia.
01:31:18.000So you wouldn't get the best kind of surgery.
01:31:20.000The kind of surgery you get when you go to a real expert, a guy who works in the Lakers or something like that, some fucking wizard at reattaching ACLs.
01:31:28.000That guy needs incentive to become who he is.
01:31:31.000Those super ambitious doctors that are the top of the food chain, those are the ones that people seek out.
01:31:36.000Would that guy be able to still charge a lot of fucking money for those surgeries?
01:31:41.000And that is one of the reasons why they're so good at it in the first place, is because that guy can have a Ferrari and live in a big house in Beverly Hills.
01:31:52.000I have friends from Canada that will come to the United States for surgery and pay for it out of their pocket because they want to get better doctors, more incentivized doctors.
01:32:00.000It's also true that it works the other way, though, as well.
01:32:02.000Remember when Rand Paul went to Canada to get some surgery, and this is a guy who's notorious for blasting, you know, their socialized medicine system?
01:32:11.000Rand Paul went to Canada to get some sort of procedure, some sort of medical procedure, and of course everybody was like, that's, you know, that's...
01:32:17.000Right, but Rand Paul's also a doctor, and he probably knew that this one guy up there was a specialist in one particular thing.
01:32:25.000But that's the exact counter to the point you just made, which is...
01:32:28.000It's usually the exception to the rule, because more people are coming from Canada to the United States to get surgery than are going from the United States to Canada.
01:32:35.000It might be just an aberration or an outlier.
01:32:40.000I'm just asking you, is it your contention that Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Australia, Canada, all these places that have universal healthcare systems, that they don't have the same level of high quality surgeons and whatever that we have here?
01:32:52.000I have talked to doctors who say that's the case.
01:32:55.000I've talked to doctors to say that this system is not perfect, that it's deeply flawed, and that greed and corruption are a gigantic part of it.
01:33:02.000However, the most innovative and most skilled surgeons and doctors are in the United States.
01:33:09.000I don't know if that's true, but I heard this from more than one doctor.
01:33:13.000It's very possible that there's a reason why the Saudi princes come here when they want stuff done, not contesting that at all.
01:33:20.000The part that people don't want to talk about, which is actually, I think, the way more important point, is that anywhere from 45,000 to 60,000 Americans die every single year because they don't have access to basic healthcare.
01:33:31.000Yes, but these two things aren't mutually exclusive.
01:33:33.000We're talking about two different things.
01:33:36.000Like, just because someone has basic health care, isn't it possible to have both?
01:33:41.000Isn't it possible to have a system like you have public defenders, right?
01:33:44.000Everyone's entitled to a public defender.
01:33:46.000But people want a private defender because the public defenders are overburdened and all that stuff.
01:33:49.000I mean, again, the point I would make is that it's a funding issue.
01:33:52.000So if you were to pay those public defenders more and attract more talent...
01:33:56.000So in other words, can you craft a universal healthcare system where there's sufficient compensation for the experts that you're talking about?
01:34:04.000Because at the end of the day, it all comes down to funding, like you're saying.
01:34:07.000Yes, if you want high quality, you're going to have to pay for that high quality.
01:34:10.000So you should set up the system so that, yeah, I don't want doctors making...
01:34:15.000Next to no money or making less than what they would make under this system now You want to have it so that you are incentivizing these people to stay here and treat here And you absolutely can craft a system like that and even if you do that you end up saving money because there's just such a I mean it's a fucking black hole here Joe forget insurance companies who are you know mafia criminals in their own respect Hospitals as well are really fucking bad.
01:34:37.000I remember covering a story on my show at least five years ago where I went through line by line this medical bill that became, you know, it blew up and went viral because they were price gouging for everything.
01:34:49.000They even had this line for cough suppressant aids and they charged like a hundred dollars for it.
01:35:11.000He chose Shouldis because it offers the surgery that he needed at the right price.
01:35:16.000The hospital specializes in hernia repair using natural tissue rather than artificial mesh.
01:35:21.000The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that the procedure in Canada will cost an estimated $5,000 to $8,000 according to Healthcare Blue Book.
01:35:32.000A hernia repair in the United States will cost between $3,000 and $12,000 or up to $19,000 for a laparoscopic repair.
01:35:43.000Read that next line because that's important right there.
01:35:45.000Healthcare costs in the U.S. are also notoriously difficult to determine prior to procedure, and plenty of patients have received bills that can be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars over what they expected to pay.
01:35:55.000That's to the point of not only are the health insurance companies price-gouging people, it's also the healthcare providers who are price-gouging people.
01:36:03.000So really we have a scam within a scam on top of a scam in the U.S. healthcare system.
01:36:07.000Another perk of going to Canada is that Shoulders offers a resort-like setting for recovering with fresh meals, an exercise program, on-site massage, and relaxing views.
01:36:18.000So we heard it was a nice spot to go and you save a little cheddar.
01:36:21.000Yeah, so, I mean, this is one of the things I talk about all the time on my show, is that I really don't think people fully understand, because you're not taught this stuff, just how much you're getting screwed in this country if you're a normal working person.
01:36:33.000If you're a normal working person, like, this is the only developed country that doesn't have paid vacation time by law.
01:36:40.000Every other country, the second you get a job from day one, within that first year, you can get, it varies from place to place, but anywhere from like two weeks to four weeks off, paid by law.
01:36:49.000Whereas here in the U.S., if you happen to get some time off, you should, it's just because your employer's being nice, and oftentimes it's not paid, it's, you know, it's unpaid.
01:36:57.000And it's little things like that that just drive me fucking crazy, because we're one of the richest countries in the world.
01:37:18.000This country, the last time we had a government that really looked out for regular Americans, for working people, it was the New Deal era.
01:37:26.000The New Deal era was a long fucking time ago.
01:37:28.000You know, so we were able to get, well, between the New Deal era and you could argue the war on poverty as well, so maybe a little dash of Lyndon Johnson in there with FDR, but you have Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
01:37:39.000We're like coasting off of the little bit of help that we got from the previous generation from the Great Depression.
01:37:45.000You know, like Biden did those $1,400 stimulus checks, the one-time $1,400 stimulus checks.
01:38:28.000There's a few issues I think that really would unify Americans, and I think somebody should run for president on those particular issues.
01:38:34.000So the first one would be, we need a new version of the New Deal, and somebody should run on making the United States of America the envy of the world when it comes to our infrastructure.
01:38:45.000I think we should have the best airports in the world.
01:38:47.000I think we should have the best bridges and roads in the world.
01:38:50.000I think we should hire millions of people in rebuilding our country and making it beautiful, making it A++ infrastructure.
01:38:56.000We just need to do deals with China and we can have that over here.
01:38:59.000They're willing to come in and negotiate.
01:39:14.000Listen, it's terrible, it's wrong, it's evil, but you gotta hand it to them in that it's the new evolution of imperialism.
01:39:20.000There was a time when people would just show up on people's shores and be like, This is now ours, and you can fuck off.
01:39:25.000Then we evolved that a little bit to, we're not going to go in there and tell you all this shit is ours, but we're going to put a puppet dictator who's from your land in there, and then that person's going to have a deal with us and sort of give us that stuff under the table.
01:39:37.000Now this is the new version of that of, what if I actually helped you out a little bit and built a couple roads?
01:40:33.000And I think that during COVID, it was probably pretty bad, too, because a lot of companies, they bought controlling stakes in, they started buying into the stock market in a big way.
01:40:44.000We really need to bring back manufacturing here in a serious way.
01:40:49.000I think it was a real, horrendous, corrupt decision when the government decided to do NAFTA, decided to do permanent normal trade relations with China, decided to do all of the terrible so-called free trade deals that they did, which are really outsourcing deals to enrich the corporate overlords and send overseas all these good-paying jobs.
01:41:09.000And as a result of that, it's been a race to the bottom.
01:41:11.000And now you have, you know, I just drove across a lot of this country.
01:41:14.000You have Dilapidated place after dilapidated.
01:41:30.000You see all these towns are just crumbling and the jobs have been outsourced and you see these things that have been left alone for decades and you think, this doesn't have to be like this.
01:41:39.000This was a choice made by the corrupt politicians to outsource the jobs for more profit.
01:41:44.000They'd rather pay somebody pennies on the dollar in Bangladesh than pay an American worker a living wage and give them health care.
01:42:01.000The other idea that I was going to tell you, which I brought up on the podcast before, is that I wish we had a direct democracy law in this country where people could vote directly on the biggest five or so issues every time they vote for president.
01:42:11.000So then everybody would decide, hey, I want to legalize weed, I want to pay a $15 minimum wage, I want to end the wars in Iraq, or whatever.
01:42:17.000And we'd be in a lot better place if we had that, because that's a way to go around the corruption.
01:42:22.000You know, because, again, all the polls show the American people are relatively united on a lot of these basic issues, but...
01:42:28.000The political overclass doesn't do any of the things we want them to.
01:42:34.000One way is to actually get the corruption out of the system and make it so the politicians are more beholden to the people than the donors.
01:42:40.000But that's a long-term thing to fix, and I think they're always going to find some workarounds.
01:42:44.000What they can't really work around is if we had a direct democracy law where what the people say goes.
01:42:50.000And that's not on every issue, to be clear, because if you have a right, the people can't vote to take away your rights.
01:43:01.000You always have a right to free speech.
01:43:03.000These are all things that they can't just vote away.
01:43:05.000But on economic issues, on foreign policy issues, on social issues, people should have a right to vote on that.
01:43:12.000Do you think that people should have a need to understand what they're voting on before they vote?
01:43:18.000I think that we need to create a system where they are educated and they do learn this stuff, but...
01:43:23.000But you can't force someone to learn things, right?
01:43:26.000You can't force somebody to learn things.
01:43:27.000You need to have good schools and good education that gets people to the point where they did learn this stuff.
01:43:32.000But we can't have a system where up front we say, you have to learn X, Y, and Z before you vote, because if we do, you end up with...
01:43:41.000Poll tests and literacy tests and a lot of the former Jim Crow and segregation methods where you try to exclude the undesirables and the lower class folks up front.
01:44:53.000Because they're attacking all this farm life and the thing about it is like they're really hard to hunt like once they get a sense that people are hunting them they find them they they're scarce they take off they're smart yeah they're really fucking smart and they they have some weird way of figuring things out and they know how to stay the fuck away from people so even though they're opening up hunting people saying like Idaho wants to kill 90% of the wolves yeah but they're not going to be able to like you don't understand This is to make it
01:45:23.000legal for people to, whenever they want, go out and hunt wolves.
01:45:28.000Good luck finding one, and good luck hunting them.
01:46:10.000The impact on elk populations is very significant.
01:46:13.000The impact on mountain lions is significant.
01:46:15.000They found out that mountain lion populations have dropped down to 25% because the wolves are stealing the kills of the mountain lion.
01:46:23.000So say if a mountain lion kills a deer, wolves come along and chase the mountain lion away, then the mountain lion has to kill another deer.
01:46:29.000So the mountain lions are killing probably more animals And they're eating less, and some of them are starving to death.
01:46:39.000And then they'll run after the cat and chase it away, and then eat the cat's deer, and then the cat has to go kill another deer, and then, you know...
01:46:47.000So are the laws from state to state on stuff like that, are they trying to do a balancing act when it comes to population control with certain animals that could be a very big issue for people and agriculture?
01:48:35.000But what about things that would directly affect, like what if there was some sort of a vote to bring back coal-fired power plants because we can increase jobs and then you're going to, you know, we could take a little bit, we've got a chart here that shows that an increase in carbon doesn't actually do anything.
01:48:53.000Turns out we just plant more trees and everything's fine.
01:48:56.000There's a lot of people that would try to trick people with that kind of shit, right?
01:48:59.000So, you're 100% right about this, and that's both the beauty and how messy democracy is.
01:49:05.000Because, yeah, I would contend that if you give people a direct vote, the majority of the time, bar some sort of insane propaganda campaigns, the majority of the time they're going to get stuff right, but of course they're going to fucking get things wrong.
01:49:31.000But it's like, if you believe in it as a matter of principle, then you win some and you lose some.
01:49:37.000Just like how Democrats were distraught on the night Trump won in 2016, and Republicans were distraught on the night Biden won in the last election, by the way.
01:49:48.000Didn't I nail it with every single thing I said in that podcast?
01:49:53.000You so nailed it that anybody that had like conspiracy ideas about why, well, how come Trump was winning and Biden wound up winning after they counted in the mail-in votes?
01:50:04.000I go, Kyle Kalinske called the entire thing from the beginning of the night.
01:50:41.000It's got a great cover, but, dude, it's all about Alan Dulles and the CIA and how Alan Dulles really killed JFK. This guy is the fucking CIA's worst nightmare.
01:50:49.000I mean, they despise him, and we had him on Crystal Kyle and Friends.
01:51:55.000Listen, I don't want to sound conspiratorial at all, but there is a thing called a deep state.
01:51:58.000And by that I mean there's people who are there from every administration.
01:52:02.000You know, who are, they're at the CIA, they're at the FBI, they're permanently there, and their jobs are not contingent on an election that happens every four years.
01:52:11.000You know, and so they're calling a lot of the shots, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, if you're talking about the Pentagon, if you're talking about the CIA, these guys make a lot of the decisions.
01:52:19.000So yeah, there's going to be some clashes behind the scenes.
01:52:22.000There always are clashes behind the scenes.
01:52:25.000We know, as a matter of fact, it's a historical record that the United States during the Cold War overthrew all these South American governments that we didn't like because they were leftist and we wanted to put in, you know, right-wing puppets who were more sympathetic to our ideology and allow capitalism to exist there.
01:52:41.000So we overthrew all these governments.
01:52:43.000What makes anybody think that we would just draw the line here at home?
01:52:48.000We're so magical and we're so special that the CIA people would be like, no, I have a moral stand against overthrowing our own president, even though we just overthrown 17 before lunch.
01:53:31.000The fact that the bullet came out pristine and there's more fragments in Connelly's wrist than are missing from the bullet and they just found that bullet magically on a gurney...
01:53:44.000And the only reason why they had to make up this magic bullet theory in the first place is because a guy got hit under the underpass with a ricochet.
01:53:50.000And that guy, when he got hit under the underpass, he got hit and they go, okay, well, obviously one bullet hit this curb and it hit this guy.
01:54:00.000So now we have to make one bullet go through two people and have all this damage.
01:54:06.000When a more likely scenario is more fucking bullets, more gunshots.
01:54:11.000And then also, like, the Bethesda, Maryland autopsy report is very different than what they described in Dallas.
01:54:19.000In Dallas, they described the hole in his neck as an entry wound.
01:54:21.000In Bethesda, Maryland, it was a tracheotomy.
01:54:59.000Well, the fucking entire NASA was filled with Nazis.
01:55:01.000NASA was filled with Nazis, and a lot of those guys in the government at the time would tell you the real threat, the real enemies were the Soviets, it's not the Nazis.
01:55:07.000Because Nazis were actually good for business.
01:55:10.000Because there was a lot of business connections.
01:55:46.000Nazis had this thing where they would they would put goggles on and they would have sword fights with real swords like rapiers real thin swords and they would slice the fuck out of their faces and it was a thing that they would do These these like dueling contests were like these scars were a badge of honor and so a lot of these guys would walk around with these Horrific facial scars.
01:56:10.000And that was to let all these other people know these are bad motherfuckers that did the dueling thing.
01:58:20.000Well you know a lot of people think that whenever you get someone who's involved in running a country that has this sort of powerful cult of personality thing going for them, like Hitler, that they craft a kind of a religion.
01:58:39.000That was what a lot of people were worried about with Trump.
01:58:42.000The really dumb people that were into Trump looked at Trump like Trump was a messenger from Jesus.
01:58:48.000They really thought he was sent here to do something really special because God was tired about all the sin and the way people were treating each other and the way people were living their lives.
01:58:59.000He was going to send Trump, of all fucking people.
01:59:03.000What I'm amazed by is when you drive across this country, everybody still has up all of their Trump shit.
01:59:33.000The New York Times released this thing where they showed, like, all the searches for him when he was still on Twitter versus now the searches now that he's off Twitter.
02:00:38.000And not only that, people will tell you, who are long-time listeners of my show, hey, I used to put the autoplay on, click one of your videos, and it would play 20 of your videos in a row.
02:00:45.000Now you put the autoplay on, you click one of my videos, it goes from me to John Oliver, or me to fucking Trevor Noah.
02:00:51.000So they take people who are almost like the fake outsider voices, and they're like, ah, that's outsider enough, I guess.
02:00:56.000Put that in right after Kyle, and they'll probably watch that.
02:00:58.000So not gonna lie to you, Joe, it's a giant hit.
02:02:30.000Like, remember when CNN was talking about podcasters, about how, you know, that there's people on YouTube that get more views than a CNN show?
02:03:19.000They're like, hey, please, de-platform the people who I don't like because, you know, oh, they're saying things that are conspiracy theories.
02:03:26.000And by the way, they use that for fucking anything.
02:04:01.000Listen, I have, now for the first time in my life, I've always been outside of the traditional media system, but now for the first time in my life, I have first-hand experience with how this stuff operates in corporate media, and it's even more gross than I thought it was.
02:04:23.000They were basically on the way out at the Hill, the corporation that they worked for.
02:04:29.000Now, they're one of very few people who've actually maintained to create a really, really good show within the confines of the corporate media system.
02:04:38.000Like, they're a real outsider voice that somehow slipped under the radar and were on corporate media.
02:04:43.000So, when they were going, when they were leaving, they had their goodbye video ready.
02:04:50.000At the last minute behind the scenes, the higher-ups at the Hill changed the title on the video.
02:04:57.000To something incredibly vague, hoping that nobody would watch.
02:05:00.000It was like Today on Rising or something like that they put, as opposed to what it was supposed to be, which was a big send-off for Crystal and Sagar and, you know, they're starting a new venture and all that stuff.
02:05:08.000Not only did they do that, they changed the video from, it was supposed to be what's called a premiere video on YouTube, which usually gets more views and gets some more eyeballs.
02:05:16.000They changed it from a premiere video to a regular video.
02:05:20.000Again, to try to decrease the view count.
02:05:23.000Then, after it was up for a couple days, they pulled that video down.
02:05:28.000To try to like, if people tune in to the show Rising for Crystal and Sagar, they wanted to sort of bury the fact that Crystal and Sagar are gonna be gone permanently, and so they took that video down.
02:05:43.000Now, that's just the stuff that's like public for everybody to see.
02:05:49.000What they don't know is that behind the scenes, Crystal basically had to beg the higher-ups, for the love of God, please let me put our show on YouTube.
02:06:53.000After she's become phenomenally successful, and Saga's become phenomenally successful, and Rising has taken off, and now that Crystal wants to start a new show with a new host, me, they view that as competition.
02:07:21.000Is there, did they have an exclusivity contract?
02:07:24.000Where they couldn't be on YouTube as a part of the contract?
02:07:27.000So what happened is they were in the new negotiating phase for a new contract, and in that new contract it was like, we're not coming back if I don't get to put this thing on YouTube.
02:07:36.000And so they were like, okay, fine, you can put it on YouTube.
02:07:50.000So, the worst part is, so I launch it and tell my whole audience, and we're so excited, we get a lot of views on the first one, and we tell them, this is how it's going to work.
02:08:03.000Audio's free for everybody, but if you want the video and you want it a day early, you pay $5 on Substack.
02:08:10.000After I told my audience, they tell Crystal, you're not even allowed to acknowledge this new podcast's existence.
02:08:18.000So now, and by the way, Joe, we decided we're going to take no ad money.
02:12:09.000They don't need anybody to be their executive.
02:12:12.000They don't need anybody looming over their shoulder, making decisions for them, telling them what they can't do, putting restrictions on them that are arbitrary.
02:12:19.000And then also extracting exorbitant amounts of money.
02:12:23.000The difference in the amount of money that they were making there versus on their own Is mind-blowing.
02:12:33.000It's all the audience saying, we love you and we want to reward you.
02:12:37.000So in the case of Crystal and Sagar, they pay the $10 a month and get the perks that come along with breaking points.
02:12:41.000In the case of Crystal Kyle and Friends, they pay the $5 on Substack.
02:12:45.000This is the way it's supposed to work.
02:12:47.000And people have gotten so fed up with the old system and the rigid hierarchy and the assholes who don't know what the fuck they're talking about or what they're doing trying to control us.
02:12:57.000Do you have any idea how pissed I was, Joe, when they told me...
02:13:50.000And I watched one segment that they did, Joe, and they were talking about, you know, the IRS leaks where we found that billionaires were paying 0.1% in taxes, and the most any of them were paying was like 3.5%.
02:14:00.000The first segment I watched is them saying, I'm so outraged, we need to crack down on whoever leaked this.
02:16:16.000Well, Colin and whoever he was talking to in the video I saw, when I watched it and they were saying it's an outrage that the whistleblower leaked the stuff on the billionaires.
02:16:45.000The way old media works is, you know, people are applying for jobs and they're regular people and they have some background in politics, but do they have the same sort of passion and independence and ideology as Crystal and Sagar?
02:17:02.000And that's why their dynamic is so good as well, is that, you know, they are coming from a place where they really believe something.
02:17:07.000And, you know, you could sniff it from a mile away when somebody's really just sort of playing the role.
02:17:11.000And so now you have more of a, I would say, a partisan Democrat and a partisan Republican that are going to fill the seats for Crystal and Sager.
02:17:19.000Whereas Crystal and Sager are, I would argue, more populist left and populist right.
02:17:24.000So the populism is the thing that's really the key ingredient and the fact that they're just original and intelligent in their own respect.
02:20:20.000Dionne Warwick would sit you down with a bunch of people that were lying, and they would pretend that they knew things, and they would sit there.
02:24:05.000I think somebody did this thing where it was like a sting operation.
02:24:08.000He had an earpiece in and he was listening to people and he was like telling them stuff that they thought he couldn't know but he heard it earlier.
02:25:05.000I talked about this the other day on the podcast, but you really should watch this and smoke a little pot before you watch it.
02:25:10.000This documentary, The Anthropocene, about the human race and the impact the human race has on the earth and what we've done in terms of strip mining.
02:25:23.000It's shot with drones, a lot of it, so you get this overall perspective of the mass of some of these mines and where they're tearing down these old churches to make room for more mines.
02:26:39.000When people at some point know that what they believe or what they're doing is bullshit, but they just can't get out of it because they're like, I've invested years and years and years into this.
02:26:47.000That's a very real thing that people deal with.
02:26:49.000You know, I recognized that in martial arts when I was a kid, you know, because the martial art that I was doing that I was really good at was Taekwondo, and it turned out that's not a really good one to learn.
02:27:31.000Turns out it wasn't necessarily true because once I learned all those other things then the Taekwondo was a huge advantage because I have all this power from kicking and I have this ability to use my legs and like you get leg dexterity from Taekwondo that's really difficult to get from other things because you you're constantly throwing kicks and you're very rarely throwing punches so a lot of people like there's a girl named Michelle Waterson she's a she calls herself the karate hottie it's hilarious but she has that That kind of karate leg dexterity,
02:28:03.000Steven Wonderboy Thompson is a top welterweight contender.
02:28:06.000He's got that kind of leg dexterity, too, where he can do crazy shit with his kicks that most martial artists that just start out just doing MMA don't really develop.
02:28:16.000But by itself, as a standalone, it's not good because it's just too easy to take people down.
02:28:22.000Jiu-jitsu guys, you're helpless against them.
02:28:43.000Chuck Liddell was a really good wrestler, but he would use it to stand up.
02:28:47.000He would use it to make sure that you couldn't take him down.
02:28:50.000So the ability to take someone down is probably the most important thing.
02:28:54.000But it's all dependent upon how good people are at each individual skill.
02:28:58.000But the point being, to just get good at Taekwondo was not good.
02:29:02.000And it was a real wake-up call for me because they were all brainwashed.
02:29:06.000All the Taekwondo people were absolutely convinced, all the people that I trained with, that this was the best martial art because that's what they had dedicated their life to.
02:29:23.000My life had still some flexibility to it, so I bailed.
02:29:26.000But I know that feeling when you're completely committed.
02:29:29.000But I remember one of the first times I was boxing, where I was sitting there with a bloody nose, just got lit up in a sparring session, and I was sitting there going, fuck!
02:29:38.000You were like, I'm not as good as I thought I was.
02:31:33.000Victories that I'd already achieved and guys I had knocked out.
02:31:36.000I thought about it in my head, but then the reality of watching someone who was actually living that life and getting up in the morning and running five miles and then eating really healthy and then going to the gym and doing rounds in the bag and then sparring.
02:31:49.000And I was like, okay, he's more dedicated than me.
02:33:18.000And you find this out, and the reason why I'm bringing this up in relation to this conversation is you find this out with the way people approach parties, political parties, the way they approach lifestyle choices and ideologies, the way they view the world.
02:33:33.000People get so attached to the tribe that's involved in whatever thing it is, whether it's a political thing or a religious thing or...
02:33:42.000They get sucked into it, and they take this comfort in that there's others that agree on the same parameters and sets of rules that they do.
02:33:51.000So I love that you made that point, because I have firsthand experience with something about exactly this, and it happened recently.
02:33:57.000So on my show, when the former head of the CDC came out and told CNN he thinks that COVID-19 likely came from the lab...
02:34:08.000He comes out and says that I cover it on my show, and I listen to his whole argument, and then I listen to Sanjay Gupta's response, and basically my commentary was something along the lines of, I have no idea what the fuck happened, but this guy makes a compelling case, and I lean slightly in favor of thinking the lab leak theory is probably true.
02:34:23.000And then you had people in my own audience, now granted I almost never read the responses because I want to maintain my sanity, but it got to me somehow that people in my own audience were disagreeing with me.
02:34:34.000Not a crazy amount, but enough where it was an issue, it was interesting.
02:34:37.000And this was over a month ago, when it was just starting.
02:34:58.000And the fact that people almost tried to make me feel like I'm making some sort of huge mistake by saying this.
02:35:04.000I mean, it's silly, and really what it broke down to was a few things.
02:35:08.000Not just partisanship and Trump and anti-Trump stuff, but it also came down to there are some people on the left who fear that this is going to be used for a new Cold War against China.
02:35:17.000And so they feel like you've got to be against this up front to stop the march towards this new Cold War with China, which we shouldn't have.
02:35:24.000And I mean, listen, my position has been very clear from day one.
02:35:27.000I lean in favor of thinking that that theory is true, but there's zero political implications to that.
02:35:32.000I'm 100% against a Cold War with China, and what we're talking about here is an objective empirical question where we're just looking for what's accurate.
02:35:39.000The political implications, we can debate those after, and I'll always be on the side of, I don't want to escalate with China and I don't want to escalate with Russia.
02:35:46.000But, like, these are separate questions.
02:35:48.000We have to be able to tell the truth, even if the truth makes you feel uncomfortable.
02:35:52.000People are so fucked because of Trump.
02:35:55.000The way the left has formed their arguments and dug their heels in on certain ideologies where they're not even willing to look at things, it's so fucked.
02:36:06.000Like, I read something yesterday that hydroxychloroquine actually has some benefit in treating COVID patients.
02:36:22.000It took five plus months of Trump being out of office for people to go, well, you know, the more we look at it, I mean, I don't know how to say this.
02:37:56.000They're just itchy, ready to call people racist for anything.
02:37:59.000And by the way, the funny thing is, I think there was U.S. funding that may have been involved in the research of the bat coronaviruses that could have led to the spread of COVID-19.
02:38:08.000The NIH funded this other organization run by Peter Daszak, and they funded...
02:38:14.000This gain-of-function research, and then when Fauci's on TV saying, that is absolutely categorically incorrect, we did not sponsor gain-of-function research.
02:38:32.000I don't, you know, that guy, I don't understand the cult around him.
02:38:35.000I get that the idea was like, oh, he's the science guy, and he's in Trump's administration, but he sort of positioned himself against Trump, but liberals made him this fucking hero.
02:39:44.000Maybe, even though you can smell farts, maybe it's blocking some farts.
02:39:50.000That's the point, is the egregious splatter.
02:39:53.000Maybe it's that, or maybe it's just the actual viral load that you take in.
02:39:57.000Like, maybe when you're breathing through that stupid thing, it takes enough of it out so that your body's immune system has a better shot of fighting it off.
02:40:06.000So maybe there's a bunch of people with masks on that got close to folks, but it wasn't enough.
02:40:52.000And the other thing is, like, nominally the idea was once people get vaccinated, if they go somewhere and say, I've been vaccinated, it's like, okay, then you're totally fine.
02:41:40.000I don't think the states can make laws about interstate travel because I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court says you can't have borders between states effectively.
02:41:49.000But didn't they have a thing when New York was saying you can't go in there unless you have either a COVID negative test within 24 hours or So a bunch of states have this thing where they say like waiting periods or whatever like you're alluding to now.
02:43:07.000You're in and out of the outside quickly, especially if you're in northern climates or if you're in the northeast where everything's covered with clouds.
02:43:14.000He's like, you're not getting any vitamin D. Dude.
02:43:17.000I have first-hand experience with what you're talking about because I've always said I'm way less happy in the winter and in the fall in New York.
02:43:52.000Yeah, and that you think of it as a vitamin because you could buy it in a store.
02:43:57.000But it's responsible for so many different things, not just your immune system.
02:44:02.000It is greatly beneficial for your immune system, but it's also responsible for brain function and muscle growth and all sorts of other things.
02:44:08.000But then if you're in it too much, you could get skin cancer though, right?
02:44:16.000Like, black people are protected because of melanin, but because of that, they have more of an issue with vitamin D. That's one of the reasons why black people and brown people were disproportionately affected by COVID in a lot of places.
02:44:30.000Because my friend who was a doctor said that when he was doing his practice in New York, that he was testing a lot of black folks, and they were, like, unrecognizable levels of vitamin D. Like, you couldn't measure it.
02:44:41.000And he was like, this is a giant problem.
02:44:43.000He goes, because when you have dark melanin in your skin, you can go outside, or when you have dark pigment, rather, you can go outside and you can take in all that sun rays because your body's protected.
02:44:55.000Because, obviously, their ancestors came from Africa.
02:44:57.000But if you're one of those people, like, your ancestors came from Scotland, the reason why they're so white is you're basically like...
02:45:03.000You're a solar panel for vitamin D because there's no fucking sunlight.
02:45:07.000So you got super pale so that what little time your skin was out there, you sucked up as much vitamin D. It's your body craving for vitamin D is what it is, which is really wild that vitamin D is really what dictates the color of human beings' skin.
02:46:33.000You tell me how you're getting vitamin D from a balanced diet, stupid.
02:46:36.000Like, they don't have any education in nutrition.
02:46:39.000So what they're, you know, if you're a general practitioner, the amount of time you spend in medical school learning nutrition is very small.
02:46:49.000And the idea that these guys are supposed to be on point today with all of the research, you know, you need to talk to someone who's like a legit, bona fide, right-now nutritionist.
02:47:02.000Someone who's been studying nutrition.
02:47:04.000All these different peer-reviewed papers.
02:53:52.000Like, you know, in that Mexican joint that I was telling you about, they would have, like, pickled jalapenos and onions on the side, and you'd, like, get those on the side.
02:54:23.000I'll cook up a bunch of meat, and then I have leftovers, and then when I eat the leftovers, I take a plate, I pour a bunch of habanero sauce on the plate, and then I take slices of meat, I dip it in the habanero sauce, and I eat it cold.
02:56:05.000And I was like, that's why we all love you.
02:56:06.000Because we know you're, you know, when you talk, it's something you really believe and you're not thinking of anything, you know, personal or about your ego.
02:56:13.000Every now and then I'll go on a kick where I'll watch old YouTube videos of Chomsky.
02:56:20.000Like YouTube videos from the 60s and the 70s.
02:57:16.000I don't know if there's another one, but Gore Vidal versus Buckley was great, but I think Chomsky versus Buckley was even better, because Chomsky never resorted to attacks or insults or anything.