Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dive into bizarre extremes—zoophilia’s psychological roots, shark attacks near Santa Monica Pier, and LA’s water scarcity—before dissecting U.S. military waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, where $300M+ sand imports and post-conflict chaos exposed profit-driven motives over democracy. They praise Terence McKenna’s Time Wave Zero for its provocative novelty theory while mourning lost knowledge like the Library of Alexandria, then contrast ancient artistry (e.g., a hidden Italian cathedral) with today’s productivity-driven creativity. MMA’s evolution—from Nick Diaz’s endurance to Jon Jones’s unmatched reach—leads to genetic engineering risks, where Rogan warns of Franklin’s "liberty vs. security" trade-off now co-opted by corporate lobbying, ending with a tease of Kelly Carlin’s comedy debut. [Automatically generated summary]
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My buddy was a cop in San Francisco, and he found a, uh, uh, this guy had a sheet, a Chinese guy had this sheet over his lap, And my buddy goes, something's going on with that fucking sheet.
You know what they find with a lot of people like that?
They have an inability to feel as deeply as a lot of other people.
So they have to go extreme.
That's what happens.
It's a term for like a banality.
There's a pathology where you essentially are numb to most of what goes on.
So they found this serial killer in England.
He was a doctor.
And he had, when they found out he was doing all kinds of terrible things, in fact, I think he was the guy they did, they based Silence of the Lambs on, the guy, you know, he ate people.
And they found that he had fucking, like, 25 pins in his testicles and a bunch of hat pins in his anus.
He was sticking them all the way to his anus.
And they were like, you know, when the psychiatrist found that it was because he couldn't feel anything, and he had to do that just to feel something.
Like, he always walked around numb.
And so the only way to get kind of a rush was to stick, hey, hey, he's a doctor, ladies and gentlemen.
If you examine the statement, the efficiency of your brain.
So your brain would work more efficiently than otherwise.
I would imagine that if I were to put you in a life and death situation or if I were to put you in a situation where that really counted, your brain would work better or at least more efficiently or at least more alertly Then would your brain if we were just sitting around shooting shit, right?
But, you know, the reality of consciousness is that we have ebbs and lulls, and we have moments where we can't remember things, and we have, where the fuck did I put my key moments?
Well, you have your days where you're, you know, whatever your connection, whatever the full symbiotic connection of things that's going on to make your mind function work.
There's a guy named Robert Lustig and another guy named Scott Conley, both doctors, and another science writer named Gary Taub, who wrote a couple of great books.
One is Good Calories, Bad Calories, and another book that was a follow-up to that book, which is a shorter book called I Think What Makes Us Fat or Why We Get Fat.
And through 20 years of research and more, and by the way, Barry Sears, who was, I think, a scientist over at MIT who was one of the pioneers in time-release drugs, and he also wrote The Zone.
Well, if you look at all their research, and these guys are on a clinical level, and they're looking at what happens to your body, they're trying to measure things like inflammation in the body, which is very difficult to do, but they're doing all these things.
What they found is that insulin, which is this mother hormone, is directly related to a lot of health issues.
So when you look at athletes or you look at people trying to be healthy, the idea is to eat foods that keep your insulin somewhat neutral.
Because otherwise, when you eat foods that oxidize as sugar, glucose in your system right away, you run into a host of, you can measure that there are a host of health problems And so, a guy like Robert Lustig just came out with this long hour and a half speech that he gave somewhere.
And Gary Taubes kind of conferred in the New York Times saying, he said, I think sugar is a toxin.
I don't think it's bad for you.
I think it's a toxin.
Which is kind of a radical thing where you go, well, come on, man.
So he said, yeah, so the soda you give to your child is doing your child harm.
It doesn't just rot the kid's teeth.
It's doing the child harm, and here are the host of reasons for it.
And if you actually look at the literature, and then more importantly, if you look at what athletes are doing, and especially Olympic athletes, they stay away from sugar for the most part.
As we say with all of our products at Onnit.com, what else did I leave out?
Oh, New Mood, which is the 5-HTP supplement.
5-HTP and L-Tryptophan.
There's a bunch of other things in it as well.
And it gives you...
A nice little serotonin boost.
And the Shroom Tech Immune, this is the new one, and as far as I understand it, the way it works is that it's a different mushroom, and this mushroom gives your body the impression that it's under attack by like a bug, you know, like a cold or something like that.
So your immune system fires up for an attack that never comes.
Anyway, and as I say with all of these things, The ingredients are available on Onnit.com.
Go to O-N-N-I-T. And if you think it costs too much money, if you have any sort of argument about pricing, go buy it in the cheapest form, steal the ingredient list, and make it yourself.
You can do it, and you probably will save money.
And good luck to you.
The most important thing is I don't want anybody buying anything that doesn't want to buy anything.
If you don't want to, that's totally cool.
If you buy it and you don't like it, you get 100% money back.
So, it couldn't be any possibly fair.
Like, you don't even have to return the product.
If you don't like it, if you try any of this stuff, and it doesn't work, just say it doesn't work, I want my money back.
Boom.
It's that simple.
And I can't make it any easier.
It's trying to make it as neutral and as honest as possible.
But I enjoy all these supplements.
I use them.
They're awesome.
And go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link for AlphaBrain, enter in the code name ROGAN, and you will get 10% off.
Well, at one point they were tagging them and what they found was they would follow them after they would tag them and they were all coming into four and five foot deep water at the Santa Monica Pier.
There are great whites, and if you take a helicopter ride over Malibu, you can YouTube it right now.
Just go, great white Malibu.
And you'll see a helicopter shooting a website thing.
And there was like an 18-footer just swimming around just about, you know, I don't know, a quarter mile, less than, it was probably an eighth of a mile offshore.
You know, let's call it 300 yards offshore.
That shit happens all day.
And by the way, they are eating seals all the time.
Surfers are always in the water.
They know you're in the water and they don't fucking bite you because it's got to be the perfect storm.
I was down in West Palm Beach, and I was staying at this place called the Amfi, this really great resort.
And I asked one of the guys, he was parasailing.
And I go, any sharks out there?
And he goes...
Oh yeah, dude.
He goes, oh yeah.
Oh no, there are times, certain times of the year they put flags, that purple flags, you can't swim because the bull sharks, they're all migrating this way.
And then you got the spinners and they'll bite your hand and feet.
I was like, what?
What are you talking about?
He goes, oh yeah, dude, they're all over the place.
He goes, I don't know why people swim in this water.
They're crazy because I'm always kite surfing and I stay on my kite surf, dude.
Meanwhile, check out how many shark attacks have been in Palm Beach.
There was one summer where there were like eight shark attacks.
Well, the zoologist, I just did a Raiders show, and the zoologist was on the show in fucking Fort Lauderdale, right?
And the guy's been to Africa 35 times, he's a documentary filmmaker, and he said, he goes, dude, I was in Rwanda, and I watched a giraffe drinking, and a croc come out, grab that giraffe by the head, pull it into the fucking water, drown it, and twist its head off, and then its friends came in and ate the rest of that fucking giraffe, so nobody's safe, okay?
And by the way, you know what else ain't safe?
Baby elephants.
When they stick their tusk in the water, they'll grab that trunk and drown it.
They'll eat elephants.
Whatever's in the fucking water.
Oh, and by the way, did I mention that the ones in Tanzania weigh in at over 2,000 pounds?
What is the NDAA? That was the bill that essentially makes America a battleground, officially classifies it as a battleground so the military can come in and stop civil unrest.
Yeah, when you get to the point where you're just automatically opening up to the idea that you can't trust anybody, that everybody must be able to be scanned and stopped and searched.
And if you ever want to learn history, you know, whenever you say to somebody, well, you should learn the history of Ireland, the problem with that is that how do you, you know, a lot of young people, I get, like, texts after I do these things or tweets, and they say, hey, can you give me a reading list or whatever?
And the problem with educating yourself today is it's very hard to know what to read.
It's also very hard if I say, well, you should educate yourself on history.
What does that mean?
Do I pick up a book on history?
I mean, Jesus, who wants to slog through that?
No.
If you want to learn about history, if you want to learn about a history of the Middle East, you want to learn a history of Ireland, you want to learn a history of the founding of the State of Israel, which I'm reading now, a book called Exodus.
If you want to learn about Ireland, read a book called Trinity.
If you want to learn about the Arab world, the Middle East, read the Hajj.
Leon Uris is a guy who was a foreign correspondent, Who spent a great deal of time all over the world and happens to be a fucking brilliant writer.
He wrote most of his books in the 70s and the 80s and I think even the 60s, but he's considered a great writer.
And the point I'm making is that when you talk about how a society and its laws and its government can sneak up on you, if you read Exodus about what happened to the Jews in Poland and in Germany, You're talking about a group of people who lived there for 700 years, and many of them were very well established in all fields, whether it was science, academia, the arts, and things like that.
So when all this anti-Semitic behavior started occurring under Hitler's regime, and it started really in, like, 1933, Where stores are being broken in, articles being read about blaming the Jews for everything, people were being dragged out in the street and beaten up.
The majority of the Jewish people who were established in those societies were like, look, I go back generations.
I'm a German.
I'm as much a Jew as I am a German.
And by the way, I've written several books and my roots are in this society.
If you ever told any of them, That, well, your government's going to come round up all of you, all of you, and I'm going to give you some numbers in a second, and they're going to kill everybody you know, and worse, they're going to gas, torture, and starve them all in a systematic way in concentration camps.
That was a true apocalypse, and if you don't know anything about the Holocaust or World War II, then you're remiss because it's the worst event in recorded history, but it's also very important to study because you don't understand and can't fathom The depth of human evil until you see that.
Because here's what it was.
It wasn't mad men.
It was very rational, cool-minded men with shaved cheeks who sat in a room dressed in medals and in suits who came up with something called the final solution, which was to kill every single Jew in the world.
And they almost did it.
And in Poland alone, out of 3.1 million Jews who'd been there for 700 years, mostly in ghettos, but who had deep roots and huge contributions to that society and Germany, at the end of World War II, and this is just five, six years, there were 50,000 left.
All of whom were wretches, all of whom were starving, all of whom were coming out of the concentration camps like Birkenau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and all these things.
So if you really think that you're safe, or if you really think that giving anybody power over you, Is a good idea.
Is a good idea.
You're fucking wrong and you should pick up a history book.
And what makes this country very, very special and what you have to fight for is government by the people, for the people.
And that's very easy to forget.
And even George Washington said, you've got to be careful because people will invent laws to take their own power away from them.
That's what George Washington said.
And it is very human.
And if you look at anybody in power, I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat.
This is why I'm a Ron Paul supporter, because if you look at anybody in power, when you're in power, you have an impulse to try to solve a problem.
You want to solve a problem.
And the only way to do that, government does what?
It passes laws and it grows and it taxes.
Taxing and passing laws are two coercive measures.
That's what they do.
And you do need some laws.
You do need some taxation.
Let's be honest.
But when you have a central authority like that, the big question for anyone is, who is going to govern the governor?
This is the biggest enemy, and you have to be on guard of that all the time.
And by the way, it always is under good auspices.
It's always any society.
My God, even the Nazis, for God's sake, even the Nazis, that monstrous machine, defined what they were doing along what they would consider moral grounds.
Hitler was trying to quote-unquote Solve the Jewish problem, etc.
And the propaganda that had Ukrainians and Poles cheering on those firing squads as they were killing Jews, that's what happens.
And it's almost like it was the first event of that magnitude, a horrific event of that magnitude, where air travel had just become sort of a big player in the way the world functioned.
Because people could fly over you and drop shit on you.
Things changed very quickly.
They accelerated very quickly.
And it's just amazing that it's all within our capability of recording it and watching it.
These are women and these are infants and they all had names and they all had...
They all had families and they all had connections.
They were all as human as you and I. And it's very natural for us to kind of say, well, that was a long time ago and they may have looked at life differently.
No, they had all the same dreams.
They had all the same hopes.
They had all the same love.
They all had all the same bonds.
And it's overwhelming and too much for your heart to bear if you really think about what human beings have done to other human beings, especially the Holocaust.
It's why the Holocaust, that word, That word, the Holocaust, which I believe means the Great Fire, or a derivation of that.
That's why that word is used only for that specific event in history, because they did get burned.
They did get put in ovens, and all trace of them was washed away.
Because as the Russians and the Americans closed in on those camps, they had to get rid of all the evidence.
So they blew up all those gas chambers.
They burned the bodies.
They crushed the skulls.
And they would use other Jews to do it.
They would make you do it.
So you'd be 14 unloading bodies out of a fucking...
Think about this.
I mean, it's as crazy as it gets, right?
It's as worse and as depraved as it possibly gets.
But the way you get people to go about it is two things.
One is deception.
One is, and human beings have always done it, And I'll explain why we're living in a world where it's harder to do, but what you do is just misinformation, propaganda.
You say, hey, guess who's causing all your financial problems?
A group called the Jews, or a group called the Chinese, or a group called the blacks.
And by the way, they also kill their own kids and they're subhuman.
And you take young men who have no education or have been educated specifically and they're full of fire and what they go to war for is to protect what they consider their way of life.
See, I don't think people go to war for hatred.
I think people go to war because they're in love with their way of life and they're trying to protect their families.
They're trying to protect their way of life.
And that's how you create a real soldier and a dedicated patriot.
You create a sense of misinformation.
Young men who are 18 and 19 are not asking questions.
They're trying to be a hero.
And if it means having to kill all those bad guys over there, and even their kids and their women...
Well, their kids and their women are kind of subhuman.
You always create a subhuman...
Context for the enemy.
But the good news in 2011 is that it's becoming harder and harder to do because of the internet and we're all getting closer and closer together.
And it's easier to kind of empathize with somebody when you see them suffering, when videotape doesn't lie.
When you can hear their voices and they create political bodies and groups and they say, you know, look, we bleed and we cry just like you do.
And that's what I think has a lot to do with breaking down These natural, tribal tendencies that human beings have.
Because human beings are tribal.
We are tribal.
Even if you belong to one martial arts school, it's so natural for you to go, yeah, we're better, though.
Those guys over there kind of, yeah, they're fucking, they do that thug jitsu.
We do the original, pure.
You'll find that in anything, right?
We're tribal.
And look at teams.
Look at the nationalism involved in my team versus your team.
I mean, you know, these big rivalries.
But the good news is that I believe that, and I may be naive, but I don't think so, that pulling off something as horrific as what happened in the Holocaust would be very difficult, very difficult today, and almost probably impossible because too many of us would go, this is outrageous.
And those places, again, are pretty remote and still haven't, but most of Africa, I can't remember the number, but there are an inordinate amount of cell phones in Africa.
And during the violence in Kenya recently, people started videotaping soldiers raping women.
There was an earthquake in Ohio, and they found out, well, there's some controversy that it might be because they're drilling for wells, and that they actually had to shut it down because there was some recent activity from this drilling.
They've noticed that the activity has been higher than normal, and so they shut it down, and then just a little bit of time later, there was a 4.3 earthquake in Youngstown, Ohio.
Because we have water shortage in parts of this country, but apparently there's a massive aquifer that they say is going to push a lot of industry in that direction.
We had to divert water from the Colorado River, and the Owens Valley just dried the fuck out.
That's what Chinatown's about, where the Owens Valley had all these farmers and this way of life, and they were like, the powers that be came in and go, we need to grow fucking orange groves, and by the way, let's start the movie industry here because the weather's predictable.
We need water.
Fuck the Owens Valley.
Redirect the river over this way.
And all these farmers were like, my fucking sheep are dying.
Dude, you know, my buddy works for, like, the Secret Service, you know?
And you know they get calls all the time because, like, sometimes they'll get their foreign service guys who go in and they'll fucking take, like, they try to mix in with the locals and they'll take drugs and then they'll just end up in the middle of the fucking Amazon or the Congo and they have to get a search team to go find them because they took some fucking drug and there are several stories like that.
Or how about this?
How about this?
The guy during Haiti...
Not during this earthquake, but there was another disaster back in the 90s when people were trying to emigrate to the States, right?
And the guy...
They had one dude, some young dude who was basically at the embassy...
There's a long line of people trying to immigrate to the US and none of them were getting in, right?
So you basically just go, denied, denied, denied.
They had this one young guy who was like a shit assignment there, right?
And it's hot, there's a fan on him.
And he started, people kept lining up and he just kept going, he kept going, denied, fucking denied.
Finally started going stir crazy, right?
And he had this little, what's that Star Wars, who's this Star Wars character?
Okay, well, so he starts going, Boba Fett says no, right?
Right.
All of a sudden, the people started giving him Boba Fett offerings, okay?
So, like, a week later, Boba Fett has a fucking pile of everything from food to cigarettes, like a whole mountain, like right here, okay?
Then, a black market starts developing over Boba Fett dolls, Boba Fett costumes, and people started coming up with Boba Fett costumes and dolls and stuff, trying to get in because they thought that was kind of who you had to talk to.
They figured this guy was, they figured this guy's obviously talking to Boba Fett, and this guy, and he's a Boba Fett fanatic, so we should show allegiance to Boba Fett.
So people were coming and dressed like Boba Fett and the US Embassy had to be like, alright, we gotta fucking stop this.
Take that fucking doll out of here right fucking now.
Because I said, how much of this is like a group of men, a cabal of evil men, or how much of this is centrally planned, or people have different interests?
And he said, dude, it's not like that.
He said, what it is, is there's just a whole bunch of, and I'll give you another example of what's happening now.
He said, what it is, is there's a whole bunch of interests working, a whole bunch of money to be made, and everybody has a different opinion.
And some opinions win the day and others don't, right?
And so the State Department has their own agenda, the executive has their agenda, and everybody has their own agenda.
But ultimately enough shit starts to be kind of like talked about where you start creating an enemy, you start saying this might be a good idea for the following reasons, and pretty soon there's so much, there's so many sort of, there's so many groups of people that have a vested interest In going in, and usually it's an intellectual interest.
Usually it's like, I think we can bring democracy to the Middle East.
And that's a very grandiose idea and a grandiose plan.
Oh, and by the way, because it's going to make the world safer at the end of the day.
There are a lot of idealistic people involved in this as well, not just money people.
And all of a sudden, all this shit starts to come together.
And before you know it, you're fucking on your way to war.
And the way he described it made a lot of sense.
It's like a tidal wave.
It starts as a snowball, and before you know it, you've got a fucking massive tsunami on your hands of just momentum.
And there's just so many interests and there's so much movement in one direction that what are you going to do then?
Call it off?
No.
You got weapons of mass destruction.
He's used them before.
Let's go take out the fourth largest army in the world because it's not safe.
And, you know, let's make the world a better place.
And you get a bunch of people like that who do it.
And then, of course, you get a lot of people behind the scenes going, we can make a lot of fucking money.
Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon saying, dude, they're going to need a lot of weapon systems.
They're not going to need them, but we can sell them to them.
We have an $11 billion arms deal with Iraq right now, okay?
And it's about to go through.
But here's the thing.
Can't give Iran the arms because Maliki is not agreeing to the terms we set for him, which was you have to share power with the Sunnis because we don't want a civil war there and we have a lot of American interest already in Iraq.
There's a lot of American companies making money.
Now here's the thing.
You tell a politician to veto that $11 million arms deal.
You know how many people that employs?
You know how many constituents are voting based on the fact that they get a job because of $11 billion?
You're going to take $11 billion out of the American economy?
Oh, and by the way, we're going to give that to you, Maliki, so you can create your own army of Shia to keep the Sunnis down, and that's called a civil war.
I think the private sector makes a lot of money off of the decisions made in government, and so there's a profit to be made from war.
And if that's the case, it does raise an important question.
If war becomes big business, let me give you another example.
Iran.
Iran has a nuclear program, at least we're trying to stop, right?
We did sell bunker buster bombs to Israel about three years ago.
Now, what are bunker buster bombs?
Bunker buster bombs, and these particular ones we sold to Israel, are bombs that can penetrate deep into the earth and take out an arsenal.
So if you have a nuclear facility that is churning out weapons, these bunker bombs are supposed to go into the earth and blow that fucking facility to smithereens.
Now we don't want to do it, but maybe Israel will drop those bombs because they know where Iran is making these weapons.
Do you think that the Americans are sitting back and using the Israelis as a proxy to see if those fucking bunker buster bombs work?
There seems to be a lot of noise headed Iran's way, it seems to me.
There seems to be something brewing in Iran.
They have taken a very aggressive stance with the Gulf, with blocking off oil routes.
Now, and the U.S. Navy is saying this is unacceptable.
There's a whole bunch of noise going on.
It seems to me things are moving in a direction that is not in Iran's favor.
And let's see what happens next.
But a lot of money.
A lot of money.
We probably gave those weapons to Israel for no pay, but we want to see if they work.
Ron Paul would say, the only way to fix it is to make the government...
The government that everybody feeds off of and that has a lot of power to make these decisions, you make the government smaller.
You take away some of government's power.
I just watched a speech by Ronald Reagan that he made in, I think, 1969, and it's called A Time to Choose.
And if he made that speech today, Ron Paul could make that speech today And it wouldn't be any different at all.
He talks about how 37 cents of your dollar is gone to the government before you even wake up in the morning.
37% of your day is working for the government, and the government keeps getting better.
He talks about the war on poverty, and he did a little arithmetic.
He goes, if we take the money that we spent on poverty, and he takes a list of how many poor people there are, he said everybody should be getting $4,600 a year.
Instead of having some asshole in a fucking suit that represents your state, you know, go up in front of everybody and misstate everyone's position, instead of having that, you could have the people actually connect.
You're not alone in your thinking, and the conversation we're having is being had all over the country, in both Democrat and Republican circles.
This whole Occupy Wall Street movement is in some ways voicing some of those frustrations.
I'll give you a piece of good news, in my opinion, and a piece of good news that we've never experienced before.
You hear a lot of people talking about inequality of income, and there is.
However, we are experiencing, and I'm stealing this from a Wall Street Journal article, so I'm paraphrasing this, but there is an equality of consumption that we've never experienced before.
Let me tell you what I mean by that.
Take somebody who's very wealthy, very wealthy, You have a lot more money than I do.
I do pretty well, but you got a lot more money.
Your life and my life are very similar.
The only difference might be that you drive a faster car, but we sit in the same traffic.
You drive a Porsche, I drive a Prius, but we basically sit in the same traffic.
But the interior of my car, not that much different.
I got GPS, I got a great stereo, I got everything I need.
You wear the same clothing I do.
I guess you could wear Armani and Versace.
You never would, and the rest of that is fluff.
We eat the same amount of food.
And if you look at most people, and I'm talking about the middle class in this country, including people who are struggling for money and stuff, most people, the average amount for a wedding spent in this country is somewhere around $26,000 a year.
I mean, $26,000.
That's a lot of money.
So what we have now is an economy where very rich people invent something.
Say it's an application or a computer or something that we all use, okay?
But they don't make any money unless they can generate mass consumption of that product.
Most of us own a computer.
Most of us own a cell phone.
And that cell phone has all kinds of applications.
Most of us have a TV that allows us to watch pretty much anything we want.
High-def TVs cost $700.
The technology that you have in your phone.
Let's take the old Wall Street.
The first Wall Street with Michael Douglas.
He pulls out a Motorola phone that weighs two pounds and cost $3,995 back then.
Yeah, so we have access, and we have access to information and inspiration.
How many people listen to your podcast who don't have a lot of money, but they get inspired, that you turn them on to things that they can afford?
You know, this is what the good news is about.
Yes, we may have inequality of income, but we have equality of consumption like we've never seen before, and that's fucking, that's a big deal, and nobody talks about that.
My buddy, the other guy, the CIA guy said to me, he said, he spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, and he said they were talking to a dude on the border of Pakistan and of Afghanistan, Waziristan, that lawless area.
The guy didn't know what Pakistan was.
He lived on a mountain.
He was like, what are you talking about?
That's not my reality.
And you want a guy in Kandahar to have loyalty to the government in Kabul?
And then we go out there, and you talk to anybody who really knows about the country, including those soldiers who've been there a long time ago, what the fuck are we doing, man?
You can't build...
The U.S. is going to build a nation?
Afghanistan?
You're going to build a nation where there never was one?
Because the notion came out of those schools in Peshawar and in Saudi Arabia.
Oh, most of those schools, all of those schools in Peshawar and came out, were financed by...
Saudi Arabia, our number one ally in the Middle East, okay?
They were financed by that.
Why?
The Saudis are Wahhabis.
That is a puritanical sect of Sunni Islam, okay?
Obsessed with purity, okay?
So let's start there.
That's what happened.
You have to go all the way back to when the Soviets actually invaded Afghanistan and we were financing the Mujahideen and everything else with the help of the ISI, which is the Pakistan sequence.
Is it true, you would be the great guy to ask about this, because I watched it in a documentary where they were saying that the whole term for jihad was originally a war on your own vices.
And they were afraid they were going to lose control of Afghanistan.
where do we have Afghanistan never really had nobody ever wanted to be in Afghanistan you didn't want to be living in the Khyber Pass it's too forbidding there wasn't oil there they say there's minerals there Good luck.
Nobody fucking wants the minerals.
We get plenty of minerals from Africa and places that are much easier.
Nobody wants to go into Afghanistan.
It's always been a group of unruly, very proud people.
When you talked to, I think it was Tony Snow before he died, they were saying, well, what are you guys going to do about this situation?
He said, guys, when we're in the Oval Office and you've got a bunch of people there with all the top brass in the military and the CIA and then you've got the State Department, we do exactly what you think we do.
Try sitting in a room with 30 people and come up with one idea.
Try to come up with one thing everybody agrees on.
You don't.
Everybody's banding ideas back and forth.
People are disagreeing with each other.
People are pissed off because you talked over me.
Nobody can get the president's ear.
And that's what happens.
And then the president has to go into a room with three of his advisors and they have to fucking go, we've got seven options that we've been presenting.
Well, we would have to step up and say somehow or another we're going to boycott.
You couldn't boycott the whole country.
That would be ridiculous.
You couldn't do that.
You couldn't make a few people that won't play nice internationally responsible for the whole country.
What the fuck would you do, man?
Well, you know, what you've got to do is, somehow or another, get it into people's minds when they're really, really young, really young, that the world is so much better if you're cool to people.
And then once they get there, I mean, it's spreading that...
And he said something, and it goes to the internet and stealing and things.
Look, he said, when you give people, like you do it here with the brain thing, you say, if you don't like it, don't even send it back, we'll give you your money back.
When you do something like from a business plan, and he talks about it, he says, just tell people you'll give them either, you can tell people you'll give them double their money back.
And people go, well, people will abuse it.
I'll go broke.
Guess what?
About 2% of the people out there always abuse it.
Always.
And the rest of them don't.
And the bottom line is, it's like stealing music, okay?
Once you started getting out there that piracy is stealing, Most people, and I don't steal fucking music, okay?
Some people do.
But I was like, I'm an artist.
I'm about to come out with my one-hour special.
I'm like, I don't want people stealing it.
I mean, it'd be nice if they paid for it, I guess.
I feel guilty.
I feel guilty because I listened to a great song and all the effort that went into it.
I don't want to steal it.
And actually, most people, most people don't steal music.
Most people go to iTunes.
unidentified
Except for ages 12 to 25 because they have no money.
The reality is what Brian was talking about earlier.
Is that Brian Callen was talking about earlier, is that this is a pretty good time to live.
You know, we could fix it on the negative shit.
This is a pretty good time to live.
And it's 2012. You know, this big change that everyone's going to look back on, you know, like the idea that the Mayans were correct and the time wave zero novelty theory.
Time Wave Zero Novelty Theory was a mathematic algorithm created by Terence McKenna, the great psychedelic bard and author and botanist.
And he went on a mushroom trip in the jungle and came up with this idea based on the I Ching, because he had studied the I Ching, and he came up with this idea that the I Ching was a map of time.
And that he was going to construct a mathematic algorithm based on the I Ching that would literally track progress and human innovation, you could track it like a wave that it was a mathematical program.
And it came to a point of what he called ultimate novelty, which means something, novelty meaning innovation, novelty meaning some new thing that had not existed before, or some new branch of some new thing, and that a period of a point of ultimate novelty will be achieved December 21st, 2012.
Now here's what's fucked up about that.
That is the exact same day, to the day, as the end of the Mayan calendar.
So he came up independently on his own with this crazy mathematical algorithm that I don't even know if it's real.
It sounds ridiculous, but if you believe the guy, he says that he did not know the end of the Mayan calendar until much later, that he had been working on this mathematical program for like 30 years, bringing in mathematicians to work on it, and apparently there's some debate over whether or not he had fudged numbers.
I'm way too dumb when it comes to math to understand any of it, but the idea has always fascinated me of, even if it's on a date, December 21st, 2012, even if it's on a date, but the idea of it, the idea that it's inevitable, that it really must have, it's going to happen.
And if you look at how fast shit has happened to get to the point we're at today, and just a few hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years ago, the way we were living is just unrecognizable.
The hard surfaces on the roads, and things flying in the sky, and the lights in the city.
unidentified
Or that you knew, and now you know his name because he made up this whole bullshit, you know, like he knew the Mayan calendar from the whole time, you know what I mean?
He just had this crazy idea that came to him on mushrooms, and the most ridiculous aspect of it was he asked the mushrooms, why me?
Why are you giving this to me?
And they said, because out of the thousands of years that we've been in this field, no one's ever come up to us who had the I Ching in their head before.
So what it was, was to him, was he happened to be in a place where he had studied some incredibly ancient...
Chinese divination system.
It's a real mystery what the I Ching is, because it's a method of fortune-telling, and it seems to be incredibly effective, statistically, numerically effective.
It's really weird.
People try to figure out what it is about the I Ching, but it works more than it doesn't work.
And what does that even mean?
I don't know.
I don't understand it, but it's based on hexagrams.
It's based on these patterns, and McKenna coming into this field, eating these mushrooms, tripping his fucking balls out, had this ridiculous idea that what the I Ching really was was the Chinese, at some point in history, a long fucking time ago, had figured out a map of time.
You could look at it that way, but I think he made a lot more money off of lectures on psychedelics than he ever did on this Time Wave Zero thing.
When you look at the fact that the guy worked on it for over 30 years, it seems to be some weird labor of love and obsession that he had.
I don't know if it's correct.
I don't know if it makes any sense at all.
I don't know if it's total horseshit.
I just think it's fascinating that a person would spend so much time Making a correlation between the I Ching and a 13-cycle, 28-day lunar calendar that is apparently more accurate than the calendar that we employ today.
And that you could use the I Ching as a calendar, and the I Ching was somehow or another some map of waves.
And that novelty and positive things, it's never a steady rise to the top.
What I think is interesting about what you're bringing up is that the fact of the matter is with technology, and we've talked about this before, we're probably going to live, if you live long enough for the next 30 years, we're probably going to live through things that are going to take our entire paradigm of reality and what we see as reality and certainly the world we live in and destroy the entire thing.
I think that the questions of being a human being will always remain.
I think there are questions that we ask ourselves as human beings.
What is fulfillment?
Who am I? What am I doing here?
Those are questions that...
That's a responsibility you can't run away from.
It's why I love Seneca and reading those guys, because you read those fuckers.
And these dudes who sat around thinking 2,500, 3,500 years ago, and they came up with questions that you still have to answer.
And most of us, most of us, when you read that shit, you go, What happens to you is you go, oh, I'm living in a fucking, I'm living in a glass house or a box of cards.
Like most of my belief system, most of how I live my life, a lot of times, you know, when you read it, you go, there's not a lot of scaffolding for that.
There's not a lot of, you know, there's not a lot of like, I can't really justify it along true moral or truthful terms.
And that's what Socrates and Seneca would do.
He would just ask you questions like that.
It's really interesting.
You know, you kind of, you kind of, that's why reading the dialogues is such a mind fuck.
Because all it is is just a series of questions, and you go, hmm, fuck.
Well, I believe this, and I have some standing, and now you're asking me a question I don't really have the answer to.
During the Dark Ages, when Alexander was burned down and during the Christian Crusades and also when the Ottoman Empire came in and took over and things, a lot of this knowledge was lost.
But the people that actually were the only people that could write back then in Europe were primarily the Irish clergy.
The priests.
And they would write down, they copied these books, they painstakingly copied a lot of these books and carried them around with them and carried them in their oral traditions as well.
And so a lot of that information, like the Greeks and all the things that we base our political system on, Was carried through, at least the thesis of this book, was carried through by these Irish scribes, by the Irish clergy, who during the Dark Ages kept the tradition of this alive in books and kept their own libraries hidden.
Isn't it amazing when you look back at really, really ancient academics, like when people would go to Egypt, a lot of the Greeks would travel to Egypt to study.
At one point in time, there was obviously some gigantic pool of information.
There was a much more advanced society than we give credit to.
Did you hear about that guy that got arrested in Italy because they thought that he was building some sort of a military thing and they were going to storm his house with guns until he let them in?
He had a modest home in the countryside and then inside his house was a giant fucking construction that went into the hills and the mountains and it was a beautiful cathedral, incredible artwork.
I mean, this place was massive and stunning.
And stunning.
And it was him and just a few friends, and somehow or another they've been working on this for 20, 30 years.
And everybody was like, what is this crazy asshole doing digging a hole?
Dude, you have to look at it.
Because it is art for the sake of art.
He didn't want anyone to know about it.
And it's beautiful.
He has rooms that are like Egyptian rooms with like hieroglyphs and sarcophagus.
It's online.
Just look up Italian, home, mountain, look up not whole...
Well, what I mean is that the craft of stone making and when they take a tapestry and two generations of artists would work on it.
So one generation would work on it for his lifetime, then die, and then the next generation, his apprentice, would come and finish it.
And all those things, when you look at St. Peter's Cathedral, that was a group of people that were so divinely inspired, the notion that they were just making what you said, art for...
For art's sake, as an homage to something much rare.
I mean, it is some of the most stunning shit, and I don't like that stuff.
I was over to these people's house.
They're very nice folks, but they have this ridiculous mural, like a painted mural on the wall, and it's like bad art, and it looks so like a boat and shit, and some fucking asshole fisherman.
You're like, what are you doing here?
unidentified
There's a restaurant by my house that just hired their daughter, I think, to do it.
The greatest thing, the greatest fucking, the greatest line for Michelangelo when he, and to define what you are as a person in art, was when he looked at the fucking, at this huge piece of marble, and he's about to carve the statue of David, and his girlfriend at the time, his one love, said to him, what, how are you going to do this?
And he said, it's already in there.
I just have to get all this stuff out of the way.
And it's a great metaphor for art or a human being.
You start a piece of shit, and if you can delete enough stuff, just through hard work and carving and stuff, you can become a better person.
But what I'm saying is like doing something that people enjoy really is like the fucking key to happiness in life.
It's like doing something that makes other people happy in some way.
It really is the key to happiness in life.
It's one that so few people ever figure out and that's one of the reasons why people are so fucked up is because so many people have this selfish, it's all about me attitude and you don't understand that you will never be happy.
Not only that, you won't be prosperous either.
You won't be because you are a part of a gigantic system.
And you are in a symbiotic relationship with every human being that you come in contact with.
So when you fuck them over, you fuck up your whole system.
You spread out negative energy, you put out bad ripples, and it comes back.
You've got to be able to assess your objective strengths and weaknesses at a moment's notice, and you've got to be able to do it completely accurately.
You can't be burdened down by some ego that has you convinced that you're right, and you're doing it together and avoid all the...
Yeah, but most people don't even know what a tag is, dude.
Most people just want something real clean.
Click on, here's the shit you wrote.
Click.
Well, I'll get that done eventually, but my point is that I would never write anything on purpose trying to be funny.
I would just sit down and just look, man, the world is funny.
This is just stupid shit that's going on all day, every day.
If you can't see some funny in the world, but it's also that that's some funny, especially when you're writing blogs, It's always balanced out with the shit that's not funny.
That makes the funny stuff even funnier.
It's got to be whatever the fuck is coming out of there, and then I just extract the jokes from that.
The stuff that's actually funny, I extract it from that.
you know they have this group of people that want something to lead the way dude a following is very hard to manage what we're talking about don't fucking listen to your following too much because you start getting you start believing the hype you get older and people like I go on the road yes but appreciate it It's a responsibility.
Just don't let it define you because then you will start trying to be a certain way that I think it's all about when it happens to you that you develop a following anyway.
The real issue is striking versus jiu-jitsu because you can't do that every day with striking.
It's just too difficult.
I mean, if you have a great group of people where you guarantee, like, hey, man, let's just go light, and you really do not try to kill each other, that's awesome.
Norm was like the gentleman that we were talking about earlier today, the very successful gentleman, and we won't mention his name, who doesn't know how to spar.
He just tries to kill guys in the gym, and they tell him, listen, man, you're not going to get any fucking sparring partners.
Because that's a psychological war that's going on right there.
And if you can get a guy flustered and call him a bitch and get up in his face and get him thinking about your emotions, that's the intelligent thing to do.
If you were an intelligent fighter, you would add that.
I know it's beautiful to be a George St. Pierre and to bow like you're a martial artist and to never be talking shit in the middle of a fight.
Do it completely respectfully.
And he gets it done masterfully.
But, in my opinion, I like watching a guy like Nick Diaz get in there and go, what, bitch?
I mean, they're very boxing-centered, and why not be?
Because, look, first of all, everyone knows their jiu-jitsu's nasty, so you don't really want to take them down, necessarily, and wind up in their guard.
You know, I think what happened was, I think, you know, Nate got pissed off on himself after that fight with Rory McDonald, and he said, you know what, fuck it, I'm kicking it up a notch, and decided, you know, 155 is where I was supposed to be, and, you know, just really get to it.
And that Pappy Abetti guy, I feel like he could beat anybody.
I feel like if you fuck up and let that guy punch you in the face, if somehow or another you zig when you shoot a zag, you get caught, which happens to guys.
You know, for the most part, most guys, they came up with one discipline or another, and the best thing they could hope for was to be really good at something.
Whether they're really good at wrestling, so they take a guy down, or really good at striking, they just learn how to sprawl like Mirko Krokop.
You know, he never really became anything other than a striker.
He has a couple submission victories, but they're mostly after he, except the Randallman fight, mostly after he was fucking a guy up.
Nobody ever expected that Jon Bones Jones was ever going to exist.
you know before he existed nobody would have suspected that some brilliant young kid could come in here who was a a an excellent amateur wrestler with you know a few years of karate and taekwondo or something under his belt maybe not even a few years i should say like you know months of it but just you know practice some kicks and knew how to do them and then you get him with some ace trainers like mike winklejohn and greg jackson and they mold this kid into some fucking prodigy i
I would have never said that could have happened before, that some kid could have been in the game only like three years and just dominate guys like Shogun, dominate guys like Machida.
You know, he put Machida to sleep with a standing guillotine.
When's the last time anybody put a high-level champion to sleep with a standing guillotine and then dropped him like it was Mortal Kombat?
But they're super dedicated and they love the sport.
you know, and they get a lot of attention, so they do it a lot, and their parents love it, and Come on, man.
Those kind of guys, that's the next wave.
So as crazy as Hoist Gracie was in 1993, Jon Jones is in 2012, and as crazy as Alistair Overeem is in 2012, you're going to have some new dude that's going to be 10 years from now or whatever, and he's going to have some mad distance between them.
But when you're taking on a guy who's physically much bigger than you, right?
Anderson is...
Were we asking how tall he is?
6'4", yeah.
He's got 6'4", but he has a reach that's bigger than some 7' tall people.
He's got a crazy reach.
Yeah, I mean, I just said that, and that's real.
His reach is the longest of anyone in the UFC, including Semmy Schilt, who used to fight for the UFC. So his ability to touch you with his hands is like right up there with Stefan Struve.
Stefan Skyscraper Struve has a...
Than Jon Jones does.
So he's just got...
He's got everything going for him.
He's got intelligence.
He's got confidence.
He's got the courage to get in there and fucking throw down against the best fighters in the world even though he's only been doing it for three years.
And he's got the athleticism to pull it off.
And he listens to everything.
And you listen to interviews with him.
The dude is on YouTube all the time watching wrestling matches and learning moves and putting them in his head.
He's a fucking...
He's loving that he's the baddest motherfucker in the world.
He said that he's got an announcement, and he said, my next move after Mark Munoz, what he said was, I don't know, but if I was George St. Pierre or John Jones, I'd take a real deep gulp right about now.
It's a little more, I mean, every doctor has their own philosophy and doctors have their own specialty, but some doctors don't like to do it that way because they believe that it compromises the strength of the patella tendon and it makes the knee a little bit wigglier.
I have both.
I had this one done.
My left knee was done.
Patella tendon graft.
My right knee was done with a cadaver.
And the right knee came out way better.
Maybe it was a better doctor.
That's very possible.
But the guy that I did in New York was a top-notch guy that did New York Knicks and did basketball teams and shit.
He was supposed to be really good.
But it took a long time before that knee felt right again.
They take a chunk out of your bone and they slice your tendon.
They take a strip of that tendon and a chunk out of your shin bone so they pull it off intact in one thing and then they open you up and screw that in place and that becomes your new ACL. Yeah.
In a four-hour body, that's why it says those Soviet coaches and some of those guys, the way they get you conditioned in Olympic condition, they make you walk really fast for 15 minutes.
And every day you have to cover more ground.
So walking is your aerobic exercise.
And if you walk speedwalk for 15 minutes as fast as you can, you'll get in the best shape of your life, especially if you do it uphill.
I went to Dan Gable's camp for two weeks, I remember, and I'm realizing, if this is what it takes to train in college, I don't want to fucking be a college wrestler.
I don't want to get up and sprint.
For an hour in the morning.
I was 17. I was like, fuck this.
I did it.
Then I came back my senior year and did pretty fucking well just because I'd been in Iowa.
So I remember watching when he first started fighting in the UFC. I'm just like, man, these guys are coming, man.
I always knew they were around.
I always knew from my time in wrestling, there was always guys that would go to the States and watch the best guys in the States go out to the division champions.
We had a kid in our, when I was a sophomore, when I was a sophomore in high school, we had one kid that was in like national level, who smoked cigarettes too, by the way.
Yeah, Mark Collin.
And he was a great fucking guy, like a really intense, passionate dude.
And I remember one time, I believe the coach's name was Hurwitz.
But this Mark Colling guy would have this fucking crazy practice and everybody would be dying, hands on their knees, and Colling would run across the fucking room and slide down on his knees and go, come on, let's go, who's next?
And just wanted to keep wrestling, wanted to keep going, wanted to keep drilling.
And the coach pointed at him and he goes...
There's guys like that in every weight class.
He goes, you better get that in your head.
There's guys like that in every weight class.
And I remember realizing myself, you know, being 14 years old or whatever I was, you know, I was either 14 or 15. And I was looking at him and I was going, my God, like this.
Yeah, you got to know.
You got to know that there's dudes out there that are willing to take it like that.
What is the human athlete going to look like a hundred years from now?
Because a lot of things going on, like Venus and Serena Williams, okay?
They're going to have sex and they're going to make a baby.
And I can only hope they have sex with some Olympic athlete motherfucker and we see what's possible.
And everybody just keeps doing that to the point where it just becomes the number one seed on the planet Earth and just see what is possible with this human form.
She's going to use you like a dildo and just grab you by your little asshole and stuff you inside her pussy.
Could you imagine if you could just decide, I want to be a 10 foot tall woman because men have been fucking with me, I'm just going to walk around kicking guys in the balls and shove them.
The idea is, can you stop that technology from getting to that point, and can you keep it out of the hands of a person who would use it for a terrible thing?
Right, but will there come a time where we have to stop people from becoming 10 foot tall, attacking the giant women, stomping on dudes and shit?
I mean, could you imagine if the manipulation of actual physical life, if it actually gets to a point where you can design what you want to look like, and like you can say, Mom, Dad, I've decided to be one of the blue people from Avatar, and you just decided.
Because if there's no morality and there's no humans that are in control of it, clearly it's going to get to a point where it's going to be wild, wild west for genetic manipulation.
I've been in a car with another friend of ours who we talked about earlier in the podcast, Josh Adam Myers, and maybe a drunk driver hit him, but I don't know if that's real.
You're always, like, whenever I think, you know, you're just like Joey Diaz and Burt Kreischer or Duncan Trussell.
Whenever I think you're out of interesting shit to talk about, you come with a wave of new things and I swear, man, when you were talking about the Holocaust, I've always been aware of the Holocaust, of course, but there's something about the way you were describing it that it was shining like some extra light on how fucking crazy and barbaric it was.
You were saying it so eloquently, it really made me tune in to how chaotic and sane and disgusting and horrific it really was, man.
The people who founded this country knew that shit could go wrong.
So they had a bunch of things in place.
And one of the things that Benjamin Franklin said, and you should never forget this, that he who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither.
Thank you to The Fleshlight for sponsoring our podcast, as always.
Everything we sponsor, everything always.
We will never sponsor anything that we don't believe in.
And both Brian and I, and even Brian Callen, have fucked these things, and I'm telling you, it's way better than beating off, and you know you're going to beat off.
Stop playing games.
Just go ahead and order one.
And when you're nutting your little fake vagina thing, and you're like, ugh, you'll be like, Joe Rogan was right!
Thank you to Onnit.com, makers of Alpha Brain, Shroom Tech Sport, Shroom Tech Immune, and New Mood.
All different types of supplements for different things.
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Pretty wicked, from what I understand.
But I don't understand any of this shit.
I'm just talking out of my ass.
I just work here.
If you go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link, enter in the code name ROGAN, you will get 10% off all that shit.
And always, everything on it is 100% money back guarantee.
If you don't like it, Just fucking tell us and you get your money back.
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Find the ingredient list online.
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O-N-N-I-T. Okay, January 27th, the Chicago Theater is still not quite sold out.
The whole bottom is gone.
Now they opened up a new top layer.
So there's still some tickets left.
It's going to be me, Duncan Trussell, and Joey Diaz.