Joe Rogan and Shane Smith dive into bizarre health horrors—Smith’s undiagnosed neck fracture from surfing, parasitic infections, and "Shane’s Law" about toilets—before debating war’s senseless brutality, citing child suicide bombers and fabricated WMD claims like Dick Cheney’s Iraq lies. They argue governments ignore veterans’ trauma, contrasting it with dolphin pods’ complex social structures, then pivot to food ethics, praising free-range meat over industrial alternatives. Rogan questions the Gracie family’s branding in combat sports while Smith insists on accountability in media, valuing platforms like Vice and JRE for exposing truths. The episode ends with chaotic tangents—custom slippers, asteroid threats—highlighting how even serious discussions spiral into Rogan’s signature mix of humor, conspiracy, and camaraderie. [Automatically generated summary]
That's O-N-N-I-T. We just started getting these new things in that are not weapons, okay?
And Brian keeps accusing them of being weapons just because they're clubs and maces.
Just because it would really help you if the apocalypse went down and we went back to sword fighting, okay?
You would want to use one of these steel maces that we're carrying around these days.
We're selling these club bells and steel maces and of course kettlebells.
What all these things are is functional strength equipment.
And there's two things that are super important to know when you're doing any kind of weightlifting.
One is the correct form.
I can't stress this enough.
If you can afford it, hire a trainer.
You only have to do it like once.
Pay attention.
Write shit down.
And tell them to give you three or four simple exercises.
Clean press.
Real simple things to know about where to place your weight and how to keep your posture.
Know those, study those, and live by those.
It's one of the most important things about strength training.
Don't be an idiot.
Use proper discipline and use proper form because if you don't, you're going to get hurt.
That's number one.
And number two, if you want to get in serious shape, there's no better exercises than exercises that use your whole body.
Those are the kind of exercises that when you take it and you can translate it almost immediately to any sort of athletic activity.
Whereas muscle-specific exercises like bench press or curls along those lines, they make your arms bigger.
They make you a little stronger, but it's not the same as working your whole body as one group.
That's what kettlebells are all about.
That's what these steel maces are all about.
We have medicine balls.
Those kind of activities are activities that translate into everyday life and to sports.
So that's the kind of shit we sell.
Along with the best protein powder you can buy, hemp force protein powder, different supplements, brain supplements, endurance supplements, immune system supplements.
All literally the best shit we can get our hands on.
We sell it to killer bee honey.
We don't give a fuck.
We're selling killer bee honey.
We're jacking killer bees, taking their honey, and then selling it.
And if you go to Onnit.com and use the code name ROGAN, you save yourself 10% off any and all supplements.
This Thursday night in San Diego, California.
That's tomorrow.
Yeah, right?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow night, Brian is going to be at the American Comedy Company with a bunch of really funny guys that are friends of ours, like Tony Hinchcliffe, who's fucking hilarious.
Really one of my favorite young guys coming up.
Jason Tebow, an awesome dude.
A very, very funny comic, too.
Billy Balnell, another very funny comic, and Yoshi.
So you guys have a hell of a show, and it's one of the coolest clubs in Southern California, that American Comedy Company.
It's a sweet little spot down in San Diego.
All right, if you listen to this and you're in L.A., we've got a show tonight at the Pasadena Ice House.
It's Ari Shafir, Ian Edwards, and me, and it's going to be at 10 o'clock.
It's just a minor bulge, and it's getting better through doing this disc decompression therapy where they hook you up to a machine, and it's like this slow pulling and pushing where it slowly, like, separates your spine.
Right now it's only, like, 19 pounds, which sounds like a lot, but it doesn't feel like anything.
You know, Boss Rootin scared the shit out of me the other day.
That scared the shit out of me.
His arms scared the shit out of me.
Boss has had two neck surgeries, and he's not getting signals to his right arm.
So his right arm is shriveled up, and they just recently fused three of the discs in his neck.
So this is a second surgery he's had on his neck, and then the other day his arm failed on him, so there's another blockage, so they have to go in and figure out where the nerves are blocked.
Also, every time you go to anywhere and have a glass of water or eat anything, you're just thinking, fuck, I just got another one of those fuckers in my colon.
I remember somebody said to me, the first time I went to Afghanistan, they're like, whatever you do, don't drink the green tea, because they give you green tea everywhere you go.
But the problem is, if you refuse the green tea, it's sort of like an affront.
The tweets that I get the most response are like Shane's Law, which is the more you need a toilet, the ratio is directly proportionate to how bad that toilet will be.
So for example, when you have explosive diarrhea, In West Africa, guess what?
That toilet is just arcing ropes of shit and piss and fucking blood everywhere.
Whereas in Sweden, when you're having one lovely, beautiful log and then one white wonder, you have perfect, beautiful, clean toilets that smell of jasmine.
And so it's literally like Murphy's Law, Shane's Law.
How bad you need to take a shit is directly proportionate to how bad that toilet's going to be.
It's like all of a sudden where your house is is a cliff going down.
And everyone's walking around the edges looking down, not knowing when it's going to expand, if it's going to expand, if it's going to stay that way permanently.
It's very possible your shit's going to get fucked up.
It's really all about staying alive.
And you've got to think, really, realistically, you've got to think, if you live here, it's very possible that every couple decades or so, The fucking earth cracks the foundation of your house.
Plumbing is spraying water into the street and it powers out for a month.
You've got to be willing to accept that that's possible.
But I'm not stocking dried meat or anything nutty.
I just think that there's no way that with all the possibilities of natural disasters that we really don't take into consideration because the extent of our history, of what we really know about what's taking place on the earth, and the amount of devastation that can occur over an enormous period of time,
billions and billions of years, where all these unique events, which have been documented throughout history, where They're just starting to understand what caused certain geographic features and what kind of cataclysmic effect that must have had.
There's meteorites blowing up over Russia right now, and we missed two after that.
I would say I'm not a prepper, but I will say this.
You know, in northern Canada, they have these millions and millions of lakes with fresh waters, nobody on them, nobody can get to them, all these things.
And you're like, if you have a few bucks stashed away, and you can build a cottage on one of these fuckers with pure water, you'd be stupid not to because if shit goes down, And you've got this lake and this thing and it's hard to get to and all this stuff, then you can get the fuck up there.
It's like hedging your bets.
You're just hedging your bets.
And the only problem with it is, if shit does go down, how the fuck you get up there.
You know, we went to the Maldives, we went to Venice, we went to Greenland, and then we were in New York City, and I actually interviewed the deputy mayor, and I said, you know, Sandy hit, and it was bad, but, you know...
Because you're like, oh, sir, I got my fucking bolt hole up in Canada on the lake that's stocked with shotguns and dried meat and fucking peas and seeds.
And then you're like, how the fuck am I going to get there when there's no goddamn gas?
And by the way, you can't get out the bridges and you can't get out the tunnels.
The tunnels are fucking flooded.
And at that point, you're sort of saying, well, I don't know what you're prepping for, but if something bad, like really cataclysmic happens, we're fucked.
So that when the shit hits the fan, people want to show you where their basement is with their canned tomatoes.
You know?
You could develop a real sense of community.
It would actually be kind of something refreshing if you could actually ensure that you weren't going to get attacked by roving hordes of outlaws that had given up on society and started robbing people.
But if we could...
You know, if we had something to, not necessarily something that kills a bunch of people, but something that gets everybody scared enough to bond together.
Well, my thing is, you know, we're a learned species.
We learn most things, but we are hardwired for three basic things, which is survive, which is why people commit suicide, they figure are crazy, because you're going against your hardwiring.
So it's survive, procreate, right?
So we're hardwired to procreate, and then protect the progeny.
So at the end, you sit there and say, okay, if you're talking about protect the progeny, history makes sense.
Because that means, if you're in these villages, everyone's sort of intermingled.
You know, like your cousin and me, and we're, and everybody, all the kids are there, and they're all playing.
So then you would fight to the death to protect the progeny, because that's hardwired into our spinal fucking column. - Right. - So that's why we have this innate desire to form these communities and to protect these communities.
- Yeah. - And that's been the history of humankind, and it's only when sort of the nation state came and sort of had these supranational entities guaranteed security theoretically that politics in the modern form started.
But before that, it was just about, we're gonna protect our village.
Yeah, I think if we could figure out how to truly recognize that all people that can speak English and that can follow a certain ethic, just to be cool to people and just be friendly and be nice to people, just that attitude alone,
if that is possible to change, if it's possible to heal people psychologically enough to where they don't lash out at others, like for whatever reason, for their own mistakes, for their own I mean, I think we're literally that close to it.
The number one thing that was missing throughout all of human history was the ability for all of us, all of us to have a say, all of us to be able to express ourselves, all of us to connect, all of us to figure out how to get information with no boundaries as far as countries and time-limp zones and internet connections.
It's so free now.
That I feel like there's never been a time like this before where people might have a chance of taking a step back.
It's just overcoming the amount of momentum that's behind it as far as tradition and government and rules and regulations and how we've always done things.
But if we could just relax, if everybody could just relax and understand that there's no secrets anymore as far as Where the oil comes from or where the money goes.
Everybody can prosper.
There can be a way where instead of being insanely overbalanced, where the money is going to these foreign banks and all this crazy shit, You guys would be happier too, you super rich guys, if you had less money but no evil karma to go with it.
I'm not you, I'm talking about banker type characters.
If you're a banker and you're one of those evil cunts that has a house in the Hamptons and you have these people that are around you all the time and you've made a billion dollars by finagling your way through Wall Street and you're just this maniacal Gordon Gekko type character, you failed.
You got into a crazy game, and you sort of decided that the numbers were more important than people.
And somehow, somewhere along the line, you figured out a way to manipulate it to the point where you're like...
And I think that humans generally are capable of incredibly...
I mean, you see heroes every day and incredibly sort of heroic feats and communities sticking together and humanity sticking together and all this stuff.
We're also, sadly...
can fucking possibly imagine.
And the problem that I have with what we're doing at Vice now with our news and what we're doing with the HBO show is, you know, we're going out into the world and we're seeing all this shit and you're like, holy fuck, we're fucking, we can do some really, really bad shit.
And I think that as people do bad shit, it collectively brings humanity down.
When you're using children 6, 7, 8 years old to be suicide bombers or assassins, that's collectively bringing humanity down.
And I believe what we have to do is we have to stomp that up.
We cannot let that fucking go on.
Because of modern day politics, what happens is these kinds of heinous crimes are being perpetrated all the time now.
That's the problem, because it's like apocalypse now, right?
And they're like, you know, we went in and inoculated, this is fiction, by the way, but we went in and inoculated the arms, and then the, you know, the Viet Cong came in and cut the arms off, and they're like, you know, Kurtz, when he's going crazy, is saying, you know, how are we going to win against that?
These are the kinds of things that we are capable of.
These are the kinds of things that are happening today.
Well, I mean, it's fiction within the movie, but the reason why I brought it up is when I was interviewing the Taliban and they were telling me about that they were going to continue to use child suicide bombers, all I could think of was this quote from the movie of, if they're going to cut off the arms of their own children because they were inoculized by the Americans, then how can we win against that?
And I was thinking, if they're going to send their own kids to be suicide bombers, then how are we going to win against that?
You definitely can't do it militarily because then it's just one-upmanship.
Who can be worse?
Who can fuck the other guy up the most?
And you know about this in any kind of street fight.
Okay, well, you're beating me with fists and I'll use a bottle.
Yes, and well, not only that, nobody likes it when you kick their ass.
It's not like they forget that.
No, they make you their sworn enemy, and they want to come back and get you.
And a lot of times, those situations where you make an enemy for life could have been avoided if you went out of your way to be, whatever, more apologetic, friendly, or nicer, understand his point of view, and then he probably would concede a little bit too, and then maybe you could get a drink, and then maybe you could be friends.
I mean, there's a lot of moments like that in life where it could go one way when you get in a fistfight with someone that was totally avoidable, but...
Maybe you were in a shit mood because your girlfriend just dumped you or maybe he said something that he wished he didn't say but he's fucking 22 and you say stupid shit and you don't even really mean it.
You don't even know what the fuck you're doing.
You're just making noise with your mouth and practicing being a person.
And next thing you know, you've got an enemy for life.
Well, because, you know, you see guys who are going out there and, you know, you're going to have a fistfight in the back alley.
And then, you know, I was in a place one time where there was a fistfight and a guy sucked out a guy's eyeball and then just tore it out with his teeth.
Oh, my God.
Because he's a psychopath.
And you sit there and go, well, there's always going to be somebody willing to take it to the next level.
Yeah.
You saw that?
It was in the place where I was.
I saw the aftermath of it.
Actually, it's a famous, what they call firms in the UK, football hooligans.
It was a hooligan move where they pound you and they suck your eyeball.
Yeah, and then there was also speculation that he was told to throw the fight, that the people had bet on it, but he looked terrible.
He just didn't look, and then he quit.
And then after he quit, man, fucking Latinos, all the people that supported him, all the Spanish-speaking world were so upset because he was this macho, fucking savage representative of everything.
I mean, he just quit for no reason.
He's like, no mas, no mas.
Like, nothing.
He's fine.
He's like, you know how much we fucking paid to watch this?
Because in my opinion, this was the scariest I've ever seen a human being be in my life.
I remember I was like...
I think I was probably like...
I was watching this at home on TV, and Tyson just destroyed Marvis Fraser in the most violent fight I had ever seen in a boxing match.
And I thought to myself back then, I was like, if there's one person that would be the most terrifying person to be encountered with, it would be Mike Tyson, that has ever lived.
Watch this fight.
I mean, he just...
Marvis Frazier was like a top heavyweight contender.
And Tyson just stepped to him and just started fucking blasting him.
Dodging under punches.
Got him in this corner right here.
And this is the end right here.
Wah-bing!
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
That's all before he can fall down.
He's already unconscious.
Tyson hits him four times more before he even gets to the ground.
And he would, Customato would say things that to this day, there's, you can have a short, precise point that an athlete can digest and take with him as he steps out of the locker room and into the ring that actually can help.
And Customato said one of the most brilliant things that I've ever heard when it comes to being terrified in the face of combat and in the face of a fight.
And he said that every man experiences fire.
And that fire can cook your food, it can heat your house, or if you let it get away, it can burn you to the ground.
And you have to decide how to take care of it.
But the coward and the hero feel the exact same thing.
It's just the coward...
It falls into the pressure where the hero figures out how to manage it and overcome it and actually rises to the occasion and keeps it together.
So for Custom Mono, he had studied psychology and he had studied so many aspects that are crucial to success in that crazy, isolated type of a sport.
You've got a guy like Tyson who's this needy, young, energetic, physical specimen, just Just filled with anger and rage and not getting enough love.
And all of a sudden this Yoda motherfucker comes out of the Catskills.
If you look at now, too, if you look at what's happening in Japan, they have massive protests in Japan saying you have to stop nuclear energy.
Look at what the fuck happened in in Fukushima because you know we had a tsunami which we're gonna have more and more of but guess what now we have whole radioactive villages and you know radiation in the groundwater radiation all but radiation in the food What is that?
We had this dude, Scott Sigler, on the podcast yesterday, and he's an author, and he writes about shit like that, like a fucking island of mutated animals that are 650 pounds, and they're packed predators with fins.
So you're freaking me out right now, man.
You're freaking me out with these Siberian werewolf stories.
That would be an awesome movie, though, Siberian werewolf, because of the mutation.
That was like, you know, almost all of the like, like when you were a kid, but well, not all of them, but it was always a constant theme for superheroes.
And that was such a big theme that somehow or another you would get into some encounter with massive amounts of radiation, but you would become a superhero.
And so every kid sort of looked at that like, wow, yeah, man.
Well, when we interviewed the IAEA for our World's Most Dangerous Border piece, which I think we talked about here, India, Pakistan, and Kashmir, which actually the fort that we were based out of just got attacked yesterday, They said categorically that if you use more than 100 warheads, of which they have hundreds of warheads pointing at each other in Pakistan, that the world, as we know it, ceases to exist.
Everything is just, I mean, the ozone is gone.
It's over.
It's like, you know, the Planet of the Apes dudes who are living underground?
That's the type of shit that you're, you know, and you sit there and say, this is what's happening today is that India and Pakistan hating each other mean that, you know, we have the distinct possibility that Our ozone is gone or...
What's happening is they kick the men, the boys, out.
And so these kids who grew up in this religion that says everybody else is evil and you can't do anything and they don't know how to pay bills, they don't know anything.
They just kick them out and said, okay, you're gone now.
Is it just a way the body is designed that some of us are worker bees and some of us are middle management and some of us are the contrarians hanging on the outside like you or I? Life is hard.
I really do think, all bullshit aside, that your shit that you guys are doing on Vice.com has as much of an impact on where this culture is going and the potential that this culture has for understanding The true inner workings of all the various aspects of intergovernmental relationships and nutty places like Chernobyl and the Liberia episode.
I didn't know anything about Liberia until I watched that show.
You guys have done more.
Look, just for educating me, okay?
And I can, I mean, not really educate people, but tell you what link to click on.
Your audience is maybe the best audience in the goddamn world because we, you know, people used to say Vice was the best content on the web that you've never seen.
And when we started to come out here and do this podcast, all of a sudden we'd get these, you know, fanatical, sort of positivist, wow, like great responses.
And it was always with the hashtag, you know, Powerful or Rogan or whatever.
And it's always by...
100% of the time, it's your...
You know, and I've got to say...
That says a lot about you, but it also says a lot about the people who listen to this podcast, which is they're thinking for themselves.
They're listening to alternative shit.
They're not believing the bullshit that they see on regular mainstream TV. And look, they're positive when someone says, look, like you said, you and I live on the periphery.
And we live on the periphery, but we're trying to do our thing.
And you know what?
When people who listen to this podcast are so positive...
It makes me fucking happy and it makes me say, you know, I don't mind.
I got a helmet-headed fucking flesh-eating fucking colon.
Because these motherfuckers on Twitter and on Facebook and on Vice, they're so fucking positive.
And then, you know, I'm going to tell you another thing.
It makes me feel like we can change shit.
It makes me feel like, okay, there is some negative motherfuckers out there in the world who are doing some really bad shit.
But we can actually do things to stop that.
And you're doing it and I'm doing it.
And by the way, the people on this podcast are doing it.
And the more people that actually educate themselves and listen to you and come in here and check on those links, that's fucking how we change shit.
We shouldn't expect anyone else to change the shit for you because they won't.
You project a very honest and humbled view of the world.
And I think when someone is exposed to a guy like you, when a guy's sitting on his stationary bike right now, riding along, listening to the show and listening to your experiences in life in Karachi and Liberia, which I really want to get to again.
They sort of get this view like, okay, here's this fucking guy who's out here doing all this crazy shit, and he's saying all these things.
This guy has no reason to lie to me.
He's not like anybody that I've ever met before, but yet I'm sort of absorbing his thoughts.
And by doing that, you're injecting these ideas that might not have ever manifest themselves in hundreds of thousands and millions of people.
And that's some powerful possibility.
powerful, powerful shit And it's not on CBS, and it's not on NBC, and it's never going to be.
It's never going to be broadcast by anybody that doesn't want to risk everything they already have.
And this is another thing I want to say about the people on this podcast.
A lot of times, for example, what just went down in North Korea, we get attacked by mainstream media.
And yet, you know, people who are on the periphery, people who are watching us, people are just like, exactly, this is exactly what the fuck we want to have go on.
Well, nobody exposed mainstream, well, nobody in the mainstream, rather, exposed North Korea the way that you guys did.
When you went to North Korea and showed those fake restaurants and showed just how spooky and nutty the atmosphere was over there, We were not...
There was no shows that were doing that.
There was no...
60 Minutes wasn't doing that.
The honesty in which you portray things, like from Ladyboys in Thailand, you know what I mean?
Like when you were hanging with the Ladyboys.
Dude, I'm telling you, man, I became a fan of yours when I saw that video of you hanging with the Ladyboys.
You know why?
Here's why.
Because you were being kind to them.
You were being nice to them.
You were chilling out with them in a bathtub and all laughing and so on.
But it wasn't even...
You weren't being creepy and sexual.
You weren't being a douchebag.
You were being a sweetheart.
You were being a nice person to a bunch of other nice people.
No bullshit.
And...
It's hard to do that.
It's hard to do that.
It's hard to do that without this fucking faggot.
It's hard to do that without someone being mad at you.
It's hard to do that without protecting your ego.
How are people going to think about you?
You're hanging out with these ladyboys.
You were just a guy who was there and he was trying to be nice to some other people and they were being nice to you back and it was the right thing to do and it resonated.
And I remember watching that video going, this guy's a cool motherfucker.
And I... I think that was before I even saw Heinmo's adventure, Arctic Adventure, which was the thing that really made me a vice addict.
I look at vice.com more than any other website on the net, pretty much, other than Twitter and checking my own email.
I watch all your shit.
I watch that Heinmo's great adventure, whatever it was, Arctic Adventure.
Well, also then you start to deal with, you know, the questions of there's steroids involved and there's different things and enhancements and other weird shit that's involved and all that stuff.
Because I said that although I support anybody becoming transgender, if that's what you really want to do, I would never tell anybody what they can and can't do.
But you shouldn't be fighting women.
Maybe a tranny league.
And I don't say tranny.
It's not derogatory.
Until it is.
Didn't the guy from Bravo get in trouble for using the word twink?
And I was just like, well, you got to think that, you know, if you're in most countries, maybe not Thailand, but if you're a ladyboy or a female or transgender or whatever, they're fighting all the fucking time, you know?
And so, you know, anyway, I saw that video and it was just kind of like, because I hate those, I was just in Thailand at a conference and there's all these fucking, you know, Australian sort of rugby dudes who are just spoiling for a fight, just They just want to go and they just want to fight.
A guy like Tank Abbott, he's one of my favorite fighters of all time.
And one of the reasons why is not because he was the best, not because he was the most technical or won the most titles, is that you genuinely knew for a fact, 100%, no doubt about it, If you fucking flap your gums in front of Tank Abbott, he's going to make you swallow your teeth.
It doesn't matter if you're on a Greyhound bus or on a fucking space shuttle.
He's going to beat your ass.
And there's a reality to that that I find refreshing.
Like drowning in the ocean or getting hit in the head by a meteor.
There's certain unavoidable consequences to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many more than I do, but most professional fighters or fighters who do it for a living aren't going to get to a fight in a bar because someone's going to take a bottle to their head, you're going to fuck up your hand, you're going to do something...
That or they would, and they would clean out the whole bar and you have a real problem on your hands.
Yeah, yeah.
A guy like Randy Couture and Dan Henderson.
I don't know if this is a true story or not, but there's a legendary story about those two guys in college when they were both elite wrestlers just cleaning out a ball.
I don't know if it's true.
I never talked to Randy about it.
But what I can tell you of what I know about Randy, I've been around that guy for, I saw his first fight in the UFC, and he fought Tony Halma, and then he fought this really promising kid, I forget his name, Kevin something or another, and he beat both of these guys, and I was like, wow, this guy's a stud.
This guy is the real fucking deal.
He is one of the friendliest people you could ever be around.
You would never imagine that Randy Couture would ever get into a street fight.
If you're talking to that guy, whether it's in a bar or a Denny's or a bowling alley, he's a smiling, handshaking, comfortable, pat-you-on-the-back gentleman.
You would never imagine that anybody would ever find themselves so cunty that they would be in a fistfight with Randy Couture.
Speaking of Heinmo, we went to the The Arctic, this guy lived out in the middle of nowhere, and he lived with his wife out there, literally in the middle of nowhere.
He was the most isolated person on earth, until they found, I don't know if you heard about this, this Russian family in Siberia.
They were like Russian Orthodox, and during the Communist Revolution, they went up to this mountain that's nearly impossible to get to, and they lived in this little shack.
And they lived like...
They didn't even have shoes, which I don't understand because I don't know how you get frostbite in Siberia.
But they'd wrap their feet in like birch bark and moss and shit.
And they were eating seeds.
And they lived up there.
The guy was like 90 years old and they finally came in and he had his family.
They were there and they were like 70 and 60 and shit.
And they finally arrived and they had like iPods and everything.
And when they got there, they had lived this whole time...
unidentified
You mean the people that showed up had iPods, not the family.
I truly believe that living without good food and living without, I mean, if you've got to survive, you know, if you're living in The Walking Dead and you've got to shoot deer and shit, that's all well and good.
Well, what I was going to say was that the idea of subsistence living is although frightening, that food is delicious.
Eating deer over a campfire, that's a really yummy tasting food.
If you're saying like shitty food, like cardboard tasting, bland food...
That's a big part of the enjoyment of the day.
In my opinion, a meal with my family, I think, is one of my favorite things in life.
And that sounds like utter horseshit to single people.
But the real idea is sitting down with your kids and having a laugh and having a meal.
I think that whole process is very important.
And nutrition is very important, but for me, the taste is very important as well.
I think it's important to eat things that are delicious.
It's a part of a pleasurable aspect of life.
And so if I had to choose, honestly, between...
Drinking booze and eating delicious food.
I would go with delicious food.
I think delicious food is more important because I've experienced the booze.
And I understand the lessons.
The lessons of the dropping of the inhibition and the good aspects of alcohol, which are often overlooked by people who just can't handle alcohol.
We were talking before the podcast started about not...
There's a certain level of trust that you have where someone's willing to get drunk with you.
Like, you know that guy's demons.
They're all right there.
It comes out.
Five or six Jack and Cokes, you know, telling a story about Tijuana, and you're like, holy shit!
How did you...
Whoa!
What did you tell your mom?
You know what I mean?
It's like you get to know a person.
And you realize that there's no benefit in hiding all that shit from people you love anyway.
There's a benefit in telling them.
And the sort of camaraderie that ensues from those drunken conversations of complete and total honesty where the alcohol does a purpose.
Instead of inhibiting you and making you make shitty decisions, the alcohol...
releases you from this idea that anything makes any sense whatsoever and you start telling the truth or you start expressing yourself or you start looking at things from a more relaxed perspective even temporarily where that thought gets planted in your mind and then You just have more of a sense of friendliness the next day.
Oftentimes, it's little encounters that steer us.
I remember this Anthony Robbins quote, who believe it or not, I've listened to a lot of his books on tape and read his books, and he's got a lot of interesting ways of looking at things that I really think are enabling.
But one of the things that he said is that sometimes if two people are going along the very same paths, like think of yourself as like two boats, if one boat just turns one degree to the right, like over the course of the boat's motion through life, Just that one decision can lead it so far away from the original path that it was on.
And that, often times, it's a good time that leads you.
And it might cost you a day or two of being hungover.
But there might be that phone call where you call each other on a Wednesday like, I had a fucking great time, dude.
I'm not even talking about a crazy fucking boozy fucking crazy time.
The reason why I ask the question is because whenever I meet people I like and I respect, I like to ask them questions because I believe that's how you learn.
And so I have this problem.
Because I'll tell you what.
I grew up poor.
I grew up poor.
I left home at a very young age.
And a lot of what I learned, I learned initially through books.
So I'd read books.
And that's why I have this sort of intense curiosity about the world.
Because I'm like, oh fuck, I'd like to go there and see that for myself.
So anyway, speaking of Chernobyl.
So I go to the Ukraine.
I'm just a regular fucking dude from buttfuck nowhere.
And I go there and I have this dinner and they bring out these potato pancakes with sour cream and caviar and vodka and all this shit.
I think it was the first time I had caviar and I'm eating it and I'm like, this is fucking awesome.
Now, granted, I was a few vodkas in, but I'm drinking the vodka and eating the caviar, and it's Russia, and it's crazy.
We're out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It's not Russia, it's Ukraine.
We're out in the middle of fucking nowhere, and it's some crazy Cossack shit that's going down, and I'm like, fuck, this is like living in a book, and it's crazy.
I literally had one of the best nights of my life.
It was like living in a book from the 1800s.
So I had one of the best times of my life.
Then, you know, so for the longest time I'm like, I fucking, caviar is my favorite fucking food and this is the greatest thing in the world.
Then I was shooting in Iran.
So I'm going to Iran where the best caviar comes from now.
And in my hotel room, sorry, in my hotel in Iran, the only hotel foreigners can stay in, they sell caviar in the lobby.
So I'm sitting there in the lobby and I go, fuck Yeah, I love caviar.
That's my favorite shit now, man.
So I go and I buy the caviar, right, in the store.
It's like the best, I don't know, I bought like $10,000 worth of caviar for $100 or some shit.
So I get it, and I go upstairs, but they don't have no booze, right, because it's Iran.
So I have like orange Fanta and some chips in this caviar, and I'm like, this is just fucking salty, fucking fish egg.
Is that like when you have a big fucking fat old steak with a good glass of red wine, how much of it is the fucking red wine and how much of it is the steak?
When you have your linguine and clams with a nice fucking crisp fucking white wine, how much of it is...
You know, I enjoyed the people and the craziness and the fucking vodka and the caviar and the fact that I hadn't had it before and everything went fucking apeshit and all that stuff.
Yeah, and so when I was asking you the question, because we were talking about food, and you were saying, like, you know, if you have a bad back, you shouldn't eat the pasta.
No, what I was saying is that this chiropractor that I was talking to over the weekend, she was explaining to me the influence of certain wheats and glutens.
For me, weed is like, that's the one that really made a big difference.
I think alcohol has played a good part in a lot of positive aspects of my life as far as joyful evenings and having fun with friends and telling them that you love them and hugging them and even whatever romantic altercations.
For me actually, booze was my savior because I was hanging out with a lot of dudes who were doing some serious bad drugs.
And my whole thing was, I don't want to be 60 years old So I always have this, my idyllic sort of retirement, which I'm trying to get to sooner rather than later now, is just like this sort of forgotten little cove.
Who was diagnosed with lymphonic cancer, like the worst cancer you can ever...
And he was a Greek dude.
He grew up in America, but like, you know, came here when he was three or some shit.
So he goes back to Greece to this little island in the middle of nowhere, and he has to walk up this hill every day.
He goes to talk to his buddies, drinking the wine, he's eating the food from wherever.
And all of a sudden, like five years...
He was given like six months to live or whatever.
Not even six weeks to live.
And they said, you know, what the fuck happened?
You didn't die.
And he goes, you know, I came here and I forgot to die.
Because...
You know, he's sitting there and there's no stress and he's walking up the hill every day and he's drinking wine with his buddies and he's eating the fish from the bay and the fucking whatever.
And I sit there and I say, you know, now I'm looking at this shit.
So my idyllic retirement is basically I'm stealing this guy who killed cancer by living this euphoric life of I live on this little cove and I'm drinking my wine and I'm sitting out there and I'm just blissing out on reality.
Now, that's why I didn't get hooked to heroin.
That's why I didn't get hooked to fucking crack.
That's why I didn't get hooked to all the shit that my boys got hooked to because I always thought to myself, if I fucking get hooked to this shit, I'm going to have to A, die, or B, fucking quit it.
And if I quit it, guess what?
I'm never going to be able to sit on that fucking cove with my glass of fucking wine sitting out there and being this blissful old Buddha dude, right?
So for me, that was booze.
But I will say this.
We were just in Jamaica filming the Snoop stuff over New Year's and Snoop Lion and we were in this place.
Well, they get into everything, but, you know, generally the end result is...
Well, now it could be meth, but heroin...
And the thing is, even in shitty sort of nice Canada, people end up on jonk or they start doing more and more serious crimes.
And this is one of the reasons why my cove was my dream was because, you know, you have guys who are dying of heroin overdoses or guys who are going to prison for life or worse, getting killed.
And, you know, these are 17, 18, 19-year-old kids and you're sitting there saying...
That's the biggest tragedy is you never fucking live.
You're a teenager, you think you've fucking lived your life.
You haven't lived shit, you haven't done shit, you haven't seen shit.
And one of the reasons why I say I'm going to go out and I'm going to see shit and I'm going to do all this shit, whatever, is because I didn't fucking die.
But at a certain point you sit there and you say, look, you know and I know how hard life is.
And also, we realize there's a lot of people who didn't make it.
There's a lot of people who just, for one reason or another, they don't get to where you are.
And so that's why now, anyways, one of the reasons why I like coming here and having these discussions with you is, you can actually say, look, I've come to these fucking realizations...
And look, we're two guys who are saying, you know, we don't need to fucking fight.
What I'm trying to get at is, when you see fights in Iraq, those fights are different fights.
Those fights are like they shoot you in the head fights.
So what I'm trying to say is, you know, you want to get to more of an understanding, and this is when I go back to, like, I don't give a fuck what people think about me, I don't give a fuck about other shit, because when you see it, you sit there and say, on this hand, this motherfucker got shot, or this guy got into heroin, or this guy got into this.
Now, to go back to this, this is very long-winded, but if you go back to it, what do I want to do?
I want to sit in the cove with my family, your family, hanging out, have a drink, enjoy myself.
I don't know how much food, although I'm a fat bastard, I don't know how much food is going to play into that, but I definitely want to be sitting there with that glass of wine, looking out at that cove and just going, I fucking made it.
And that's why I don't judge anybody, because I'll tell you what, everyone's trying to get through the day to get to their goddamn cove.
What we're doing right now is we're figuring life out.
And we still have a lot of old standards and old traditions and old things that we abide by that don't make any sense and they trip us up.
We step on our own dicks.
But I think ultimately...
We're moving forward in a direction of progress.
As much as people like to be cynical about the possibilities of the future, I think just where we are today in this country, despite the eroding civil liberties, all that, that's all good on paper, but the reality of the progression of information through the internet is we're taking the world to a different place right now.
America and democracy was based on honesty and being critical and being allowed to be critical because you couldn't say, fuck the aristocrats, fuck the king and all that shit.
They cut your head off.
So democracy is based on people like us sitting there going, you know what?
The political system isn't right.
And guess what?
The political system will not change unless motherfuckers like us and everybody listening to this fucking podcast Do something about it.
But more importantly, the people who are in the positions of power, it must be reinforced that we are all living in this temporary state.
And to make the most of your temporary state...
You can enjoy the bounty of your work and the fruits of your labor and the overwhelming affluence that you get from having successfully figured out capitalism.
But it's possible to do that in a way where you don't fuck people over and you promote freedom and love.
You know, I'm going to tell just one quick story, but I was hanging out with a guy who inspired the shit out of me.
And he was the president of the Maldives.
It was a 35-year dictatorship there.
He got elected against all odds and he did all this shit like underwater cabinet meetings and stuff to bring awareness to global warming because his country is sinking.
And so he was going to buy land in Australia or Sri Lanka or India because he's not going to have a country anymore.
And then they ousted him, and he has this flotilla going around the Maldives, which is actually like the size of Europe, but like islands.
So he's on these fishing boats, and I went on these fishing boats with this guy.
He's called the Mandela of the Maldives, because he's been in jail most of his life.
I was hanging out with this dude, and one of the interesting things that this guy was doing is he was just saying, look, you have to take individual control.
You have to say, look, unless we do it, unless we as a community fucking say no to this shit, it's going to continue.
So this is my second point is, you know, for the people, of the people, by the people.
And you sit there and say, the people...
This is the country, the first country, that was set up not for the aristocracy but for the people.
And the thing is, I think that was forgotten because if you actually look at the people and what the people want and what the people can do, people want a good life, but they're willing to say, you know what, fuck, I don't want to fucking have, you know, all this garbage or whatever the fucking radiation is.
I don't want to have this, you know, threat of nuclear war and all these things.
If you look at, actually, if you talk to regular people, people are sane, people are good.
Actually, when you were talking about it, people actually, if you hang out with your neighbors, people are inherently good.
And by the way, that's what's keeping governments in check because mainstream media is not keeping fucking governments in check, which is their fucking job and they're not doing it.
If you look at what happened in Iraq, they had these thermobaric weapons.
What's a thermobaric weapon?
If you have to do house-to-house fighting, which traditionally is the worst fighting you can do, right?
Very difficult.
They have this weapon where they can, it's called a SMA-ME, and what happens is they shoot it into a building.
And it does a heat blast which sort of takes all the oxygen out so it kills you right away.
And then it has this massive heat blast and then it implodes the house.
The problem is it's suspected that this is a thermobaric weapon that's made from depleted uranium so what happens is all that dust that goes out there becomes radioactive or chemically laden.
Because if you were, you know, the Washington Post, even though they, you know, Deep Throat and Nixon and all this business, you know, because of your proximity to the Pentagon, you can't lose your fucking seat at the fucking White House table.
They'll tell you whatever.
Now we can sit here and say, okay, those thermobaric weapons...
By the way, the story was broken by a Marine.
Ross Caputi, who's a Marine who fought in Fallujah, who saw the thermobaric weapons, The Marine broke the story and said, by the way, this is what the fuck was going on.
And I'm breaking this story because I saw what happened in Fallujah.
This is a fucking Marine who's saying this.
And you sit there and you say, because of the fucking movement of information, and by the way, we're on the cusp of this, me and you, as we sit here and have a few drinks, this is why, this is why you have to be honest.
So to go back to the story, now I've realized it, if you look at WikiLeaks and you say, okay, Is WikiLeaks good or bad?
I believe that the freedom of information is imperative to democracy.
Unless you have transparency, unless you have accountancy, unless you have people who...
There's no way they should have put that guy in solitary confinement...
There's no way they should have isolated that guy from the rest of the world.
There's no way they should have made that guy feel like he was going insane because he longed for the human touch and he knew that he was being punished for releasing information.
That's inhuman and that's unnecessary with A government that doesn't have anything to prove.
If a government is being honest and is not hiding anything, it doesn't need to take a guy like Bradley Manning and put him in some horrifying state of detention where he has no rights.
There's no need for any just and loving government to treat any of its citizens like that.
What I think some people who are scared of losing their position of dominance, what they're afraid of is they're afraid that people are going to understand what's going on and they're going to take over and they're going to lock them up and they're going to isolate them from...
I've actually, you know, I said something in this podcast one time when I said, if you ever go to a war zone, I can't remember exactly, but I said, you cry, and then you puke, and then you freak the fuck out.
And I had so many people respond to that, and they were, by and large, I would say about 98% ex-military.
Because if you talk to the people who go to these things, they're like, oh fuck, I didn't know what the fuck I was getting into when I signed up for this fucking shit.
I did not have a fucking clue.
And you look at that and you say, okay, before we go to war, before a government sends people to war, before Dick Cheney sends people to war, saying that Al-Qaeda is being sponsored by Iraq, or Iraq is having weapons of mass destruction and all that, All of which is completely made up.
And by the way, made up by the government that the mainstream media then said, and by the way, everybody who had half a brain knew that fucking the secular state of the Ba'ath party was totally against Al-Qaeda.
There's no way Al-Qaeda was doing anything, but 9-11 was the fucking, you know, the sort of carte blanche to go in.
Guess what?
These motherfuckers lost their lives, they lost their limbs, they're fucking, you know, pissing out of fucking catheter bags now.
When I first saw a battlefield, I fucking cried my eyes out.
If you want to get into it, there's guts coming out of cavities.
There's hands.
There's severed heads.
The bodies are not human beings anymore.
It's like cow parts or some shit.
There's blood running into rivers.
But the dead people aren't so bad.
It's the wounded.
Because these fuckers aren't going to walk again.
They're going to be shitting out of a bag.
They're young kids.
And this is the other thing I say.
We're sitting here debating, well, my cove with my red wine, or would you have a steak, or would you have a glass of booze?
These fucking kids, they're never going to be normal again.
And you sit there, and by the way, I'm not saying you can't police the world, and I'm not saying that there aren't bad people out there that have to be bucked out.
But I am saying, if you do that, you better fucking be cognizant of the fact that when you're sending our best and our brightest and our fucking nicest fucking kids out there, that they're going to be coming home with no legs and no arms and shit out of their fucking bag.
Unless we realize that, then we should never go to fucking war.
I think we're still operating under this behavior pattern that was established before the kind of communication and understanding that we enjoy now exists.
I mean, this guy, his friend was trying to explain to me the amount of times this kid had been pronounced dead and brought back to life and that it was unbelievable and the amount of courage that he had shown.
Apparently it jumped on a grenade.
And it was an intense, intense, intense conversation.
And all I could think of was this guy unquestionably was a hero from a Joseph Campbell story.
You know what I mean?
What's exhibited in a true hero is beyond ideology, beyond politics and political influence, and beyond special interest groups.
What he exhibited is the thing that we aspire to the most.
The person who's willing to literally sacrifice their own being for the health and the welfare of the whole.
He was willing to dive on a grenade for the rest of his crew.
I don't want to send our heroes, or I don't think anyone in the world should send their heroes to fight a war that isn't philosophically correct, that isn't backable.
The people who went and fought should be the fucking voices that we hear about next time we go and fight.
Because they're the motherfuckers that know what fucking time it is.
And guess what?
No one listens to them.
And I'm going to tell you one thing about this podcast, is whenever I say, you know what, I fucking saw that shit and it was bad, the response I get from people who have been there, they're like, exactly, exactly, exactly.
And I agree with you 100%.
If we're going to go to war, then we should listen to our fucking veterans, because it is not...
Fucking pretty.
And the people who make the decisions to go to war are not the people that ever have to go fight those fucking wars.
Those are the only people that are going to understand that reality.
That reality is so extreme that it can be sort of justified and glamorized and glossed over in a fictional sense by people who have never experienced it under the threat of their own life expiring.
And that's the reality that those people have experienced, that No one who can make their decision from an air-conditioned room with a custom-designed suit should ever be allowed to do.
The only people that are going to understand that reality are the people that have experienced that reality.
And as a whole, as an organism that respects itself and wants itself to evolve, we should all collectively get together and say this is completely unnecessary for what we're all looking for.
And what we're all looking for is happiness.
And we can all compete.
And all of these needs to accomplish and conquer can all be satisfied in a very ethical way.
Like this idea that we have to continue the Genghis Khan way is nonsense.
And if there is a war, the people who are making that decision have to understand and have to talk to the people who have previously been there.
Because if you talk to anybody who's gone to Vietnam, if you talk to anyone who went to fucking Korea during the Korean War, if you talk to anybody from World War II, World War I, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, anywhere, they'll say, don't fucking do it.
Everybody knows, everybody knows that you need a hug, okay?
You know, I know, we all know.
Let's accept that.
You're the dominant ruler of your situation, but you shouldn't be because you would be way happier if you weren't.
You'd be way happier if you let all those people go.
You'd be way happier if you released all those political prisoners and slaves and whatever the fuck you've got going on there with your wacky laws and the people that were in prison because they didn't cry long enough after your dad died.
If everybody was let out and everybody said, alright, settle the fuck down.
Let's vote on this shit.
Let's be cool with each other.
Let's be nice to each other.
And the dominant person, the dominant ideas, the most accepted ideology will pretty much always rise to the top.
And the exceptional people that can influence the groups, as long as they're doing it in an ethical way, and as long as they're truly trying to advance their culture, good.
But they all need to have a certain amount of...
Of reality in their own head and a certain amount of humility in their own head and a certain amount of experiences with dark situations or bad moments in life or understanding of failure or psychedelic experiences or whatever the fuck it is.
I would say for the first time, and maybe I'm being naive, but I would say for the first time in history, because of the internet and the freedom of movement of information, that you have this young population, Huge, massive, global, young population that most obviously is causing change in Arab Spring.
In these countries where Gaddafi was never going to fucking leave.
Mubarak was never going to leave.
And forcing change in there.
Forcing change in Europe.
Because young people are pissed off.
They're unhappy.
They're poor.
They're broke.
They don't have a lot of opportunities.
And they're sitting there saying, we're going to force change.
I think that that change is coming to Asia.
I think that change is a global phenomenon.
The world economic crisis has forced us to wake up.
We're saying there's a lot of young people out there and they're fucking pissed off and they're going to fuck shit up.
And they're either going to fuck shit up in a good way.
And by the way, I think Arab Spring is a positive thing.
There's going to be an implosion in Europe if it hasn't already happened and we're just seeing the aftershocks.
There's even shit happening here in America.
Which, by the way, I'm not afraid of because I like change.
I like things to be de-stratified.
Because I don't think America, if you look at right now what's happening in Congress, I think America's political system, the America, the political system in America, is broken.
Because you have Congress just fighting each other over things that are detrimental to what's going on.
So I was on the Seabob thing, and then eventually, because the Seabob fucking ran out of batteries, I was holding on to the side of the boat with my thing, you know, snorkel and my mask.
And that's when all the shitting and the pissing and the cumming happened.
They don't have thumbs and they know we have guns.
It's that simple.
They don't have thumbs and they know we have guns.
They're not stupid.
What's going on here is that they realize that evolution has blessed them with the ability to move through their waters as if they were flying through the fucking sky like superheroes!
They don't have to breathe for minutes at a time.
They can always get to the surface unless some crafty Japanese dudes have manufactured some sort of a netting that traps them in the water.
You were talking about a strip steak, and you were saying, this fucking steak, they take it out of the whole cow, and this is the fucking thing, and you put it on the goddamn barbecue and whatever.
And I was sitting there, and I was like...
Why the fuck isn't he talking about a porterhouse?
Because the porterhouse has the strip and the filet.
But also, I spend the majority of my time out there in the shit...
And I will tell you this, when you actually have something, like for example, like you said, if you kill a deer and you cook that on an open fire, nothing tastes better than that.
You're right.
However, the thing is, this might be my paranoia, you've got your sinkholes and your werewolves.
What I think is happening is there's a global restructuring happening.
There is a global restructuring happening.
The people are seeing their calling the greatest recession since the Depression.
They're saying, well, this is this and this is that.
I think this is the new normal.
So, to be honest, and I'm not necessarily proud of this, what I love about New York City is I kind of feel like Nero as Rome is burning because I believe New York City is the greatest city in the world.
I believe it's the capital of the world culturally and economically and politically, for that matter.
And, you know, when you go out in New York City, It has the best restaurants in the world.
It has the best nightlife in the world.
I believe it has the best everything in the world.
But what I will say is when you go out in New York City, right now, today, and it might be Shanghai in 10 years or whatever, but today, New York is the global capital.
And you can go out in New York City and you can, like me, come as a penniless immigrant and become a fucking rich motherfucker who can go out and have the greatest food.
And by the way, that food can be like a dollar.
Spring roll at the Vietnamese Bice or the best steak at Peter Luger's or whatever the fuck it is.
But what I will tell you is, I don't believe that the sort of Roman bacchanalian craziness that is New York today is going to be around that much longer.
A transcendental meditation point where he understands the point of view that he is in right now does not represent where he will be in infinity.
If he is in fact a soul and if a soul transgresses from one point in history to another Over and over and over until you get it right.
Now this sounds like hippie bullshit, but do you understand that Helio Gracie believed in this?
Helio Gracie said something once, and if you don't know who he is, his real name isn't Helio Gracie.
I say that for all you white people who don't understand how Brazilian people pronounce things.
But they pronounce the...
for whatever reason...
Helio Gracie, H-E-L-I-O, was pronounced Ilio Gracie.
That's how the Portuguese in Brazil use that word.
Ilio Gracie.
He said something once, and he's the guy who trained Hickson Gracie and Hoist Gracie, the original winner of the UFC 1 and the UFC 2. I mean, Hoist Gracie changed the entire face of martial arts.
Not only did Ilio Gracie do this, he did this when he was 140 plus pounds.
He was like 145. He developed a method of using leverage and using technique to submit guys that were much, much, much larger than you.
He trained Hickson.
He trained Hoyce.
He trained some of the most influential martial artists in the history of the world.
One of the things he said is that you live this life and if you make even one mistake and you live this life incorrectly, you will return and you will do it all over again until you get it right.
That sounds crazy.
I heard about that, and I was like, oh, you motherfucker, why are you putting all that bullshit on me?
There's no way anybody's ever going to live this life perfectly and get it...
And then I thought, if anybody knows, if anybody understands the path of man in its truest form without hyperbole, without...
Directing other people's insecurities back on different folks to alleviate the pressure of reality.
If anybody's going to understand what the fuck is really going on, it's going to be a 145 pound man.
One of the most beautiful things about what Elio said, what Elio Gracie said, when he said that he would...
Like, that he literally had sort of figured out a way to test who you are and test what you could figure out and test what you could do.
And he truly believed in these most extreme of circumstances, literally fighting these much larger, much stronger men and letting them break his arms.
He believed that if you live this life, That you must do it correctly.
And if you did anything wrong, anything contrary to your spirit or contrary to the soul or the collective idea of humanity as a whole being of the utmost importance, so you, the one who is tested, must represent humanity.
And in that...
Saying that if you made any mistakes, you would do it again.
I was so scared.
When I read that, I was like, that might be one of the most frightening things I've ever read in my life.
Because he might be right.
What if that guy in his battles, literally almost to the death.
I would like to give a shout out to one guy who I met.
He's a guy named Matt Ruskin, right?
And he was in the Marines in Iraq.
And they had these fight clubs in Iraq.
And the Marines, these were tough motherfuckers.
And he was doing this.
They had these fight clubs.
And they would fight the fuck out of each other.
And he's like 200 pounds.
And he would fight guys who were 250. He would fight guys who were 150. He was fighting them.
He would beat them all.
And he came back and he started doing MMA. He started fighting MMA. And he hooked up with this guy, one of the Gracies, and taught him Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, of which he was, I believe, five-time world champion, the Gracie.
Anyway, but I gotta say this, Matt Ruskin, the Marine fought in Iraq, came back, started fighting with the Gracies, took me down there, showed me what the fuck was going on, And I've got to say, you know, I learned the story of the Gracies from the Gracies when I was down there.
And that story of, you know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and him sort of taking on all comers with the bounty, you know, like if you can beat me.
When I heard it was a million bucks, but I think it was actually more like a hundred grand.
He lost, but I think it was more of a case of a...
When a guy immediately gets thrown into the UFC, there's a thing that happens called an adrenaline dump where you get in front of the big cameras and you think about the Hoist-Gracy fights of 1993 and you panic.
It's like the overwhelming input of the moment is too much.
What I'm going to say is, Daniel Gracie, whatever you want to call him, what I'm going to say is, he's a bad motherfucker, but by the way, he took us around Brazil, he took us to the Valetudo gyms, he took us to the gyms, he took us with Matt, and I got to say, it was fucking, I got to say, you see a different level of shit down there than you will see anywhere else.
Do you hear this, Matt, and do you agree with this?
unidentified
I was in the Marine Corps, the Iraq in 04. We walked into the favela.
We were in the complexion of the Alamal, which at the time was like the worst of the worst.
And we had to go ask the boss if we could come in here and film.
So the boss said, yeah, no problem.
Just don't film the kids with the guns.
And we're looking around.
We're like, what kids?
What guns?
We take a left turn down the street and I mean, it was just wall-to-wall 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds with, like, military-grade weapons.
I mean, you've got to picture the look.
It was, like, board shorts, flip-flops, you know, like a 1989 Luther Campbell, like, gold rope chain with a medallion, you know, side-to-side mount gold teeth, fucking, you know, collapsible stock M4 with an ACOG grenade launcher, the whole nine.
I mean, these kids were armed to the fucking teeth.
And everyone that we went down there with was just looking around like, holy shit.
I completely understand why someone who especially was in a situation where they were a very talented guy and they were trying to maximize the The sort of the spread of their name as far as possible.
And the word Gracie, because of Hoyce and because of Horian and what they accomplished in UFC 1, it was one of the most important moments in the history of martial arts.
Would you agree, Matt?
For people who don't know the history of it or weren't there when it's happening as martial artists, it was one of the most important moments ever.
It's like all of a sudden we found out what really works, right?
And those guys...
That name, that Gracie name, that shit's like Q-tips or Kleenex, you know?
It's synonymous.
I don't give a fuck about your tissues.
If you have tissues made by Kraft macaroni and cheese, if they're right next to Kleenex, I'm taking the Kleenex.
Okay, because they dominate, as does the NFL. They dominate as well.
You know what I'm saying, Matt?
Jesus Christ, back me up.
unidentified
I do, but in Daniel's defense, I gotta tell you, I think the name was given to him by Enzo and Hyatt.
Because you're not going to come with that shit if you live in a fucking cubicle and you're panicking, taking Adderall all day to get through your workload.
For anyone right now collecting their thoughts and gathering their finances on their way to the bank, on their way to financing their very first yoga studio, I want you to know, I know this podcast doesn't represent how you feel right now.
When you're...
When you're in that train and you're thinking to yourself as you make the connection to the bus on your way to work, I don't want to be that guy!
I don't want to be out of control, worrying about asteroids with intestinal viruses that look like fucking aliens grown inside my shit tract!
because we need all of the information about all the possible realities of all of the human beings existing in this temporary state that we both exist in that you all three of us right now this 2013 can i say one thing Let me say whatever the fuck you want.
Between Fear Factor and your UFC shit and all your other shit, but the fucking podcast that you do, and by the way, I'm sitting here in a room with 700 cameras that Red Band has set up.
I'm sitting here doing podcasts with you.
The fact that you do these podcasts and you finance these podcasts and you do these podcasts, I've got to say, I fucking hand it to you, my friend.
But you don't have to do these podcasts, and the fact that you do these podcasts, the fact that you have Anthony Bourdain, and the fact that you have me, the fact that you have all these people on, that is something special.
And I know we always get to this at the end of it, but I've got to say, what you're doing with Brian and with yourself, come on now.
At least accept the fact that that's an important fucking motherfucking thing.
And by the way, if you don't accept it, I will do something bad with this thing.
Well, there's people that you give a shit about that don't listen to this because they don't know about it.
But the reality is that the ethic of what Brian is trying to put forth and what I am, and unquestionably, without a shadow of a doubt in my heart, what you're trying to put forward...
It is what resonates with a lot of the people that are sort of waking up in the middle of history and looking at this crazy world that is handicapped and sidetracked and hobbled by these ancient traditions that were written back when people couldn't even fly fucking planes and didn't even have printed type and there was no internet and unfortunately this Distribution of information is far more
swift than the absorption of it amongst the people and the altercation or the changing of the culture because of that information.