Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan debate systemic corruption, with Rogan skeptical of progressive taxation while Callen advocates a 30% flat tax. They explore AI-driven fact-checking, synthetic biology’s ethical dilemmas, and genetic adaptations from stress—like MMA fighters Cain Velasquez or Julio Cesar Chavez’s endurance. Rogan teases Death Valley TV and future guests Jimmy Burke and Kelly Carlin before pivoting to supplements, sex toys, and Gaddafi’s death, all while Callen playfully embraces Rogan’s chaotic charm, hinting at more collaborations ahead. [Automatically generated summary]
Let's step outside of the boundaries because I tire of these questions and these things.
And one of the reasons why I tire of it is because everyone seems to have some sort of a position in this machine and everyone is describing all the varieties of issues within You know, these positions of these different statements and different belief systems that everybody has subscribed to when it comes to this world and how everything runs.
What's the ideal way to do it?
If you were a guy, and I know that you've thought of this, if you were a guy that could stop everything and figure out how to make an even system, what would you do?
How would you engineer it?
If someone came up to you and said, listen, dude, we're going to let you go on television.
You have a year to formulate a plan.
I think you're a smart guy and I think this is what the world needs.
The world needs a smart dude who thinks out of the box.
You get together.
You have one year.
Come up with a fucking plan as to how to redistribute the whole thing.
How to re-figure out where the money gets stored and what the money is based on.
I don't believe that any large bureaucracy, I don't care if it's a corporation, especially not the U.S. government because there's no accountability and you don't have to have a bottom line.
You don't have to produce a profit.
There's no marketplace telling you you go out of business.
Since, what was it, 1960, fucking That is a problem.
You've seen the documentary The Corporation, right?
Where they detail how corporations act as sociopaths.
They act as psychopaths.
They act as people who don't care about the repercussions because there's a diffusion of responsibility because there's a million people in the corporation.
I think when I look at what's going on right now, I see a bunch of different factors.
And the big factor that I think is not being paid as much attention to in all of this is that...
The whole problem is the access to information, and that the system has always been corrupt, and the system has always been run unfairly, but we didn't know it.
We didn't know it the way we know it now, and the access to information is unprecedented now, and because of that, people are starting to exchange information, and because of this access to information and social networking, they're allowed to do it in real time.
Listen, man, here's what everybody's woe is mean about, man.
There was a study recently that I tweeted that talked about violence.
It was a Kurzweil study.
Violence is at an all-time low per capita.
People are much less violent.
Life today is much safer than it's ever been at any other time in human history.
Things are getting better.
It's just right now, I think we are in the process of a birth.
We're in the process of another stage, and it's really close to bottlenecking.
The influx of technology and information into the world of the monkey is so complete right now and we are biologically struggling to keep up with all this new shit that's going on around us all the time and all this new information and all these new challenges and all this...
You know, these new issues that are presenting themselves to us and it's happening because of technology.
Yeah, it almost feels like, you know, they're talking about the planet and it's warming and all that stuff.
I always feel like, is that essentially like the idea that we keep growing as like literally an organism where we're going to have to mesh with machines just to survive in an environment?
I have an old gray, one of those tan Apple fucking towers that's in my garage somewhere.
It doesn't work anymore.
I have an old laptop with a little track wheel on it.
That doesn't work anymore either.
Those are skeletons.
Those are dead animals.
Those are things that they're predecessors, or rather they are the predecessors from today's sleek laptops.
They're old, shitty, they're clunky, they make weird noises when you turn them on.
They are essentially the monkeys in comparison to us.
I think it's real possible that if we do have some sort of an artificial intelligence and we do create a life form out of computers that is able to recreate other life forms, I think that's probably the next stage.
We personally think that it's so important that we continue this animal struggle with emotions and sperm and eggs.
I was going to say, but human beings, it seems, are on the verge of actually creating a whole new kind of synthetic biology that we're going to be able to mesh with.
Who's to say that that synthetic biology can't be just as...
The cardboard car is all fucked up and the new car is not ready yet.
It's a matter of whether or not we can complete our cycle of technology and artificial intelligence and then combine with it before we blow ourselves up.
Very, very smart people are re-engineering, reverse engineering the brain, the eardrum, the eye, the red blood cell.
We just reverse engineered the red blood cell of a dog.
And that means that if you reverse engineer it and you know exactly how it works, you can make a replica of it with synthetic material, which would be a nanobot because it's about that big.
So nanotechnology and then re-replicating what you just reverse engineered, if you can do that.
Then it is clear and it follows...
By the way, we're also doing it with an eye, we're doing it with an eardrum, etc.
If you can do that, well, when is the brain...
They're already working on trying to reverse engineer the brain.
It really fucking raises really cool questions.
It really does, man.
Because if you can do that and you can create a machine...
But that's the biggest question with a lot of computer scientists who are saying, when these robots develop will...
Which means when you say that, when they develop consciousness, meaning they are conscious of their own existence, the nature of anything that is conscious of its own existence, or even just having its own existence, whether it's a cancer cell, an ant, or a human being, is that you want to replicate and stay alive forever.
I think that people always say, well, they're going to have respect for our biological heritage.
And what they don't realize is we're going to be changing, too.
We're going to be changing too.
When you start talking about computers being this advanced, you're talking about human beings because I'm going to tell you right now, as soon as I got a biocompatible machine that I can download information into, etc., You're going to have it in your body.
When I leave my house and I don't have my iPhone, I feel like I'm missing a part of my body.
And, you know, if you read Tim Ferriss' book, did you read the part about having a cell phone in your pocket, how it cooks your fucking balls?
Well, one of the things that he did was he did a test on his sperm count, and he did a test...
And he found out that his sperm count was fairly low, and he's in really good shape, and he's young, and he was like, what the fuck is going on?
So then he starts doing all this reading on different studies, and one of the things he comes to is studies about cell phone usage and keeping your cell phone in your front pocket and how it affects your sperm count.
The radiation from your fucking cell phone diminishes your sperm count.
So either way, take zinc supplements or do whatever the fuck Ferris did, and by taking the phone out of his pocket, he radically increased his sperm count.
I think certain people with certain demands have higher demands, especially if you're an athlete.
If you're doing a lot of jujitsu, when people say what you need for your recommended daily requirement of vitamins and protein and all that stuff, I always look at them and I go, okay, but what are you doing physically?
Are you doing what I'm doing, man?
Because I'm fighting for my life.
And I don't think people understand that.
I did a thing, I'm in men's fitness this month.
There's a thing on my workout.
They did this whole thing on my kettlebell workout and Steve Maxwell's in town and we're working out this weekend together too.
I'm super excited about that this week.
I'm going to do some hardcore kettlebell drills.
People don't fucking realize how hard some people work out.
And I don't work out nearly as hard as a guy like Cain Velasquez does or a guy like George St. Pierre does.
I just simply don't put in the amount of sessions in a week that they do.
But when I do do it, I go fucking all out and you can't do that and just eat spaghetti.
You can't do that and not have vitamins and not have protein.
One of the things that I've done over the course of being involved in combat sports since I was literally a child I haven't had a moment since I was 14 years old that I wasn't learning or practicing some type of martial art.
It became an obsession super early in my life.
There's a direct correlation to me with good performance, good movement, healthy body, mind, spirit, and diet.
I think that the way to start eating better is, first of all, to educate yourself and start eating better, but then just start noticing the difference.
Because what happens is you start getting a pleasurable response when you eat well and what's good for your body, and a negative response when you go out and eat a whole pizza at pizza or whatever.
You won't feel as good as if you have a shake I was just talking about.
My point is, in all my years, I've done it both ways.
I've done it where I eat shit food, and I've done it where I eat really good food.
And when I do it when I eat really good food, I have a different body.
It's that simple.
It works way better.
It just works way better.
Nobody, before they get into the UFC, eats fucking three Carl's Junior, you know, bacon cheeseburgers and fries and a large coke.
You just don't do that.
Because if you do, your body's going to perform like shit.
You know why?
Because your body's fighting off poison.
Your body's in a war to process all this shit.
Saturated fats and trans fats.
That's fats with dicks, right Brian?
Yes That's Brian Cowan's favorite Hey guys I was just kidding about Making out with the transvestite And my friends Somebody needs to Create a guide for life And have all these different Ideas in there And one of them is going to be the importance of diet and exercise.
And even though I know a lot of smart fucking people, I know so many intelligent people who are really super creative and really interesting.
They say a certain percentage of people have chimpanzee DNA. I have chimpanzee DNA. I mean, not just chimpanzee DNA, rather, Neanderthal DNA. There's no question about it.
I got some Neanderthal in my past.
There's no doubt about it.
There's like a certain percentage of humans, some large number.
Yeah, there was another part of that Zeitgeist thing that was really interesting.
A lot of that Zeitgeist, the part that I watched, I only watched the first 15 minutes or so, and what was really interesting about it was all the different things they were talking about, about health and cancer.
And illnesses.
And about people who develop breast cancer.
There's like a gene.
A lot of people get breast cancer and they can find that gene and say, you are susceptible to breast cancer.
Well, people who have breast cancer, only 3 out of 10 have that gene.
7 out of 10 don't have that gene.
And they're trying to figure out, well, what is it that causes people to get cancer?
What is it that causes people to have violent behavior?
Well, are there genes for violent behavior?
Yes, there are.
But you know what they're realizing?
People who have been abused at childhood have a different genetic structure than people who haven't been abused.
They couldn't get his heart rate over 165. He's a beast.
No matter what they did, they couldn't.
Yeah, you're fucked with that guy.
Some people have a certain genetic structure where they can utilize oxygen better, but a lot of it's also repetition and practice, and your body is incredibly adaptive.
It also helps you realize how many times you repeat the same things over and over again, how many subjects you obsess on, and it becomes a normal part of your everyday life.
But when you start trying to pump that out of the podcast, people are like, bitch, I heard that already.
Stop fucking freaking out about the same thing every goddamn week.
You've got to evolve, man.
Well, we talked about Occupy Wall Street three times in a row now, but I think...
We're also doing it with different people just to sort of get their different reactions because I think this is a pretty important part of human history right now.
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I think it's funny that you both said that you really like Daniel Day...
How about, oh, whoops, I washed my toe and I actually had a hangnail and some shit got inside of it and it camped out of my body and grew and made a chain all the way to my brain and started sucking brain juice out of my big toe.
And I went to the doctor.
I was like, why is my big toe leaking?
Oh, that's cerebral spinal fluid.
Oh, what the fuck's going on?
Oh, there's a pipeline between your fucking brain and your toe.
That civil war has seen that Sierra Leone, Liberia to a small extent, and Rwanda has seen some of the most concentrated and ferocious killing in the history of the fucking world.
I was with Zach Galifianakis and Brody Stevens, and we were watching the Lady Boys, and some of them are as good-looking as the girl I was making out with from my earlier story, my friend, or better.
You should never change a goddamn thing about you.
You are what you are.
Next time he comes on, we will fucking fly in Jimmy Burke.
It's going to happen.
You need to meet this guy.
He's a hell of a character.
Kelly Carlin, we're going to get to you.
I guarantee you I'll call you soon.
Josh McDermott is coming on.
David Tell moved.
He's going to be doing it next week?
Is it next Tuesday or something like that?
He's on soon too.
Lots more good shit coming up.
This is UFC weekend.
This is only the first of these podcasts we've done this week.
We're going to do another one probably tomorrow.
I don't know who though.
And then we're going to probably do another one on Thursday.
But I'm fucking crazy.
I don't even know who it would be with.
I'm wild, folks.
I'm living by the seat of my pants.
We appreciate everything that you people do.
We appreciate all the positive energy.
We appreciate all you people listening on your fucking treadmills, in your cars, in your gyms, in your life, in your home, while you're cooking, whatever the fuck you're doing, we're with you, bitches.