Joe Rogan and Daniele Bolelli debate religion’s role in morality, from Las Vegas as a "carnival for the slave" to the Taiping Rebellion’s millions of deaths under extremist interpretations. Bolelli contrasts Taoism’s intelligence demands with Confucianism’s rigid guidelines, while Rogan questions if government debunking of faith would spark chaos—mirroring fundamentalists’ zeal. They critique drug prohibition’s black-market dangers, citing LSD’s original formulation vs. street versions, and explore legalization’s potential to redirect law enforcement jobs toward safer alternatives like forestry. Bolelli’s book Fifty Things You Aren’t Supposed to Know About Religion teases deeper dives into history’s darkest religious hypocrisies, leaving Rogan’s audience with unsettling questions about power, belief, and systemic control. [Automatically generated summary]
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Powerful.
Danielle Ibole is in the house.
What is it?
unidentified
Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Brian, you're like a 12-year-old DJ. That's like the kind of sound effects I would be really into if I was a DJ and I was 12. Yeah, or it sounds like a sports broadcast, you know, like, this week on NBC Sports!
That it is that we live in 2012 and we have this incredible depth of religion that's still controlling our lives.
How is it possible that something that seems so, like, it seems so, if you're rationally looking at it, you would go, okay, maybe there's some truth behind any of this.
Maybe.
Maybe there's some truth behind the origins of the creation of the universe.
No, but I mean, some of the things are because they boil down to eternal type of questions that no one has an answer to, you know?
And so the fact is unless, you know, people always say, oh, screw religion.
In that case, we go for science and reason and we need to be rational.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, reason is a great tool, but if it doesn't give you answers to the things that scare the hell out of people, people are going to want some answers, whether they're bullshit answers or not, doesn't matter.
It's like, give me some answers because otherwise it's too damn scary.
How nuts would it be if you died and you really were at a gate in the clouds?
How psychedelic would that be?
If you really did have a dude, St. Peter, who's like the FBI, who's just been following your life since you were a baby, and he's like going over a day, why'd you do this?
I wonder if that ideal, this ideal of having to live a karma-free life and having to have done only good things, only be pure, and then you get to a moment.
Are they envisioning a moment of ultimate enlightenment?
I mean, what is the idea of the heaven?
Like, where is it coming from?
Is it coming from the need for the next level?
Like, what would be the best possible scenario?
The best possible scenario is all loved ones would be in the clouds forever and ever.
But really, how fucking long would that last before you're bored as fuck?
The reality is, when you get people and you just let them go free like that, you give them 24-hour free reign, go drink, and you just wind up doing ridiculous shit.
Funny though, because you see these people that are going all wild, doing all this crazy shit, and you know that they are the ones who are at 9am at work, in suit and tie, and you're like, this is the carnival for the slave, you know?
I know, it must be a fucking grind to try to go back to work after a weekend of that.
But people who live there, man, they must get an extraordinary view of humanity.
They would be like great psychologists.
People who live in Vegas, they probably understand a lot about people.
If you work at a casino, say if you're like some dude, you could be like a guy who's like a real crafty dude who lives in Vegas could really describe humanity in a very unusual level.
I mean, there's no way he could be talking this much if he doesn't have a belief.
But anybody who believes something that they can't really prove and believes it to a point where they're willing to base their lives on it like that...
If a girl, like, had a diaper on, she had shit all over it, and she was really hot, and you had a bunch of napkins and, you know, some hot towels and what, you would clean her ass and then fuck her.
Do you think that the Bible was initially created just to try to keep people in line?
Do you think it was created like, look, these are some stories, this is some lessons that we've learned, and then it just kind of like got out of control?
Sometimes you use it as a tool to control people's behavior if you feel that they are too fucked up, but also it's an internal thing.
I think it's not just, I know this is bullshit, but I'm gonna feed it to them just so I keep the crazies in line.
I also think that some of the people themselves who start some of these things feel it, need it, they desperately need it to the point where They will, they are going to be the first one to stick their own lives on it.
And that's, I guess, the Santorum thing.
You know, you want to live that way.
I mean, I think you're nuts, but whatever.
It's your life.
You should be free to do whatever you want.
When you want to impose it on everyone else, that's when you piss me off.
And really, the shit that's the weirdest is the oldest.
That's nonsense.
We need like a new behavior standard guide for humans.
That's what we need, instead of a Bible.
Just a behavior standard guide, so we can all get through this world.
Like, these are the rules that we agree to.
Instead of bestowed upon us by a higher power, Yeah, you definitely shouldn't do most of the shit the Bible tells you not to do.
Don't be killing anybody.
Don't fuck your neighbor's wife.
All that stuff.
That's all good.
Yeah, you really should.
Those are good.
But we need some more of those.
And we need like a comprehensive guide just based on what we all know to be right.
We all know.
I think this is the best time ever to do something like that because even though people are complaining that times are tough and unemployment is bad, and it certainly is, the economy is in a terrible position, but it's still better than any time in human history.
There's really been no better time as far as safety, as far as the access to get food and medicine.
If there's ever a time for us to get our shit together, like on paper, now is it.
Like together as like a group of humans, instead of bound by some crazy words that were written first in ancient Hebrew.
First of all, they were told as an oral tradition for like a thousand years first.
There's what are the official scriptures of every religion are one tiny part of what used to be out there.
And then people, I mean, you get to the cases of Christianity where literally they get to vote on which books are sacred and come from God and which ones are not.
I mean, can you believe that?
It's like somebody sit around the table.
It's like today right now.
We pull out some book and go, okay, what do you think, Brian?
A lot of these was, because it wasn't like, oh, we decide this is God's stuff, and so the other stuff, well, read it if you want.
No, it's like, we have to burn it, because it must be the devils, and so it must be terrible and horrible, and we need to squash any possible other alternative, and so let's burn them all.
So when something else pops up that shows a different side to it that wasn't made a part of the official canon, then it makes everybody feel like, what the hell is going on?
So we can't base our life on this, or can we?
I mean, most people are going to ignore it anyway, because otherwise it messes with their categories, but that's basically the attitude.
Think about the concept of faith, the stuff that's at the basis of Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
Think about the story that they all revere, they all think is a great idea.
God shows up, tells Abraham, I really think you should kill your son.
And they were like, well, I mean, I don't want to kill my son, but you know, if it's God speaking, well, in that case, sorry, boy, come on, you know, let's go.
He's about to kill him.
And then God sends an angel saying, no, no, no, wait, just kidding.
Just testing your fate.
You know, just checking you passed the test.
You did very well.
And now you'll be rewarded for it.
Last time I checked, when you hear these embodied voices telling you you should kill people, listening to that is now what should make you the guy who everybody looks up to and thinks, what a great example of fate.
Just because it's not part of the official canon doesn't mean that it's all good stuff.
It's easy to fall into the pattern of, oh, these evil bastards manipulated the things, put on these horrible things in the books, and so everything that got squashed must be good.
No, not really.
Some of the stuff that got squashed is probably even worse.
I love the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls is always linked to crazy shit.
It's always UFOs and mushrooms.
It's like every wacky, crazy story is linked to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Even the fact that they found them.
You know, one of the coolest things is the science of putting together the pieces because a lot of them are in leather.
And one of the ways they put together the pieces was they did genetic testing on them to find out which ones came from the same animal so they knew that it was a piece of one skin.
Which probably over the last 2,000 years they found a bunch of those things, but you know, 500 years ago somebody would have looked at it and is like, hmm, you know, maybe I can start a fire with it or something.
Yeah, it's amazing to think that human beings can be so fucking creative and then so destructive.
What people don't understand is there was some sort of incredibly advanced society that created ancient Egypt.
I mean, to this day, there's a bunch of puzzles when it comes to The immense construction, the fact that how much just actual mass was moved, just the size of some of these obelisks.
I mean, it really is incredible society, and they knew a lot of things.
And all of it was wiped out in a fire.
And I think it was like two fires.
I think there was two different times they were attacked.
Like, man, how much further would we be if we knew all that shit?
But it's the same kind of stuff that happened even in other places.
Because when the Spaniards came over out here, when they conquered the Aztecs, and the Aztecs were one of the indigenous people that had big libraries and had books and had written language and the whole thing, and the Spanish approach was like, well, Does this look like the Bible?
I mean, it's like, you guys are not Christians, so you must be devil worshippers, and as such, we should burn everything you've ever done, because it's all crap.
It's one of the pyramids, the bottom of the pyramid.
There's this gigantic stone head of a snake.
And it's like, where the hell is the body?
It's like, because that one day of the year when the sun rises, it eats the shade of the steps in such a way that it looks like the body's coming down the pyramid.
It's like, Can you imagine building that whole thing and then you have shitty weather?
I mean, around there, you see the transition from tribal religions that tend to be more mellow, flexible, because they are not written down.
It's a relatively small society, so there's a lot more flexibility about the beliefs.
So they are generally mystic, shamanistic kind of beliefs.
But then when you turn them into a big society with, like, millions of people living in it, they become...
You still have a lot of the stresses of that stuff.
It's all about spirits and this and that.
But then they become much more rigid, official.
There's a clergy.
There's becomes a business.
There's the temple.
And you know, so it's kind of a more structured type of animism that in my mind kind of pretty much eliminates whatever is good about animism to begin with.
Yeah, I don't know if he's true or not, but the legend tells it that he would say that at night he would get there to write and suddenly he would see the shadow behind him.
And he wouldn't turn, but you could tell that it was Conan carrying a giant axe ready to chop his head off unless he wrote all night.
And he would stay there and like sweat and write and write and write.
Holy shit.
And by morning he was gone.
And so he could finally pass out and sleep.
But he would get ready for the next night because Conan would be back ready to chop his head off.
And I find it interesting that then he's the same guy who comes up with some of the concepts for UFC, you know, how the, uh, Gracie's had brought over.
Cause he was one of their students, you know, really this was one of the students of the Gracie's and he was the Gracie's.
They had, uh, Art Davy and they went Milius as kind of a creative, uh, director into the first UFC who started coming up with some of the ideas that then somebody else designed for the octagon and all of that.
And I'm like, I love that guy.
He created Conan the Barbarian and was at the beginning of UFC. That's incredible.
He has this giant monster truck with his face on the side of it and shit.
It's fucking awesome.
It's hilarious.
It's all lifted and shit.
We drove around and I even trained with him.
We went to the gym and trained.
We filmed everything.
We went and got chicken together.
Yeah, we went to Popeyes.
He's cool as fuck.
I like him.
I don't mean anything.
When I'm judging a fight, I'm not judging a fight, but when I'm doing commentary on a fight, All I'm trying to do is sort of objectively assess what I think someone could be doing differently to try to get themselves out of a spot if they're not winning.
You know, those are the guys that I always like really enjoy watching maybe the most.
If anything, I'm biased towards those guys.
But I just, you know, I appreciate all of it, man.
I appreciate wrestling.
I think wrestling is one of the most important aspects.
I always say that that's the biggest base of the pyramid.
I was never really a wrestler.
I only wrestled for one year in high school.
I don't have a bias.
When I'm looking at it, I'm really trying to look at it as objectively as possible.
And it changes all the time.
What's important?
It changes all the time because different levels of guys will enter the game, and that's when things get weird.
Things get weird when you get a really high-level striker that all of a sudden learns how to sprawl and is really good at wrestling.
Maybe we wrestled a little bit in high school, and then all of a sudden, boom, he's in the UFC, and you've got to deal with this.
You get to a really high-level, professional Muay Thai-type fighters who have really crisp striking, If one of those guys, one of those really top-end guys, one of those Ernesto Hoos in his prime, one of those guys steps into the UFC, everything changes in that division.
And then everybody has to figure that guy out now.
Everyone has to either evolve around his skills, find a way to be able to stand with him.
And also, he's creative, because there are a lot of guys today that are awesome athletes, they're great fighters, but they are It's kind of boring to watch because they do what everybody else does.
And so, I mean, don't get me wrong.
It's like all the respect in the world because you're doing something amazing.
But it's not that you'd watch somebody like Jon Jones or you'd watch Anderson Silva or you watch some of these guys.
There's like, it's a master at work.
You sit back and it's like, Jesus, what's he going to do now?
I like watching sometimes somebody's entire career kind of rather than watching a bunch of fights from different people.
Like watch one guy and watch back to back fights of their style and you see the evolution of their style and you really see a style there at work and it's awesome.
Yeah, that is a fascinating thing to watch guys evolve.
You know, I remember Anderson Silva's first couple of fights.
When he first started fighting in Pride, he was primarily a stand-up guy, and he got submitted when he went to the ground, like Takahashi, I think it was, got him in a mounted triangle, and then with wrestling shoes on, I think he did.
So that guy goes from that, and then all of a sudden he fights in the UFC against Chris Lieben, and now you see this master.
You know, you see, like, wow.
Like, the way he took Lieben apart, like, this is a master.
You know?
The way he moved, the way he, like, everything Lieben threw, he's, like, shucked out of the way and countered.
Bam!
These just precise counters, and Lieben's charging forward, and he's blasting them with kicks and knees and punches, and you're like, God damn, is he good!
Well, you know, one of the interesting things is that Forrest, I had an interview with him about that, and he told me that he had gotten knocked out twice in training camp before that fight.
So, right away, he probably shouldn't have even been in there, you know, right?
I mean, if you get knocked out in a training camp like two times, how many concussions are you allowed to have, like, really close back-to-back like that?
And you see Balfour going out about Jesus giving him the strength, and then you see somebody's open been split with blood everywhere, and you're like, really?
That's what was going on?
But I thought it was pretty funny.
But then again, with respect to Vitor, good guy, so I'm not picking on him, but...
People have a real hard time with that, though, when you start segmenting human beings and saying that some people are more worthy or some people are more capable or some people are more even evolved, you know?
So you think that if the government came out and said, hey listen, we did some studies, it turns out religion's totally bullshit, and we gotta start from scratch because we don't know what the fuck is out there.
What percentage of people do you think would just go completely batshit crazy and riot in the streets?
The one that pissed me off the most of these things is the euthanasia debate.
The fact that today, in 2012, with the technology that we have, you could let people die in a good way.
You could let somebody say, look, when I get to that point, I want to be able to shoot me an injection, you put me to sleep, you give me the other one that puts me out without pain.
I think it's a tricky thing, man, because I think there's going to be a lot of people that have cranky old grandparents, and they're going to push that motherfucker into that bed and go, look, he's been delusional right now, but he's been telling us to kill him for a couple days, so we're just going to go ahead and do this.
You have either people should do when they are young.
What do you want to do in X amount of situations and sign it and deal with it?
And unless they change their mind, that's what sticks.
Or they pick somebody that, in the same way as they pick somebody to manage their bank account, they pick somebody who can make those kind of decisions.
Wow.
um because otherwise really you are in the position where today if you have a sick dog you can take them to the vet and they are gone in no time with no pain but for human being you have to suffer every step of the way seeing your body go to crap and we're very uncomfortable with giving someone the power to shut off a life yeah we're very uncomfortable with it right it's tricky and in my mind is that's you know when you love somebody you care for somebody and you see them go down that path and that's what they want That's the biggest
thing you can do for them, is let them die the way they want.
It's kind of like even in the ancient world where people die left and right all around them, people are a lot less sensitive about human life.
It's like where you could have the gladiators and people clap and think it's cool because it's like they see people dying left and right all the time.
Hey, at least you got to die after you train a bunch of months, you look like a hero, you got your head chopped off, but hey, you know, you're going to die anyway in six months in some other way, so might as well.
I mean, Caligula was sort of, you know, to the tenth power, but Roman culture in general, Jesus Christ, these guys were violent to a point that, I mean, you know how today there's the, you shouldn't kill people in ways that are cruel and unusual, all of that.
They are all about, you know, the more violent, painful, and public we can make it, the better.
You will make a statement to the Fed that you don't fuck with the States.
The comedy club has these automated locks when they're closed, and so I went out to go, because we're not supposed to shit in this bathroom, because it shits and makes everybody smell the shit.
And then, of course, you grow up in an environment where, you know, your uncle kills all of your family, your brothers and sisters, and have your mom beat up to the point that she loses an eye and then gets her to starve to death.
You know, that's the environment you grow up around.
It's amazing that people ever get to a point of royalty, that people allow that hustle.
It's a very strange hustle that even though there's no fucking food, everybody's starving, there's no prosperity, there's no books, people are so silly, they'll believe that this one guy is worth more than everybody else.
He controls their armies and he's their noble leader.
You're out in the sun, your body produces vitamin D. That's why when you see like George St. Pierre when he's fighting and he gets tanned, that getting tanned like that actually makes you perform better.
Basically, the approach that Bruce Lee had to martial arts, I was trying to play adapted to religions, sort of like taking from a bunch of different religions to look at what all the big questions are, look at what some of the answers that are out there to make up your own thing as you go.
Because ultimately, to me, that's the only thing that anybody does.
Call it religion, call it philosophy, call it whatever makes you feel good.
But bottom line is a way of life.
And so I was like, do your homework, see what's out there, and come up with your own answers that way.
And actually, now that we did this one, they decided to go for it.
So I think I'll publish the other one toward the end of the year, you know, in the end of 2012. So this would be a really big book?
They asked me to cut it a bit.
And it's probably a good idea because it's probably too much stuff and people will be like halfway through like, ah, fuck it, no more.
But so yeah, I'll do that one, cutting it a bit.
And so that one I was super excited about.
But back then, they were actually smart because they know that this kind of stuff sells because it's...
Quicker, funny, weird, random, informative stories, in and out.
You know, you read one, next.
You know, you don't feel like you like that one, boom, you jump to the next one.
So there's 50 of them.
But yeah, it was weird, because when I originally signed up to do it, I wasn't as, now I'm really happy I did it.
When I started, I was like, eh, I need money, I guess, so sure, what the hell, why not?
But in my initial moment, and then it was in a shitty period of my life, because I signed on it, it was like, January 2011 or something.
And I said, sure, I'll get it done.
And they're like, do it by April.
Like, okay, that's a little tight, but sure, I can do it.
Then that's when everything went to shit with my wife, six weeks in the hospital, horrible things.
And then the second all that was over, I'm now responsible for a 90 month old baby to deal with her all the time.
And I have a month and a half left to write this stuff.
And I'm like...
Shit.
No, that's intense.
But the thing is, generally, I mean, I break more lows than I can keep track of, but one thing I don't do is I don't break my word ever.
And I told them, you know, I'll get it done.
They were even be nice about it.
They were like, you know what, we can push the deadline.
But like, no, man, you know, you wanted it done by then.
It's good for me.
It gives me something to focus on.
So rather than being there, you know, contemplating my navel, thinking the world sucks, I have something to do.
And not only that, but it has to be funny, light-hearted, at a time when my life is really not neither funny or light-hearted.
And so it's It was actually good.
It was awesome therapy for me because I could, you know, while I'm giving my daughter milk, I'm thinking about what the hell is the next line and I had to make it snappy, fast, you know, in quick fashion but funny.
I have one chapter, I think it's kind of the stuff I was telling you earlier.
It's called, If You're Too Stupid for Taoism, You Can Always Try Confucianism.
That always would make me popular in China.
I have...
Oh, this is great.
There's this guy.
The title of this one is, God is wearing dragon robes and wants you to kick Confucius' ass.
This is an awesome story.
In the 1800s, this one Chinese guy became converted to Christianity and he started saying that he was Jesus' younger brother, that he had this vision of God that was wearing dragon clothes and told him that Buddhism and Confucianism were all crap and it was his duty to stamp them out.
So he gathered up all these followers, started preaching in the countryside, getting all these people.
They became so powerful that they carved out their own state within China.
And they said that this was going to be...
I forgot how it's called.
It's something...
I have to find it because this is too good.
But it was called something along the lines like the Heavenly Kingdom of Everlasting Peace or something.
Well, the Heavenly Kingdom of Everlasting Peace ended up with the death of 20 million people in the course of civil wars between the Chinese government that was pissed over these guys trying to break away and this kind of weird version of Chinese fundamentalist Christianity fighting against these guys.
And eventually, when they laid the siege to his city, he was telling his followers, don't worry, God is on our side.
And, of course, he died shortly thereafter by eating some poison observed by mistake.
But it's brutal civil war wrecking China for a bunch, which is one of the reasons why a bunch of Chinese people migrated to California at the time when there was the gold rush is because southern China was getting wrecked left and right.
It's really fascinating the way the Chinese have their language, you know, it's phonetic obviously because they have totally different characters than we have, but the way they've expressed it in like the letters that we use, so it's bizarre.
Some of the words are really strange, especially like with X's and them and shit.
Yeah, I mean, my wife was Chinese and she was trying to teach me some Chinese and I was like, I mean, I couldn't say it because she kind of hated Japanese people, but I was thinking, Jesus, couldn't you just be Japanese?
I mean, I'm sure if that's where you come from, if you speak Chinese or something, yeah, English must be a pain in the ass.
But for anybody coming from a vaguely Latin-based background or any of the Western languages trying to pick up any tonal language, like Chinese, Vietnamese, some of those, it's just like, good luck with that.
Well, how bizarre is it when they have places like there's some spots in the Amazon that they're, you know, just recently discovered people in these tribes.
And this is the first contact they're having with the modern world.
And they're in there with their own wacky language.
Yeah, what folks don't know is there's a bunch of people living.
I mean, they are people.
They're living like people used to live thousands of years ago.
They're essentially...
You know, living an ancient tribal lifestyle that we didn't really even think existed anymore.
They have their own handmade tools and weapons, and they're wearing fucking crazy leaves on their dicks and shit, and animal skins.
And they're still in there and then these people who are logging are going deeper and deeper into the forest and they're just cutting it down at an astounding rate and there's all these incredible medicines to be found there and all these different plants and animals that haven't even been discovered yet and insects that haven't been discovered yet and who knows what the fuck's in there and they're just chopping that shit down left and right and these people oftentimes are getting caught up in this Where,
you know, they'd lived there in that forest, deep in there for thousands of years, and then all of a sudden, one day they wake up, and they're fucking, they're watching trees fall in the distance.
You're like, what the fuck is going on?
And they're just coming towards you.
It's an inevitable swarm of tree-eating machines, and all these people, these greedy people behind them, and they don't want to move around you, and they're going to chop your fucking trees down.
There's a thing called a Brazilian wandering spider that kills you by giving you an erection until you die.
Yeah, it fucking, it has something to do with nitric oxide, which is like the same stuff that's in, that works in like Viagra and stuff that makes your dick hard.
And apparently this spider hits you with it and it causes some crazy fucking reaction.
It's neurotoxin.
It's the most powerful neurotoxin known to man.
And your whole body just completely stiffens up in horrifying agony.
And your dick...
It gets hard as fuck.
So hard it's like breaking.
Like your dick is engorged and breaking.
And even if you survive it, which most people don't survive, but even if you do survive, your dick will be destroyed.
They'll have, like, jeans will have these new pockets or these tubes that just kind of go up to the side where you just put your dick in during the day because you have a rock heart.
And, you know, he would do it day after day after day and he's getting delirious and shit.
It's a really strange, like, documentation on this guy.
Like, he had done a bunch of different endurance swims before and, you know, like, had got all these people behind him.
And it's a documentary that's taken by his son.
It's really interesting because his son, you know, is, like, watching this guy do all this nutty shit and sort of falling apart and all the different parasites he's getting from this water and...
Well, not only that, he would like jump off the boat into the night in the middle of the night and start swimming and they'd have to follow after him with spotlights and shit.
I mean, some guys were weird, like you take Thomas Jefferson or something, he basically edited the Bible by cutting up all the stuff that he thought was crap, which was most of it, and saving, you know, like, he took out, out of the gospels, he took out the virgin birth, the miracles, all of the stuff that in his mind was a bunch of crap, and then he saved up the parts of Jesus that he likes, saying, yeah, he's...
I would love to introduce you to my pet king, Cobra.
And there's actually a reason for that.
Because in the Gospels, there's this story of Jesus telling you that if you really have faith in him, if you are a true Christian and you have faith and all of that, you could take poison, snakes could assault you and bite you, and you'll be totally fine.
And I was like, wow, you know, if that's what Jesus is saying and if this is what you guys believe, hey, let me bring out the snakes.
Let's have it a try.
And it's like one of two things are going on.
Either you know that the stuff you believe in is crap and you don't really believe it.
Or you know that there are no good Christians, because, sorry, that's not the way it works.
Today, I don't care how much faith you have.
It's like nobody can survive taking the most poisonous stuff on earth.
Or you're telling me that that line in the Bible is crap, and it was put in there by somebody else, but it's not real, in which case it doesn't exactly say great things about the reliability of the whole thing, but it's like there's no getting out of it.
Hey, if you are right, you have zillions of people following and you'll be the greatest asset to Christianity ever because you made millions converts.
And actually, to tell the fact that some of these guys really are serious about it, there have been a bunch of people where, particularly in...
In a lot of, like, Carolinas, Tennessee, a few places where there was this tradition of snake handlers that they would, you know, let poisonous snakes bite them.
And, you know, quite a few of these guys died miserable deaths, and then some of them, the poison wasn't that much, so they managed to survive and all of that.
They're always going to need something, whether they're going to need, you know, liberalism, you know, conservativism.
They need a path.
They need someone to just chop out the brush for them and point them in the right direction, whether it's, you know, Christianity, whether it's atheism.
I've met atheists that might as well have been religious.
They're so anti-religion that it's a religion in and of itself.
I had a chapter that was supposed to go in the book that was basically saying that atheist and hardcore fundamentalists are twins separated at birth because they are both based on certainty on how the universe works and all of that.
But then my publisher decided that you already are offending people of seven million different religions.
If a real fucking alien battleship, like all these stupid movies that keep coming out, there's another stupid movie coming out where it comes out of the ocean and they fucking go to war with the American military.
They're shooting cannons at this fucking crazy robot monstrosity thing that pops out of the ocean.
I have this Chinese doctor who, when nobody could...
There were all this weird stuff going on with my body.
Nobody could figure it out.
This guy was amazing.
He just fixed me like that.
But the last time I saw him, he spent a half hour telling me about those motherships coming at the end of 2012, and who knows whether they are nice or not.
When all the motherfuckers with their degrees and in suit and tie, all the top doctors from Kaiser and all of that couldn't figure anything out from him.
You know, the fact that you can be incredibly smart and come up with all this awesome stuff doesn't mean you are wise enough to know how to deal with it and not fuck everything up, which is...
Well, that is the one sort of, I don't want to say justification, but the one sort of argument for having one powerful military that dominates the rest of the world.
Is that by doing that, at least they keep everybody else from blowing everything up.
They keep your military from growing to the point where you are able to make the same decisions that we can make.
We don't want that.
There's an argument in that, I guess.
If you look at the statistics, what people are like, what the potential for people to behave is like.
I'm not a big fan of the U.S. government, but when I compare it to a lot of...
There are a bunch of places and governments that I would like better, and there are many others that I'm like, Jesus Christ, give me George Bush again.
Just give me the worst crap in the U.S. ever, and still I like it better than the Taliban, you know?
People in the U.S., they grow up with everything about the country is amazing and wonderful.
And then when they find out that it's not all amazing and wonderful, that some bad shit happened, they go to the extreme opposite and it's like, everything that's American is horrible, terrible, and the U.S. is responsible for everything that's evil in the world.
I think people go where the money is, and there is money right now in enforcing the current drug laws.
There's a lot of jobs that would be lost.
If we just said, alright, pot's legal, sorry.
You know how many fucking people are going to be out of jobs?
Sure.
That's a real issue.
And it's something that should be corrected too.
There should be a bill that addresses that as well and says, listen, we're going to replace these drug enforcement jobs with the jobs where they're doing something more helpful.
Whatever the fuck it is.
Border security.
Whatever the fuck it is.
Something that makes more sense.
Border security is a terrible example.
Put them in torpedoes.
Or submarines, rather.
Get them to patrol the ocean.
These aren't really well thought out ideas.
But if you were trying to come up with a good bill, a good bill would be make marijuana legal, make it readily available and sellable, and then take the jobs that will be lost in drug enforcement and put them into something positive.
Whatever it could be.
Forestry, whatever.
Whatever jobs.
Then the issue would be those people wouldn't be qualified for those jobs.
So how do those people benefit from it?
Are those people just going to be shit out of luck and have to come up with a whole new career?
It just seems like it's OK because it's behind the wall of something written down on paper somewhere.
But the reality of it is it's pretty fucking immoral.
You know, when you're when you're locking a kid up in a cage because you caught him with some plants or some fungus, you know, that's absolutely it's it's reprehensible.
And not only that we can, because if you look at the political scene, nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, I mean, nobody who has a shot at winning, let's put it that way, would even bring up this topic, because it's political suicide.
You know, it's like, you're soft on drag, you really want five-year-olds to be shooting air, you know, it's like...
I once met Albert Hoffman, the guy who created LSD. And one of the things he was telling me was, you know, most of the stuff that goes for LSD around the world is not LSD. Because the stuff, the way I make it, it uses certain compounds that are so rare that there's no way that it could support such much production.
So you say whatever they sell out there, I have no idea what the hell it is, but it's certainly not my stuff.
And he argued, who knows, maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but he argued that his stuff would give you kind of all the benefits of LSD without all the crap from street LSD. So street LSD, though, is still giving you the same benefits as the stuff that he produces?
He was actually, you see this guy, he's like a Swiss chemist, so very serious, old dude, very, now he's been dead for a while, but he's, and he was originally looking for a cure for headache, like he was working on a headache pill, and he came up with LSD. That was pretty funny.
Yeah, didn't he come up with it and not even realize it, he took it, he accidentally got it in his skin, and it was riding home on his bike, and just tripping his fucking balls off.
There's a weird thing that you get sometimes when you're talking to one of those old acid dudes.
You might have seen some shit that's not available anymore.
They might have seen some limited production view of life through acid.
You know, acid in the 60s, I would have loved to have seen what it was like.
Like the flower children of the San Francisco early 1960s.
I watched that Hunter S. Thompson documentary, Gonzo, The Life and Times of Dr. And it's a fucking fun documentary, but one of the things it talks about was the utopia of the acid culture of the early 1960s in San Francisco.
And they show all these people running around, holding hands together, tripping their fucking balls off.
It's really interesting, man.
That whole fucking part of the world, it wasn't illegal yet, and that whole part of the world was just...
Blossoming with all these new ideas and new music and this new like sort of wild psychedelic culture was all like emanating out of this one place and they fucking threw the water on it and squashed that shit.
Even if you just listen to the music alone and you listen to what was in the 1950s and then you switch to the 60s, it's like what the hell just happened?
It's like it's a whole other universe right there.
You know, there are moments in time, man, where if time travel isn't possible, but time recreation is, if they ever figure out a way to recreate, like, we could just go in and peek.
You know, like, remember those things that you had when you were a kid, the view sliders, and it was like dinosaur, and you would click, click, and it would, like, be the next dinosaur.
Right.
If there was something you could put on, some goggles, and just take a view as to what life was like in a certain area five million years ago.
Be like a fucking security camera on the wall a hundred million years ago in the jungle and watch dinosaurs run down jacking things.
If you look at his maps, they are based on, you know, many of the cultures in his sort of fantasy world are based then on cultures that eventually evolve in real historical times that we know of, but it's supposed to predate all the stuff we know.
So he argues that there was Atlantis and this super powerful civilization and that collapsed and the world went into this hardcore barbarism and then civilizations were rising up again and that's when Conan sets in and then the history we know of that comes down the road.
You know it's funny, I actually grew up, I watched Conan a million times in Italian and so I never really heard it in English and when I heard Arnold speaking it, I was like, Jesus, this is a whole completely different movie watching it.
You know, speaking of people tweeting and stuff, I wanted to mention your fans are fucking awesome.
I've never been around people who are, like, after the first podcast, I got a million different people on Facebook.
Now I started Twitter and stuff.
And, you know, every single person I've run into has been really smart, really nice, super polite, but you check out their pages and they all have, like, really interesting people.
I think if you put out that sort of a show, you put out that kind of a vibe and have people like you come on the show and other people that I've had that people have really reacted to, like Graham Hancock and I got this Sam Harris cat that's coming on soon.
Having really intelligent, interesting people on the show and putting out your personal philosophy on things.
Just fucking be nice to people.
Stop being cunty to each other.
Everybody can be cool.
Everybody should be generous.
Surround yourself with a bunch of people that you really like.
And don't tolerate any bullshit and negativity from people.
Remove that shit from your life.
Remove that shit from what you're doing for a living.
Push yourself in the direction that you actually want to go in.
When you put that out there, people respond to it and it starts to become a part of their vibration.
It starts to become a part of who they are as a person.
I think that's what's happened.
We have this crazy group of people that are super cool.
I'm not delusional about this.
It sounds completely ridiculous that I would even say, well, there's a reason why my crowd is cool.
But if you go to my shows, the waitresses are always saying that.
The people are so nice and they're so generous.
I think it's just you put that out there, man.
I think it's good for all of us, man.
I didn't figure this out all on my own.
I had to meet a bunch of people that started behaving like this.
I had to meet people that had their shit together, that impressed me, that were nice and were positive and that impacted me.
And I learned from the way they behaved.
I think we're all doing that for each other.
And these conversations and these subjects that we're having, these subjects are...
It's unusual that you would have someone who knows as much religion In your life, as you do, to sit down with and go over this kind of stuff.
There's not a lot of opportunities that people have to talk to a big group of cool people.
You probably get the message from the guy in Iceland somewhere where he's like the weird guy in the village and everybody else is looking at him like, what's your problem?
And now he has a chance to realize, shit, there are other people out there who actually can see the world the way I do and they...
I hope for one they pick a better name because it really just took me forever to get on Twitter because it wasn't like really do I want to get on something called Twitter now right now on I'll say I tweet it's like Jesus Christ they have some self-respect here yeah it sounds ridiculous they should have called it Conan then I would have respected it that would have been cool Today's episode is called Conan.
So can you imagine if that was the case, people would have hanged around their neck, somebody with a spike sticking to a guy's ass, and that would That's how the originator or the original story that Draco was based on.
Vlad the Impaler.
He used to eat his lunch and there's photos of him, or not photos of him obviously, drawings rather, of him sitting at a banquet table while these people are on spikes writhing around him.
Speaking of human beings, but seriously, could you imagine somebody thinking, hmm, let me figure out how I can shove this giant pole at somebody's ass, but missing all the internal organs so I don't kill them, and then they go slowly, it's like, who the fuck think of that?
Yeah, and apparently the Vlad the Impaler story was a guy, he was particularly ruthless.
And one of the things, because he was outnumbered, so he set up a lot of these bodies outside the perimeter of his town just to scare the fuck out of anybody who would come near.
And it was more like, he was like back up against the wall and had to take some crazy chances.
Yeah, I mean, it was one of those punishments, like impaling people.
The idea was, how can we make you suffer the worst possible in a very public way, where people go by and they will see you slowly dying there for three days.
And it goes back to this desire of rulers in certain states, and the Romans were...
Perfect example of these guys, but they weren't the only ones doing that, who got into it because it was a way to make a statement, which is don't fuck with us, because if you ever even think of rebelling against us, this is what's going to happen to you.
And every time you go down the street, you see somebody there and think about you being there, you may want to think about that plan of rebellion that you had.
And, I mean, you don't have to do it that often to have any impact on people.
I don't think you need to see that many people crucified for it to stick in your head.
But you had cases like when the Spartacus Rebellion, where after the rebellion, they grabbed, like, thousands of slaves and nailed them one every so many hundred feet between Naples and Rome.
Well, they had some thousands of prisoners following defeating Spartacus.
They had literally thousands of them.
And so they decided to execute them all by, you know, sticking them all on crosses between Rome and Naples, where the whole thing went down, and make a very public statement about for other slave thinking of rebellion.
You ever drive like into certain towns and they have these giant fucking enormous ones that they hum when you pass by them and they feed, you know, like towns that are like miles and miles away?
Those are, they can't, it can't be good living next to that, right?
Well, there's different ones like, you know, there's certain areas like really rural areas where you pass by big fucking giant ones.
I I don't understand much about the science behind providing electricity to cities, but there's obviously a lot of energy going through those goddamn things.
If your house is just sitting there, the thing is just right above you.
Is that fucking with some things that you can't see?
But yeah, that's the thing today that nobody knows.
It's like, hmm, we have gazillions of cases of cancer, but we don't know why.
And, you know, there are all these many, many, many things in our environment that are fucked up.
From the stuff we eat to the stuff, yeah, power lines, to all sorts of things that we don't really know to what degree they do or do not contribute, but...
In India, because of a study of 134 people with stomach cancer who are avid consumers of which food can contain MSG, the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Owners in Eastern India has asked its members to refrain from using MSG. There's like a website called mstruth.org backslash cancer.htm and it's just all these reports of like where MSG is like, no, it's seriously not.
There's a really good Thai place that's in Hollywood.
I don't want to say the place, but Palms.
But they use MSG. And then I had it once with MSG, and then the next time I returned there, I'm just looking at the menu going, Jesus Christ, they put MSG in their food, and they have it right here on the menu.
Just like, hey, by the way, we use MSG. So I go, can I have no MSG? And they're like, oh, yeah, sure, no problem.
And so I got the same shit I got last time.
It tasted exactly the same.
It was delicious.
It was amazing.
It wasn't like, oh, wow, there's definitely a night and day difference.
The U.S. health nuts avoid it like the plague, but in many parts of Asia it sits on the table along with salt and pepper to enhance the flavor of meals.
Leading expert in MSG, senior scientist, company name blah blah blah, insists that the definitive link between MSG and headaches has yet to be proven.
Furthermore, his own research has shown that the hospital patients who have lost their appetite more likely eat their meals when sprinkled with MSG. This, he postulates, could help elderly and sick people improve their appetites, get nutrition they need, and live longer.
So, I mean, I'm sure it boiled down to real, factual things that people said, you know what, we need to make a hardcore rule because otherwise people don't respect it.
So let's make it that God said so and, you know, let's have everybody stick to it.
And then, of course, then they stop making sense when hundreds of years later or thousands of years later, the conditions are different, so they no longer, you know, the animals could be in cleaner conditions or whatever, but then the rule sticks around.
Why is it any different than what had happened with that one guy with the dragon suit that 20 million people died because he said he was Jesus' brother?
Yeah, I wonder how much of an effect Scientology has on his success.
I wonder how much of what he pulled off he wouldn't have pulled off if he wasn't deep in the throes of some I think you're on your way to converting me.
You know, my game is weird because I roll for the longest time not in formal classes, so my way is weird because I'm lacking some pieces of the game that you should learn when you're a fucking white belt, but then I have other...
Yes, I don't put my weight, I don't put enough pressure on top, I don't do some of the stuff that you're supposed to do that you learn as basics, but then at the same time I have like weird ass movements that I can tap people who are insanely better than me.
Well, yeah, those two guys are like neck and neck for the best leg locks.
And even Nari is terrifying.
He's so good at wrapping guys up.
My God.
He's horrifying.
He's got also an amazing omoplata submission.
Called the Iminari, where you go, like, you have the shoulder lock, and then you grab an S-grip underneath the guy's face, and you lean back, and it just snaps his neck.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible thing, because his arm is twisted, and you're pulling his neck back.
I mean, even psychologically, going into the game, knowing that somebody has spent the last year training just in order to rip you apart in a more effective fashion.
I met, um, when I went to Vegas, I met, uh, I went because I was, uh, meeting Randy Couture.
And so I got to hang out with him a little bit and I never met him before.
And I was really blown away by the way you see him on TV is the same way you see him in reality.
And he's so Calm.
It's like the opposite of what you expect.
Like I kept asking him about fear, you know, going into it and being afraid.
And it was like a foreign concept to him.
It was like, I think he wrestled so much as a kid and got over the fear of performance, the anxiety, all of that as a kid, that as an adult, he just look at it as a problem to be solved and it's no big deal.
I know, and he fought some of the toughest fighters in the world with that attitude.
I remember one time, I don't remember who it was that he fought.
Whether it was Tim Silvio, or maybe it was Brennan Vare.
I forget who it fought, but he was on the side of the octagon.
And I was looking over at him before the fight started.
He looked over at me and he winked.
And I'm like, this guy's so relaxed, he can just look at you and wink right before he goes to war.
He was just so calm about it.
That's one of the reasons why he was able to keep fighting, you know, into later ages.
He was so calm in there, preserved his energy, so efficient and experienced, you know, and that Greco-Roman man, the ability to control guys.
Apparently, everybody says that Randy Couture was one of the nastiest guys, like when he would grab ahold of the back of your neck.
The control was so nasty.
There's dudes that have different levels of control, and you really haven't felt it yet.
A lot of times, if you train with people that only have a certain level of skill, then all of a sudden you train with someone who has a very high level of skill, it's baffling to you.
You literally aren't even aware that someone could be so good.
It's staggering to you.
Apparently a lot of people's assessments of Randy's clinch that he would get a hold of.
One of the guys that is, Joy Varner, he's one of the guys that, one of the trainers at Extreme Couture, and so he said, let's work on it together.
He wanted to do it, and then he liked my writing, so he said, hop in, and we'll write it, and do this thing about Randy.
Because he was saying, you know, most of the MMA books that are out there are autobiographies, which are cool.
But then in an autobiography, you can only go, you know, you can only hype it up so much because you sound like an ass if you're like, I'm this legendary fighter and all of that.
Whereas doing it as a third person with a lot of the voices from his opponents, Kind of like a Face in Ali type of thing where you get multiple perspectives.
I think it was 1997 or 98. It might have been 98. It was 97?
Thank you.
And Tony Halma was this giant fucking pro wrestler dude.
And Randy Couture ducked under that dude's big punch, got him, took him down, and strangled his ass.
And I remember thinking, holy shit, look at that.
Like, that was the difference in, like, one guy was like this big, strong, sort of pro wrestler type character, but the other one had that stupid grappling strength that I remembered from some freaks in high school.
When I wrestled in high school, you know, when we were in, you know, a certain district, and I went to the, I think it was like the regionals, I forget what it was called.
But, you know, the guys who'd won, like, certain tournaments would advance to other tournaments.
And so I got to see, like, the state champion wrestlers, and I got to see, like, some of the really high, high-level wrestlers.
And I'll never forget, there's the way that really good wrestlers could manipulate guys, like, just toss them and throw them around.
I remember thinking, Jesus Christ.
Like, there's, like, just like anything else, there's guys out there that are taking it to a very extreme level.
Unless you go and see it, you don't know that that's possible.
Did you think he had a chance when he fought Vitor?
Because, I mean, he did beat Halma, but those guys were, you know, the first two guys he beat weren't that good caliber guys, and then when he stepped up to fight Vitor, did you feel like...