On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the boys talk about a new grill the Green Mountain Grills. It's a badass grill, and the guys talk about some other stuff too. Joe also talks about his recent trip to Montreal, Canada, and some other things that have happened to him in the past week or so far. Enjoy the episode, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss the next episode! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not represent those of any other companies. We do not own any of the music used in this episode. All credit goes to original artists and labels. Thank you so much for all your support and support of the show, it means the world to us. Joe Rogans Experience is a production of Native Creative Podcasts and is a labor of love, and is dedicated to all things Native Creative. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll make sure to send you a review and subscribe to the show and send it to us so we can spread the word. Peace, Love, Blessings, Cheers. -Joe Rogan. XOXO, Kristian and Thomas. P.S. -PSA. - Thank you, Tom and Thomas, and keep on Keep On Truckin' -Josie and Keepin' on Truckin. and keep On Trucking. -Podcasts - - Tom and Sarah - and the Crews - Thank You, Tom, and P.J. and -Sue, and Thank You! -Drew, Sarah, and Sarah, Thanks, Joe, and Jack, and Tom, John, and Brett, and Brad, and Mike, and Ben, and Matt, and Ryan, and Jake, and Josh, and all the rest of the Crew, and Paul, and so much more! - . . . , and . -POD, and much more. , and all of the crew, and thanks for supporting the podcast, and your support, and everything else, and love, - and all that we can do, and more! Cheers, Thank You.
00:00:25.000I'm a little tired, but we'll talk more.
00:00:27.000The Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by several things.
00:00:30.000But before that, before we even bring up the sponsors, I want to thank Green Mountain Grills for hooking me up with this fucking badass grill.
00:00:36.000They hooked me up with one of these pellet grills.
00:00:53.000This dude, Eric, who set it up, gave me the 411. All these grills that they use for these barbecue competitions, they all use pellet grills now.
00:01:02.000And the way these pellet grills work is you don't have to light anything, you don't have to fucking use lighter fluid, but it's still wood.
00:01:09.000And what it does is it all gets done in a hot coil, and slowly but surely the pellets get fed through a machine to the hot coil.
00:02:18.000Like, stuff that you would never do because you're not going to be the smart guy who's out there, like, knowing exactly how much firewood to put in the thing.
00:02:25.000Because, you know, if you're, like, smoking something the traditional way, you, like, have a That shit's whack, okay?
00:02:33.000You gotta get up in the middle of the night and go put some wood in there because your fucking, your meats are gonna get cold?
00:05:59.000And if you go to any big name store, whatever big name cell phone company name the name, when you're paying X amount of money, it's normally more than that.
00:06:08.000So they take that money away from the price to sort of entice you into it.
00:06:12.000But the deal is, if you try to take that phone and then just cancel in a month and take your X amount of dollar savings, they'll...
00:06:21.000They would lose a lot of money that way.
00:06:23.000So the way they do it is they make you pay that back if you cancel.
00:06:58.000They're on the Sprint backbone, so you don't have to worry about any wonky fucking backwood service.
00:07:02.000It's an actual real top-flight cellular backbone.
00:07:07.000And because of that, they can offer you whatever A big-name company can offer you as well as offer you what this ethical small company is trying to provide.
00:07:19.000Look, they have the cell phone tower things that you put in your house.
00:07:22.000So if you have bad service in your house, it broadcasts internet.
00:08:35.000Or if you're really gangster, get one of them Virgin Mobile fucking flip phones and pretend you use that shit for anything other than dick.
00:08:42.000Anybody sees you entering their number into that and knows, oh, this motherfucker doesn't care about me.
00:08:53.000They have a couple of things going for them that's great, besides the fact that you don't have contracts.
00:08:57.000One of them is that if you, they have certain tiers, like, you know, use X amount of minutes.
00:09:02.000I don't know the exact system they have or the plans that they have, but what I do know is if you use what a lower plan would be, they credit you on your next bill.
00:09:16.000They're trying to offer you the best cell phone service available in a way that's very ethical, in a way that I think is very generous, and it makes you feel better about what you're dealing with because you know what else is out there.
00:09:29.000If you could deal with a company like this, I like to vote with my money.
00:09:34.000And when there's a company like this that comes around that's doing something cool like this, I like to support it.
00:09:38.000And so that's why they're a part of the podcast.
00:09:42.000We're also brought to you by Onnit.com.
00:09:44.000And if you've ever been to Onnit before, we've got a whole bunch of new shit, man.
00:12:30.000And the way to get super big is you gotta do deadlifts and squats and all that shit with heavy weights so that your body goes, oh Jesus, we gotta get bigger.
00:12:39.000Well, with kettlebells, the beautiful thing is you just get stronger.
00:12:42.000It just makes your body acclimated to doing a lot of physical work that will really manifest itself in real life situations.
00:12:51.000Because you're using your body all as one unit, too.
00:14:40.000It's a completely non-psychoactive version of the cannabis plant.
00:14:47.000It's not the same thing as marijuana and it's illegal all because of it as a commodity.
00:14:54.000They hold it down and they keep it from farmers because it could take away a lot of different things, take them out of the market, a lot of different things that we consider standard like ropes, nylon ropes.
00:15:08.000Well actually hemp is a better fucking rope.
00:15:11.000Clothes, clothes are made out of cotton.
00:15:13.000Actually if they were made out of hemp they'd be better, they're more durable.
00:15:26.000If it looked completely different than pot and had a completely different name and was not related but was going through the same circumstances, people would be up in arms as they should be.
00:15:37.000Farmers should be up in arms about this because it's an incredibly...
00:19:33.000Yeah, there's a really good book called The Biography of a Dollar, which talks about just the development of the currency of the U.S. dollar and where it is today.
00:19:40.000And the conclusion of all of those books is basically like, buy shotguns, buy food, get something in a different currency.
00:19:47.000And what was kind of wild is, so when I was looking at the, doing research for The 4-Hour Chef and got into this, the wild stuff, and we can talk about that, but like the foraging and hunting and all these things I'd never done.
00:19:59.000And I went a little bit off the rails and started meeting all these survivalists and preppers and whatnot.
00:20:04.000And so I ended up writing like 150 pages I had to cut because I just went ballistic in more ways than one, just researching all this shit.
00:20:12.000And I had a number of close friends in San Francisco, New York, thought I was fucking nuts.
00:21:05.000Fooled by randomness is a really good example, which is, you know, the turkey thinks that things are going great all the way up until Thanksgiving.
00:21:12.000You know, like, just the fact that he's had 364 days of living pretty doesn't mean 365 is going to be very pretty at all.
00:21:22.000That there could be an anthill that exists in a field and it's a big anthill and these ants have been working in this anthill for God knows how long and they only live for like a short amount of time so it's been there long before they were ever born.
00:21:35.000This anthill has existed in its many fucking complicated caverns and then one day this little kid comes along and stomps the fucking shit out of that anthill and no one saw it coming.
00:21:45.000It never happened before so they never even considered it.
00:21:48.000They just fucking go about their day and this little kid comes along and stomps the shit out of that anthill.
00:21:53.000And that's exactly what happened with Hurricane Katrina.
00:21:55.000That's exactly what happened with Sandy.
00:21:57.000That's what could happen with Yellowstone.
00:22:37.000And if for some reason it just swishes back and forth a little, it's going to wipe out everything for a hundred miles in like it's nothing.
00:23:26.000And you start thinking about, let's just say, climate change, and then you look at the wealth Concentration in the first 10 to 20 miles of every coastline.
00:23:38.000It's like 80% of the world's wealth would just be wiped out if there's a dramatic temperature change.
00:23:43.000And with Hurricane Sandy, what's not amusing, it's depressingly amusing to me is when people are like, oh, that's like one in a hundred, one in a million.
00:23:50.000And if you look at, there was a piece in Nature magazine, this is just in the last, I think, few months, where they said, if climate change continues as predicted, 100-year storms will happen every three years.
00:24:05.000I took a training course in San Francisco that was done by the police department and the fire department, which was the Northern California Emergency Response Training, NERT. And in the first class, this is the police, this isn't some wacko, paranoid, Doomsday predictor,
00:24:23.000he said, alright, let's do an exercise.
00:24:25.000How many people are there in San Francisco?
00:24:26.000Some are like, well, whatever, 800,000, right?
00:24:28.000Okay, if everyone's commuting in, like, a couple million, whatever it might be.
00:24:32.000Okay, how many fire engines do you think there are in San Francisco?
00:24:35.000And everyone's like, 100, 250, whatever it was.
00:24:37.000It was something like 19. And he said, what that means is, if you look at, like, the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, it could be 7 to 10 days before anybody gets to you.
00:25:20.000No, there's no possible response that would cover it.
00:25:23.000And so what I figured out is I started doing the math and I was like, well, I spend, because I've broken myself like a thousand times, I spend $500, $600 a month on health insurance and I don't even have 20 gallons of water and food And a shotgun.
00:29:56.000I just saw them as really responsible, wasteful, kind of jerk-offs.
00:30:00.000And then I met Steve, and so I'll give a little...
00:30:02.000You've probably heard this story, but what blew me away about Steve is he'll say, look, there are a lot of better hunters than me, although he's a really good hunter.
00:30:08.000And he'll say, there are a lot of better cooks than me, but I'm a decent cook.
00:30:11.000But there are very few people who can put them together.
00:30:13.000And so he took, for one of his books, I guess it was the Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine.
00:34:00.000My experience was that my whole life I had thought about it one way and then that one trip home I started reconsidering like this is fucking crazy and then I started looking at but there was no internet back then you know so I'd have to like read a book which is really annoying I've sat down there and I mean I don't mind reading a book now But when I was 20 or whatever the fuck this was,
00:35:23.000I think it depends a lot on the duration of that stress.
00:35:26.000So what happens a lot, for instance, I have novice bow hunters, and I'm not a bow hunter.
00:35:30.000Like they'll go in the woods for hours and hours.
00:35:32.000Well, they'll hit it with a bow, and then instead of waiting for it to die, they'll chase it, and it'll run around, run around, run around, run around for like an hour, right?
00:35:42.000And again, I'm super novice, but based on what Steve told me also, depending on what gender deer you hit and if it's during mating season or not, if you hit a ruddy buck that is just pumped full of naturally occurring hormones, then I can end up being pretty...
00:35:59.000What if it's an aphrodisiac when the deer is super horny and you eat its meat?
00:41:30.000Well, he knows what he's doing in all aspects of the whole hunting thing.
00:41:35.000His attachment to it isn't just hunting, it's also to the history of the United States and the people that lived in the land, the American Indian heritage, and the stories.
00:41:49.000He had some amazing American Indian stories.
00:45:37.000How hard it is to kill an animal like that, depending on the circumstances.
00:45:42.000I was talking to a friend of mine who's a Navy SEAL and he's still enlisted.
00:45:47.000I mean, he does deployments and everything, but he was at one point in Africa and these villagers in sort of the downtime knew these guys were with the military and they said, hey, could you help us call this herd of water buffalo because they're destroying all our property and blah, blah, blah.
00:46:00.000We can make Food out of the buffalo that you kill?
00:46:49.000Well, when I was in Africa doing research for this book, too, I went to India, Japan, all over the place, and when we were in South Africa, water buff will kill everybody.
00:47:00.000I mean, people are afraid of the lions, but if you meet, let's say, the Maasai Mara, these warriors who jump up and down, they're famous for the red robes, they're not afraid of lions at all.
00:47:09.000They'll walk off into the darkness with their big walking stick, going from one village to the next.
00:47:13.000They're like, eh, big house cats will scare them off.
00:47:44.000I'll just give you the brief documentary about a part of Africa where the rivers change courses and it's isolated these lions with water buffalo.
00:48:56.000It must have been amazing back in the day when the Native Americans would run into these herds that was far as the eye could see of these things.
00:49:07.000Because they really didn't have many natural predators.
00:49:57.000The wolves would run this trippiest thing when you see it from the air.
00:50:01.000They're almost like a peloton in the Tour de France, so they have the wolf in the front who's tiring out the caribou, and then the replacement runner will come from the back and fill in, and that guy will drop back.
00:50:11.000And so they just run this relay race where they tag in and tag out.
00:50:17.000On running this animal until it drops.
00:52:01.000When we were camping, what was great is we had these fucking...
00:52:05.000Bags of wine because they were from the boxes but they've been taken out and they look just like an IV bag.
00:52:09.000So I've been like fantasizing about getting these like rolling carts from the hospital like supply store and just getting fucking IV bags of wine that people can drink through like a camelback at dinner just to creep the shit out of everybody.
00:52:30.000So we had to be really careful about keeping all the meat cool.
00:52:33.000That's part of the reasons that you need to One of the reasons you need to remove the internal organs so quickly is so that the meat doesn't spoil.
00:52:41.000What was super trippy for me, because I've just never experienced anything quite like it, was when I was doing the field dressing, maybe a minute or two into the process, I just felt like I had done it before.
00:52:57.000I had this hardwiring moment where I was just really good at it.
00:53:18.000Obviously, you're a very smart guy, so this had been something you had considered for quite a while before you actually went hunting.
00:53:23.000But I never read about the field dressing because I wanted to have an intellectually honest first experience for my readers and to be able to convey that to them.
00:53:31.000So I did not study butchering, field dressing, anything.
00:53:33.000The only thing I studied was the marksmanship because I didn't want to fuck it up.
00:53:38.000One of the things I liked about his show, as opposed to a lot of other hunting shows, was the fact that he did do a lot of the field dressing on the air.
00:54:15.000And it was fascinating to go through it for the first time, but also document the whole thing in terms of photos and videos and everything else, all the way until that night when we had...
00:54:26.000Yeah, some backstraps, which are kind of like the spinal erectors.
00:54:31.000Yeah, well, I'm using Steve Rinella's vocab.
00:54:36.000Yeah, well, the backstraps, what was trippy about that, because I think about anatomy just in terms of training and weightlifting, deadlifts and blah, blah, blah.
00:54:43.000And so I was thinking, oh, backstraps.
00:54:45.000And so then I went back to where we were staying with a guy named Dave Amick, who builds custom rifles.
00:58:07.000But the reality of this environment that we live in now, this world, this existence, this dimension that we live in now, is that these animals, these are all temporary.
00:58:19.000And some of them, they're dumb as fuck.
00:58:22.000There's this whole system going on here.
00:58:24.000You've got to recognize this system where we're attaching morals to...
00:58:28.000To something that's just this natural, everyday process of animals, consuming animals.
01:00:04.000And I would also say, you know, what a lot of people don't realize is the industrially farmed meat, and I use the term, you know, farmed very loosely, but is extremely damaging to the ecosystem and ecological sustainability in the U.S. But what they miss is,
01:00:22.000like, monocrops, like wheat, soy, corn, are arguably equally or more damaging.
01:00:29.000And I think that So one of the things that made me want to actually explore food more is that in the next 10 years or so, I met with a lot of really interesting people like Sam Kass, who's the private chef for the Obamas at the White House, also does a lot of food policy stuff.
01:00:44.000Damn, you know the chef at the White House?
01:01:06.000But something like 50% or more of the current small farm owners in the U.S. are set to retire in the next five to ten years.
01:01:16.000And what that means is you have these last of the Mohican, like, small family-run farms in many cases.
01:01:23.000They're going to be up for grabs, whether that turns into strip malls or is handed over to Monsanto or some big industrial food corp.
01:01:30.000Or third, which is really the only sustainable option that I see, is moving from a few really big producers to many smaller producers.
01:01:39.000Otherwise, there's just too much politics involved with subsidies for corn and things of that type.
01:01:44.000Explain that to people who don't understand that because there's a weird thing going on with corn.
01:01:49.000When you have a handful of very large industrial food producers and you have basically an exchange program between, let's say, the governmental bodies that regulate food And the Monsantos and the Conagras of the world,
01:02:06.000you end up in a really fucked up situation where there are certain crops that do a lot of damage that are forced into the food supply in everything you can imagine, like corn, which will be in everything from certain, like, toothpastes to every condiment you use to bread that you eat,
01:02:22.000because the growth of corn and distribution of corn is subsidized by the U.S. government, which makes it If you look at the topsoil in many of the most...
01:02:57.000I think it's really important to realize that people are voting for...
01:03:06.000The future of this country in many, many ways, financial and otherwise, certainly from an ecological standpoint, every time they eat a meal.
01:03:14.000You're voting three times a day for what you want in the next 10-15 years, and it's not going to be reversible.
01:03:21.000Once that farmland goes away, we're kind of fucked in a lot of ways.
01:04:25.000If you can buy food whenever possible from smaller producers as opposed to bigger producers, closer producers as opposed to those really far away, The healthier you will be, the better your performance will be, and ultimately the less you'll be shackled to some company that can do whatever it wants.
01:04:40.000It's so hard for people to do that though, and it costs a lot of money.
01:04:44.000Even if you want to eat organic, that shit's so expensive.
01:04:46.000If you want to eat really healthy foods, If you want to go to the supermarket and go to a Whole Foods or something and get all grass-fed this, it's amazing how much more expensive it is than going to a market and you get some weird-looking semi-gray steak and take that bitch home.
01:05:04.000There are ways out there for people to make it.
01:05:09.000Sort of tactical choices, for health at least, about which produce to spend more money on.
01:05:13.000Their annual lists, for instance, the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen, and what all that means is there are The Dirty Dozen are the 12 most contaminated produce items, vegetables and fruits, that exist on the market in the U.S. They're studied every year and chemical analysis is done.
01:05:34.000Those are the fruits and veggies that you'll want to get organically if you can afford it.
01:05:39.000The Clean 15, on the other hand, Our foods that even when produced conventionally with pesticides, antibiotics, etc., have the lowest levels of contamination.
01:05:47.000So those you can actually feel pretty safe buying at lower prices conventionally.
01:05:52.000And a good way for people to tell if you're getting screwed by your local grocer or not, or tricked, is on most fruits and vegetables, you'll find a label or sticker, right?
01:06:02.000If it starts with nine, it's probably organic.
01:06:04.000If it isn't, If that number doesn't start with a nine, then you might be getting bait and switched if they say it's organic.
01:06:35.000Organic means a lot of things to a lot of people, but in general it's supposed to mean without, or as it's intended by a lot of people, without additional pesticides, antibiotics, etc., as it would have been grown 100-200 years ago.
01:06:54.000A lot of these labels, if they're not regulated, get misused.
01:06:58.000And what is the feasibility of, say if you had a community of people, say if you got together with 10, 20 people, whatever, and you all wanted to get in on some farmland and figure out how to grow your own vegetables.
01:07:10.000Have you ever thought about how much land it takes, how many animals you need?
01:07:15.000Yeah, I've looked at it super closely.
01:08:08.000A very manageable amount of acreage and it produces an astonishing amount of food.
01:08:14.000Now you have to know what you're doing from a Gardening standpoint, I think raising animals in a lot of ways is a hundred times simpler than keeping track of like 20 species and keeping them alive.
01:09:46.000I thought when you had fried eggs, that you were having baby chickies that you caught them in time and you killed them before they became little.
01:10:52.000Yeah, they moved it over to CNN. That's what one of the guys, Mo, who's the director of Meat Eater, is also one of the guys who works for Bourdain.
01:18:00.000Dealing with, you know, setting up whatever the fuck you have around your vegetables, whether it's fences or this or that, or keeping your irrigation going, keeping your watering going, dealing with fucking pests, little fucking things that start eating your food.
01:18:14.000You can actually purchase, they're pretty cool, I think they're hydroponic, I might be using the wrong word, hanging gardens.
01:18:25.000So they have these plastic containers that hold the various plants and it actually hangs down the side of a door almost like a shoe holder and then there's an automated water system that you can time so you can leave and go away for a day or two and it just grows these plants effectively vertically which is super super cool.
01:18:43.000And then they get to a certain size you have to plant them?
01:18:45.000Get to a certain size and you can eat them.
01:18:53.000Yeah, you would plug in, if you have the timed and automated watering system, then you'd plug it in.
01:18:58.000See, that seems to me like it's at least slightly defeating the whole purpose of the whole thing, if you need the fucking electricity to be on.
01:19:05.000I think this is more for the aesthetic of having plants on your door.
01:19:09.000Yeah, well, it's pretty dope if they can keep the power on.
01:19:12.000But if you don't keep the power on, then all that means is you have to water the plants, which means you better have some goddamn water if your water system, if your municipal water goes out.
01:19:55.000Having a firearm as worst case scenario insurance in a location where a seven point or higher Richter scale earthquake is 80 plus percent probable in the next 15 years.
01:20:46.000And there's another method where they have two sticks that are shaped like L's, and they hold them in either hand upside down, and then when they cross, that's supposed to indicate...
01:21:22.000I think this ended 2000-2001, but one of the reasons I went there as an undergrad is because they had something called the Scientific Anomalies Laboratory.
01:21:28.000And this is where, among other organizations, several branches of the military funded research into things like remote viewing, which is basically scientifically controlled clairvoyance, where you have a transmitter and a receiver, and they use double-blind protocols to see if it is possible to report images back from one location,
01:21:55.000To validate whatever, or to design the studies and then analyze the data, they had some of the world's top mathematicians and statisticians supervising this stuff.
01:22:07.000And Professor John, J-A-H-N, who ran, I believe that was his name, who ran this laboratory, and I went down, I was a test subject.
01:22:15.000I didn't have any X-Men-like powers, sadly.
01:22:19.000Who supervised this, did this closing presentation when the lab was being wound down due to lack of funding, and he presented some of his findings.
01:22:28.000He basically said, if you look at the statistics, all of this stuff has been validated, but it will never be accepted because of A, B, and C. And what was really trippy about the remote viewing, right?
01:22:41.000So in the remote viewing protocol, one of them...
01:22:44.000They would have, let's say, three or four envelopes.
01:22:48.000They would leave, get into a car with the supervisors, the experimenters, and then open the envelope, find GPS coordinates, and go to that location.
01:22:57.000And that's where they would transmit from.
01:22:59.000And what they found was, for one of the locations, the drawings that came back, and some people were better at receiving than others, the drawings all looked very, very similar, but they didn't resemble the gas station where people were going.
01:23:13.000And then they did research on the location and they found out they were drawing barracks that had been there like 120 years earlier.
01:23:26.000Say if you wanted to set up an experiment today with remote viewing, are there experts that you would go to that are the bad motherfuckers of remote viewing that you really think could replicate something scientifically, like for a television show or something like that,
01:23:46.000I honestly think that these types of abilities are at some point going to be as analyzable as shooting three-pointers or looking at the top UFC fighters.
01:23:58.000Okay, we're going to look at the fiber composition of a GSP and Anderson Silver.
01:24:02.000I think at some point it's going to be like, oh, like, Johnny's really good at remote viewing because he has the blah, blah, blah in his, like, substantial nigra.
01:24:11.000Yeah, he's got, like, some fucking the TH374 gene is turned on.
01:24:15.000And so there are some people who appear to be better than this than others, but just to touch on, like, the Ouija board and fucking tarot cards and all that shit, I think that they're...
01:24:27.000I don't place any power in the tools themselves.
01:24:30.000I think there are people who have abilities who then use those tools to explain their abilities.
01:25:20.000I can't believe I haven't seen it now, now that I think about it.
01:25:24.000So, there's nothing that you can, like, no studies that you can point to that definitively have proven it, but you, do you maintain that it's possible, or are you a believer?
01:28:13.000I mean, if you're in Beijing, you'll have...
01:28:15.000Art students come up to you like every 10 minutes to sell you their unique pieces of artwork and they're poor and they could really blah blah blah.
01:28:27.000I mean, there are tons of scams in China, so who knows?
01:28:30.000But what I would say is, you know, in the research for, let's say, The 4-Hour Chef, because it's kind of a book on learning.
01:28:35.000It's a book on accelerated learning, not just on food.
01:28:37.000But I met people who could memorize a shuffled deck of cards in like 43 seconds, right?
01:28:41.000Or somebody who can learn a language like Icelandic well enough in seven days to go on TV and be interviewed.
01:28:47.000So to me, if that is within their own possibility, or memorizing, training yourself to memorize 10,000 numbers, like, moving, something like moving the leaves between your hands is not like beyond belief for me.
01:29:13.000And again, there's been no physiological evidence to demonstrate that is possible up to this point, but there are lots of things that seem impossible that have been certainly observed, whether it's through looking at...
01:29:29.000Theoretical physics or looking at applied physics for that matter.
01:29:32.000I mean, there are plenty of things that were thought impossible that are just not.
01:30:28.000You're not saying necessarily that you believe.
01:30:30.000You're saying that there's so much weird shit that is real that you leave open the possibility that a guy could have some strange telekinetic control over matter.
01:30:39.000Yeah, and for instance, you need for something to be scientifically verified with, let's say, statistical...
01:31:29.000Right now, I'm actually involved with and partially funding studies at UCSF, University of California at San Francisco, in their neuroimaging lab, where for the first time, they're able to do a couple of very interesting things, like take a functional MRI machine and use it in the same room at the same time as an EEG,
01:31:48.000which is actually a really tough problem, because these fucking magnets will, like, you know, pull shrapnel out of your skull.
01:31:58.000Using like even retail products like the connect and whatnot to look at how you can reverse Symptoms of dementia potentially like how do you train someone's brain to go from resembling that of a 60 year old to that of a 20 year old and The better the tools for measurement the more precise you can be the more precise you can be the more specific the protocol is that you can use and And it's fucking amazing.
01:32:24.000There's stuff going on right now that is going to just turn things upside down when it comes to training mental performance and reversing the symptoms of age from a cognitive standpoint.
01:32:36.000So for me, it's just like, God, as we follow Moore's Law and technology gets smaller and faster exponentially, there's certain heat issues when you get to a certain size, but the tools we're going to have for measurement in five years are going to be like Ray Kurzweil land.
01:32:51.000So we're going to be able to isolate all cofactors involving nutrition, cellular development, the evolution of the genetics.
01:33:00.000We're going to have all that mapped out.
01:33:26.000I mean, it's like the Turing test, right?
01:33:29.000And somebody could call me on this if I'm fucking it up, but I believe the Turing test was having effectively a chat communication between a real human and a computer, and having that computer trick the human into believing that it is another human.
01:33:43.000I think the more interesting Turing test is when you get an artificial human sitting across from you who tricks you, fools you into believing that it's another human.
01:33:53.000I mean, maybe I'm in my own sort of echo chamber living in Silicon Valley, but just seeing how quickly things are moving and how quickly things are getting quicker, I'd be surprised if we don't hit that point in five to ten years.
01:34:30.000Well, if you think about the movie Minority Report, right?
01:34:33.000So Minority Report was made, what, like 10 years ago?
01:34:36.000And, like, all of that technology, and I think that was supposed to take place, like, 20 years from now or whatever it is, like, that stuff's going to exist.
01:34:43.000All of those screens that you can move with your hands and everything, I mean, that's going to be widespread in the next two years, probably.
01:35:03.000Because of some of his beliefs, and I think a few of his conclusions are clouded by the fact that he fears mortality and wants to bring his dad back to life and things like this.
01:35:11.000But he's a brilliant guy with an excellent track record of prediction.
01:35:14.000So when he says we're going to have nanobots that you swallow and are able to diagnose all your issues and fix all these problems, I don't think he's that far off with most of it.
01:35:24.000I really don't think he's that far off.
01:35:26.000Are we going to be able to make people immortal in the next 20 years and have it very conveniently coincide with his projected median death sentence?
01:36:24.000And I actually saw the debut of Transcendent Man, or Transcendental, one of the two, at Tribeca Film Festival, and Ray was literally right here.
01:36:34.000He was sitting in front of me watching it, which was pretty cool to sort of watch him watching this movie.
01:36:44.000Well, I guess starting a few years ago and for a number of years was a visiting faculty member for the finance and entrepreneurship track of Singularity University, which Ray started along with Pierre Diamandis, chairman of the XPRIZE, based at Ames NASA location in Mountain View,
01:37:05.000I've had a chance to interact with a lot of Ray's cohorts and colleagues, as well as Ray himself and Peter Diamandis, who's a really impressive guy in his own right.
01:37:25.000So I think when a lot of people who are very, very smart have extremely bold ideas, they sort of get browbeaten into curtailing their belief.
01:37:37.000Well, I think that Ray has stood up to critics so many times and gone on TV so many times despite the fact that People tend to completely dismiss a lot of his stuff out of hand.
01:37:51.000And I just like that he has so much intestinal fortitude to stick to his guns.
01:37:58.000His level of conviction, based on everything that he has seen, I think is warranted, number one.
01:38:06.000I just find it very admirable that he doesn't hedge or try to concede or in any way negotiate.
01:38:13.000See, I'm so out of the loop and I hang out with such a bunch of weirdos that no one that I hang out with even remotely thinks that it's crazy.
01:38:21.000I hang out with people that believe in chemtrails and shit and fucking government conspiracies left and right.
01:38:26.000So this coming singularity is like, oh yeah, that's happening.
01:38:31.000I'm also living in San Francisco and it's...
01:38:37.000People who want to colonize Mars and shit.
01:38:39.000So it's not that out of reach for people that I spend time with.
01:39:13.000Humans are constantly creating things that can destroy everything.
01:39:18.000Well, our best accomplishments are all destructive.
01:39:21.000People would say that's really an ignorant thing to say.
01:39:24.000But I would say that the most impressive things that people have figured out how to do is create nuclear bombs.
01:39:30.000To make the Large Hadron Collider, which is not necessarily a destructive thing.
01:39:34.000The Large Hadron Collider is not a destructive thing, but it does make microscopic black holes.
01:39:39.000You really have to realize that you're creating some incredible amount of energy.
01:39:46.000You're releasing some amazing amount of energy to make these atoms collide at the speed of light or just slightly under the speed of light.
01:39:55.000It's not destructive, don't get me wrong, but it's bordering on it.
01:40:24.000If you can conceive of the idea of someone dropping an atomic bomb on a city full of people that had nothing to do with the conflict and really had...
01:40:34.000No choice whatsoever in where they were born, which is exactly what we did in the 1940s in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
01:40:41.000If you can conceive of that, the next step is literally you show up where this town used to be and there's a giant black hole just sitting there.
01:40:51.000You can't get too close to it and it's just no matter and you can't see through it and it just sits there.
01:41:18.000The next level shit is going to be even nuttier.
01:41:20.000And that's the forefront of our capabilities.
01:41:23.000And of course, it's like distribution of information and beautiful things that have come from medical innovation and the scientific understanding of the world, the universe we live in is beautiful and it helps the growth of the human being.
01:41:52.000And then there's all of the stuff behind the scenes that people don't see, where there are very competent people who are very deliberately trying to destroy things.
01:42:03.000I mean, I have friends who are on deployments to different places, and they're like, oh yeah, we just got a biotech terrorist with a PhD from a brand-name university in the U.S. in Yemen who's trying to build a dirty bomb to explode over the Great Lakes using blah, blah, blah.
01:43:32.000They got students to pretend to be jailhouse guards and prisoners.
01:43:38.000And they had to stop the experiments really quickly because people immediately started abusing each other.
01:43:43.000It was supposed to go on for something like a week or two weeks.
01:43:46.000They canceled it, I think, after 48 hours.
01:43:49.000One of the big problems with the idea of warrantless surveillance is that you're allowing people that are just regular folks to decide whether or not they should spy on people and whether or not they should take their information or whether or not they should fuck with their lives.
01:44:06.000You have no evidence whatsoever that they are enlightened, no evidence whatsoever that they're operating on a higher frequency, all with the good of mankind.
01:44:41.000And we've seen with this General Petraeus thing, okay, that the people at the highest level of government, a guy who's the head of the fucking CIA, still can't keep his bitches in check.
01:44:52.000He's still got regular people problems.
01:45:02.000And these people, that's the CIA, they're allowed...
01:45:05.000Ironically enough, what I think is fascinating about this is this must allow the people at the highest levels of government to understand how dangerous this is because the whole thing came about, like his exposure came about because the FBI was investigating the CIA. The FBI and the CIA don't like each other.
01:45:39.000Mildly don't like each other or want to kick each other's asses?
01:45:43.000Well, they play football against each other, don't they?
01:45:46.000Maybe that's an unfair question to ask because you're generalizing and lumping everybody into one group.
01:45:53.000But, I mean, if you look at, let's say, the FISA bill, which Obama passed a couple years ago, which effectively allows warrantless wiretapping, the response that people have, which I understand, which was a response I had for a long time, is, I don't have anything to hide.
01:46:08.000If it keeps everyone safer, go for it.
01:47:08.000There is fucking no reason this should be news.
01:47:11.000There's no reason this should be investigated by anybody that's in any organization that's trying to stop crime.
01:47:19.000Because there's no crime being committed other than, I guess, morals violations by the guy who's supposed to be exemplary of the military's highest honors.
01:47:28.000Yeah, I guess you can look at it that way.
01:47:30.000But the reality is, no one's in danger.
01:47:32.000Why are you wasting resources on this fucking National Enquirer shit?
01:51:02.000And we have slipped away from that to the point where now we operate under this semi-democratic situation where you kind of have a say but not really.
01:51:59.000It's like the coming and going of the tides.
01:52:03.000Because when I was a kid, I remember the Vietnam War ended when I was, I think I was like seven or eight or something like that, and I remember it.
01:52:09.000Because I remember very clearly thinking, I was really terrified of the idea of war because my stepfather had avoided the draft.
01:52:56.000And I was living with my friend Jimmy Dottilia.
01:52:59.000We were living in Waltham, Massachusetts.
01:53:00.000And we're sitting in the middle of the living room watching the shit on TV. Because it was the first time they would show you these night vision shots of these rockets flying through the air in this eerie green hue.
01:53:12.000And you're seeing all these explosions.
01:53:14.000And he just looks at me and goes, well, buddy, looks like we're at war.
01:53:18.000That Boston accent, I was like, holy shit.
01:53:26.000And then post-September 11th, it's like the entire lessons of generations that had to go through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, those lessons were, whatever society learned from that, at least it was temporarily lost.
01:53:43.000Temporarily, we lost our fucking minds.
01:53:46.000And now people are starting to come around to it again, and I'm hoping that the evolution that we make from this version of it will be more lasting because of the freedom of information, rather the free ability to distribute information with the internet, that we can get it out a little bit easier this time.
01:54:03.000Then we can say, listen, ladies and gentlemen, we're not saying we don't need government.
01:54:15.000What we're saying is you can't get crazy.
01:54:18.000You can't go nutty and not look at humans and not look at the human race as the most important thing.
01:54:23.000Instead, concentrating on money, concentrating on the extraction of resources from strange parts of the land that people aren't really paying attention to because it's not close by.
01:54:32.000So it's okay to kill people with robots that fly in the air.
01:54:37.000And it doesn't mean we can't keep A nice order in the world, we can, but we can't get too fucking crazy.
01:54:45.000And I'm hoping that, I don't know if you agree with this, but that there's a sort of a wrestling match going on between the idea of an apocalyptic scenario that's human created and the idea of technology and understanding meeting somewhere in the middle and working it out.
01:55:36.000It's a race in a sense, and I don't know which side is going to come out in front.
01:55:44.000I mean, I'm very, very curious about population growth and how that Population density and global travel and how that compounds the impact of something like avian flu or SARS or whatever.
01:55:56.000At what point do we reach a population density where it is like the deer jumping in front of your car?
01:56:02.000Where you just have such a high density of people that the inevitability of disease and rapid spread globally through Air travel, effectively, just wipes out.
01:56:18.000And isn't that sort of the natural cycle of things, is that when there's an overpopulation...
01:56:44.000We're going to move in with Mrs. Redman.
01:56:47.000I actually ended up visiting a couple of, from the last book, for our body, had a number of hedge fund managers who basically want to be the guy from Limitless.
01:56:58.000Oh, dude, we've got to talk about this.
01:58:15.000Is kill Amazon publishing so that they aren't able to recruit good authors.
01:58:20.000And so they want to make an example out of me as this guy who's had two number one New York Times bestsellers, very fortunately.
01:58:29.000They want to basically cripple me so I don't hit the New York Times list and then point to that and in effect say, if that guy can't do it with Amazon Publishing, don't sign with Amazon Publishing.
01:58:42.000Oh, you're talking about being banned?
01:59:05.000What a lot of people fail to realize is, let's say at a Barnes& Noble, it's just like a Walmart.
01:59:10.000If Coca-Cola owns the first 20 feet of Walmart, they legitimately pay for that space.
01:59:16.000Similarly, if you walk into Barnes& Noble and you see the whatever-whatever rack or the new Noteworthy or whatever, the store owners have some decision over that, but a lot of it is paid co-op advertising.
01:59:27.000That's why it's so hard if you're self-published to get books into Barnes& Noble because they're like, what are you going to pay us for an end cap?
02:00:16.000No, what I'm saying is they were saying, hey, Amazon, you're not letting us put these books on the Nook, so we're not going to carry you in the stores.
02:00:23.000Amazon came back and they're like, okay, fine.
02:00:32.000In fact, some of the Barnes& Noble store owners...
02:00:35.000Wanted to carry this book and they got severe slap down from corporate because corporate got word that they were ordering copies of the book.
02:00:43.000And they just gave them the iron fist.
02:00:44.000Have you thought about organizing an email campaign or something against Barnes& Noble's unfair practicing?
02:01:19.000Secondly is, the only competition is for loyal customers.
02:01:24.000And bookstores certainly more than ever need loyal customers.
02:01:27.000If someone comes into, let's say, Barnes& Noble, browses around, and then goes home to buy the book on Amazon for price, that person was never a customer to begin with.
02:01:35.000If, on the other hand, somebody walks into a Barnes& Noble and says, I really want to buy a copy.
02:01:39.000I want to buy three copies of The 4-Hour Chef as Christmas presents and for myself, and then they can't get it, all that accomplishes is they're driving that loyal customer to Amazon to become a customer of theirs.
02:01:51.000So I don't quite understand the logic.
02:01:55.000But again, humans are emotional, right?
02:02:00.000I'm not sure if it's a completely rational decision.
02:02:05.000Amazon's a big scary company to a lot of booksellers, but I think that, for instance, the only way to keep print relevant for For the foreseeable, let's say, 10, 15 years, is to create a tactile experience,
02:02:22.000like works of art through publishers like Faden, P-H-A-I-D-O-N. They make beautiful books that is next to impossible to replicate on digital or to have a very unique experience and a relationship with your customers like Omnivore Books in San Francisco, which is all cookbooks.
02:02:38.000It's like you want to know anything about cookbooks, buy something out of print, get a recommendation, meet one of the top chefs in the world, that's where you go.
02:02:58.000And those businesses will continue to thrive, but it's like if you're competing against digital for price and convenience, it's going to be a pretty tough road.
02:03:08.000So, I mean, the only reason, if I wanted to just make...
02:03:11.000More off of the book, I would have stayed with other publishers, quite frankly.
02:03:15.000But Amazon was interesting because I want to try new things.
02:03:18.000And I want to be allowed to try new things.
02:03:20.000Like I'm doing a content partnership with BitTorrent.
02:03:24.000I'm putting out like tons and tons, like probably well over a gig of free material and videos and all this shit on BitTorrent because they have 160 million users.
02:03:34.000And that's the kind of thing that Amazon will let me do, whereas others may not be so keen to let me.
02:03:40.000The other thing that people are talking about the distribution, the distribution, and they're like, oh, well, what's Amazon going to do?
02:03:45.000The first thing, no publisher out there, I don't think any publisher except for Amazon, in my case, would let me do a 672 full-color book with thousands of photos.
02:03:56.000That is a fucking expensive book to make.
02:03:58.000I don't think anyone else would have let me do it.
02:04:10.000Like, to create a really physical book, a really beautiful physical book, like a tactile experience, there just aren't many publishers who will do that anymore.
02:04:17.000And so, you know, distribution aside, if you...
02:04:27.000Amazon interesting from the standpoint of a content creator is that if you look at almost any other publisher, Simon& Schuster, whoever, it doesn't matter, they do not have any direct connection to their readers.
02:04:39.000They sell to the head buyer in a category of Barnes& Noble.
02:04:42.000They sell to the head buyer in a category at Books A Million in the middle of the country.
02:04:47.000But whereas Amazon, I mean, I use Amazon Prime Amazon probably knows me better than I know myself in a lot of ways.
02:04:54.000They have such direct access to tens of millions of customers.
02:04:59.000It just makes it really attractive as an experiment.
02:05:12.000Amazon has a couple good things going for it, besides the fact that people already know it as a great place to buy things with one click and buy books.
02:05:19.000They have this new thing that they're doing with Audible, which is one of the sponsors of this show.
02:05:29.000I was going to save it for the next Audible commercial, which is this week, but...
02:05:34.000What WhisperSync is, essentially, is you read a book and say if you fall asleep, wherever that page is, you can have it on your smartphone where you get in your car, you plug it in, you have an app that plays through your audio jack,
02:05:50.000and it picks up Where you left off and starts reading the book to you while you're in traffic.
02:09:55.000As long as the labels are policed to some extent so that assholes don't come along and start mislabeling things purposefully, which happens all the time.
02:10:05.000And, I mean, one of the goals that I have is to sort of create a supertrend Of about 20 million people who simply think about, let's say, purchasing food for breakfast differently or dinner differently.
02:10:21.000And if you can create a super trend by getting roughly that number of people to change a certain buying habit, then I think that this country can really turn towards more of this smaller producer,