In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with comedian and podcast co-host, JOE ROGAN, to talk about how he got his start in comedy, how he became one of the funniest people in the world, and how he built a business empire that includes a podcast, a radio show, a TV show, and a brand new venture, COVID, which is a new kind of viral drug that's been around since the early 2000s. We talk about the origins of this drug, how it got its name, and what it's like being a comedian in a world where you can get paid for your knowledge and experience in order to spread it. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please tweet me and tell a friend about it! Timestamps: 3:00 - How did JOE get started in comedy? 4:30 - How he became a comedian How he got into podcasting What does it take to run a business Why he doesn t drink coffee Where did he get his start If you don t have a job, what are you looking for? What s your biggest pet peeve Do you have a weakness? How do you deal with anxiety Should you go on a meth bender I ll tell me what you do to deal with it Would you be better off without a job All of these things Can you take a couple of days off? Have you ever taken a couple days off from work ? Is there anything else you d like to do better than you'd be better than that? I ditching your day off? What would you do without a good day And what do you need to do more than that would you like to be more of a day off from the rest of the day? Thank you for listening to this episode or do you have an existential angst? Thanks for listening Check it out Listen to it out? - What do you think of it? Cheers, Joe Rogans Experience? Tweet me! Subscribe to my Insta: . Insta : , & Subscribe Tweet Me! & I ll be back next week Thanks, bye, Joe :)
00:01:00.000But this is not like even PCR tests, right?
00:01:03.000Because one of the things that as of December 31st, I believe it was the CDC put this regulation in place, they stopped using the standard PCR test for COVID because there's too many false positives.
00:01:15.000People with influenza, other coronaviruses, common colds were testing positive for COVID-19.
00:01:55.000We still don't know, but, like, you seem to know, and you obviously interview a lot of brilliant people like me, that will give you some of this information, but, like...
00:02:06.000Look, when I met you, you were, this was before news radio, and you had stand-up where you were, like, imitating tigers fucking.
00:02:16.000How do you go from that to, like, you know, like, particularly on COVID? Because the information's changing.
00:03:05.000Here's my other main question that I've been dying to know.
00:03:08.000How do you – because in the entertainment industry or creative people, we all know that there's the drive, there's But the downfall is ego.
00:03:24.000How have you navigated this empire where you now own three-fourths of Texas?
00:03:31.000And how have you managed To not succumb to some Shakespearean story of where hubris...
00:04:00.000Because the training that I do, the martial arts stuff and kettlebell stuff and the strength and conditioning work, it's so hard that everything else is easy.
00:04:09.000And then I do ice baths and saunas, and they're so hard that everything else is easy.
00:05:24.000Yeah, I do a lot of my meditating while I'm in the sauna.
00:05:28.000I used to listen to books on tape in the sauna, but I realized it's actually beneficial to my head to just have nothing and just go in there and sit and think.
00:05:36.000And so for 20 minutes every day, I'm just sitting and thinking in this fucking oven.
00:05:42.000And when you go to bed in your chamber, right, in your tank, do you sleep in an oxygen tank?
00:06:15.000Like, those cheat meals, when I see, like, The Rock's cheat meal, it's like...
00:06:22.000So he is not eating anything, like he's not doing bread or sugar, and then he's, like, just the amount of diarrhea he must have on those cheat days, right?
00:06:32.000It's gotta be like, I'm not cleaning that bowl.
00:09:41.000I love him to death, but Tom is his best friend, and Tom and I have had conversations where we express concern, and I'm like, I don't know what to do.
00:09:49.000I mean, you can't, like, you know, that's one of the reasons why we did Sober October.
00:10:24.000Well, you're supposed to wean yourself off of it, and you're supposed to, like, when people detox from alcohol, they do it under medical supervision, because it's very sketchy.
00:10:32.000It can be really dangerous for your body.
00:11:08.000With a coroner's report after her death revealing that Winehouse had a blood alcohol content of 0.416, more than five times the legal limit to drive.
00:11:19.000Yeah, but I bet she did that all the time.
00:11:52.000Well, if you work in an office in a high-stress job, alcohol is almost mandatory for those people, just to unwind, throw a couple ice cubes, and they're like, Jesus fucking Christ, what are we doing?
00:12:03.000At the end of the day, these guys just want to do something to take the fucking edge off.
00:12:10.000I mean, if you're a person who's in one of them high-stress jobs where you're working 12 hours a day every fucking day, and then you're bringing a lot of it home with you, right?
00:12:31.000You know, I spent like five days, because of course all shows got reshuffled, so my October, November, and December were really intense with tour dates.
00:12:45.000And so I was in Seattle, and I would do my shows and go back to my hotel room and just write.
00:13:35.000Like, I remember at one point, my brother-in-law was like, he was, I was doing spots in the city, and he was like, what do you get paid for these spots?
00:14:35.000And so like the notion of touring, I mean, look, we live in a day and age where people are putting out multiple specials.
00:14:45.000I remember Dennis Leary did his No Cure for Cancer.
00:14:50.000There was no expectation that he would need to do another one.
00:14:53.000Right, well, Kinnison, he had that one HBO special that was his really good one, and he had the Ronnie Dangerfield spot that he did, and then, you know, he had a couple afterwards with their kind of fucking, he was doing coke and partying, and it really wasn't the same.
00:16:59.000There's Carlin experts that probably could explain it a lot better than me.
00:17:04.000Well, he had some really good interviews, and God, I wish he was alive while I was doing the podcast where I could have interviewed him and talked to him.
00:17:48.00063 and then 67 and then 72 and then another one in 72. God, he had two in 72 and then one in 73, one in 74, 75, 77, 81, 84. So what is the total number?
00:18:03.000So for this discography from Maine, I guess, whatever Maine means, is 20, including that 2016 one.
00:18:11.000So the 2016 one, I kind of like it when a lot of people die, was supposed to be out on 2001 around September 11th.
00:18:21.000But it was literally scheduled to come out right after September 11th.
00:18:26.000And the name of it, I kind of like it when a lot of people die.
00:18:29.000That's fucking, obviously, a bit of an issue.
00:19:37.000I remember I was probably 93. I just started stand-up, and he went on at the original Improv on 44th Street.
00:19:48.000And I remember he had a tape player, and he had a piece of paper where he, you know, like a cassette recorder, and he had these notes, and he had punchlines underlined.
00:20:03.000I mean, granted, this is 30 years ago, so maybe I'm remembering some of it wrong, but I remember thinking, God, that is just, the detailing was so impressive.
00:22:34.000I just found out in Texas, you can bring a child to a bar, and as long as the dad is with the child or the mom is with the child, the child can have their first drink.
00:23:05.000What we do is we just, we have these bottles of scotch and what we do is we just lace them with heroin and then comedians come in and we'll just give them just like a sip of it and they'll just freak out.
00:23:20.000How long did you take off during this pandemic with no stand-up at all?
00:23:46.000But it was, yeah, I did a couple of them, and I was grateful for them, and I'm sure the audience hopefully had a good time, but it wasn't stand-up.
00:23:55.000It's a little something to, like, remind people what it used to be like to go out and to see a show, but you're in your car, you don't have to worry about catching anything.
00:24:06.000And so, but to answer your question, I went a good...
00:24:31.000I was doing these CBS Sunday commentaries for the first 22 weeks, but I didn't really write stand-up.
00:24:41.000Because my thought was, no one's going to want to hear about this pandemic, so I'm not going to write about the pandemic outside of these CBS Sunday commentaries.
00:25:33.000Similar to politics, where we consume all this politics all the time that when people get into a comedy room or a theater, they're not going to want to hear about it.
00:25:43.000But I think that the pandemic has been so truly traumatic, not just the pandemic, the whole experience, that we're going to be digesting this for quite some time.
00:25:56.000And there's going to be a lot of anger.
00:25:58.000There's going to be a lot of anger at a lot of the businesses that went under.
00:26:02.000There's going to be a lot of anger at the politicians, how they handled it, and medical professionals, and whether or not early treatment options were pursued correctly.
00:27:18.000They would not just use leeches, they would cut you and leak your blood into a bucket to try to remove toxins from your system.
00:27:26.000It's so weird, like, the shock therapy stuff, how, like, that disappears in our lifetime, where they're like, can you believe they did shock therapies?
00:27:35.000And now you'll read an article, they're like, you know, these things shock therapy might work.
00:28:42.000That's why it's so crazy about presidential candidates.
00:28:44.000We're talking about elections overseas, about in other countries they do it a very quick election, there's not as much It's only a six-week thing where everything's running.
00:28:55.000Our elections essentially run for two years.
00:28:58.000It's like from 2022 on, there'll be a two-year process of people posturing and moving their pieces into play.
00:29:10.000I can't say officially, but if I was going to run, I would have Attack this administration on their terrible treatment of blah blah blah, and this and that, and the border crisis.
00:29:20.000And what have they done to the infrastructure?
00:30:36.000I think Kamala Harris has a storied history of incarcerating people and keeping people in jail past the time they were supposed to be released to use them as cheap labor for the state of California to fight wildfires.
00:30:49.000Mike Pence believed in like you could do therapy to get rid of gay.
00:32:31.000The problem is when enormous groups of people are led by a small, tight-knit group of individuals who are influenced almost entirely by money.
00:33:33.000And every now and then, someone does something, like Mitch McConnell, he's going to go out to dinner in Kentucky, and he's going to be harassed by a Trump supporter.
00:34:44.000There's a few people I know that are comics that are fairly successful, have zero comic friends, and they are the most miserable, weird, fucking bitter, stingy people.
00:34:55.000They're just fucked, because they're on the outside.
00:35:39.000I think it's really strange, and this is along the same lines, how people...
00:35:44.000And the public perception is so off on this, is that what people don't realize is that comedians with completely different views on a lot of different things, stylistically, dramatically different, in the green room,
00:36:09.000People that don't get along and there's people that go astray and, you know, they can become outcasts because they steal material or whatever.
00:36:18.000But I think this notion that comedians wish ill upon each other is so false.
00:36:45.000Whereas I think in other aspects of the entertainment industry, it isn't the case.
00:36:51.000Like I presented, I don't want to brag, but I presented at the Country Music Awards.
00:36:57.000And what was so interesting is I know very little about country music.
00:37:02.000But the sense of community there was sincere.
00:37:07.000Like, it was an award show, and they opened the show with these ten stars, you know, from Brandi Carlyle to Dolly Parton to, like, you know, that's probably all the country music.
00:38:51.000It doesn't matter if someone's headlining or someone's middling.
00:38:54.000And that's not the case in the – you know, that's why I think people want awards is because – so when you go into this hierarchy, you're like, no, I can come in.
00:39:08.000I had a conversation, a friend of mine was dating an actress, and she was talking to me about NewsRadio, the sitcom I was on, and she asked me what number I was billed on in the credits.
00:39:26.000So what that means to everybody else at home, there's eight people in the cast, and she wanted to know when they said my name, like when the opening credits.
00:44:16.000It occurs where there are people that look at you with By the way, I was on a plane next to Chris Christie and it was interesting because I was thinking about him and people were getting on the plane and people were very polite but I was like,
00:44:44.000So many politicians, you know, and he's a fighter, but so many of these politicians, maybe they almost crave kind of like saying something that the audience doesn't like.
00:47:45.000But I think it's very arrogant to pretend we have any idea what happens when we die.
00:47:51.000Do I believe that there was a man who walked on water and died and came back to life and...
00:47:57.000No, but I think that most of what that is, if you understand human language and you understand history, is, you know, you're dealing with stories that were thousands of years old before they were ever written down.
00:48:13.000And they're in a lot of different cultures, too.
00:48:29.000And I'm a firm believer that a lot of what that is is documenting cataclysmic disasters that happen to the human race.
00:48:37.000And those have been substantiated by archaeologists and by people that are geologists that study core samples.
00:48:45.000There's been some epic moments where most people were wiped out and they survived.
00:48:50.000And a lot of these stories, I think, are the basis of a lot of the roots of these stories that are in the Bible and the Torah and a lot of ancient religions.
00:49:00.000But the idea of, like, is there a God?
00:49:40.000It's very interesting because obviously...
00:49:45.000I'm not in a 12-step program, but that is a faith-based thing.
00:49:50.000And I do think that the notion for me personally that there is something – That is – I'm not in control is really important.
00:50:07.000So that – and that possibly there is a notion of something that can forgive me or that I should not be caught up in this twist of self-hatred is really important to me.
00:50:20.000And so that is how you balance your ego.
00:52:07.000And it's also one of the things about being a comic or any entertainer that becomes very successful is there's not much of a blueprint for you to follow.
00:53:25.000It was very unique in that there were so many world-class comics that all lived in one place and would headline in these areas like every week.
00:53:55.000There's some places that were, I mean, allegedly, I don't know for sure, I could never say this in court, fully run by the mob.
00:54:03.000And, you know, they had these wild ties to organized crime, and they were running comedy clubs, and I'm sure they were moving money around and stuff.
00:55:20.000They could have been world-class everywhere, and they chose to not do that and to stay within the confines of the comfort of their playground.
00:55:31.000Which is almost the upside-down version of you being able to go to Austin, right?
00:55:39.000So you going to Austin, you're like, I can go...
00:55:44.000Where I want, and I'm going to go here.
00:55:47.000And the them not leaving Boston, you know, it's similar.
00:55:53.000You know, like, look, I grew up in a small town, and there were people that, when I moved to New York, were kind of like, how'd you get that?
00:56:02.000And I'm like, you can move there, too.
00:59:06.000All right, here, let's do a—you're going to do your prediction of what's going to happen in the next 10 years, and then I'll do my prediction, unless you want me to go first.
00:59:18.000With the collapse of the narrative that people are gonna be saved from COVID by vaccines They're gonna try to push them even further and there's gonna be a bunch of people buy into it because they're gonna be afraid that if they don't buy into it That they're gonna be ostracized from the good group of people and that only the bad group of people don't believe that This is the only way to go the the Possible medical treatments for COVID,
00:59:48.000the ones, the early treatments that are important, that are being developed, and some of them that exist, will be adopted by some, and there'll be a divide between people that think you should have early treatment or people that think you should have, like, your fourth booster, which is what they're doing in Israel.
01:00:04.000Along the way, what I'm worried about most is that they do import some sort of a vaccine passport which will evolve into a social credit system.
01:00:45.000It's not like a small box vaccine or a measles vaccine.
01:00:48.000Is there any truth to the rumor that went with the different variants as we go through the Greek alphabet that when we finish the Greek alphabet, the world dies?
01:01:08.000When human beings have power over other human beings, whether they're a boss at an office that's unchecked, that wants to fuck all the secretaries and steal all the money, or whether it's a president, or whether it's a congressperson who gets to use insider trading tactics and accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:01:31.000Because they've accumulated unchecked power, and they will continue to exert this unchecked power as often and as widely as possible.
01:01:41.000And my fear is that one of the tools that will allow them to do that is to institute some sort of a social credit system.
01:01:49.000And people will go along with it because they think that they're doing the right thing, that they're good people, and that good people want people to be vaccinated, and the best way to do that is to have an app, and the best way to ensure that people do the best to protect those around them is to sign up for this social credit system.
01:02:05.000And they're already buttering people up to it.
01:02:07.000There was an article in Yahoo about how you're going to be able to have access to more credit if you agree to this social system.
01:02:14.000If you agree to allowing them, the premise initially was allowing them to look at your browser history.
01:02:22.000If you allow access to your browser history, I'll show you the article.
01:02:44.000So it's letting you slowly get integrated into the system, and the benefits that you get from it will allow you to take this chance, and then they're going to have their hooks in.
01:02:53.000And this is the thing that most social psychologists that are studying this shit are terrified of.
01:02:59.000Credit scores may soon be based on your web history.
01:03:05.000Experts predict in the not too distant future, your internet habits could affect your credit score and help lenders determine what they offer you.
01:03:13.000We will let you in on what we know so far about how your online activity could be used to determine how much credit you can get and what interest rate.
01:03:37.000That kind of shit is how they divide society.
01:03:39.000And that is 100% on the table for the United States of America if we don't watch.
01:03:45.000If we don't pay attention and if we allow these politicians to have this unchecked use of power It absolutely could be our future, and it will be dystopian at best.
01:03:57.000If that's what happens, if they have that kind of unchecked power— And you think that—is this more likely to occur among the Democrats or the Republicans, or in either?
01:04:12.000I think our idea of what people are capable of is based entirely on the allegiance we have to our tribe and whether or not we think we're the good guys or the bad guys.
01:04:26.000I think if you look at the way the far left behaves with Antifa lighting fucking buildings on fire and throwing rocks at cops and all that crazy shit, their behavior is just as crazy as people that are on the far right.
01:04:50.000So you think that Antifa is as big enough of a problem as the insurrectionists and stuff like that?
01:05:01.000It completely depends on where you live.
01:05:05.000It completely depends on how much power they have.
01:05:08.000I think if the insurrectionists got to a point where they were supported, like those morons that went to the Capitol on January 6th, If they got to the point where they were protected and supported by politicians and they were- If they were described as patriots.
01:05:46.000I don't think there's a good ideology and a bad ideology when it comes to the opposition of power.
01:05:50.000I think there are tactics and strategies that people will use, and they will use them if they think they're doing it for social justice, if they have fucking blue hair in a Molotov cocktail, or if they think they're doing it because they're patriotic because they have an American flag bandana in a fucking Molotov cocktail.
01:06:08.000I think they're the same people, and if you got that guy, With the fucking Buffalo helmet on, who sat in Nancy Pelosi's chair, if you got that dipshit and you moved into Portland and he grew up there and he thought that he was gonna, you know, take down the Capitol building and throw a fucking hand grenade at Ted Wheeler,
01:06:24.000who's the mayor of Portland, he would have done that.
01:07:48.000They're going to lose a lot of—they're going to impeach Biden on, you know, some kind of Benghazi kind of thing.
01:08:01.000And it's this powder keg that's getting worse and worse.
01:08:06.000And then, you know, the voting rights, people are going to be, I would think people would be like kind of pissed in these, you know, these communities where there's, you know, African Americans have one place to vote and it's 20 miles away when I know that I can walk in and I don't even have to set aside a half an hour.
01:08:31.000I think people are going to be kind of pissed.
01:08:33.000I think there's going to be more violence.
01:08:36.000I think it's probably not going to be good.
01:08:42.000Is that a gigantic issue where so many African Americans live in a place where there's no place to vote in person?
01:09:04.000Well, there's definitely shenanigans on both sides when it comes to voting.
01:09:09.000Because from the beginning, like, if you said to anybody, like, do you think there's ever been an election where there's zero voting fraud?
01:09:52.000But there wasn't the storming of the Capitol when Trump won.
01:09:56.000Well, I think that's entirely a creation of social media and the ability to gather up people and do something really fucking stupid like that.
01:10:03.000And then on top of that, agent provocateurs.
01:10:09.000Didn't Trump do a tweet like it's going to be wild?
01:10:12.000Oh, listen, he is 100% a part of why they did that.
01:10:18.000100% because of his influence and because you said you have to be strong and you have to do that.
01:10:23.000He was compounding upon some other things that were happening.
01:10:26.000But I also think there was, without a doubt, agent provocateurs from the federal government that encouraged people to go into the federal building, into the Capitol building.
01:11:22.000But there was also some people that were probably legit terrorists.
01:11:26.000I think that guy who was with the fucking zip ties, if that guy found Nancy Pelosi and zip tied her and carried her off or maybe even executed her, I mean, that's not outside the realm of possibility with some of these fucking people.
01:11:41.000The thing that I find so amazing is that the fact that, and sadly, there was five people that died, but the fact that none of the government officials were killed is like a fluke.
01:12:01.000If they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, they didn't anticipate that.
01:12:05.000And they thought that, you know, they would be held off so they stayed in the Capitol building and they weren't rushed off into some fucking underground bunker or wherever they put those people.
01:13:08.000Well, he was also—I think he sincerely loves his wife.
01:13:14.000I think he's sincere in his Christian faith.
01:13:17.000But, like, I think, like—look, all politicians are politicians.
01:13:23.000But, like, the level of decay—and, by the way, this is following up two stand-up comedians talking about the amount of shit that we've eaten— The amount of humiliation that we've consumed.
01:13:37.000But there is a point where you're like, really?
01:16:48.000He was so smooth, and he was so measured, and the way he would talk about things was so statesman-like, that that I mean, look, all of them people are going to have policy issues with.
01:17:01.000All of them people are going to have issues with what we do overseas or what happens with the economy.
01:17:07.000There's going to be disputes left and right about everything the president does.
01:17:14.000What you can't deny is what Obama represented was about as good as America has to offer in terms of intelligence and poise and control of himself and the way he dignified the office.
01:20:03.000I think there's a lot of people that don't trust someone who they think is a politician, and they're more willing to trust someone who is a fucking talk show host.
01:20:11.000A guy who is a host of The Apprentice.
01:20:59.000I don't know him well, but from what I know from talking to him, I really think he's sincere, and I think he's really intelligent, and he has a very clear philosophy.
01:25:01.000And I want them to know where I stand on these things.
01:25:06.000And so – and some of it is I did treat myself because I do believe that – You know, I don't think that a comedian—I had a tweet where I was like, if you think that—if you're letting an entertainer tell you who to vote for,
01:25:25.000But, like, I think that there's a lot of people, particularly during the Republican convention, there were all these, like—they brought out a nun— To say that Biden's not Catholic?
01:25:37.000They had Lou Holtz, you know, say he's not Catholic.
01:29:31.000I think people like what he stands for, that he stands for someone who stands up against career politicians, like the ones we were talking about earlier that are, you know, using insider trading tactics to enrich themselves while they're in office.
01:29:58.000And because of the fact that he wasn't a career politician and because of the fact that he talked off the cuff and he said wild shit, that that would somehow...
01:31:09.000I think what he has done to allow people to continue their lives while trying to protect the elderly in Florida, although controversial and although easily criticized, I think it's admirable because it's a difficult path.
01:31:27.000Because initially when he decided to do that early on in the pandemic, people said he was out of his fucking mind and they expected there to be a body count in Florida that was off the charts ten times more than anywhere else.
01:31:38.000I mean, they're gonna let restaurants open and bars open.
01:32:23.000What's important is educating people about the value of being healthy.
01:32:28.000Taking care of yourself, and then, you know, if they're saying they're running out of hospital beds, increase the fucking hospital beds.
01:32:34.000Like, that's what people should have concentrated on.
01:32:37.000Make more access to medicine and health.
01:32:40.000And don't fire healthcare workers because they don't want to get vaccinated when they've already had COVID and beaten it, and they have the antibodies.
01:33:11.000They didn't, they couldn't, and I talk about it, they didn't have, you know, they didn't want Sanjay Gupta to be like, well, Anderson, all the fat asses are going to die.
01:34:12.000Like, one of the things that happens to me when I, if I go on a bender, and I'll eat, like, a lot of pasta, which is my thing, that's where I gorge.
01:36:21.000Tom Papa's bread is made with a starter, and it is a sourdough starter, and sourdough bread, in general, has less gluten than regular bread.
01:38:13.000Okay, and then Britain blockaded sugar imports to continental Europe.
01:38:17.000By 1880, sugar beet had replaced sugar cane as the main source of sugar in continental Europe.
01:38:23.000But it still wasn't like corn syrup, like where it was prevalent.
01:38:28.000Yeah, another thing said 1770 in Britain is when they started eating like five times the amount of sugar they'd eaten in like the previous 1710. Ah, so that's when it started.
01:39:17.000It essentially was assembled by – it was a success of pirates that was instrumental because they had this war with the Spanish and they were like – there were these pirates and they're like, hey, you can free reign if you attack the Spanish.
01:39:33.000And so they essentially – it was – It was essentially a bunch of criminals.
01:39:53.000The British Navy, this great military power, was essentially like, you know, criminals.
01:40:00.000It kind of makes sense, though, if you think about all these different civilizations throughout history that were run by tyrants and evil warmongers.
01:40:10.000I was just listening today to this person who was talking about – and this is kind of funny because Dan Carlin's actually kind of joked about people saying these things before.
01:40:19.000Dan Carr was the host of Hardcore History.
01:40:23.000What this guy was talking about was how the Mongol Empire, it paved the way to a lot of great things with trading, with Asia, and all these different things.
01:40:40.000Waxing poetically about the impact of a group of people in the Mongols run by Genghis Khan that killed between 50 and 70 million people in his lifetime.
01:40:51.000He killed somewhere around 10% of the population of Earth.
01:40:55.000So much so, he reduced the carbon footprint on planet Earth.
01:42:25.000In quantitative terms, 10% of the men who reside within the borders of the Mongol Empire as it was at the death of Genghis Khan may carry his DNA. Yeah.
01:44:26.000Whether they tortured him, whether they just scared the fuck out of him, whether they put him in exile and just made him have an adjustment of his attitude.
01:45:09.000And I don't know if you would call it corruption, if they're intertwined, like the way they think of business is like business and government, that the business serves government.
01:45:22.000And then not only that, they're doing it in all these other countries where they're giving them loans that they know they can never take back or they never pay back, rather, and then they control these natural resources.
01:45:33.000Well, and also, aren't they doing, hey, we're going to build you this power plant.
01:46:01.000Unless she was serving the big businesses and serving the Chinese Communist Party.
01:46:06.000If she was a part of their system over there and she sort of exhibited the kind of arrogance that you've seen her exhibit as a person who's the Speaker of the House in America, it's like it's a different world over there.
01:46:20.000When they have a dedication to the Chinese Communist Party, that's what their dedication is.
01:46:25.000Well, is it that or some people believe that it's revenge for the opium wars?
01:47:15.000Which ruled China from 1644 to 1911, 1912. Essentially, how I understand it is these European powers were trying to take over China, and there was some resistance.
01:47:27.000So what they did is they essentially got them all addicted to opium.
01:51:08.000Right, but you know that Ford is actually, they're going to stop production of almost everything except the F-150 and the Mustang, which is pretty crazy.
01:52:35.000It seems like it's already happening, and it seems like...
01:52:38.000Well, they quietly took over Hong Kong during the pandemic, where they locked down all freedom of the press, and they started arresting activists, and they started doing things that no one protested about, and they just...
01:52:51.000Oh, okay, we're going to keep doing this.
01:52:52.000You know, I love performing in China, so I don't want to...
01:53:07.000Well, I'm performing for XPath, but there are people that have lived in the US and have gone back there.
01:53:15.000But I would say that my prediction is after the Beijing Winter Olympics, that's when China's going to be like, all right, we're going to take Taiwan.
01:56:54.000One of the things in Dan Carlin's hardcore history, and again, this is in the 1200s, right, when Genghis Khan was alive, he talked about the Chorismian Shah who went to visit Jin China because they were trying to see, like, you know, should we visit Do they invade these people?
01:57:24.000There was a million dead people stacked on top of each other.
01:57:28.000They had abandoned the roads because the roads were so filled with decaying human bodies that the roads had deteriorated into mud and you couldn't- Where is this?
01:57:43.000You couldn't make it through and people were dying just from sickness, from the stench of the rotting bodies and the bacteria that was in the air.
01:57:51.000But the fact that there were so many dead bodies that they mistook a pile of them as a mountain with snow-covered peaks.
01:58:00.000And then as they got closer, they realized, oh my god, that's a stack of bodies.
02:04:44.000Orange carrots get their bright orange color from beta-carotene.
02:04:48.000Beta-carotene metabolizes in the human gut and bile salts into vitamin A. The origins of the cultivated carrot is rooted in the purple carrot in the region around modern-day Afghanistan.
02:05:25.000For instance, how do you say that guy?
02:05:28.000Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, around 100 BC, had a recipe for counteracting certain poisons with the principal ingredient being carrot seeds.
02:05:42.000It has since been proven that this concoction actually works.
02:06:37.000Different in terms of style, but also similar in terms of the way they laid out their villages and their cities to coincide or to match up with constellations.
02:07:02.000What's really nuts, man, is that there was thriving civilizations in the Amazon, and that they believe that they were wiped out by European diseases, and that this was not really known until the invention of LIDAR. It was speculated,
02:07:24.000and it was the premise from the movie The Lost City of Z. But over time with the advent of this new technology, which is like a light-emitting radar type deal, this thing called LIDAR that allows them to non-invasively scan the ground.
02:07:43.000And with this penetrating technology, they can see trenches that were indicative of irrigation systems, grids that were there for cities, all swallowed up by the jungle because the people there died because European settlers brought in smallpox.
02:08:26.000They went to these areas and they talked about these incredible golden palaces and these amazing gilded chest plates and helmets these people wore.
02:08:36.000Then they came back like a new group of people came back 50 years later and it was all gone.
02:09:31.000Supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans.
02:09:35.000Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness.
02:09:41.000Not only did they do that, but they did that with a specific technology in creating a compost that we, to this day, do not understand the process of For a special compost.
02:09:53.000They had a very special compost that created this dark, very rich earth that was made with controlled burns and the introduction of some composted material and some biological material, whether it's food or decayed animals or whatever the fuck it is.
02:10:10.000But the bacteria from this was incredibly rich and allowed them to have this amazingly fertile ground that they're losing When they're doing these mass burns, and they're defoliating these areas for cattle ranches,
02:10:27.000and they're fucking up the rainforest in the process of doing this.
02:10:31.000So, based on that, then, the oxygen output that the Amazon provides was not there at one point.
02:10:46.000I mean, you got to imagine there's a few million people that were living down there, but it's nothing like the 20 plus million that live in Los Angeles or Mexico City, which is enormous, or some of these other cities.
02:10:58.000But that whole rainforest area where we think of as like, this is how it's supposed to be.
02:11:04.000No, they were planting a bunch of these really prolific plants that they used for agricultural purposes.
02:11:12.000Now, wouldn't that lead us to believe that we could therefore reverse global warming?
02:11:21.000If we could do something like that, take it from me.
02:11:24.000Again, I tell food jokes for a living.
02:11:27.000There's people that also believe that one of the things about carbon dioxide is that carbon dioxide, which is obviously what human beings exhale and plants inhale, and then they produce oxygen.
02:11:38.000With the excess carbon in our environment, there's actually more greenery today than there was 100 years ago.
02:11:52.000And I think one of the reasons why people don't like talking about it, because they don't want to exonerate human beings from the disastrous impact of our carbon output on the Earth itself, and not just carbon, but particulates and all the pollution.
02:12:09.000Because that was actually told to me by a legitimate scientist who was explaining how the one benefit of the increase in carbon is Is that there's actually an increase in the amount of green plants that exist today because of that.
02:12:22.000Because they literally exist off of carbon.
02:12:34.000Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide make plants more productive because photosynthesis relies on using the sun's energy to synthesize sugar out of carbon dioxide and water.
02:12:44.000Plants and ecosystems use the sugar as both an energy source and as the basic building block for growth.
02:12:50.000Yes, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps plants.
02:12:55.000So global land photosynthesis changes in its causes.
02:13:00.000So if you look at the year 2000, look when they go back to the year 1000, like look at that chart.
02:15:28.000They must have been wild fucking people willing to get in a boat and take your kids across a fucking ocean with not even a YouTube video to watch.
02:16:43.000Like St. Louis, Cincinnati, all German.
02:16:47.000And German and French, but like there was a time when like the percentage of people that spoke German in the U.S. was – now we're going to find out it was like 38 percent.
02:17:13.000Well, I think that Hispanics are at least 20-25%.
02:17:17.000Right, but how many of them are fluent in Spanish?
02:17:19.000Because I have friends that are Mexican that don't speak Spanish.
02:17:22.000Well, I think that's the American story, is that the first generation wants to become American, so they kind of don't embrace it, and then generations after that try and kind of rediscover it.
02:20:03.000I mean, it makes sense what you're talking about with pirates, that they had to be the most horrific monsters to try to control the empire.
02:20:13.000By the way, so I did this special in Spain, and I love history, so...
02:20:21.000Do you know what year they finally unified Spain, where they got rid of the Moors, and they finally, the Castilians kind of pieced together what we consider modern day Spain.
02:22:15.000You guys, like they literally, like one of the things they did is they built a navy and they got their ass kicked by the British.
02:22:22.000You know, so it's really fascinating to see what, how quick these empires come and how quick they disappear.
02:22:31.000Yeah, and that's the strange thing about where we are today, is that we want to think that the United States is going to be around forever, and that the power and influence we enjoy over the rest of the world will continue this way, and there's no way we would ever live under the thumb of a ruthless dictator like they did back in the day in this part of the world or that part of the world.
02:22:55.000That's been the standard way that human beings have governed forever.
02:23:00.000Yeah, the Romans were like, we're good.
02:25:29.000He's like, let me quote from this book that I read.
02:25:33.000I'm like, dude, I haven't, like reading this dense information, he goes, Sophocles wrote this thing.
02:25:40.000And you're like, how do you know that?
02:25:43.000Yeah, and he covers so many different topics.
02:25:47.000He had a great piece on Martin Luther and the invention of Lutherism and the time in history where making a version of the Bible that was phonetically readable, that people could understand,
02:26:03.000like a phonetic interpretation of the Bible where you could say the word.
02:26:16.000And Martin Luther came along and said, actually, what God said, you should probably interpret it yourself and not leave it to these people.
02:26:23.000And they came real close to killing him a few times for that.
02:27:18.000What we're capable of collectively, I mean, we're both carrying around a small glass and metal device that sends video through the sky to people that live on the other side of the planet.
02:27:31.000And we use it and we have no idea how it works.
02:29:26.000Well, the first time I was in one was there was an app where you could rent a car from the app and they would deliver it to you, sort of like Uber Eats or something like that.
02:29:38.000They'd deliver a car for you and you drive the car around and you tell them where it is when you're done and then they would come and get it.
02:29:45.000I was like, whoa, this was like early on in the podcast.
02:33:19.000And also, he's got great time management in terms of his ability to concentrate on SpaceX for a little bit, Tesla for a little bit, and then, you know...
02:35:52.000You know, it's like tunnels have existed before.
02:35:56.000I think that's one of them, but I think in other ones, you're going to attach yourself to a thing, and then it's going to rocket you way faster than your car can go.
02:36:05.000Right, so it's going to rocket you from San Francisco to LA. Allegedly.
02:43:54.000I mean, if you can get on one of those shows, and, you know, anytime you can get on one of those shows where you're on ABC or NBC or whatever it is, and, you know, you get a little bit of heat, you can blow on those embers and throw some kindling on it, and you can make a fire.
02:44:08.000I mean, there's people that have real careers that they've made from those goofy shows.
02:44:12.000Like, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
02:44:14.000I mean, haven't there been, like, a bunch of big businesses that have been launched from those shows?
02:48:46.000And in these moments of truth, these men and women, these mere mortals, just like you and me, as they peer over the edge, they calm their minds and steel their nerves with four simple words that have been whispered by the intrepid since the time of the Romans.
02:51:57.000I'm curious to see where all this cryptocurrency stuff ends because I had Andreas Antonopoulos on my podcast years ago when Bitcoin was just like some thing that people talked about on the internet and I had no I was like well let's get a guy on and understand and they so they call him Bitcoin Jesus and he came on and explained it to me and long ago Andreas was Paying all of his rent,
02:53:04.000But I love looking at the art, and what Beeple has done is, what's really fascinating is he's actually putting together an actual museum filled with things like this, and larger ones, too, of digital artwork.