Joe Rogan and Bryan Callen contrast Thailand’s uncolonized monarchy worship with its legalized prostitution zones, debunking myths about cultural openness. They scrutinize Osama bin Laden’s 2011 killing—DNA confirmation, secret burial, and UN criticism—while Rogan questions why the U.S. prioritized his death over systemic issues like teacher tenure and wrongful convictions. Callen links fame’s distortions (e.g., Kim Kardashian) to societal shifts, but Rogan ties it to tech-driven complacency, critiquing doomsday narratives while praising Ron Paul’s libertarian stance. The episode reveals how power, culture, and justice collide in modern and historical contexts. [Automatically generated summary]
When I was at Gersh, Gersh had some secret deal with the improvs that they didn't tell me about.
It was really creepy because other clubs would tell me, like a few of them would say, hey, I've been trying to book you forever and I could never book you.
And I'd be like, really?
You know, I never heard any of this.
I never got any of the deals.
Like Nashville, I never did Nashville when I was with Gersh.
There's a lot of clubs that they just would ignore me.
So if you open a restaurant and somebody gets food poisoning and they sue you, A lot of times you better have really good insurance because keeping up with those medical bills, if four people get E. coli or whatever it might be and you have a local restaurant, we'll see you later.
The reason that a lot of these restaurants take a chance of opening up, it's very hard to make a restaurant work anyway.
The reason you open a restaurant if you're P.F. Chang's, you got deep pockets and you become a corporation.
You can withstand any kind of bullshit you deal with when it comes to lawsuits, Are they franchises?
It's also a life that connects you to a community.
And a very strong community with history.
And also I think it's really easy, it's a lot easier in some ways to grow up that way because you're given a, your boundaries and the way to behave and the blueprint for how to live your life is laid out for you.
A lot of times we grow up in this country with no blueprint.
It's why any time you see any government experiment in history, in any society, where it's a monarchy, an oligarchy, whether it's a collectivist sort of nature, we're all going to behave this way and these are the rules.
I think with the power of any kind of religion or anything, anytime you try to go beyond that which you can measure, I think a lot of belief has to do with less to do with superstition and more to do.
It's kind of the same thing.
It has to do with inspiration.
So the same way you listen to a piece of music that gets you pumped to go do something, I think people can derive the same kind of strength and inspiration from Scripture.
No, listen, if the Muslims had kicked the ass that the Christians did, we would all be learning that Muhammad was the thing, and we wouldn't be celebrating Christmas.
But you have to understand that all this stuff is rehashed old shit.
I don't have to tell you that.
And the reason why we are immersed in Christianity is because this epoch, this world that we're living in, we're dealing with a very small amount of time.
It seems like an enormous amount of time for us.
But the amount of time that the Christian religion has dominated the earth is not the same amount of time that back when the Romans were dominating shit or the Greeks were dominating shit.
They had a couple thousand years on us.
We've only been around for a couple hundred years.
Or, you know, this country.
And the world, the world of Christianity, it's 2,000 years?
We know we're something different, even from monkeys.
There's a reason why you're allowed to keep monkeys in the zoo, but you can't have a slave.
It's because we make some sort of a distinction that we are something different from them.
And people will say, well, that's stupid.
We're not.
That's wrong.
You know, animals have rights.
Honestly, they don't.
Here's the deal.
If it wasn't for us being so super smart, they'd all have eaten us.
It's really that simple.
There's some crazy, weird survival thing going on.
And the only way to truly be happy is you have to be on whatever team your race is.
If you're a dog and you're ratting out all these other dogs and then the people run around and club the dogs to death in front of you, you'll be a shitty dog.
I always try to relate this to people when we talk about the...
I've had so many conversations.
Alex Jones is a good friend of mine.
And Alex Jones will tell you that right now the CIA that end up...
He's so doom and gloom.
I have some people that I know that I'm friends with that are so, so this is the end of the world.
You've got to look at it this way, bro.
The apocalypse is here, but not here.
It's on the earth in certain spots.
It always has been.
It's just back then when you describe the apocalypse and the plague.
Well, yeah, there was a plague in Northern Africa.
But guess where there wasn't a plague?
In fucking China.
At the same time in China, they were chilling, they were banging, making more Chinese people.
They were playing fucking games.
You have access right now to too much information for our puny brains.
And that's where religion and any sort of a predetermined pattern of behavior that you can follow as an operating system, whether it's being an Amish person or anything, that's why they come in handy.
Because things are so squirrely.
Things are so crazy.
You look, the fucking meltdown in Japan and fucking Mississippi's underwater and you, the fucking tornadoes that go through Alabama and birds are falling from the sky.
For any of the young people who are listening, if you think it's worse today, pick up any piece of literature or history.
Just take a look.
Take a look at Lincoln's life.
And you'll find that back then, let's just take Lincoln's era, okay?
Civil War.
First of all, you always lost two or three of your children to all kinds of diseases, For example, diphtheria.
When was the last time?
Who do you know who ever died of whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, smallpox?
These diseases would roll through in epidemics.
And it wasn't like the flu where you got a cold.
You died slowly and horribly.
And it was usually your child under a tent that you couldn't touch.
So if anybody...
And tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis.
When you got consumption, which is another word for tuberculosis...
It's just any time you read any piece of literature or history from even 50 years ago, it is always a story about somebody, Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Prize winning playwright.
His brother got tuberculosis and he had to watch him die.
And Long Day's Journey in the Night is about that.
There was nothing you could do, man.
You know what they'd do?
Go up to the mountains and breathe the air to see if it helps your lungs.
Otherwise, you fucking died.
And that was one disease of count.
Look at polio 60 years ago, 50 years ago, when kids were on iron lungs.
And the best case scenario, your child is four, he'll never walk again.
That was the best case scenario, but usually you just died because your lungs didn't hold up.
And we've invented, that's the fundamental difference.
Nobody that's listening right now, I guarantee, Nobody knows anybody who has even been crippled by something like polio, scarred by something like smallpox.
So the world, in a lot of ways, we're feeding.
In the 70s, in the 70s, and especially in the 60s, China and India, half the world's population was starving, man.
They couldn't even, they had to import grain.
Now India is a huge grain exporter.
So, because of the Green Revolution, because of what's that guy's name?
One man who came up with ways to make, you know, grains and things more resistant to drought and things like that.
Our advancements, our technological advancements have pushed us so far beyond our biology, it's not even funny.
However, you're right.
It's so overwhelming and moving so quickly that people feel like, since they can't understand it, they have to come up with some kind of a debunking mechanism or something they can understand or at least something they can hold on to, and that's where religion plays a huge part.
I don't think technology is pushing religion out of the way.
In some ways, I think this huge exponential growth of technology is actually ushering in Another wave, and that is a wave of very religious people who don't know how to put this technological wave into context.
He's like, you know, back before the internet, if you had a fetish, man, it was just really hard to find like, you know, a group or just anybody you could get hit with.
You'd have to go out to dinner and be like, I'll be right back.
There's so many weird groups that we're finding out about from doing this podcast and you have to talk to porn stars.
You have to.
They hold you down.
You know, and sometimes, you know, you get in conversations like, you know, like you find out things like cream pies and, you know, and foot jobs and all these different like really creepy things that are just totally standard.
When I was 14 years old, we always used to find porn in the woods.
And everyone shares this story.
By the way, all over the country.
I grew up in Boston.
I've talked to friends that grew up in LA. I've talked to friends.
You found porn in the woods.
We all used to find magazines in the woods.
And I remember, I will remember this.
This is the very day that the darkness, the dark side of sexuality was revealed to me.
Because normally when you find these magazines, you'd find like Time magazine, You know, and then there would be like a Playboy inside of it.
Someone would be naughty.
You know what I mean?
Like if you would find one over someone's house.
But if you find them in the woods, you know, like I never bought a magazine until I was like 20. You always found them over someone's house or you stole it from your dad's bathroom or something.
But the magazines that you would get from your dad were like Penthouse if you were lucky.
And I remember this because also, it was the first time my friend Josh, who was the next one to speak, it was the first time I ever heard someone say, what the fuck, in a way that I knew they didn't really want an answer.
You know, when you say what the fuck, occasionally you say what the fuck like you come home, there's water everywhere.
What the fuck?
But sometimes you'll say what the fuck where it's like, what the fuck?
And you don't really want an answer, man.
There's no way you can have an answer.
There's certain times when you say what the fuck where if you were expecting an answer, you asked the wrong question.
And this is one of them, this fucking magazine, this wet magazine that we found under a log, right?
They're always damp, the pages are stuck together, and it was all dicks and feet.
It was so weird.
It was all white guys, you can never find a black dick.
If you were looking for some black dick back in the day, it was very difficult, right?
I didn't see a black dick until the internet came along, and then I was like, wow, they really are bigger.
Technology, for example, in porn, for example, it gives you exactly what you want right now in every technicolor detail.
And there was an article I read by this, I can't remember her name, this woman who said that they're finding this interesting phenomenon with teenage boys, and that is that these kids now have access to RedTube, and they're watching porn starting at 10, 9. And they're getting exactly what they want.
Here's the problem.
When you and I saw a naked girl, right when we met, we didn't have the internet.
When you saw tits and you saw an ass, you were just like, holy shit.
I wasn't worried about lines.
I wasn't worried about shaving.
I was just like, look at the smell of her.
She could have a hoof and a horn.
I'm fucking her.
I don't care.
I'm this far.
Now what they're finding is boys.
They're so used to seeing perfection in exactly what they want that they'll see a girl and they'll be like, ah, she's got a dent there.
I don't like that.
Fuck it.
I'm bored.
On to the next.
And these kids are going from girl to girl to girl to girl.
And girls are having to rise to that occasion and become sluttier and sluttier to hold a boy's interest.
And they've done a lot of really interesting social studies on it.
Do you know, according to this one book called The Murder Room, that this guy who's a serial killer profiler specializes in sadism?
Do you know about this?
It's really interesting.
The Vidocq Society, where they get together the third Thursday of every month, all these retired profilers and And detectives and they solve cold cases.
And the rule is it's got to be an unjust case where a little girl was killed.
It can't be a drug dealer who was knocked off.
But it's usually they deal with serial killers and people got away with it and they think it's a serial killer.
And they've solved a lot of crimes.
And he said, he basically wrote the helix on the evolution of a serial killer that the FBI still uses today on profiling.
And he said that almost all serial killers start with a fetish.
They start with a fetish.
And once you get into the fetish, once you get into, you know, whatever it might be coming on somebody's feet, and then you want to, then you want to, you know, maybe choke them or whatever, you don't go back.
You mentally never go back to being normal.
Once you start going down the rabbit hole, Some people stop.
Well, there's a lot of new science to suggest that if you are an evil person, let's just say you're a serial killer or you're just a killer, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that You lack the ability, not only with the medigula, which is the part of the brain that, I guess, deals with compassion and things,
but you also may also not have the neuron synapses required to actually fire when somebody's being hurt and it causes a sense of disdain or you feel bad about it.
So, as we learn more about the brain, it may just be that criminals, for the most part, are brain damaged, are simply brain damaged.
So that raises a really important question.
If, then, you can prove that someone has a lesion the size of a pinhead on a certain part of their brain that causes them to lack any kind of compassion and, in fact, causes them not to be able to feel at all, and so they have to do crazy shit just to feel, Just to be alive.
I think that you're definitely wounded sometime in a crucial stage of your development, probably.
That's another theory I've heard, where people say, as you're developing, a lot of times, if you're developing sexually and mentally at a certain age, and you see something really horrific and violent, you can associate violence with sexual release.
There's all kinds of shit like that.
Or as a way of coping with something you can't even put into context, you turn it sexual because it's a defensive mechanism.
The mystery is that you see people who go through the worst abuse in the world and they come out of it incredible people who give back to society and they're everybody's hero.
And then you see somebody where one thing happens.
One thing happens at the right time, and they're in and out of rehab for the rest of their life.
Look at people who make a shitload of money.
A lot of their kids are good-looking, tall, they're doing all the things, and they spend their whole life battling a drug problem, whereas one dude comes up in an orphanage and ends up running a company or whatever it might be.
If you look at it in the progression of their lives, what kind of experiences have they had, how they move towards solving or getting past that experience, and what can you learn from watching them?
If you really wanted to take the crazy point of view, the crazy point of view is that...
This world is really your imagination.
And that everything that takes place in this world is really a lesson for you.
You can either learn from it or not.
You can see the whole thing as some grand play played out for your amusement.
And in every weakness, you can learn.
And one of the issues that I have with human beings, and like I said with religion, I get upset at things.
That I'm afraid of seeing in myself.
I get upset at weakness in people.
I get upset at jealousy.
I get upset at all the things that I'm terrified of seeing in myself.
And one of the things about jiu-jitsu is you get tapped, man.
You get tapped all the time.
I roll with good guys.
I get caught, man.
And when you're getting caught, it's a matter of, do I tap out or does my arm break?
Do I tap out or are you going to fuck my neck up?
But by doing that all the time, you get very humble.
Absolutely.
And you get used to losing and winning and you realize that The good that you do, whether you do good at jujitsu or any other game, one of the reasons why I'm obsessed with games is because there's a direct correlation in my mind between focusing excellence, like focusing my energy and my concentration on something, and then seeing direct results, and then applying those direct results to the rest of my life.
And with some people, they never have any real competition in their life.
And because of that, when anything comes up, anything that's big, anything that does require you to rise the occasion or deal with a social issue, you fucking lock up, man.
And I truly believe that in order to be truly great at something, you have to give in to a certain amount of madness.
And how much can you manage that madness?
I don't know.
But guess what?
If you want to be that guy flying through the fucking air with your tongue out in front of the baddest motherfucking basketball players in the world and kicking shit on a level that they've never seen before, Dr. J, suck my dick, stupid.
Watch this.
Watch this.
I'm going to fly through the air.
How about that?
How about I'm going to do some shit that nobody's ever done?
I'm going to hit some fucking layups that's going to have all you white bitches scratching your head.
He owed some fucking golf hustler a half a million dollars.
And the guy wrote a story.
I believe it was Esquire.
Was it Esquire or GQ? One of those magazines.
And there was a big ass story about Michael Jordan and how he's gambling with Michael Jordan.
Michael Jordan wouldn't pay him.
And Michael Jordan is just this ultra bad motherfucker who's obsessed with it.
He just has to constantly get new pussy.
He has to constantly get the latest Ferrari.
He has to constantly be playing golf and winning money and gambling on basketball games and gambling on baseball games and gambling on whatever the fuck he can, man.
He's just out there riding it.
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I think a lot of athletes have so much trouble fucking managing.
If you're a pro athlete or you're a hip hop, the first thing you should do in your entourage is have fucking three accountants following you everywhere.
Just hire, go to New York, find a Jewish or Italian accountant, have them fucking follow you around all the time.
But what they were saying, what he was saying, rather, was he was hanging out with Eddie Murphy and Michael, or hanging out with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall.
And he's like, I had to fucking keep up, you know?
So he was, you know, buying a Mercedes and the best watches.
And then that shit runs dry.
And, you know, that's like the most transient of jobs or the most temporary of jobs.
And by the way, how much money, you would know better than I would, if you make, if you get a $20 million payday, right, and you're a boxer, how much of that money after taxes and jail?
of things you have to pay and the bills are high but the the amount of money that you actually get is like 34 cents on a dollar something silly like that it's something ridiculous yeah so yeah so these guys spend like they actually have 20 million bucks but that's part of the fun man it's part of the fun is watching someone walking around with giant diamond encrusted chains and crazy fucking watches and then a month later finding out that they lost their house there's something there's something for you for your own amusement Joe Rogan knew a comic who had a huge deal.
The king, from what I understand, his son is a little bit different.
His son has fallen a little bit out of favor with the people.
He's a playboy and he's a product of just having a lot of money.
But his dad, his dad is, and by the way, I mean, his son was, you don't hear bad things about his son, but his father was always this sort of sober, stayed presence.
But even that kid, they take their role as a symbol very, very seriously.
And they know how important a symbol they are to the notion that we are what you should aspire to, which is...
You know, being conservative.
Like a lot of things about the Thai women, like people think, well, because there are a lot of like strip clubs and there's a big sex trade there that Thai women are loose.
Absolutely not.
In fact, in Thai culture, women are, it's not like you just go fuck a lot of people at all.
They're very conservative in their own families and as a group of people.
I've talked to a lot of Thai people about that and women who are there, who are working and stuff.
She's like, it's a huge misconception, the notion that you can just meet a Thai girl and bang her.
This is something I wanted to talk to you about because I wanted to know if you remember the place that you were when you heard the news that the prince was wed.
The CIA has admitted several times that they were going to make fake news stories.
This was after 9-11, and they said to throw off the terrorists, they were going to make fake news stories.
As soon as they start saying, they're letting everybody know, we're going to lie to you.
The depths of their lies is only your imagination.
Who the fuck knows?
I mean, when you see him and his beard is dyed black, and then you see other videos of him and his beard is white, I don't buy that.
But hold on a second.
This is why I don't buy that.
It's because there, right now, will absolutely be an active campaign to discredit him.
If they have murdered him, if they did shoot Osama bin Laden and he was unarmed, They will discredit him.
And one of the ways they're going to discredit him is to make him look vain and to make him look like he's a crazy dictator who's, you know, living in squalor, like he's an insane person.
So if you show pictures of his house and his house is all fucked up in disarray and there's blood all over the place and there's just garbage everywhere and then you show pictures of his beard and it's black, he looks like a nutty man.
For anybody who talks about conspiracy and the idea that this might be a fake story, take a look at how the U.S. government works.
Take a look at, for example, how these operations work.
Let me tell you something.
When you do a major operation like that, you've got SEAL Team 6, first of all, it's got to go through all kinds of civilian channels.
Right away.
And they have to be privy to all kinds of information, not to mention the Security Council and everything else.
If you take a look at, and I'm talking about the hundred people at least who have top secret clearance, who all have different agendas and have no interest in glorifying Barack Obama at all, a lot of those people.
All of them.
I mean, the idea that you could ever pull off this fake assassination of Osama bin Laden after we've been trying to get him for this long, it wouldn't work even in a Hollywood movie.
And when you talk about fake stories, what the CIA was doing with those fake stories was they were leaking them.
It's true to Al Jazeera and things like that, but mainly what they would do is they want to get information out of you and you're a young man.
Who believes in your Iman and you got captured?
They'll show you a fake headline of the New York Times and they'll say, look what happened.
All your guys have been killed and all of them are singing like canaries.
They used all kinds of techniques like that.
There's no doubt that you don't want to trust the CIA, but what's wonderful about our government, and this is just a fact, is anytime you try to keep a secret or come up with a huge conspiracy like this, you're dealing with 16 other people who have a totally different agenda who want nothing more than to expose you.
And any time you have a group of people, whether it's Kissinger and Nixon or whoever, who try to come up with their own agenda to steer foreign policy or, my God, come up with a way to glorify their president, which is what this did for the Democrats.
And I'll tell you something, the Republicans are going to have no...
They can no longer use the notion that Obama is weak on terrorism for this upcoming election.
So I can promise you there were plenty of Republicans who would have loved to have taken credit for this.
You'd have to go through...
It'd be basically impossible.
And by the way, launching a team like SEAL Team 6, what was interesting about this was it was so risky for the president.
That notion...
Here's why, if you're young and you don't vote, this is why...
Forget the platform you're on, whether you're Republican or Democrat.
When you vote for a president, make sure that guy has wisdom.
Make sure that guy is an intellect and he has wisdom.
And here's why.
When you're the president of the United States, you have very little power, but you also have a great deal of power.
And this is how it works.
They come to you with six different scenarios.
And they say, Mr. President, we have a lot of intelligence to suggest.
That Osama bin Laden, who's been protected by the ISI and whoever it is in Pakistan, he is living in a compound.
Now, here's one of the options.
We could drop 60,000 pounds worth of bombs on that and create a crater and comb the place for DNA and see if it really was him.
Or we can send in a crack commando team like SEAL Team 6 and take this guy out.
Why is that risky?
Well, here's why.
A couple of reasons.
You're sending in a team.
It is a third of a mile or something crazy, or three miles less, away from what Pakistan's West Point is, this huge military facility.
They're going to scramble jets, which they did, and a whole bunch of other things, the minute they start hearing gunshots right in their quarter.
And by the way, there are a lot of people in the military who probably know he's already there anyway.
So we send on our team.
If Americans die and we fail at this, or our helicopter stalls, which it did, You can say goodbye to your fucking election.
I agree with everything you said about the SEAL Team 6, the baddest motherfuckers in the world.
These are the guys that, by the way, if you don't know, being a SEAL is incredibly difficult.
Then they take the best of the SEALs and 50% of them wash out because they can't handle what it takes to be in SEAL Team 6. I mean, I've read the Dick Marchenko books and all the...
Dude, they're on another level of human being.
They're on another level of human being.
Boss Rootin was telling me how he trains the SEAL Team 6, and there's a record they had for running up and down this hill.
Mark Hominick had it.
He ran up and down this hill four times.
It's a huge hill.
The SEAL Team's guys, they did it 12 times, and Boss had to stop them because he thought they were going to die.
Yeah, and they're not going to do—they all have different agendas, but the bottom line is the government has lied about a bunch of stories like this in the past.
There's a woman that was, she was inside of a fucking hospital, and they pretended there was this crazy gunfight to get her out and rescue her from the Iraqis.
And what really turned out was it was just a girl in a hospital, and there was no bullet shot at all.
They put it through a facial recognition scan right away, which is about as they take the geometric portions where your nose, your eyes, it's like a fingerprint.
And they go, guess what?
That's a match.
That's Osama bin Laden.
Then they take DNA as well.
Then they got the body.
And you know how many people saw his body?
Probably literally a hundred.
All the SEAL team guys, all those people on that ship that dressed the body, that read the rights, and then dumped them at sea.
Which, according to Islamic law, you've got to bury a body 24 hours after it's been killed.
Right, because then it would be a martyr and it would be a shrine.
Doug Stanhope had a great point.
He said, how come they identified his body within an hour, yet it takes these poor fucking guys that are wrongly accused 30 years to get a DNA match to get out of prison?
It's a good question, Joe, because it also raises, this assassination raises a fuckload of questions, one of which is, now that we've gotten the big name, Do you have a justification for being in Afghanistan?
Listen, we're in Afghanistan for minerals and probably heroin.
That's what we're in Afghanistan for.
The Taliban had dropped heroin production down to minuscule levels.
Now the United States is over there and we produce shit.
More than 90% of the world's heroin in Afghanistan.
More than 90% of the world's heroin is growing.
The world is big.
The world is big as fuck.
And if 90% of the Viagra was grown in one little village, guess what?
We would infiltrate that culture.
We would find a way to corrupt them and turn them into terrorism.
We would have them attack ships or blow things up.
And then we'd use that as an excuse to go in and jack their Viagra.
That's what we would do.
Because that's what we've done forever.
That's what we would do.
If Viagra was...
Look, dude.
Hard dick pills are very fucking valuable.
If they didn't exist...
The Chinese would kill tigers and get their In Afghanistan, the number one way that they bribe warlords, because if you don't know, the way Afghanistan is structured today in 2011, the reason why it's an unwinnable country and an unwinnable war is because it's not a country.
It's a series of warlords that are all kind of interconnected, and they all live in these villages.
It's funny, there was some, you know, everyone keeps on, all these Osama stories are coming out, and they're saying, like, people are saying that Osama was a huge video gamer, that he used to play guitar hero, and so it's like all these bullshit stories now are coming out.
He never took a paycheck from the CIA, but he did himself open a lot of hospitals with his own money and things like that when the Soviets were invading and trying to colonize Afghanistan.
When you hear about the Jessica Lynch story, you have to wonder, man.
You have to wonder how much of this story is true and how much of it is not.
Is it possible that they stormed this fucking compound, there are a bunch of Islamic militants there, There are a bunch of bad guys they were looking for.
They cap these motherfuckers, but there's no Bin Laden.
And that's why we need to go to Pakistan with these drones and shoot hellfire missiles out of these drones to the mountainside to fuck all these people up.
I think it actually puts the U.S. in a really tough position because now you've got a lot of people asking very tough questions of Pakistan saying you guys didn't know he was there.
And Pakistan has been our ally for the most part.
They're not really, but they've ostensibly been our ally because we need them.
But the most dangerous country in the world in a lot of ways is Pakistan.
They have a hundred nuclear weapons and growing.
And they've already given that technology already to Libya, North Korea, and who the fuck else?
One other person.
One other group of people.
And to this guy A.Q. Khan, they had complicity with the Pakistani military.
And there's no doubt that Pakistan has its own agenda.
They're terrified of India.
See, here's the thing about foreign policy nobody thinks about.
We have our agenda, right?
We're going to go into Afghanistan.
The motherfuckers that live there...
And around there, they go, you guys are gonna be gone in 10 years.
We gotta deal with what's really going on.
So you want us to be mean to the quote-unquote Taliban?
Like you said, you know who the Taliban is?
It's the dude with the biggest fucking guns and the most drugs, okay?
That's who's gonna be holding the cards after you guys leave.
So after your centralized government, that big experiment where you have democracy in a country that's always been a series of tribes, you're gonna tell me, what are you gonna do then?
We have to deal with that fucking mess.
We got to deal with that law, this area, Waziristan, etc.
And that's what's funny.
They kind of just wait and let us spend a shitload of money.
And then they're like, ah, look, a vacuum.
And they just fill it up and it goes back to normal.
That's the fucking tough thing about foreign policy, man.
I believe that the only thing that has resilience, the only thing that changes anything in life and the only thing that has resilience is ideas.
An idea is very powerful.
When an idea takes hold, like the constitution of this country or whatever, when an idea takes hold, if an idea called democracy takes hold, it'll fucking change and bring down military dictatorships.
Take a look at fucking all of South America.
It was all military dictatorships.
20 years, the notion of democracy, even as messy as it is, took hold.
It was an idea that you just couldn't fucking argue with.
That's, by the way, what's going on in the Middle East.
This spring awakening with all these young people who could give a shit about Islam, what they really care about.
Is having a better life for themselves and their kids.
And they want education and freedom of speech and representative government, which are human fucking rights.
You try keeping that.
Now that that's out of the box, just try.
Good luck to all the Gaddafi and all his assholes.
Good luck trying to keep a lid on that shit.
You're not going to do it.
Because that's caught fire and they've seen how the rest of the world lives.
They can see it with their computers and their cell phones.
And you're never going to be able to keep the fucking truth down.
Two places you came to do it in Cuba.
One, the final vestige of that is North Korea.
And those people suffer so horribly it's sick.
But that's the one place in the world that still somehow this tyrannical dictator has the lid on.
But there is a, like we were saying, there is an evolution of freedom, isn't there?
Right, but it's true that the CIA is without a doubt involved in orchestrating a lot of these revolts.
It's not that these things are happening organically.
Wesley Clark in 2007 talked about the United States plan in all these different foreign countries, and many of them that have dictatorships, including Libya.
And he talked about the plans to overthrow Libya, and this was in 2007. It's true, but you know, this Spring Awakening really actually caught a lot of people on their heels, and especially a lot of Middle East experts.
When you hear about a guy like Wesley Clark, who's a fucking, what is he, a four-star general running for president, he says that the United States had been plotting this COVID operations.
I think in the sense that we're trying to—well, I mean, the influence we had, for example, in Libya was that we, along with our NATO allies, said we can't allow the Libyan military to fly over these rebel strongholds in these towns and just carpet bomb the fuck out of them and shoot them.
We got to create a no-fly zone around these people.
So in that sense, we did get militarily involved.
It was very controversial.
It still is very controversial.
But, you know, to an extent, I think that democratic countries, starting with Europe, and this was actually led by Europe, they say, what is in our national interest?
Is it still in our national interest for Gaddafi or Mubarak in Egypt who'd been there for 30 years?
Is it in our national interest for that guy to be in power?
There is a convenience when Mubarak is in power and you say, you can make a phone call to Mubarak and say, hey, you got to cooperate with Israel because it's in our national interest.
Well, that's no longer the case.
It's a different fucking ballgame now.
It's a different ballgame.
You're having to deal with the Arab street.
You're having to deal with the will of the people.
And that's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out.
You know, when you read shit like Confessions of an Economic Hitman and you see that we go only into countries that have massive natural resources that we want to stockpile and control...
It makes you very skeptical about motivation.
It makes you very skeptical when you see all the money that people spend on war.
And I'm not pro-socialist, but I am pro-fixing problems.
And I think, I don't believe necessarily in welfare.
I don't believe that if you give people money that you're going to somehow or another improve their life because they were broke and now you give them money and now everything's going to be great.
No, because you're going to develop a whole culture that expects to get a check for nothing.
And then when you have that, you have no motivation, you have no work ethic, you have no enjoyment and satisfaction, you have no productivity.
But I am for fixing schools.
I am for trying to develop human beings that are going to contribute.
And I think as a society and as a community and as a culture, that's one of the most important things we can do.
Yet we ignore that.
We all know this and we ignore that and concentrate on boogeymen on the other side of the fucking planet where it's quite obvious that this is transparent game going on where these boogeymen just so happen to only be where the gas is.
They just so happen to only be where the oil is.
They just so happen to only be where the heroin is.
But I think also that the other question it raised is that anytime you have a country with a lot of natural resources, let's just take oil which is traded openly on the world market and that none of us would go anywhere without oil.
We all need it.
If you look at the history of oil, I'm not an expert on the history of oil.
I did live in Saudi Arabia for three years, but you look at the history of oil and the Middle East, which was strategic because of that resource.
The Soviets and the Americans were obviously always fighting over who had control of that.
The Arabs, for the most part, created something called OPEC and said, fuck both you guys, we're going to start controlling our own idea.
But the idea of pan-Arabism, which is the notion that all the Arabs, that's what Saddam Hussein and Abdel Nasser in Egypt try to do, they try to bring all the Arabs together under one banner.
You're never going to do that because people are nationalistic.
People go, I'm Libyan first, I'm not Arab, I'm Libyan, I'm Egyptian.
And it just never worked.
You look at how there was so much involvement and vying for those resources between two superpowers that of course, of course shit is going to get crazy.
Of course when Saddam Hussein makes a huge mistake and invades Kuwait and we not only come to his rescue but we use Saudi Arabia, the land of Muhammad, where Islam started and we're launching planes out of Saudi Arabia to kill other Muslims.
For a guy like...
Osama bin Laden, that was the equivalent of slaughtering pigs in a synagogue.
For those guys, they were like, you're out of your fucking mind.
Now the imperialists, whatever you want to call them, are actually killing Muslims from the original caliphate state.
And that was one of the things that radicalized him.
My point.
You're right.
The CIA has an idea.
They want to do something.
But when you say we, by the way, again, it's a lot of different people in a room that come up with an idea.
But let's just simplify it and say the CIA or the U.S. government at the time, they say, we want this.
This is our agenda.
One thing that they always talk about is there's always circumstances that unfold that none of us had any fucking idea would happen.
It seems to be that's the way life is.
You got one plan and everything goes to shit.
You know, I mean, you could make the argument, by the way, that the idea that we killed Osama bin Laden has raised a whole bunch of questions a lot of people don't want to answer from a political point of view.
There's fucking no community centers in these bad neighborhoods.
There's no guides.
There's no counseling.
If you wanted to look at the one huge problem that we have, it's babies and children growing up and becoming shitty human beings because there's no love.
Because there's not getting any help.
And we're not putting money in that at all.
The disproportionate amount of money we put in the military budget and compared to how we treat children in this country and raise kids and work on terrible communities and work on educating and getting people out of bad situations.
And you say, oh, well, you know, they've got to figure it out on their own.
You don't have a fucking clue What kind of a disproportionate life you would be living if you were born in the ghetto.
If you've ever been around the projects, if you've ever been around terrible neighborhoods.
I never lived in a really bad neighborhood, but I lived in Jamaica Plain in Boston and it wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination.
There was a lot of really poor people around me, but we would go into really bad neighborhoods.
We would go to buy pot, We would go to do different shit.
We would go just because it was dangerous.
We were young kids.
We were close to bad neighborhoods.
There's people living in ways that you can't even wrap your fucking head around.
Well, you know, one of the things that's always raised with social scientists is they say there are a lot of cases in this country where you threw a lot of money at a problem.
Let's take Head Start as an example.
Or just a lot of the money that Bush spent on education, which was a lot of money over the past eight years.
Why in the world didn't a lot of test scores in certain segments of society, they didn't budge and sometimes they went down.
And that is a really important part of being a human being.
If you look back on your teachers that you had and how much they influenced you and how much power they have over you, this is the person who stands in front of the class and tells you how the fucking world works.
And when you're a kid, that's a huge responsibility that many times is bestowed on idiots.
It's bestowed on idiots, and they took this job because they couldn't get another job, and they're fucking bitter and cunty.
Well, there's a documentary for everybody who watched called Waiting for Superman, but forget that.
There's an article just now in the New York Times about trying to get, I think it was in the state of Ohio, just trying to get one law passed.
One law.
One law that makes it harder for a teacher to get tenure or easier to hire a high-quality teacher in place of someone who's not performing.
You are dealing with fucking 65 different interests with a lot of lobbying power starting with the teachers union that also then has a subsidiary called the Chicago teachers union that has a subsidiary called the county teachers union and you're dealing with fucking the reality of trying to make a law go through holy shit man holy shit yeah talk to a senator sometime say hey I want to get a law passed and it's a simple one talk to him and see how long it takes And how many years and how many people you've
got to pay off and how many people you've got to convince that their interests...
And we have to wrap our heads around the fact that there's...
Some sort of a creepy situation has happened where there's a lot of money in keeping people in jail.
And because of that, make no doubt about it, the prison guard unions and all these various law enforcement unions, they are not lobbying to make marijuana legal.
They don't want it at all because it's a part of their economy.
That's why being a politician or a president, the old saying when you're a president, you make one decision, you make 50% of the people happy and another 50% of the people out there hate your guts.
What you're going to do is you're going to make it so you can't get fired so you are allowed to be free with your ideas and you don't have to worry about the repercussions of your free thinking.
And this is going to promote thought.
But the problem with that is when you know that you can't get fired, you become a cunt.
We'll find them and I'll show them to you later because this is going to be a pain in the ass.
But my point is, and you and I have both talked about this, and I did get out of here for a little while, but moving to somewhere where that's not an influence.
Is that even possible anymore though?
Because that influence is sort of like all over the country now.
I think, though, at the end of the day, you're still going to have a lot of people who hold on to what's important because life is basically a kick in the nuts and it's going to teach you that shit.
You know, you still got to compete.
You still got to fight gravity.
You still got to find fulfillment in accomplishment.
And the only way to accomplish something like a black belt in jujitsu is fucking roll all the time for four or five, six or seven or ten years.
If you want a black belt, that's what it takes.
You If you want to know that you truly are, you know, somebody that can tie somebody in a knot, and I'm speaking metaphorically in anything, it takes a long fucking time.
You want to be a good stand-up?
You want to make people laugh all over the country?
And ultimately, all these things are in place so that we can have this society, so that people can survive, so that people can keep breeding, so we can continue doing what we're doing.
Well, we're the only animal that has a symbiotic relationship with an artificial life, and that artificial life is technology.
You could say technology is not alive, but we used the word evolution culturally earlier.
We used the word evolution for machines, and if you look at simple machines that were around 50, 60 years ago, and you look at the complex machines now with the The microchips that are just powering your fucking cell phone and where this is all headed in some sort of a weird direction.
And this is one of those conversations that inevitably, whenever we have this sort of conversation on the podcast, on my message board, someone will come up and go, Fucking bullshit!
Stoned hippie talk!
It's always some aggro fuckhead with a poor argument, and they get upset about it.
But the bottom line is, with all this hippie talk, is, you know, everyone's like, why are you thinking about that?
Why are you thinking about, like, where's it all going?
Where's it all going, man?
It's going nowhere.
Shut up.
Go to work.
The reality is, something is happening.
And for whatever reason, we have an instinct to ignore it.
By the way, you think it's hippie talk, take a look at what computer scientists are talking about.
Of course.
Computer scientists and scientists in general are talking about evolution in terms of human beings can control and are controlling their own evolution.
But Stoner Talk, in 20 years, we are going to, like it or not, have to contend with technological advances that are so far beyond what most of us are dealing with today.
Biocompatible technology, things that fit into your body, that make you remember faster, keep you awake longer.
I think that's kind of where spiritual conversation comes in with the notion that Yes, we have all these technological advances, but the same old questions that a human being is going to have to answer for himself are still going to exist.
WikiLeaks, apparently they did remove names of all the people to protect the people, except people who are no longer with the CIA or whoever they were with, and they were already exposed.
Do you know out of the 12 BP whistleblowers, all the 12 people that came forward about all the problems in the oil disaster, nine of them are missing, including people murdered.
Listen, out of the 12 people in question that were the BP whistleblowers, nine are mysteriously dead, one nearly died in a brutal assassination attempt, one is imprisoned under questionable circumstances, and another has simply disappeared.
Well, I mean, that's pretty crazy seeing three girls' buttholes and vaginas that are underage and you're just driving around like minding your own business.
And by the way, if you're telling me that all those investigative journalists out there from all those newspapers who are always looking for a story wouldn't be all over that, believe me, they would be all over that.
Okay, you're right, but you're giving in to the man.
You're saying whatever rules that you make, as illogical as they are, I'm going to fall by them because I don't want to get locked in a cage.
What I'm saying is there's no way you should be locking someone in a cage for that.
It doesn't make any sense.
And if someone does that, they're the criminals.
When you have a society, a complex society, With a massive amount of access to information, literally you can find the answers to any question instantly on your phone.
When you have a law that's in place that's completely illogical, like marijuana laws, and then you prosecute people for them, and then you lock them in jail, you are the criminal.
You are the one who's going against logic and nature with all your fucking silly studies.
Ron Paul just owned some motherfucker the other day on the Senate floor.
I mean, it was so on the money, man, about all of it.
We need less fucking laws.
All you people out there that are involved in this industry of laws, an industry of creating jobs that are attached to laws, you're leeches.
This is leeching off society.
It's a fucking loophole.
And if we got rid of that loophole and forced everybody that has some shitbag jobs for locking people up for pot, we would force those people to have more productive lives because they would have to evolve.
It could be argued, though, that if there were less laws, and there were more freedom, and there was less people in these fucking bullshit, parasitic government jobs, that those people would be forced to contribute.
There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal about how a lot of states, three out of one job are government jobs, not private sector jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
And it is a form of social welfare, because if you give someone a job and make it so they don't have to find their path, it's like I've always said, the greatest thing that ever happened to me when I was 21 years old, I played the lottery once.
I won a free ticket.
If I played it again, I won nothing.
And then I was done.
I said, I quit.
That's it.
What if I was 21 and broke and scared and lost and I won the lottery?
That would have been the worst curse ever.
I would have never found my way in life.
And if you get some shitty fucking easy government job that you can't get fired from and then that becomes your life, well, guess what?
And makes the call on what is really going on and why we're invested in all these different parts of the world and what we're really doing.
He's honest about it and he's saying this is not what America should be all about.
And he says that all the time.
This is not what this Constitution was supposed to mean.
This is not what our founding fathers wanted.
This is supposed to be the best example possible of what you can do with a society.
This is 2011. We've learned from the Greeks.
We've learned from the Romans.
We've learned from the Nazis.
We've learned from everybody.
We've got it down.
But we don't.
We don't.
And it's transparent how we don't.
It's all there.
Every time, like, Obama recently passed some fucking new law about genetically modified food, and it's going to fuck over all these organic farmers, man.
And this shit's been going on for a while.
Monsanto's involved with a lot of fucking creepy shit, man.
Again, when you talk about technology, Monsanto and these other companies that do genetic engineering, the only way we're going to feed the growing population is through genetic engineering.
Now, there's a good way to do it.
There's a bad way to do it.
Obviously, it comes with risks.
It also comes with a great deal of promise.
But genetic engineering is in all of your future, whether you like it or not.
You don't have the soil to farm organically and feed all the people in Africa, for example, and et cetera, et cetera.
There's going to be a lot of that, and they're going to figure this out in the courts, but the bottom line is this.
One thing that...
One of the promises of genetic engineering is that we will maybe never have to use any pesticides And if you want to talk about agricultural runoff, that's one of the biggest forms of pollutants in all our waterways.
So, for example, if you could come up with a kernel of rice, an apple that requires no spraying because in it, it has genes that are not only incredibly nutritious but that can ward off any kind of a pest, that's something that is going to be in our future.
It doesn't come with risks.
Are there problems?
Do I feel weird about taking the gene of a jellyfish and putting it into a strawberry because it actually keeps it from freezing so you can ship it farther?
Like, I read on some guy's thing, you know, he was shitting on someone for being middle-aged and buying a sports car that it was, you know, such a midlife crisis sort of a thing.
And I was like, God, what a silly way to look at that.
I remember the first time I saw Pong, I was obsessed with it.
I couldn't believe that someone had figured out a way to make this move something on the TV. You were one of the first people I ever met who had email and stuff.
When we were doing the man show, that was one of the most fun things, to put up a bunch of ideas and try to make them.
I do that with my writing.
Do you do that?
See, I'm a little bored up there.
I do that with my act now, and I take a photo of it on my iPhone.
And then when I'm in a hotel room and I want to go over my notes, I just look at the photo.
And you could expand it, so I move it around, and it's easier than turning pages.
It's, you know, technology, man.
It's making it all easier.
But I think writing something down and, like, putting it up there for you.
There's something about creating when you write things down and then put it in, like, a little box and then stick the box on the wall and then step back and look at it.
It's like, instead of, like, being on top of it, writing it, and being immersed in the words, just put it on the wall and step back.
From Alan Ball, who I talked to, who wrote American Beauty, who I talked to about how he starts his scripts and stuff, and he said character, but any of those guys, all of them, Todd Phillips, they outline the shit out of it.
They see it up on a board, and I don't know one director or one writer, certainly not one screenplay writer, not one, who makes a fortune Who's a successful screenplay writer, a professional, who doesn't do that.
What I said earlier, the way I phrased it was the first time I ever phrased it that way, that it's here and it's not here.
But I'm writing this whole big chunk about that.
And so it's forcing me.
I'm constantly reading all this nutty fucking shit about the world, and I'm like, God damn it, this is not that fun.
You can freak out about fucking supermassive black holes and super volcanoes, and you can freak out about the shifting of the polar ice caps, and it really doesn't make life any more interesting.
You know, life is fun for like a fucking hour and a half.
You know what I'm saying?
If you pick up a good...
Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, and he's a horror writer as well.
It's about a guy who is a rock and roll star, like some creepy Marilyn Manson, who buys this dead guy's suit.
Online because it's haunted it comes with a ghost and he thinks he's being accused so he buys this dead guy suit I don't want to say any more about the plot because the plot is brilliant like how it's all established and set up but it's a fucking page-turner and it's so much more fun than reading a Michael Rupert book about the collapse of civilization you know smoking cigarettes collapse documentary have you ever watched you want to shit your pants watch that collapse documentary what is that?
It's Michael Rupert.
He's this guy who used to be a former LA cop who busted the CIA selling drugs in LA neighborhoods and went public with it.
And eventually left the police force and was told that he was supposed to let these people go when he caught them.
And he's, you know, very, very vocal about it.
Always worried he's going to get assassinated.
Well, that started this downward spiral of doubt and doom.