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Nov. 8, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:59:19
Joe Rogan Experience #413 - Dan Carlin, Daniele Bolelli
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d
dan carlin
01:00:11
d
daniele bolelli
19:17
j
joe rogan
01:37:35
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jamie vernon
00:11
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
What are you eating over there directly into the microphone?
joe rogan
What is it?
Fisherman's friend?
daniele bolelli
Should be illegal, man.
joe rogan
We're live, we're live, alright.
Fisherman's friend.
That's like a gross cough drop, right?
daniele bolelli
But you don't feel, like, when I lecture a lot and you have to speak in a loud voice for a long time, sometimes my throat is killing me.
I take one of these things, I don't fucking feel anything for 20 minutes.
It's like anesthesia or something.
It's insane.
joe rogan
Interesting.
I'll have to look into it.
But they taste like shit, right?
daniele bolelli
Yeah, but it's so bad that it's beyond tasting good or bad.
It's like a whole lot of...
joe rogan
Like a medicine type thing.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, it's something else.
joe rogan
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Daniele Bolelli and Dan Carlin are here, ladies and gentlemen.
this shit could get epic.
dan carlin
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
unidentified
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
joe rogan
If I had to think of the two guys that have freaked me out the most with stories of the past, it's you two gentlemen, so.
unidentified
It's what we do.
daniele bolelli
It's a pleasure.
joe rogan
Out of all the years of listening to podcasts and talking to you guys on the podcast, you are without a doubt the two men who have freaked me out the most.
You with that crazy story about the bodies on the stakes, was it in Persia?
Or Rome?
What was the story?
daniele bolelli
I think I told you two.
One about, of course, impaling and all the fun stuff that goes with it.
And the other one was about the end of Spartacus Rebellion, where they crucify some 5,000 people on the road between Naples and Rome.
joe rogan
That was it.
daniele bolelli
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's dark.
daniele bolelli
That would be a trip that you probably remember if you take the road on those days.
joe rogan
Could you even imagine?
Just the idea.
I mean, how many miles is that?
What is 5,000 people?
How far do they space them out?
daniele bolelli
Is it about 100 miles?
Something like that.
joe rogan
Jesus fucking Christ!
Something like that.
100 miles of crucified bodies!
daniele bolelli
Every so many steps.
One more.
And then another one.
joe rogan
You know, what is that, a blink in terms of actual time on this planet?
Just a blink ago.
Like, these same things that we go to school with and go to the supermarket with, these same humans are capable of that in their darkest of dark days.
From your podcast and from Daniele's, I think the understanding of how easy we got it is really cemented home.
Your stories, some of the stories, especially one of the ones that I really enjoyed recently is the Martin Luther tale, the tale of Lutheranism and the Anabaptists.
dan carlin
And the city of Munster and all that.
joe rogan
Fascinating.
dan carlin
It's Waco on a huge scale.
joe rogan
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
And again, not that long ago, man.
1500-something, what was it?
dan carlin
Oh, a guy like that could arise today, too.
I mean, they still make those kind of people.
joe rogan
Yeah, yeah, they do.
What is it about people that fall for that shit?
I mean, it's just...
dan carlin
There's a sucker born every minute, right?
joe rogan
But why?
What is the flaw in humans that we're willing to believe people that are that fucking nutso?
daniele bolelli
My take is the appeal of authority.
That's why the hitlers of the world gain an audience is because most people are insecure.
Most people like a father figure to tell them I got it under control.
I'm the strong man in charge.
I can take care of business.
Look at me.
And I think there's an appeal of people who have that issues.
They like dictators.
That's probably slightly oversimplified, but I think there's a part of it.
joe rogan
There's also a thing where I think people really terribly want to be a part of a group.
daniele bolelli
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan
Like, very, very much so.
And the more extreme their devotion to that group is, sometimes the more rewarding the actual experience of being in the group is.
It means something special to be a part of this wacky group of crazy fucks that's willing to murder people.
Like, it's almost like this extra charge of being alive that's missing from a lot of people's lives.
I think that being involved in a cult or, you know...
Any sort of crazy, wild, rebellious group that's doing dangerous things.
It's almost to fill a void that's left in human beings that we've sort of like these echoes of our primal days that are still just lingering around in our DNA looking to be played upon with the right harp note.
dan carlin
I think there's almost, too, when you think about like a Hitler, there's some wonderful film you can see of Hitler with crowds on the street, and you can see the look in the people's eyes, and they look like they're seeing a movie star, and they just want to get a little touch.
Maybe my hand will touch his fingers, and you just think to yourself...
Hitler is a celebrity type figure, but there's that same thing about because you're famous, because...
I've never understood the celebrity thing where people just get dumb around, but it's the same sort of the look in the eyes.
It's like seeing Elvis, and instead it's Hitler.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think you're onto something there for sure, because there's something about the ultimate celebrity experience, like meeting a guy like Obama, or meeting a guy, you know, any world leader type character.
It would be so overwhelming, just the presence of that person.
Now think about this all happening at a time when, you know, it was fucking really hard to get a book.
You know, really hard to be properly educated and know alternative media sources that we face today.
You know, goof on alternative media all you want online, and some of it is much deserved.
But the one thing these guys do is they'll cover all kinds of fringe shit, and that'll be their headline news.
You know, like, I'll go to Salon, and people accuse Salon of being, like, too left-wing and too...
You know, but there's some smart people that are pushing it that way.
What I like what they're doing is that their front news is like, it's not like the front news that you're going to get on CNN. It's front news about, you know, like gay and lesbian rights and things in the workplace.
What politicians said about what race that was deplorable.
And all that stuff is front row shit.
Yeah, it's really, really lefty.
Very lefty.
But that's important too.
It's important to have a To balance out a super ultra-sensitive, to balance out the fucking savages of the 1500s that are still rolling around in our DNA. You know, you need someone out there on the fringes of super-sensitive progressive behavior just to try to, like, give us a better medium, give us a better baseline.
dan carlin
Well, let me bring it back to that Munster podcast we talked about.
One of the sub-themes in that was whether or not—you remember the whole question about whether or not regular people should be able to read the Bible for themselves.
Yes.
This goes to what you said about Salon or all these alternative media sites, because the Prime Minister in Great Britain, over all these Snowden leaks and what The Guardian has done, was talking about, you know, maybe we should dial this back.
Maybe it's time for some press restrictions.
In other words, maybe this is too darn dangerous that you're getting to read all this stuff, and we don't have a choke point to shut it down, because in the regular media, whether it was ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post...
There are choke points where, you know, these people literally just pick up the red phone to the editor of the Washington Post and say, let's talk about this story you're thinking about running.
That's a great choke point.
When you have the media as diversified as it is now, all those choke points go away.
And the David Camerons and all these people miss the choke points.
joe rogan
And there's people like Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden in a lesser extent because he's on the run and hiding.
That become huge celebrities because of information that they release to people.
Like Greenwald, even though I know they harass him and they've harassed his boyfriend, they detained his boyfriend in England and...
But the bottom line is that guy became super famous because of this.
So it's a positive thing.
dan carlin
Well, think of how he changed the world.
I mean, I had a lot of people write when the story broke say, this is no big deal, nothing we haven't heard of, all this kind of stuff.
They're not saying that now.
Even John Kerry, the president, all these people have come out and said things that, oh, maybe we shouldn't be doing this, maybe we should be having this discussion.
It's really changed the world.
All this stuff we're talking about now with the NSA, that's all Edward Snowden stuff.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's amazing that one guy can have that kind of impact.
And in the future, when they look back on today, and I think historically, he's getting swept under the rug, and what he's done and the impact of it is just sort of getting ignored by the media.
And more and more, they paint him as this controversial figure.
More and more, they paint him as this guy on the run from the NSA. But there's no support of him in anything...
Mainstream.
There's no support of what he did or who he is.
There's no call to action for the government to release this guy that he's actually a patriot.
That he's actually looking out for the true American way and is exposing people to people.
Not America, but people in America that are making a huge mistake and they're doing it for the name of America.
And whether or not they think it's right or wrong, ultimately we don't think it's right.
And ultimately finding out about it pissed the entire world off.
That's the facts.
So if the government was really representing the people, they would look at it in terms of like, what do all the intelligent people who've reviewed this think?
Yeah, it's a travesty.
It's a fuck-up.
It's anti-American.
The idea of it is ridiculous.
And the idea that this is the only way you can control security is by spying on every fucking person?
Well, then the terrorists have won.
I mean, that's a victory because that's terror for everybody.
That's no privacy, that's weirdness, that's employees like Snowden, who they kept going on and on about how he failed high school.
High school dropout.
High school dropout that could read my email, man.
High school dropout.
dan carlin
That just makes you look worse.
You gave the passcode to that high school dropout?
joe rogan
What the fuck?
Why are you goofing on him?
You hired him.
It's ridiculous.
You fucking hired that guy to watch everybody's email.
dan carlin
But think of how you were talking about...
One person, just one guy.
But think about how much that same attitude scares the government.
One of their many, many, many thousands of workers was able to do that.
That's scary on the whole opposite side.
You know what it is, too?
I think we're dealing with a bit of a...
And this kind of gets them a little off the hook.
I think you have a bubble mentality.
I mean, in life.
You have them in professions.
I mean, scientists get it.
Unions get it, bureaucracies get it, the army gets it, the police gets it.
Where people get promoted, these guys all get promoted to the top NSA positions because they're better at spying.
They figure out better ways to get around defenses.
They don't get promoted to that special room where there's five or six of them making policy because they did a better job of finding a Fourth Amendment that doesn't let them spy.
So when they're in the room, they all see the world the same way.
And this happens, like I said, in every profession.
They tend to push each other forward because there's no devil's advocate there saying, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't use every power we have to spy as much as we can.
To those people, you see these NSA guys testifying in front of Congress, and they don't even hide how mad they are at us.
How mad they are that this is even known, how mad that they have to be there, how mad you're questioning them, and it's because there's nobody in the room saying, guys, we shouldn't do this.
And really, to be honest, there's no obvious line where you should call the dogs off, you know, where you should say, Hey, maybe this is okay, but that's not okay.
That does not happen.
They talk about the Fourth Amendment, but then the other guy goes, well, we're not really violating the Fourth Amendment.
If we just take everybody's trash at cans and we keep it in a storage locker with their name on it, we're only violating it if we actually, like, search through their trash, which we'll do later.
If we have to, and then everything's on the kosher up and up.
If J. Edgar Hoover wants to search Joe Rogan's trash for evidence of illegal activity, you're going to have to send a physical agent out there to do that.
Now we just collect the trash on Trash Day, bring it to the NSA headquarters, dump it in there, and we'll sift through it later if we have to.
joe rogan
Yeah, they could essentially...
Tune in on anybody, anywhere in the world now.
dan carlin
With a flip of a switch.
joe rogan
Yeah, and that kind of power is awesome if you guys are like super enlightened monks that are designed to save the world.
daniele bolelli
The U.S. government.
Right, exactly.
joe rogan
But if you're a regular person, you can't have that kind of juice.
Regular person just can't have autonomy over all these people's information.
dan carlin
What if Richard Nixon had it?
That's what I always say.
unidentified
Oh, God!
dan carlin
And you think you're not going to get another one of those?
joe rogan
Dude, what if Dick Cheney had it?
dan carlin
He did have it.
joe rogan
Did he have it?
dan carlin
Yeah.
joe rogan
You think so?
dan carlin
Absolutely.
He put it into place, man.
joe rogan
So they were accessing everybody's emails as far back as...
dan carlin
Yeah, there's a book called The 1% Doctrine where they talk about how after the 9-11 attacks, the rule that they decided, and mainly because of Dick Cheney, to operate under was...
If there's even a 1% chance of another 9-11 happening, anything is fair.
You can do anything to justify it.
And I think what their attitude was, is on 9-12-2002, everybody would have said, oh yeah, okay, whatever it takes, man, don't let that happen again.
When it was still fresh in our minds.
joe rogan
Yeah, there was a weird moment after 9-11 where I remember driving to school, or to work rather, and as I was driving to work, it was early in the morning and all the commuters were going, and everybody had a flag on the car.
Everybody had it.
And it was weird.
It was a weird feeling.
It wasn't just a...
It was like everybody was reminding everybody.
dan carlin
How long did that last?
Because I'm thinking, I just said 2002, and everybody's going to go, Dan, don't you know the 9-11 attacks happened in 2001?
But a year later, that was still an open wound.
And so how long, when do you think, if you had to guess, when did it start to wear off and we started to normalize?
I mean, New York City is exempt because I don't think they ever re-normalized, but for the rest of the country, how long do you think it took to get over that PTSD? I think it took a few years, two or three years, something like that.
daniele bolelli
I'd give even more.
joe rogan
Yeah.
daniele bolelli
Because, I mean, Bush being re-elected made no fucking sense under any point of view other than part of the 9-11 boost that he got for a while.
joe rogan
Well, it was also the real problem with the voting machines.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
The real openly reported problem with those Diebold machines.
dan carlin
How about the candidate he ran against?
That's always the first thing I look at, too.
daniele bolelli
That's also a good point, yes.
dan carlin
If you're running against John F. Kennedy, you lose that election, but you're not.
You're running against a guy, you just go, oh, really?
That's my option?
unidentified
Right.
dan carlin
That's what kills you.
daniele bolelli
Yeah.
joe rogan
Well, and a lot of people felt like the Al Gore election that got Bush into office in the first place was tainted.
dan carlin
That was a weird one.
Yeah, that was a weird one.
joe rogan
There's so much fuckery involved in voting, man, like real open fuckery that should be like, really, it's treason.
It's treasonous behavior.
And these people openly do it in order to help their candidates win.
I mean, it's one of the most un-American things of all time, manipulating the vote like that.
dan carlin
I think somebody who was a political operative would say to you that it's one of the most American things of all time.
Because it's been going on.
I mean, you know, George Washington's giving hard cider to people, you know, when they come to his little parties to get...
I mean, this is...
The problem is, and we've talked about this before, I think there's a certain amount of this that a healthy society and a healthy political system can suck up and still be okay.
There's a certain tipping point where you're not that healthy anymore, and what was okay before is not suck-up-able anymore.
daniele bolelli
Suck-up-able, I love that.
joe rogan
Well, it also begs the question.
All of this stuff begs the question.
Like, first of all, everyone's favorite argument is if you have nothing to hide, then what are you worried about?
And it's not that.
What it is is, first of all, why do you need so much information?
And what...
What have you done that has made so many people so angry that you have to check everyone's email?
What is the actual cause of all this that never gets addressed?
Whenever we're talking about how this group hates us, or that group hates us, or this group is playing...
Why?
Why?
dan carlin
What did we do?
I want to go with what you said, if you have nothing to hide, because I was trying to get a show out before I came here, and I failed miserably.
But one of the things I was going to talk about, did you see that story?
The lawsuit filed from that incident in New Mexico with the driver who didn't do the full stop leaving Walmart.
You saw it, right?
So the police pull him over for California stopping the stop sign, decide that he looks like he's clenching his buttocks in a weird way.
And this is the part I love.
Goes to a judge and says to the judge, while this guy is sitting on the side of the road, he's clenching his buttocks in a weird way.
I think we have somebody trying to hide drugs in there.
And the judge goes, I guess, judging from the story, yeah, that would be probable cause.
So they take this guy to a doctor who refuses to do with the police officer's arrest.
So they've got to go to another doctor.
Fourteen hours of anal cavity searches, enemas.
They sedated him and did a colonoscopy.
They examined his stuff right in front of him.
Fourteen hours.
Found nothing.
X-rayed him multiple times.
Found nothing.
And then apparently sent him a $6,000 bill for the procedure.
So when you say...
What have you got to hide unless you're hiding?
That's what can happen to you.
And not just that, what I love is the police department spokesman said, we didn't do anything wrong.
This is policy and we had a judge sign off on it.
So when you say, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care?
This guy had nothing to hide and that happened to him.
daniele bolelli
He clearly did because he was Clenching his butt in a weird way.
dan carlin
I know, but now if that story is true and the lawsuit claims witnesses and all this kind of stuff and the police officers think nothing was wrong there, that's what happens to you when you get rid of these protections that keep you from being searched willy-nilly or anything like that.
daniele bolelli
After a story like that, everyone in the world who's going to be stopped by the police is going to clench his butt in a weird way.
It's just the fear of this story.
It's like, oh shit, it's not the colonoscopy.
joe rogan
You're going to get people that are butt freaks, and that's what they're into.
They're into cops checking them out.
They're going to hide treasures up there, put secrets up there.
dan carlin
I didn't mean to take the conversation in that direction.
daniele bolelli
There's nothing wrong with that.
joe rogan
It's a great direction.
It's hilarious.
Well, it's fucked up that if you search someone's ass for 14 hours and there's nothing up there, that guy should be able to search yours for 28. That should be the rule.
He should be able to throw firecrackers in there.
Come on, man.
You checked his ass for no reason.
You owe him something.
dan carlin
What bothers me about that is that there's no penalty that actually affects the people who did this.
In other words, if this guy wins his big lawsuit against him, that's the taxpayers who are going to pay that.
The people who did it don't suffer at all.
joe rogan
Yeah, like someone falsely accusing someone of murder or theft or any crime like that.
It almost should be worth just as much.
If you set a guy up for murder and you know he didn't really do it, it should be worth almost as much as murdering somebody.
dan carlin
They're talking about that with these podcast troll lawsuits and everything to change the law that they're working on in D.C. would do some of that, would put some of the onus on these people who say these things, and if you lose your case, all of a sudden you're the one responsible for the damage.
joe rogan
For folks who don't know that story, I don't know the full extent of it.
From what I understand, someone out there has a patent.
dan carlin
Says they have a patent.
joe rogan
Says they have a patent on...
I'm going to very, very broadly paraphrase this.
I think it was putting something up in serial form on the internet.
So essentially it would be like every podcast, every YouTube channel, everything.
dan carlin
We invented that.
joe rogan
Yeah.
dan carlin
You owe us money.
joe rogan
The idea is ridiculous.
If you have the Bolelli blog and you decide to number them, you're violating a patent.
Obviously, I might be way off with this.
But he sent some, or the company had already won.
They had beaten Apple.
dan carlin
On a different thing, though.
A different thing.
joe rogan
On Apple, on another patent-style lawsuit, which may or may not have been more worthy.
But this one is strange because he's targeting podcasters.
unidentified
Mm-hmm.
joe rogan
And so it's a big...
dan carlin
The whole goal is to get you to do in the podcast community.
It's the old shakedown, though, where they essentially say, we're not going to get...
You stole our technology, but it's fine.
Just give us $1,000 a month, and nobody gets hurt.
joe rogan
Is it really that much?
dan carlin
Oh, I bet it's...
Talk to your friend Adam Carolla.
He got a letter.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, that's ridiculous.
You know, the idea that you could patent putting things up in serialized form on the internet.
dan carlin
In 1994 or something, or whenever they claim to have it done.
joe rogan
It's what people have always done.
I mean, we put everything up in serialized form.
Can you imagine if someone allowed them to do that with television shows?
You could never number episodes anymore?
It's the stupidest idea of all time.
Like, the idea that you could control that.
dan carlin
But see, but it's not stupid if you're them and the lawyers and everything because that thing that they're working on in D.C. isn't there yet.
You take a shot.
joe rogan
Right.
dan carlin
You know, you take a shot and you see what happens.
There's no downside.
joe rogan
Yeah, I could see that.
I could see it from their point of view, from strictly business.
unidentified
Sure.
joe rogan
They'd be like, look, we're playing within the rules.
These are the rules, and this is how you get paid.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
But I think that...
Ultimately, we're going to have to agree on something that makes a lot more sense.
Because you can't get money for nothing from people, and that's money for nothing.
You're not contributing anything.
dan carlin
I think you can get money for nothing from people.
I think we do that all the time.
joe rogan
Well, we shouldn't be.
daniele bolelli
That's the American way.
joe rogan
When I say you can't get money for nothing, I'm talking about the ideal scenario.
daniele bolelli
Okay, let's make that clear.
joe rogan
Yeah, let's make that clear.
Obviously people get something for nothing, right?
I mean, I think we're going to have a real problem in this country no matter what, as long as our financial systems remain so vague and it fluctuates, goes up and down.
Today the Dow crashed, tomorrow the Dow rises.
As long as that's a possibility, how could you ever have anything stable ever when the entire foundation of your economy is by nature fluctuating daily?
By nature, up and down, so much so that you have to close business at a certain time.
Stop fucking trading!
You have to blow a whistle off and say, no more decisions!
No more, no, you gotta stop.
We have to control this economy.
We have to allow chaos only in eight-hour bursts.
And when those bursts are over, we have to literally shut it down.
dan carlin
Can you imagine how many trades there would be the second the market opens when they've had a whole night to digest stuff?
Okay, first thing in the morning, it's billions of dollars.
We've got to get this trade in before, because everybody will beat us to it.
Can you imagine what the market would do on opening?
Now, in the old days, that's how it was.
But now, with the digital trading all in one second, there'd be 10 bazillion trades in a second and a half.
joe rogan
What's a strange idea?
The idea that you could only make transactions during a very...
dan carlin
Yeah, especially in a global economy when the people in Japan are going, so we can only trade on American things when we're asleep at night?
I don't understand.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's stupid.
It's stupid.
But if they went 24 hours, people would just take fucking Adderall and just hit it hard.
dan carlin
People would be dying of lack of sleep.
unidentified
That's right.
joe rogan
Way more than StarCraft.
All those people that are dying from playing StarCraft, that's not even for real money.
daniele bolelli
Right.
joe rogan
You play the economy, you're playing it for real money.
But what do you do?
Can you day trade in the middle of the night, or do you have to do it during stock market hours?
dan carlin
I think you can set up trades to be enacted at the market open or whatnot.
joe rogan
But you can't just ride the wave and go up and down, sell and buy.
I don't think so.
Unless you're doing it maybe on Tokyo time.
Maybe you could do the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
unidentified
They have a different stock exchange.
dan carlin
That's when you're a real addict.
When you go, oh man, the U.S. market closed.
Where can I play?
Tokyo's just coming alive.
joe rogan
Yeah, it is like an addiction.
I really truly believe it.
I don't think it's possible that it couldn't be when you're gambling.
Essentially, the stock market is a lot of gambling.
dan carlin
Especially the way some of these people play.
It's one thing to say, I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and sell it in 25 years.
unidentified
It's another thing when you go, I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and sell it in 20 seconds.
daniele bolelli
Yep.
joe rogan
And even if you're right, if you say, no, look, it seems like a gamble to you because you're uneducated, but I, in fact, am very educated on this, and it's more of a calculated risk, but the reward-to-risk ratio is very high.
A lot of variables.
daniele bolelli
That's what every gambler always says.
joe rogan
But they can show you on paper, we've profited X amount of years in a row.
This is not nearly as unstable as you like to think it is.
But part of the charge is the fact that it is a little.
So 2008 happens every now and then, where fucking everybody's scrambling and no one's got a chair, and the music just shut off.
dan carlin
What I love about that is when they show you, you go to the financial advisor's office, and they always show you the historical, the way these things are performed historically.
unidentified
And it's always, the graph starts right after the last terrible crash.
dan carlin
And you just go, well, what about the Depression?
Well, the Depression was an unusual situation.
That'll never happen again.
I think today they must start it from like last week, don't you think?
Like, here's your historical performance in the last seven day period.
joe rogan
Yeah, we don't know.
I think the idea of trying to control an entire global economy like that is preposterous.
It just doesn't make any sense.
I don't understand it at all, and the people that understand it have tried to comfort me and assure me that it does in fact make good sense.
daniele bolelli
Right, and if that's not scary enough, then you get the collusion of government and the weird economy.
I mean, when you think about the fact that there are no laws against the fact that if you have work for some companies, you can pick up a government job.
Overseeing the workings of those very companies or vice versa.
You are in government first and the second you are done you can pick up your vice president position in one of the companies that you just finished benefiting.
That's beyond perverted.
joe rogan
It's so transparent.
dan carlin
You know, one of the ways that they've said our society could go down, though, and other societies have throughout history, is that sometimes they just get too complex to manage.
And you can ride that wave sometimes until something bad happens.
But a perfect example is, I mean, a lot of people said that the Great Depression happened because what was going on in the financial system overwhelmed people's ability to understand.
And react and compensate for things.
And I remember people saying, well, we'll never have another Great Depression because we're so on top of things now.
Yeah, but we have new variables that we don't understand that somebody in the future is going to say they were such idiots way back there in the early 21st century.
joe rogan
Well, me as a barely educated fool, when I look at exactly how everything has fluctuated in the crash in 2008 and all these things, It makes zero sense.
Because as a fool, I look at it and I go, look at this.
There's the same amount of people, there's the same amount of metal, there's the same amount of concrete, the same amount of plastic, same amount of material things.
No one has produced or taken away anything from the pile of humanity's creations.
And yet, all of a sudden everyone's broke.
Like, all of a sudden, everything fell apart, and people who were prospering just a week ago are no longer prospering.
When I look at something like that, I have to feel like, okay, these guys are obviously far smarter than I, and they're running this system.
So either it's rigged as fuck, and someone just extracted a shitload of money out of the system and did it under the guise of a crash, or...
People are way fucking dumber than I give them credit.
It's one of those two things.
And I feel like when a guy like that cat from New York that ripped everybody off in the Ponzi scheme, the old dude, what is his name?
Bernie Madoff.
When a cat like Bernie Madoff comes along and robs so many people, I have to go, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
So no one knows how this thing works?
dan carlin
Well, but I mean, look, it's not that hard to understand when people are playing with things that aren't real, but selling it for real money, and then you're counting that as something that you own.
For example, we take these toxic assets, right?
It's not as hard to understand as people suggest, because let's say I put you in a house you can't afford, and And all the evidence shows you can't afford it, and I wouldn't have given it to you 20 years ago.
And then I take a bunch of people like you, and I take all of your bad things that you're never going to be paying back, and I bundle it into something, and then I sell that to someone else based on the value that isn't really there because none of you can really pay it back.
And then you say, well, I'm worth this much money.
I own these assets, and they're worth this much money.
And then those assets collapse, and all of a sudden you look like you had $50 million in your asset tree of stuff, and all of a sudden you don't.
You bought something that was worth nothing, and so...
All that money that you had on paper just disappeared overnight because it wasn't real to begin with.
joe rogan
Weren't there banks during this crisis that were actually banking on things falling apart?
daniele bolelli
Yes, hedging.
joe rogan
So profiting off of it falling apart.
dan carlin
It's supposed to be a risk management diversification tool.
joe rogan
Jesus Christ, that's a great way of saying what fucking you are.
unidentified
Yeah, exactly.
dan carlin
I'm just using the proper terminology there.
joe rogan
I've got to write that down because that's a brilliant way of fucking someone in the ass.
This is a risk management...
dan carlin
Not a risk management for you, a risk management for them.
daniele bolelli
Right.
joe rogan
How do they describe risk management...
dan carlin
Diversification tool.
joe rogan
That is goddamn hilarious.
daniele bolelli
I think that's what the cops in New Mexico said that to the guy.
unidentified
That's right.
dan carlin
Searching your cavity is a risk management tool.
joe rogan
I'm actually writing that down because it's so beautiful.
dan carlin
I think you should use that for all kinds.
Use it in the MMA color commentary.
Him throwing that punch that way is a risk management diversification tool.
joe rogan
If anybody hears that, though, if I pretended that I actually came up with it on my own, I would get...
dan carlin
All the financial advisors who watch the MMA would be going, now he's talking!
joe rogan
If I'm saying it now, I have to say it as an inside joke.
dan carlin
Wink, wink.
joe rogan
Risk management diversification tool.
That's how we're fucking you.
That's hilarious!
That's a brilliant way of putting it.
dan carlin
I'm out, then I'm out.
joe rogan
But just the idea that that could be legal, that you could be loaning people money, setting up loans, and also gambling on the fact that you'll profit if they default on those loans.
dan carlin
Look, we know you can't afford this mortgage, but don't worry.
If you can't pay it, you'll be taken out of your house, and we'll win on this other side over here.
joe rogan
That's my point as an uneducated fool.
When I look at that system, I go, well, obviously they set it up so they can extract money.
That's the only way it makes sense.
If you have the same amount of people, you have the same amount of knowledge, you have the same amount of items, and yet all of a sudden everything fell apart.
Somebody fucked you, okay?
They just did it in a way that's legal.
daniele bolelli
No, but I mean, banks, I have to tell you a story because this is too crazy.
I remember when I went from two incomes to one after my wife died and everything.
And so I applied for the, I forgot how they call it, loan modification, right?
It's like all conditions have changed.
You can modify the loan to help somebody stay in the house, all that, right?
So I get two letters from the bank in the same day.
One, I open and they say, we can't give you the loan modification because you make too much money.
You're doing too well.
You don't need it.
I open the next letter.
He said, we can't give you a loan modification because there's no hope you can keep the house.
You make too little money.
There's just no way.
dan carlin
And I'm like, what the fuck?
daniele bolelli
Did you talk to each other at least?
He's like, you're the same department.
You're sending me, really?
This is what it's about?
joe rogan
They just have, I bet, probably like patent excuses, especially when they feel like you're probably going to lose the house.
They're like, good, we'll just snatch up his house.
daniele bolelli
This is where it gets better.
I knew somebody who was hooked up with the people who owned the loan, so through somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, we got to the president of the company like, hey man, can you do something?
Is it something that we can work with and stuff?
I kid you not, the guy sent back the word, give me $20,000 under the table and I can make it happen.
joe rogan
Oh my god!
He asked for a bribe?
dan carlin
Holy shit!
daniele bolelli
And if he's doing that with me, I'm imagining that's probably a regular business, right?
joe rogan
That's amazing!
daniele bolelli
But, you know, there's no paper trail, so, you know, you can prove it.
joe rogan
So you'd have to come up with 20 cash?
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
20,000 in cash.
Holy shit, that's a lot of money.
daniele bolelli
But he's like, look how much you're going to save over the next 30 years.
It's worth it, you know?
joe rogan
That's hilarious.
unidentified
I was like...
dan carlin
I always think, to me, it's like when you talk about them betting both sides of the fence, essentially.
How is that different, though, from a lot of us probably know some pretty darn serious gamblers, and a lot of them set their sports bets up that way, where, listen, if this happens, I win, and if that happens, I win, too, and either way, I'm covered.
And that's definitely how the house handles things.
So, essentially, when we talk about the financial insiders in the economic realm, that's the house.
So, the house usually wins.
joe rogan
Yeah, and it's not a fair game.
I mean, I always say I love casinos.
I love going to Vegas.
I love doing fights there.
But if you're smart, you look around and you realize, how do you think they built this giant fucking thing?
dan carlin
That's right.
joe rogan
They didn't build it on you cracking blackjack every week.
They built it on people losing money here, man.
daniele bolelli
That's what they're good at.
dan carlin
They don't offer you those free trips and the free hotel rooms to come gamble because they're losing money on that.
joe rogan
Yeah, they're so slick that if you win a ton of money, they'll give you free tickets.
If you bet a ton of money and win a ton of money, they'll fly you back.
They're like, it's just a matter of time, bitch.
We got you here.
Just a matter of time.
It's like having a fight with Cain Velasquez.
If you don't knock him out, you're going to run out of gas before he does.
There's no doubt.
It's just a matter of time.
He's going to get you.
If there was 25-round fights, Cain Velasquez would never fucking lose.
It's impossible for him to lose.
He just doesn't have a...
His gas tank is like three times larger than a normal human being.
That's the fucking house.
The house can't lose, bitch!
They got billions!
But they do, like...
My friend Dana White is a...
He's a crazy degenerative gambler.
And he gambles millions.
He's lost a million in a night.
He's made as much as six million a night, I think he said, on the podcast.
Yeah, he's crazy.
He's crazy.
But he's a very wealthy man.
He was at the Palms, and he whacked them hard.
And they cut his credit line in half.
And he was like, what?
We do shows there.
We put on UFC fight nights there.
And he's gambling a lot of fucking money.
He's getting crazy.
But he won.
He won a lot.
And so they cut his ability to gamble in half.
So he left the Palms.
So he pulled the UFC fights out and said, no, okay, we'll go to the Hard Rock now.
What are you guys, retarded?
Like, why would you do that?
Like, you're going to get me eventually.
Don't you know you're going to get me, you chicken shits?
It's like they pulled his fucking credit.
They were like too much.
daniele bolelli
That's the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do if you're in the casinos.
You want them back.
You don't want them to send them away.
But you know what?
joe rogan
You get numbers crunchers who don't understand human nature.
And they just look at it as like a management tool thing.
dan carlin
Well, to get back to our risk management, I think there's a little bit of them going, I don't know how he's gaming the system, but I can judge from the results.
He's up to something.
Cut this guy.
He's counting cards.
He's this or that.
Just get him out.
Just get him out.
joe rogan
I don't think he can count cards.
I mean, I guess he can, but in blackjack, can he count cards?
dan carlin
They don't know what the next scam is, and they can sometimes deduce that something's going on when those odds and averages that they've worked out to the nth degree don't seem to be working with you.
joe rogan
Right.
If you're a smart player, that definitely has an impact on blackjack.
Blackjack is absolutely a skill game, right?
And I know they use a gang of decks now.
They don't just use one deck.
So I bet you can most certainly count those cards, but I think you have to be a super genius.
You have to be somebody way smarter than Dana.
That's what I'm trying to say.
He ain't counting cards.
He's just getting lucky.
He just knows how to play.
You know, he'll tell you.
He's not a fucking math genius.
He's a business genius.
He knows how to promote fights.
daniele bolelli
Maybe that's because he brings Cain Velasquez with him and puts him right next to the other dude.
He won, right?
joe rogan
I'm 100% in favor of gambling.
I'm 100% in favor of liquor, too.
I'm 100% in favor of all options on the table.
It doesn't mean you're going to indulge in all of them, nor does it mean that you should.
And a lot of the indulgences that are available right now are very unhealthy.
Like we talked about the gambling one.
I could go to Vegas.
You could go to Vegas.
We all could, any weekend, and gamble everything we own.
I know a dude who worked with a guy.
He worked with this guy for 10 years.
For 10 years, this guy saved up all his money to go to Vegas.
And his idea was he's going to go to Vegas and gamble and win.
He felt like that was his destiny.
So he saved up X amount of thousands of dollars for 10 years.
Lost it in the first 24 hours in Vegas.
Came back home to Oklahoma and was just freaked out.
Just literally like shell-shocked.
Like he had been attacked and raped by a hundred ghosts.
He just had this look on his face that he would never recover from.
This poor prick.
dan carlin
That's natural selection.
He's going to go follow a preacher in Munster now.
joe rogan
I firmly believe that you should know that that's possible.
I think we all should know.
dan carlin
Big sign on the door.
Walk in these doors and you can lose everything.
Welcome!
joe rogan
Yeah, but I think that exists for everything.
I mean, I think ultimately we have to learn from all these horrible examples that we see on TV and in the news, but every time some guy gets in a street fight and beats some guy to death and they're pulling him away, we should all learn from that.
We should all learn from that and go, hey, you know what?
The human body is a lot more fragile than we like to pretend it is.
Who's that boxer that just fell into a coma?
Did you hear about that?
unidentified
No, I didn't see that.
joe rogan
He was fighting on HBO the other night.
They put him in a coma.
dan carlin
Brain swelling?
joe rogan
Yeah, he had some swelling, and then when they put him in a coma, he had a stroke.
His name is, uh, it's really sad, man.
dan carlin
Oh, I just heard him interviewed.
joe rogan
Yeah, Magomed Abdul Salaman.
dan carlin
Who was he fighting?
I just, I heard a pregame.
joe rogan
Eric Perez.
Mike Perez, excuse me.
And Mike Perez is this badass Cuban boxer.
It was a great fight.
And that guy is...
I mean, this is a perfect example of a guy being too tough for his own good.
Magomed took a tremendous amount of punishment in that fight, but kept trying.
He just kept trying to get to that.
dan carlin
Did he make it through the bout?
joe rogan
He made it through the bout.
I think it was a decision, I believe.
It was a 10-round decision, yeah.
And he took just a furious amount of damage in that fight.
And afterwards, they found out that he had broke his hand and broke his nose.
He was taken to the hospital where a small blood clot was discovered on his brain.
And so they induced him in a medically induced coma.
And then while he was in the coma, he had a stroke.
So it's pretty bad.
dan carlin
That's what's made boxing hard for me.
I've always been a huge boxing fan.
Football's getting a little like this, where you start to wince.
It's funny, I know this is stupid to say, but I would watch boxing and I never connected it with pain.
You're watching tactics and you're watching different strategies, and you're watching foot movement and head movement.
It never even occurred to me that you're watching...
The pain and the suffering and then someone dies and you go, okay, how much enjoyment did I get out of this sport?
And I still watch it, but this is the kind of thing that just reminds you of what's going on in there.
joe rogan
Well, for me, it has an even deeper connection because I've competed, because I've fought a few kickboxing bouts and probably, I don't know how many taekwondo bouts, but it was over...
For a period of like six or seven years, it was all I did with my life.
It was my 100% waking life.
So I competed a lot in full contact tournaments and I got away with it.
I got lucky, but I've seen some guys get really hurt.
I've seen some guys get kicked in the head where they were just really never the same person again.
dan carlin
Doesn't this go to what you were saying, though, about you kind of have a right?
It's like if you talk to these boxers who are, like you said, every day they're training, you're going to tell this person they can't do that as long as they know the risks?
joe rogan
To this day, that was one of the most important things that I ever did as far as developing me as a human being because it was terrifying.
It was terrifying, and I got really good at it.
And I got really good at competing in a really dangerous, high-risk competition Quick happening situation, like the striking, especially like the weight class that I was kickboxing at 160. These light guys, everyone moves really fast, they all hit hard.
It's a scary weight class.
A lot of knockouts.
And when you're competing in that sort of an environment, you're training in that sort of environment on a regular basis, regular shit just doesn't scare you the same way.
Regular people, and they flare up and yell, or someone gets douchey with you, it doesn't have this overwhelming sense of fear that it has on a lot of people.
And I've seen people in confrontations where a guy and another guy are in a confrontation, Something happens mostly because one guy loses his ability to stay calm.
He's so confused and nervous that he can't react properly.
When I see that, I see that's a human with a deficit in the development of their character.
daniele bolelli
I don't think, unless you have been there, I don't think that physical violence is something that you're just born knowing how to deal with.
You know, it's like either you are used to it because you got beat up at home as a kid or you're used to it because you fought a lot or you're used to it because of something.
But you're not going to, you know, the first time it happens, it's fucking scary.
joe rogan
That's why the scariest kids to fight are kids who got beat by their dad.
unidentified
Yeah.
daniele bolelli
Exactly.
joe rogan
Those kids though, I remember competing against kids that I knew had like really violent relationships with their fathers.
Those kids were like really used to getting hit.
daniele bolelli
Yeah.
joe rogan
It was a different thing like and they it was a part of normal everyday life getting smacked around.
dan carlin
Well, you know, though, and this gets me back to not thinking about the pain in boxing.
I remember there was a...
Ryan O'Neill, I think it was, he was doing the remake of the Champ movie, and they had on site one of these actual boxers who was going to kind of, you know, teach him a little bit about how to do this or that.
And he tells the story, he says, at one point, he goes, the boxer who was working with him said, I want you to hit me.
And he said, okay, I'm not going to hit you in a long time.
Hit me, you've got to hit me.
So he finally hits him, he goes...
No, I mean, really hit me.
He says, I squared up and I hit him as hard as I could.
He goes, no, I mean, really hit me.
And you start to realize that guys who take lots of punches all the time in training and everything, that it doesn't do to them what it would do to you, well, not you, me.
But to them, The punches can do just as much damage to their brain, but in terms of shaking them or hurting them, it's not the same thing when you're used to it.
joe rogan
Well, one of the big things is the shock of being hit.
The shock of being hit is how a lot of people, they literally go into a freeze mode, and they can't move correctly, and they get knocked out.
Like, their body shuts off.
And it's being overwhelmed by the moment, by the fact that you're actually engaged in I mean, hand-to-hand combat with somebody.
That's a weird feeling.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen guys fall apart, like in street fights and stuff.
I've seen street fights that happened just because a guy was scared.
You know, that's a possibility too.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, because then the more scared you are, the more you call for it.
Because then you're encouraging the other.
Because if you're not scared, it's like, damn, it makes the other person think twice.
He's like, do I really want to get into it with this crazy motherfucker who's not scared of getting hurt?
joe rogan
It also doesn't progress the correct way.
The natural way in an idiot's mind is I yell at you, you either back down and get scared and I kick your ass, or you yell back at me and we fucking puff chests until somebody fucks up and makes the wrong move.
But if a guy backs down, you know that you can press forward.
The natural instinct of the bully is to press forward.
It's almost unavoidable.
I think that's a...
People do themselves a huge disservice by not understanding at least some form of martial arts, at least having some experience in it.
Hopefully so that we won't need it, though.
daniele bolelli
That book that we were talking about right before we come on...
dan carlin
Xenophon, yeah.
daniele bolelli
Xenophon, the Persian Expedition.
One of his speeches, when there are these 10,000 Greek guys, like, way behind enemy lines in Persian territory, they have to make their way back home, he looks desperate, they have no chance, and one of...
In his sort of...
In this speech that he's trying to give them to rally them up, one of the things he says is exactly what you were saying about the psychologies.
If you guys are scared now, you're all going to die.
There's just no way.
Because if you're afraid of dying, that's exactly what's going to happen.
If you guys are willing to die because you know that your odds are desperate, but you're willing to just go for it because A, you don't have any other chance, B, you go for it with honor...
The odds are not only you're going to behave honorably, but your chances of surviving improve dramatically.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
The universe favors bravery.
Doesn't want weak bitches out there spreading their seeds.
Sorry.
Sorry.
That's a fact.
It's a fact.
Right.
There's a weird trend today to almost encourage weakness.
I think encouraging kindness is always very important, but it gets really confused with encouraging weakness.
There's a lot of bitch-ass men out there that...
It would help them.
It would benefit them.
Take a fucking boot camp class.
You know?
Just do something with your body other than sitting.
daniele bolelli
That shit drives me insane because the fact that we have moved beyond the stupid stereotype of the tough macho man and the prissy woman who stays back, that's nice.
But at the same time, so often has come at the price of people giving up the good sides of the stereotype.
If the stereotype of the man was you're strong and tough, but you're also emotionally deficient and not very sensitive, rather than working on the kindness aspect, as you put it, the idea has been, well, then strength is bad.
We should get rid of that.
joe rogan
That's ridiculous.
daniele bolelli
So stupid is not even funny.
joe rogan
Well, people associate prejudicely anything male, masculine, anything unapologetically masculine with suppression of the feminine, with suppression like with anti-feminist ideas.
I have on more than one occasion gotten into it with people that call themselves feminists and their idea was that something that I had said Like, doesn't promote femininity or is anti-feminine.
The furthest couldn't be true.
I just expect a balance.
I expect people to just be people.
Exactly.
When you start looking at feminist or masculinist, that doesn't mean shit to me.
What means shit to me is, leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
I'll give you the right to do anything you want to do, but you can't say I'm an ape because I like working out.
You can't say I'm an asshole because I've got some fucking guns.
That's nonsense.
If you're a man and you don't work out because it's not enjoyable for you, I totally understand.
But the idea that someone who does or someone who does participate in manly type shit is an asshole because of that.
Watch this one thing.
It was this horrible piece that someone wrote about the rape in Ohio.
With those high school kids.
One of the most disgusting aspects of male culture.
This ability to get someone fucked up and do that to them and treat them as a subhuman.
I mean, it is without a doubt one of the scariest, darkest aspects of men that they can do that.
But in this article, they were talking about how, let's just face the facts, all high school athletes are assholes.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, that's the logical conclusion that flow from that.
It's like, what the fuck?
joe rogan
It hurt my head.
dan carlin
Where was that?
joe rogan
That was a blog.
It was a blog that somebody wrote.
But it was just, I was like, oh, I mean, it was a very progressive, very left-wing blog that I visit sometimes.
And they were actually saying that supporting the ideas of competition actually encourages people to treat people as sub-humans.
dan carlin
Yeah, and that's an old, old idea.
joe rogan
What do you think about that?
dan carlin
Listen, I think we exist in a realm where it's going to be competitive no matter what you do.
So I think to pretend we're going to de-emphasize these things doesn't do anybody any good down the road.
Because then, once you drop them in life, they're not prepared.
Well, it is a little bit like what you were saying about the fighting, but like with my kids...
You don't want to over, you don't want to crush anybody early on.
You want to nurture them so that they can handle the competition.
But if you don't teach them about competition, you're not preparing them for life.
And that's when you're going to release them into a world where, I mean, if those people really don't want a competitive world, think about how much you would have to do to turn off the competitive world.
How much intrusion there would have to be on all of our lives.
There goes your stock market right away, right?
I mean, the economy.
Isn't that a little like what some of the really hardcore communist ideas were?
Yes.
Where different people have different capabilities, so forcing them to compete is inherently unequal because you and I are born different, so we'll compensate for that and blend it out.
Sounds great in theory, but the amount of work it takes to recreate a whole system where you don't have competition, you don't have differences, is worse than the disease.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, even because you are treating people like they are sick, as opposed to treating somebody like you are going to teach everyone, man, woman, doesn't matter, gender doesn't come into place.
Everybody should be strong.
Everybody should be kind.
Everybody should have both of the qualities that are normally attributed to only one gender or the other.
They are human qualities.
They are good qualities.
They are what you need to be a complete human being.
You encourage that stuff, and you make the most complete human being there can possibly be, and they will deal with whatever shit life throws at them, competitive or otherwise, because there are always going to be challenges.
And as you say, if there are no preparation for the challenges that are going to come your way, whether you like it or not, no matter how safe you make the world, Then you're dead meat already.
Then you're going to get squashed the first time the universe goes boo at you.
You're going to freak out and crash.
dan carlin
For me, the big question in a competitively based system is not the competition part and not the winning part.
It's what do you do with the people who come out on the short end of the stick?
Because I think in a sink or swim system, you're going to find that the people who are sinking are going to decide that the system sucks.
unidentified
Yes.
dan carlin
And we're going to change it because there's too many losers.
I've always said that one of the things that you do when...
I said in a recent show that poverty is going to come back to bite us all in the ass one day if we don't do something about it.
Not because you should care about poor people, but because eventually if they're hurting enough, they will make you care about them.
They will...
They will turn the system around.
I mean, you can out-compete them all you want, but they'll come and burn down your nice house at a certain point.
So to me, when you talk about a competitive system, the winners aren't the issue.
It's what you do with the people, because you're going to have some losers in a competitive system.
How do you mitigate the downsides of that?
And that's what I always try to think about.
joe rogan
That's a very good point.
That's a very, very good point.
You're always going to have good and bad in the world.
You're always going to have conflict.
The ability to recognize that and deal with whatever comes in front of you is very important.
dan carlin
Like you said, you're going to have kids who get raised by parents who beat the hell out of them and who don't raise them the right way and who don't give them those qualities, Daniele, that you were talking about.
And then you're going to unleash those people in the world and say, go compete with this guy who went to Harvard and had a great education and was born with a lot of money.
The world's an unequal place.
You can't fix that, but you can build that into your thinking, I think.
joe rogan
It's also, there's such a broad spectrum of human beings and what the human being, where they fit into society, where their place is.
Like, I have a lot of friends that have, like, zero willpower, but they make amazing stand-up comedians.
You know, and that's where they, like...
dan carlin
The two might go together.
joe rogan
They very well might.
Like, Joey Diaz is my favorite example.
I mean, Joey has willpower.
He gets up in the morning and everything like that, but he's, you know, 300 and whatever pounds.
He doesn't give a fuck, and he's an animal.
He's a savage.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
But he's also the funniest human being I've ever met in my life.
You can't make a Joey Diaz if you get some guy who's doing fucking sit-ups every morning, a thousand sit-ups and chin-ups and jogging around the block and only eating kale.
It's not going to be that guy.
You need a guy who went to jail, did a lot of coke, kidnapped a guy.
You need all that in order to get a guy who's that wild and crazy and funny.
And I feel like...
The real problem that we have in raising children is all they teach in school is to try to filter you into a standard position in the economy.
Standard job.
Whether it's to filter you towards a career and one or more very definable things.
There's a lot of people out there with talents that never get nurtured.
They just can't figure out their way in that system because what's taught them is so small.
Such a small A chunk of the spectrum is taught.
daniele bolelli
Because schools are designed to make you average.
That's what schools are about, which if you are considerably below average because of your opportunities in life, great.
That's a step up.
But if you are not, and that goes for the other 50% of humanity, Then it's just designed to make you not nurture your talents, not do all those things, and try to make you fit in that little box.
And part of the reality is that not because the people who create schools are evil and they just want to fuck with your life, it's because they need to go with knowledge as something that can be objectively tested.
What is it that you can objectively test?
Can you test somebody's wisdom, how smart they are, how cool of a human being they are, objectively?
Not really.
What you can do is you can test how well they spit back information at you, which is a skill in itself that it's better than not knowing how.
You need to have the discipline.
You need to know some things.
It's cool.
It gives you those average qualities.
But it says nothing about what you're going to do with them, whether you're going to be brilliant, whether you're going to be able to use these ideas in an amazing way.
And the reality is That gets too...
Most people in charge of schools feel that's too subjective.
When you start talking about wisdom, what the fuck is wisdom?
Your wisdom is not my definition, so we can't really test it.
What we can test is...
And so you go back to the...
They don't want to get sued by the people who don't do well.
Like if I come into class and I say, I'll give you an A because you're really fucking smart and I can see it.
No, you really are not that good, so sorry, you gotta see.
The person you gotta see is gonna be, fuck you, you know, why are you giving me, show me why, you know, where is in the exactly that I deserve this.
And part of the game is the stuff that you can prove in that fashion It's not the kind of knowledge that makes a complete human being.
joe rogan
But the application of that knowledge in a capitalist society is what we try to define as proof that you've actually got some intelligence.
That's why people who, you might not even think they're that smart, but if they're very successful financially, you go, well, he's smart at that.
There's that thing.
dan carlin
I think what you're trying to do, theoretically, in an education system is to prepare people to succeed in life.
And the problem that I think the education system has is that it's stuck in a design for an era where succeeding in life is very different than succeeding in life today.
You're not going to go onto the factory assembly line.
You're not going to do those kind of things, but the way our system has evolved is to create people who can succeed at that.
The problem is that what we have now is a creativity-based economy that we're moving towards.
And teaching creativity, one, is tremendously hard.
And we haven't worked to create that on a mass system where you've got schools that are...
I mean, obviously, schools work with creativity.
But it's a different thing entirely to sit there and go, we're going to start in the first grade.
And by the time you graduate high school, we are going to maximize your creative abilities that are unique to you.
You know, Danielle, you were saying this.
Part of the problem is you could talk about creativity, but Joe's creative gifts are going to be different than yours and mine, and you can't have a standard course, well, I haven't thought of one anyway, that can take your gifts and your gifts and bring them to maturity unless we all share those gifts, because...
You know, your gifts are in one area, your gifts are in another.
The problem is that in our system there are no assembly lines or few.
You can't educate the mass of people to take a bunch of jobs that don't exist anymore.
So I think the system has to redesign itself to push creativity.
joe rogan
There's also some utopian ideals in raising kids that are contrary to human nature, like this new thing that they're doing where they're not having kids win.
You know, when they're playing, like, ball games and no one wins, you know, when they're little.
dan carlin
This is back to your competition.
joe rogan
Yeah.
daniele bolelli
Seriously?
I would have been so pissed as a kid.
joe rogan
Have you ever heard of this before?
It's a joke.
No.
I mean, it's...
dan carlin
Oh, it's pretty wide.
It's been going on for quite a while.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan carlin
Trophies for everyone, that kind of thing, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
I don't know how I would Google that, but they're not giving out first and second place anymore.
Well, it's not broad brush.
dan carlin
I was going to say, yeah, some places.
daniele bolelli
You played, you don't keep score.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, they don't do that.
dan carlin
A lot of kids at the younger ages, they don't do that anymore.
We kept scoring t-ball when I was a kid.
And you rubbed someone's nose in it if they lost.
There was no coach pitch.
I had five-year-old boys who couldn't do anything but hit me with the ball, pitching to me all day.
joe rogan
There are no losers.
You're just the last winner.
daniele bolelli
I'm sorry.
I have to go throw up.
unidentified
I'll be right back.
joe rogan
I mean, I think that competition, we all hate losing, and therefore we connect competition with being a negative thing.
I don't think it's a negative thing at all.
I think competition is important.
I think it's important in art.
I think it's important in everything.
And you might say, oh, well, that's not the real spirit of art.
It's not competition.
You're right, it's not.
But that competition can motivate the accomplishment of work.
And the accomplishment of work, sometimes procrastination or what have you, can delay someone releasing their art.
So in that way, the competition inspires the creation of art.
It's not always, and most of the time you're better off with that competition being internal, or not even being a competition, but rather an embracement of the complexities of figuring out whatever thing you're working on.
But that's still, there's something going on.
There's a game going on.
Whether it's going on with you in your head, whether it's going on with the audience that's going to review whatever you're creating, like a podcast, or whether it's going on with you competing directly against your peers.
daniele bolelli
To me, I love something about competition because I love the media feedback it gives you.
It's like you go out there, you do what you want to do, and at the end of the day, you see the results.
You either pull it off or you didn't.
Losing to me As horrible as that feels, as it fucking sucks and you feel like you're so mad, it's the best thing that can happen to you because winning, you're going to keep doing the same thing you've always done.
You have no motivation to push harder because, look, I'm already doing great.
joe rogan
Motivation might be fear of losing.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, exactly.
And then when you do lose, then it forces you to go back to the drawing board and figure out, okay, I ran into this stumbling block, how can I go around it?
And the fact is, this bullshit about no losers, no winners, not letting somebody experience what it is to do your best and still lose, you're not doing them any favor.
Because the fact is, in life, a million times, just because that's the design of life, shit is going to happen, whether you like it or not, whether it's fair or not, whether you deserve it or not, And how you respond to that, if you feel that, why did this happen to me?
You know, it's unfair.
I shouldn't be in this place.
I shouldn't feel like shit.
Well, you do.
Now what?
And that's that experience of losing.
In that case, you're losing at that game of life.
Not necessarily because of your fault.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
Now, how the fuck are you going to respond to this?
If you have been there a million times, maybe you have developed the muscle to grow out of it.
If you have never been there...
The first time that lies slap you around, you freak out.
joe rogan
And isn't that sort of one of the reasons why our economy and society itself is so fucked up?
It's because we're so goddamn competitive and it's because it's so natural to do that when you start controlling some of the money, you want to control more of the money.
You know, when you start making some of the laws bend to help and benefit your business.
Dude, I watched a really disturbing documentary this past couple of days.
It was Gasland.
Have you seen that?
dan carlin
I've heard of it.
I haven't seen it.
joe rogan
Holy shit.
You want to talk about a must-see.
Hydraulic fracturing.
What they call fracking.
Wow!
dan carlin
It's interesting.
joe rogan
It's scary shit what they're doing.
This guy breaks it down the amount of wells that they have.
I had no idea.
dan carlin
Yeah, it's a lot.
joe rogan
And how many people's drinking water is forever poisoned.
I mean, you're talking about giant chunks of America that are rendered poisonous.
dan carlin
Well, understand something.
This is the wonderful example now You know, if somebody came to you and said, how much money would we have to give you to poison your country?
What is that worth?
Because look at the other side of this.
Fracking, as it's called, has taken the United States from an energy really insufficient position where, I mean, we're in the Middle East, we're in all these places because of the energy question.
And I mean, in a geologic sense, overnight turned us into an energy...
Exporter again, and we haven't been that way since, I mean, we've always exported energy, but I mean, the 1960s were like the last really high-water mark where we had lots of oil and we didn't have to worry.
All of a sudden, we're the natural gas kings and everything again, and there's a ton of money.
That amount of money, the amount we're talking about here, not just money for now, money for 10 years from now, 20, this is like long-term lots of money.
That money will buy anything.
It will buy poisoning your water supply.
It will buy earthquakes that destroy small Oklahoma towns.
It's an interesting thing to see what we're willing to sell for a ton of money.
The problem is the word we.
joe rogan
It's not what we're willing.
Most people had no idea this was even happening until it was already too late.
And during the Bush administration, this...
The documentary, Gasland, highlights how this all came to be and how Dick Cheney signed over these new exemptions that you didn't have to follow the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act.
All those were exempt.
Fracturing was exempt.
So you could just fuck everything up in order to get to what's essentially like a small ocean of natural gas.
The amount that's under New York and big chunks of the country and Texas, it's huge.
It's gigantic.
dan carlin
It's changed the entire energy situation on the planet.
joe rogan
But these people have water that comes out of their faucet that you can light on fire.
unidentified
I'm not surprised.
joe rogan
You can light it on fire.
There's more than 500 different chemicals that they have to pump into the ground in order to break up this natural gas and then extract it.
And when they do that, they basically, everything gets mixed up together.
The well water gets mixed up with the chemicals, gets mixed up with the natural gas, and it's just toxic as fuck.
It's coming out of holes in the ground.
You can come up to it and light it on fire.
It's mad.
dan carlin
Do you know what the best chance, and it's a sad thing, the best chance you have of combating that amount of money over something is when we have screwed up so much of the fresh water supply that the fresh water actually becomes worth more?
And you're already seeing this happening in some places where they're talking about, you know, do we sell water rights to California from the Colorado River or this or that?
And the amounts of money that they're talking about, I mean, they're already talking about, you know, why should water be considered a feature that's owned by everybody?
Can I buy the water in the Colorado River and then can I sell it back to you?
So, I mean, the old joke is that if you buy the bottled water, it's worth more than gasoline, you know, at that amount if you go to the store.
Well, what happens when it really is worth more than gasoline in large quantities?
Then all of a sudden, fracking sounds like you're destroying an even more important spot.
I can get more money for that water than I can get for that natural gas.
That's the only chance we have in a system driven by money, I think, to keep the water fresh.
joe rogan
It's incredibly short-sighted.
And the amount of deception that's gone on to cover the amount of damage that's been done is staggering.
I mean, when these people tell their stories, it's incredibly hard to watch and listen to because people get sick because they were drinking the water.
Their kids get sick.
For the longest time, they wouldn't admit that there was anything wrong with the water.
And then they started giving people water.
They set up these giant tanks and pump in water to them every week so that they get their water from that instead of their wells that they've had for 100-plus years.
It's crazy shit, man.
It's crazy shit to watch.
dan carlin
But this is where you see the corruption of our political system, which is what's destroying.
You would think that people who live in places where they can light their water on fire would have their representatives in Washington working to stop that.
But that's where your free speech rights and my free speech rights are not equal to the free speech rights of these other people.
And this is where I always argue with the courts that say that money is free speech, which I don't mind, except who said you get 50 or 100 times my free speech rights?
joe rogan
Well, not only that, the internet, I think, ultimately is going to be a place where people vote on things, and it's also ultimately going to be a place where people can donate to campaigns that promote values they believe in.
And I think that is going to be a special interest, along with all the other special interests in the world competing for influence.
dan carlin
But what about that line, if voting really changed things, they'd make it illegal?
joe rogan
But I think it's about money.
And I think, ultimately, if people invest money in a party and a lobbyist and an idea that supports the things that they believe in, that money can influence people just as easily as the money that supports fracking or the money that supports – the idea is that it's just trading of commodities here.
dan carlin
So let's buy a legislator.
Should we get a group together?
I'm taking up a cause.
We're going to buy Senator Ron White.
Senator Ron White is probably already out.
This guy who's been working for the fracking industry, how much do you need, dude?
How much is it going to take to bring you over to our side?
I have powerful backers.
The guy was cut off in Vegas.
He can't gamble anymore.
He's got a lot of money.
What's it going to take to buy this particular...
I mean, maybe we should just do that.
The part maybe that's unfair about this is that you're never offered the chance to buy a legislator.
That's kept to a small group of people in a smoke-filled back room.
Maybe what we need is...
Look, if you're going to be sold, give us the option of buying, too.
joe rogan
We collectively have a fuckload of money.
unidentified
Heck yeah!
joe rogan
We're dealing with 300 million people.
dan carlin
Love to buy me a legislator.
It's a write-off, isn't it?
If you buy a legislator, isn't that a business expense?
joe rogan
Yes.
dan carlin
It is if it helps my business.
joe rogan
You can't call it buying off, though.
We have to call it something creative.
Risk management, diversification tool.
unidentified
That's right.
That's right.
dan carlin
You know, you got that podcast troll lawsuit.
I'm going to buy a few legislators and get them in my corner, and then I'm going to write that off, and U.S. taxpayers can pick up my buying, because that's how it's done at the best levels.
joe rogan
Well, I think that ultimately that would be a smart thing for them to pursue just by virtue of the fact that there's more money there than there is in all the corporations combined.
dan carlin
I know, but it's a lot harder to please all of us than just that one guy.
joe rogan
You're right, but the potential for extracting money off of a giant group like $300 million, even if you get 1%, that's still a huge amount of human beings that are donating money.
dan carlin
Well, the audience is going to say that already exists.
I mean, look at all the small contributions.
But it's not the same as walking up to somebody and saying, listen, I went to all my friends and here's $5 million.
joe rogan
Right.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, because the guy, you know, the corporation, they're going to invest the money to buy off a vote to get what they want.
They are going to make that amount of money 50 times over in the next year.
The person who's going to donate to a campaign, they are doing that in order to avoid something to be taken from them, whether it's because of water or something.
They're not going to see that money back.
They're not going to make more money on it.
So there is a little bit of hesitance in a lot of people.
Fuck, really?
Do I have to pay for something that I still had until yesterday?
And, oh, man.
You know, there's not that payoff of, like, you're going to win big.
You're playing a defensive game where it's like you're just holding on to what's going on.
dan carlin
It's a risk avoidance.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's sort of like you have that money and you have to invest it in making sure they don't rob you in the future.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, exactly.
Rather than investing it to rob everybody.
joe rogan
Yeah, one or the others.
Either get your agenda across.
But the idea that these companies that have enforced fracking or encouraged fracking or spent money to make it happen, and this guy goes really clearly into detail about how it all took place, they're ruining a huge chunk of the country.
And they're doing it right in front of everybody's face, and no one can stop it.
unidentified
And the worst part is they won't be around when the bill comes due for cleaning it up either.
joe rogan
You can't clean it up.
That's what's really crazy.
These people, one of the people that got incredibly sick, this woman got sick, because it turned out that these filters that they had set up don't work with the chemicals that they use for fracking.
The chemicals actually eat the membranes of the filter.
So, some of the chemicals were getting through to her and she was getting incredibly sick.
Neurological damage, all sorts of like, everyone's sick.
It's an incredible documentary.
dan carlin
It's very hard to protect the water supply.
You remember here in California with that gasoline additive that sunk into the ground and made it into the water?
And it was a weird situation because the additive had been put in there To take some of the lead from the air pollution, and then it was seeping into the groundwater.
And so you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But that's the problem, is it doesn't take a whole lot to seep into the water supply, and then you're screwed.
joe rogan
Yeah, what was that that you just put up that said gas land producers?
Put it up.
We'll put it up.
What does it say?
I don't know how they could mislead anybody.
jamie vernon
There's a few debunking things about both documentaries on Gasland.
unidentified
There's one and two, and they're both saying there's some...
joe rogan
But just put up the thing that I asked.
The Gasland producer misled viewers on...
What does it say?
unidentified
Joe Rogan is spreading false information.
joe rogan
Spread it out so we can see it.
jamie vernon
It said that it's been happening since the 1930s.
This isn't necessarily just from...
joe rogan
The water was flammable before fracking.
daniele bolelli
You know what's funny, though, is every time you expose anything, you're going to have the next day 15 sites saying, no, you made it up, it's not real, it's not...
dan carlin
That's what public relations firms are for.
joe rogan
Exactly.
daniele bolelli
Yep, yep, yep.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think that it's hard to know who the fuck is right in that situation, but somewhere in the country you can fucking, without a doubt, guarantee that these people have been poisoned.
Whether the lighting the water on fire, it always existed.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
dan carlin
Poisoning the citizens is an age-old thing.
We do it at nuclear plants.
There's been lots of situations where you're living near something that might be bad for you.
And that's nothing new.
That's what's crazy, is that that's always taken a back seat to somebody's profit somewhere.
And that's a bit sad that we can't, as an entire population being poisoned, balance out the interests of those people who decide poisoning is okay, because they can go to Hawaii.
daniele bolelli
Because I mean, from their point of view, you're a corporation, you're in the business of making money.
You're not in the business of being nice.
You're not in the business of being mean.
Whatever it takes to make money, you'll do it.
If it takes screwing people over, oh well.
dan carlin
Well, and even if you didn't want to make money, you may have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to maximize that.
Wouldn't that be funny?
I don't really want a frack.
But, you know, the shareholders will take me out if I don't.
daniele bolelli
But that's the problem.
dan carlin
I'll go to jail.
daniele bolelli
That's the corporation, right?
The role of government in a beautiful, abstract world would be that they actually enforce laws to stop the stuff that's damaging to the public.
That's only good for those...
dan carlin
Well, Joe brought up loopholes.
You brought up a loophole.
And to me, that's the biggest thing that I think people don't understand, is that you can make all the laws in the world.
If you let the loopholes happen, they don't mean it.
It's like people say to me, Dan, why do you keep saying the Fourth Amendment's going away?
The Fourth Amendment's there, courts rule it.
Yeah, but you Swiss cheese that enough, and it doesn't matter anymore.
This stuff is meaningless unless it acts as a barrier.
joe rogan
I gotta research this now because a bunch of people on my message board are putting up all these websites that say that they're debunking Gasland.
First of all, A, I would, without a doubt, I would imagine that if I was working for the fracking industry and someone put out a hit piece on fracking, that I would debunk the fucking shit out of it.
Even if it doesn't make any sense, the debunking doesn't make any sense.
dan carlin
And if you're a legislator who voted to allow it, you'd have the same interest.
joe rogan
Yeah, but that said, I haven't read any of the debunking, so I'll read that and I'll get back to it later.
daniele bolelli
But even if you don't focus on the specific example, you look at the general picture, it's fucking undeniable that we're poisoning our environment.
I don't think you can debunk that.
It's like, no, that's just facts.
So you pick one specific example that may not be exactly 100% true, who the fuck cares?
The general picture remains the same.
That's not going to change.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I think that we do really, without a doubt, have an issue with the fact that people are super competitive and that people are progressive in nature.
What I mean by progressive, they move forward.
If they have $2, they want $3.
If they have $3, they want $4.
It's a natural, weird thing that we do.
I was trying to explain anal sex to somebody.
dan carlin
Because it's a natural segue.
joe rogan
Why do guys want to do that?
I go, because they have regular sex with you.
And then they go, can I put it in your mouth?
And they go, yeah.
And they go, okay, what about that?
And that's just, it's a natural, weird progression.
I mean, all that stuff happens.
When you hear about, like, crazy...
dan carlin
How are you not a philosophy major, Joe?
That's all I want to know.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
When you hear about crazy super freaks that have gigantic orgies, how did that happen?
Did they just start off having orgies?
No.
They started out with regular sex, and they got a lot of regular sex, and they started getting bored, so they brought in extra girls, and before you know it, they're having these freaky sex parties.
It's a natural thing of progression.
People, if they can run five miles, they want to run ten.
If they got their brown belt, they want to get their black belt.
dan carlin
So it's competition, which you guys were talking about how great it was all the time, and now you're slamming it.
joe rogan
No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying.
I say it's the ideas gone wild.
The idea of what makes a human exceptional, what makes a human create everything that exists, really.
I think from electronics to the wheel to houses and everything, there's this natural desire for humans to improve upon what they've already done.
And I think that extends to control.
I think it extends to evil as well.
It's one of my arguments when everyone would talk about problems with government and whether or not there's still corruption in government.
All you have to do is look back on the corruption that you can document for a fact that happened in the 1960s and know that there's no bodies.
There's no slew of people, lives ruined, careers destroyed, parties brought down.
No, there's actually very little.
If you think about exactly what they're absolutely positively guilty of doing, there's very little damage.
And you know that everything progresses.
So the amount of The utter and complete total corruption that exists today and the sophistication of it would naturally be above and beyond what existed documentable from the 1960s.
dan carlin
Let me take it to a different level because I think it's a different thing.
I think that we are incentivized as human beings, going back to primate times, to look at things through a short-term lens.
The carrots and sticks are all set up for the short-term approach.
You brought up wisdom a while ago, Daniel.
Wisdom is being able to look at things from a long-term perspective.
Now, a perfect example is investing.
In the old days, Ty Cobb would buy Coca-Cola shares, and when he died, he had all these Coca-Cola shares on his chest at the hospital that he'd had for...
Forever.
He was so afraid someone would take his...
So he's got all these shares he's owned forever because to him, he wasn't going to sell them in five minutes.
He was in it for the long term.
Our society is set up for the short term.
Making money is set up for the short term.
There's no interest in saying something like, well, let's protect clean water.
Who are you protecting it for?
I won't be around to enjoy that clean water.
By the time that happens, I'm dead.
Now, what can I make in the short term?
Politics is the same way.
It's like when people were talking about President Obama lying about the health care plan, about keeping your own doctor, right, and all that stuff.
He's incentivized to do that.
All he cared about was winning that next election.
You will worry about the fallout later.
None of this matters if you lose, right?
Deal with the fallout of the lie later.
There's no incentive to not lie.
The incentives are all on the...
And this is if you're an intelligent human being, weighing the pros and cons.
You are not incentivized to think long-term, and yet...
That may be the only solution for the planet.
You talk about long term.
If we can't somehow contradict where the incentives are and go against our natural primate instincts, we might not be able to make it work.
joe rogan
I think it's going to take a greater level of awareness culturally than exists today.
I think the great level of awareness, the really truly objective view of humanity and the potential possibilities of the future is something that's contemplated by few groups, small groups of people, people sitting in conversation, dinner parties and stuff.
But if you think of the greater whole of humanity, the amount of damage we're doing to the world on a daily basis, the amount of Like really ridiculous behavior that operates our financial and justice system and our political systems.
It's all like complete and total chaos and yet it still continues in the exact same way it always has before.
There's only small groups of people that speak out against it.
I think once The sphere of understanding of what a complete disaster this world is because of our actions and because of our inability to correct those actions, once that understanding is in place, then hopefully it's not too late.
There'll be some sort of way to turn back the tide.
But I feel like it's an ebb and a flow thing, much like everything in life.
I think it's almost like we have to fucking poison the ocean before we realize it's ridiculous and then stop doing it.
dan carlin
I think it's going to be money.
I think someone down the road, when clean water, for example, is worth a bazillion dollars to Halliburton and they buy the water, then the rules will be you can't piss in water anywhere.
Then all of the money going to Washington will be to preserve water, preserve Halliburton's water supply, otherwise their profits will be impacted when they sell it back to the public.
Joe, you want human nature to improve, and you think it's going to happen, and I don't disagree with you.
The problem is that so many people like Dick Cheney have to be improved too before this works that I don't see that happening.
I see it going the other way.
Their incentives have to become, they're still going to want money, they're still going to think short term, but the incentives have to change so that protecting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact, as opposed to, you know, polluting the environment becomes the way to keep your millions intact.
joe rogan
Maybe, but if you look at the dissolving of boundaries between people and information and how that trend is going to continue, I think that our idea of looking at the possibilities of the future based on how humans were able to run the world just 10 years ago are kind of ridiculous.
When you think about it from 100 years from now, the options won't be available because The amount of transparency that will be required to communicate with people is going to be completely different.
It's going to be very hard to hold back reality.
dan carlin
You're assuming that there's not going to be some David Cameron crackdown between now and then.
joe rogan
I don't think they can do it.
And I think even if they did, the young people that are coming up That are more in line with the ideas of an anonymous or the ideas of open source internet, the ideas of spreading information and what a massively important thing that is for society and human culture as a whole, I think they're overwhelming.
And I think they're going to continue that trend.
The people that know that the idea of anybody being able to control information, they're literally controlling, if they do that, they're controlling educational evolution.
They're controlling the ability for...
dan carlin
Are you suggesting they wouldn't want to?
joe rogan
Can't.
You can't do it.
I don't think you could do it.
dan carlin
Is that a challenge?
joe rogan
It's like trying to pull all the sand off the beaches.
I don't see it happening.
daniele bolelli
Some of the stuff that you guys are saying, I actually think it goes hand in hand because what you're saying, Joe, about the fact that a certain level of transformation in terms of consciousness, in terms of priorities that happen at a mass level when enough people meet sort of a critical mass That feeds into Dan's argument that at that point, corporations are going to respond to it because there's money attached to it.
So I don't think it's just purely from an economic standpoint, and it's clearly not purely from a consciousness standpoint.
It's happening now, right?
It's like more and more people care about environmental issues.
So companies that market themselves as who are nice to the environment can hike their prices a little bit because they know that they are going to have some people who buy them Their products because of those values.
joe rogan
Yeah, could you imagine if you were buying some gas that cost 10 cents less per gallon, but it guaranteed comes from child labor in some shitty part of the world.
dan carlin
It's the dolphin-safe tuna label thing.
joe rogan
Yeah, exactly.
I think that it's going to be impossible in the future to hide any evil behavior.
I think right now it's still too muddy.
It's still too muddy.
I think as technology advances and improves, this connection with people and ideas and information is going to be cleaner and quicker.
I don't know what form that's going to take in, but all I'm doing is sort of objectively extrapolating what's happened in the past to what's happened recently to where I feel like it's going.
I just don't think you can hold this waterfall back.
I feel like there's too much going on.
There's too many people communicating too freely all over the world and improving upon the methods of communication.
And they're going to get to a point where you're not going to be able to hide a goddamn thing.
And you're not going to be able to make money off of...
You're not going to be able to profit off doing something that directly damages the earth because everyone's going to see it.
It's going to be something that your neighbors know about.
It's going to be something that I... We're going to know what each other are getting away with.
daniele bolelli
But don't you think you end up with a gas land kind of story where you can...
Push a story, and maybe you twist 15% of the data to make your point a little harder.
And somebody else, based on that 15 or 20% that you're making up, debunk the whole thing and say it's all crap.
And there's that part of the flow of information is that there's so much of it that for every single thing you hear that seems to prove things going one way, you have people who seem pretty credible, who give you good evidence to argue the exact opposite things, and it leaves a ton of human beings feeling like, What the fuck?
I don't know which one of them to believe.
This one sounds good.
This one also makes sense.
joe rogan
Well, I feel like we're either going to go one way or the other.
We're either going to go slide into complete total dictatorship brought out by a series of terrorist events, or we're going to slide into the next level of evolution.
I think it's a battle right now.
What is that quote from Orson Welles?
History is...
God damn it.
I forget the quote.
Amazing quote by Orson Welles, but essentially, to paraphrase it, what it was saying is that there's a race going on between people who are looking to improve the human race and people that are stuck in the old paradigm that are constantly battle between education and...
Damn it, I hate when I don't remember a great quote that I think I have at my fingertips.
dan carlin
You need a quote board here up on the walls.
joe rogan
History, Orson Welles.
jamie vernon
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
joe rogan
There it is.
And that's exactly what it is.
I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about.
I feel like the way things are going, when you hear people like the NSA folks say that, you know, the angry that a guy like Edward Snowden released all the data and he's a traitor and, you know, all this...
Craziness where you're trying to convince us that this guy is bad because he told us that you're bad.
dan carlin
See, why can I always see the dark side?
I want to come with you guys into the light.
I really do.
But see, all I see happening is another 9-11 attack and then the people in the NSA going, guess what allowed that one?
That was the stuff Edward Snowden told you.
Now see?
Now don't you learn.
Trust us next time and you won't have another one of these.
I just, you know, I mean, I think things could break in the right way, but I think...
History shows that they're stacked up against us.
And so I think if you take this attitude that, hey, things could break the right way, you are not girding yourself up for the fight that you're facing.
And this gets back to what we talked about when you talked about fights.
If you think, oh, that George Foreman I'm about to fight, ah, he's got openings.
I watched him in tape.
His left is slow.
I'll get in on that.
And then you don't account for the right.
And you get in there and you go, oh, damn, I forgot about that.
I think you need to gird yourself and say, history shows that there's always a small group of people, you know, who have a little bit of the ear of the powerful or who have a little bit more money or what have you, and they're extremely formidable.
There's never going to be like, we all get this consciousness expansion and Dick Cheney's never getting anywhere near government again.
The truth is, we're playing Blackhawk down, and Dick Cheney's busy, you know, buying up corporations.
I think this is a monumental struggle that's going to require...
You know, what's missing, and I've always said this is, We don't have any leaders.
I mean, in other generations, you can name people.
You can Wikipedia and search people that were out in the forefront bringing groups of people into directions.
I feel like we're a very directionless group.
joe rogan
Except for Putin.
daniele bolelli
Dan Carlin for president.
dan carlin
And that's what you want.
That's when you really see how limited a person I am.
I'm already at the height of my game.
I don't get any better than this.
So you put me up to president and it's all over.
Then the reviews on iTunes will be horrible.
joe rogan
A guy like Putin is like one of the last real leaders.
And a leader in a very gangster-ish sort of a way.
dan carlin
He's old school.
joe rogan
As old school as it gets.
Yeah, I mean, the guy was the president and they say you can't be president anymore.
He goes, alright, I'll be the prime minister.
This guy's the president now, fuckheads.
Oh, look, I'm the president again.
dan carlin
He is kind of showing a blueprint for how you take a new democracy and just kind of...
And the people wanted a democracy, and you just kind of convince them that the way you're doing it is better.
And you interview these people in the street, they go, oh, Russia really needs a strong man.
Really?
When did you get convinced of that?
Where's your awareness raising level and everything?
joe rogan
Just to play devil's advocate for what you said earlier, when you were talking earlier about you see it going in a bad direction, we were just talking at the beginning of this conversation about how fucked up things were just a few hundred years ago, like how much worse things were 500 years ago.
Is that really correct?
Were they really that much worse?
And if that's true, then isn't there some sort of a marked improvement in society and the safety in society that we can demonstrate today?
dan carlin
Well, the fracking situation was better back then.
joe rogan
Yeah, the water was all clean.
unidentified
No, it was.
dan carlin
Different things were messing up the water back then.
joe rogan
People shit in their water, right?
dan carlin
That's right.
joe rogan
And bodies.
They toss bodies in there.
Yeah, I mean, there's always been people doing stupid shit to the ground.
dan carlin
Because they had short-term interest at stake.
unidentified
Exactly.
joe rogan
That's a very good point, that point that you had about people looking at it.
And also, back in the day, up until recently, you didn't really live long enough to see the hustle.
If you were lucky, you lived to be 30-ish.
A good 50% of your friends were probably dead by then.
And then, you know, the guys that would leave to be 60, those rare birds that would be hanging around philosophizing in square, they were so rare.
We really didn't get that many of them.
So when you got a guy like Socrates that dropped all this crazy knowledge, like, yeah, that guy had been around a long time.
He made it through, wrote some shit down, he figured it out.
Most people, not going to get there.
Most 25-year-olds today are half-retarded.
Try having a conversation with the average 25-year-old.
dan carlin
Don't worry, their awareness is going to compensate for that.
joe rogan
And believe you me, I know that a lot of you out there that are 25 are way fucking smarter than me.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying it's you, but you know those other dudes.
dan carlin
Joe, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
That's the proverb that applies to this whole short-term thing.
If you think I might not...
I cannot even be alive to profit off this stuff.
But I can profit off it today.
What are you going to do?
unidentified
No doubt.
joe rogan
But I mean back then, you're dealing with like a whole society that was sort of structured on people that never got old enough or never had exposure to enough data.
To sort of go, I don't think we should have a Caesar.
I don't think we should have this Colosseum.
This whole Lions versus Christians thing, this is kind of fucked, man.
Let's not do that.
daniele bolelli
But that's why Dawson Welles' quote was so cool, because that's exactly what it is.
The ugly side is insanely strong and in some way getting strong.
The potential for optimism, that's also happening.
And it's one of those races where you're like, hmm, that's an interesting one.
You can put the accent on either one.
The reality is that they are both real.
joe rogan
Isn't that sort of what we were also talking about competition earlier?
That the yin and the yang, it's almost like you need opposing forces.
You need a pull and a push.
You need something in order to motivate change.
Almost the idea is that in order for society to get great or get better, it has to go through stupid shit.
And if it doesn't go through stupid shit, it never gets anywhere.
daniele bolelli
That's why I'm curious for...
I had a question for Dan on that, because I don't disagree with your view.
I mean, there's a lot of...
dan carlin
You're allowed to.
Don't worry.
I'm okay with that.
Everybody else does.
daniele bolelli
No, actually, most days that's exactly how I feel.
And even the days that I don't, I still feel that there's a lot of it that's true.
So the point to me is, how do you turn that awareness that you're stuck up against something, you know, you're an ant trying to attack a tank, you know, the odds of what you can do, not even as any single individual, but even at mass level.
I feel sometimes so limited.
And how do you wake up in the morning?
You know, how do you deal with the fact that you have kids?
joe rogan
There's a lot of beaten off, drinks whiskey, powers down, double espresso shots.
dan carlin
Some of that is true.
I actually talk about this on our political show because when you feel the most upset about things and the most powerless, you start to wonder about the wisdom of caring about this stuff.
And you look at people who don't.
I mean, I think we all know people who don't pay any attention to politics, who don't watch the news, whose life is a very, you know, it's my kids, it's my wife, it's my job.
And there are times when I question the wisdom of caring about things you cannot change.
unidentified
Right.
dan carlin
Then someone else will say, well, with that kind of attitude, you can be guaranteed you won't change it.
Yes, but there are some forces at work that if you alone have to do it, it is an ant against a tank.
And at some point you look and you go, okay, it's me and Rogan and Daniele, and that's not enough.
I might as well do what I can.
In the 1960s, they used to say, you know, look at the man in the mirror, take care of yourself first.
Sometimes that's all you can control.
But if that's the way you look at it, you're letting the...
I'm using him as my Darth Vader figure for everything today.
But I mean, then you let them win.
joe rogan
Could you imagine if you got Dick Cheney high on mushrooms?
dan carlin
I'm not sure that he wasn't the whole time.
joe rogan
He would never have that sort of...
dan carlin
You thought he shot that friend of his just totally sober and straight?
joe rogan
Oh, he's drunk.
dan carlin
Okay, well...
joe rogan
Well, he was clearly...
Not only was he drunk and clearly drinking, but he avoided the police for like 13 or 14 hours.
dan carlin
You think there weren't Secret Service guys there, too?
How do you not tell him to put the gun down, point it toward the ground?
joe rogan
Well, that's how you know what a real gangster is.
He shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized.
Yeah.
dan carlin
That is actually very good.
joe rogan
His friend was like, I'm really sorry.
Dick's a great guy.
dan carlin
I didn't mean to cause you all this trouble with the media, Mr. Cheney.
daniele bolelli
I shouldn't have my face in the path of your bullet.
I'll try to make out.
joe rogan
I'm very bird-like in my movements.
I'm tricky.
I think like a bird sometimes when I'm hunting birds and he probably tuned into that vibe.
Just shot me in my fucking face.
dan carlin
There have been times that I've been just carrying the weapon quite wrong.
joe rogan
Where's the Secret Service to take credit for that?
Why didn't they say they accidentally shot the dude?
Why the fuck did you tell the truth?
dan carlin
If they're willing to take a bullet for somebody...
joe rogan
How did the guy not say he accidentally shot himself?
daniele bolelli
But nothing happened, right?
So it doesn't matter.
dan carlin
A little bit of birdshot in the face.
joe rogan
Birdshot is very small, people.
I'm not saying try...
Try a wad in the face.
dan carlin
You know, you've got a few mannequins here that we could conduct some experiments on.
joe rogan
Yeah.
dan carlin
You know, how does that alien thing handle the bird shot?
joe rogan
Well, there's a reason why it's so small.
When you're shooting something like a pheasant, you can't really shoot it with a fucking 12-gauge.
It'll blow a hole through the bird.
dan carlin
Screws the meal up, too, later.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's useless.
It's filled with little pellets.
The fucking half the thing is blown apart.
So you gotta have, like, a little...
So that's what the old guy got hit with.
Just a little baby bird shot in the face.
No biggie.
dan carlin
Tough it out.
joe rogan
Now Dick's got a new heart.
Isn't that hilarious?
Imagine if he had a new heart and then they put it in and he just started fucking feeling really regretful for everything and started writing books.
dan carlin
Did you hear the line he said?
And I didn't read the story.
Sometimes I just read headlines so you just have to ignore me on this.
But do you remember that story about Dick Cheney where he said he feared having his heart hacked or whatever?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Of course he did.
dan carlin
Because you knew what he would have done in the same situation.
joe rogan
Absolutely.
dan carlin
I'm hacking Joe Rogan's heart right now.
joe rogan
Which leads me to believe you and I had exchanged a couple tweets and emails regarding this Michael Hastings thing.
How fascinating that whole story was.
Michael Hastings, the journalist who was very aggressive towards members of the military.
dan carlin
He was aggressive towards everybody.
joe rogan
Yes, very aggressive.
And aggressive towards, like, these guys who are fucking...
Killers on a global scale.
When you get to be a four star general or what have you, you're fucking real good at killing people.
There's no other way around it.
No other way to get there.
And this guy was being aggressive towards them.
dan carlin
Have you changed your mind?
Have you altered your view on that at all?
joe rogan
I have zero opinion.
I've also read that...
A lot of people believe that he was unstable, and a lot of people believe that he might have been doing drugs.
That's possible, too.
I mean, the kind of guy who is so risk-taking that he's willing to go after generals, that kind of guy might do a lot of wild shit.
I think it's possible, though, that they can do that to a car.
I think that's what I've gained from this.
What I've gained from this is by reading the experts, the technology experts, the people that have no vested interest in this politically one way or the other, weren't a Hastings fan or denier, The people that looked at the possibilities for what you can do with a remote-controlled system in a car now, and they can do it.
They can make your car do things.
People that were formerly in the CIA have come out about it and said that they believe that the technology exists.
It makes sense.
daniele bolelli
And even before it existed, remember the guy who had done all the exposing of the CIA crack cocaine epidemic, like basically accusing the CIA of having help Latin American drug lords who happened to be their friends?
joe rogan
Which guy is this?
Barry Seal?
daniele bolelli
You know, I can't fucking remember the name.
I just remember that he was, he owns the record for having, quote-unquote, killed himself by shooting himself with a shotgun, so far nothing strange, twice.
Which seems a bit complicated to pull off.
dan carlin
The most interesting thing about the Hastings thing to me now, because I'm with you, I don't know what you could figure out from Hastings based on what we know.
I was fascinated, and this gets to your new media thing, all the information out there, and it also gets to yours, Daniele, about...
False information or muddying the waters.
Do you realize how much of what circulated the globe about this Hastings thing came from that one source, that part-time contributor to that local news station in San Diego, that Kim Dvorak woman?
She's the one who said things like, well, there was no body in the coffin and everyone was upset with that.
Well, that turned out to be totally false, but oh my lord, did we all share that?
Did everybody hear that?
Most people not ever hear the retracted.
One person saying something that was not true created so much of the foundation for where we all started.
Because that's when I freaked out.
I said, wait a minute.
The coroner didn't give the body back and cremated it without permission.
If you've ever dealt with coroners, that's just not kosher.
joe rogan
And that turned out to be not true at all.
dan carlin
And I don't think she ever retracted it.
But in the old days, they used to make us confirm sources twice.
She's in the position where she's supposed to be confirming sources twice.
She says that the San Diego news station runs it multiple times, and then we all retweet it and share it, and it becomes part of the urban legend almost.
But that a single strand, one person, was able to do that with the global sharing and everything, That to me is as fascinating as the Hastings thing.
joe rogan
I agree.
I think it's just as fascinating.
And the real desire to know one way or another is just a natural part of human curiosity.
We want to know.
Did someone assassinate this guy?
Or did he go wacky and drive 100 miles an hour into a tree?
Both are possible.
The reality is I don't know.
And so, you know, I say, when you say, did I change my opinion?
I don't have an opinion.
When I first looked at it, I said, wow, that looks like that.
But I wouldn't be betting on it, you know?
A lot of weird shit happens just naturally.
dan carlin
Yeah, but there's another element, Joe.
And the element is an us-versus-them kind of thing.
I mean, we felt, people like yours truly, anyway, felt like Hastings was on our side of the fence, right?
He's reporting on stuff that we're going, thank goodness, finally somebody's doing this, right?
And then all of a sudden he's gone.
And in a weird situation, I mean, I think the tendency is to say, one of our guys got it in the neck, and he got it in the neck for doing something that we've been waiting for someone to do.
And what does this say to the other people out there we would hope would...
So, I mean, I don't want to say teams, but there's a part of me that says, to me, I don't know if I would have liked the guy on a personal level, but he was on my side.
And I feel like...
God, the powers that be have everybody on their side.
I mean, there was a feeling like, please tell me that somebody working for the good of all of us didn't get knocked off.
I don't think he did, but there's certainly that feeling where you just go, what sort of a message does this send to other would-be Michael Hastings?
joe rogan
You don't think he did, but would you be surprised if you found out he did?
If you found out he got knocked out?
I wouldn't be surprised.
dan carlin
There's a book called Poisoning the Press concerning a reporter who was the Michael Hastings of his day, but a thousand times bigger, named Jack Anderson from the early 70s.
And Anderson actually had the Nixon administration officials, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, those guys, talking about potentially killing him.
A guy whose show I was on several times, G. Gordon Liddy.
Liddy was volunteering to kill him.
They were going to run him over with a car.
Now, I always think to myself, okay, so the plot never happened, but they were discussing it at the highest levels of government, and that's what makes you go, maybe this Hastings thing isn't that far off the wall.
unidentified
I mean...
joe rogan
I don't think it's far off the wall at all.
I just don't know what happened.
dan carlin
No, me either.
Not at all.
And I tend to go with the safer answer, when in doubt.
joe rogan
Sure.
I mean, that's a nice way of not looking stupid, too.
dan carlin
Which is, of course, my goal in life, right?
joe rogan
It's too late for me.
dan carlin
Too late, exactly.
unidentified
Me too.
joe rogan
So I just dive right into the stupid side all the time and go, hmm, what if?
Because the what if is always there.
dan carlin
Let's hope they're grading us on a curve.
joe rogan
Well, that's the unfortunate reality of history, isn't it?
That if you really do pay attention, you go, wow, they've done it before.
Well, there's been, you know, people have conspired.
They've gotten away with it.
They did.
They did false flags.
They lied to get us into wars.
They lied about certain actions that were going on.
They assassinated people and lied about that and then got caught.
dan carlin
They had a short-term incentive.
Same thing?
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan
Always...
Always has been.
daniele bolelli
The thing that's weird is, though, when people are doing the exact opposite of what we're doing right now, which is, you know, it could have gone this way.
It could have also realistically gone this way.
I don't have the evidence either way.
And people bet their lives one way or another.
unidentified
They're like, I know that this is what happened and there's this conspiracy.
daniele bolelli
No, you're totally full of shit.
It could never happen.
And it's like, how the fuck do you know?
joe rogan
I got out of an argument online the other day on my message board about the JFK assassination.
I get to that when I just go, okay, I'm good.
I gotta step away.
I know too much about the JFK assassination.
I've studied it for far too long.
And it drives me absolutely fucking bonkers when I see people that are 100% convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
I'm like...
I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but guess what, fuckface?
You don't either.
And the reality of the evidence is not that cut and dry.
The Warren Commission itself was a massive contradiction.
It was clearly designed to achieve a predetermined conclusion, and they ignored all evidence that went contrary to that predetermined conclusion.
And that conclusion was there was a single shooter.
dan carlin
Are we gonna go into this?
Are you opening this topic for discussion?
unidentified
No, I'm not.
joe rogan
I'm not.
dan carlin
Your message board will love this.
joe rogan
My point is that when I see people argue, I don't know if he acted alone.
He might have acted alone.
I leave that open.
But when you see that stupid bullet that supposedly went through both of their bodies and shattered bone and came out looking all pretty and beautiful, you're like, get the fuck out of here.
Well, that just showed up on Governor Connolly's gurney at the hospital.
It just magically was there.
In perfect shape and just happen to be from the same rifle that you're attributing to the guy who's dead now who got shot by a fucking mob man.
daniele bolelli
Right.
joe rogan
Come on.
dan carlin
Now I have to jump in.
It stinks.
I changed my mind on this subject.
joe rogan
Look at that bullet.
Look at that bullet, Dan Carlin.
dan carlin
I've seen the magic bullet.
And you know what's funny is that I don't dispute any of those things.
What if the government had a really good reason that you would have approved of to cover it up?
And we're doing a podcast on the First World War right now.
And Kennedy was famous for having given The Guns of August, the book that's about the lead into World War I and how nations were kind of sucked into something they didn't want to do based on an assassination of a world leader sitting in an open car next to his wife, by the way.
And...
If you're Lyndon Johnson, and you're the people around Kennedy, and it's a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, right?
You almost have World War III a year ago, and a guy kills a young, popular president in front of his wife, who's, you know, in there in the Chanel clothes with the blood and brains all on her, and his children are orphaned, and you're mad as hell.
And the guy's tied to communism like nothing.
I mean, he's fair play for Cuba Committee.
He's one of the few people who defected to the Soviet Union.
He's one of the very few that came back.
Would you maybe be worried that the American people would be so angry and so ready to somehow punish the communists who may have even been behind this attack?
I mean, you can create a scenario where it might have been a national security interest To, as much as you can, disassociate Cuba, communism, and the Soviet Union from the assassination of the president, because even if it didn't happen, can you see the Republicans and the administration back then going, we need to do it!
You can't let them get away with potentially shooting our president!
Let's invade Cuba!
joe rogan
I'm a little confused.
Are you implying that you think that they made it look like Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it?
Because if he did do it, then that's communism killing the president.
dan carlin
No, I think what most of us, when I was on the side saying that I think there was a conspiracy, is you point to all the obvious things the government hid.
And that, to me, is always a red herring, right?
You say, well, they hid the magic bullet, couldn't have been this and that.
And then you start to think...
Well, would there have been a good reason for a government cover-up?
Well, the first good reason is because they did it, right?
So you go, well, those bastards.
Could there be a reason where you would sit there and go, oh, no, I understand why you did that.
You did that to prevent a greater evil.
And I'm not saying that that's the case, but once you sit back and do that, you go, there could be multiple reasons.
joe rogan
So you're saying they would blame it on Lee Harvey Oswald instead of blaming it on the Cubans?
dan carlin
No, I think they might try to obscure the idea that this was something involving communist Cubans.
And I think, can you imagine if Oswald had actually had to take the stand someday and testify about this?
This may have been the thing where the government said, listen, this is just one guy who did this, but it's going to open up a whole can of worms with the political opposition.
I mean, remember, there were posters of John F. Kennedy saying, wanted for treason in Dallas the day he was killed that the right-wingers down there had pushed.
What do you think they would say if Lee Harvey Oswald is tied to communism so closely a year after we just avoided World War III? That's a really stoned idea.
joe rogan
I think you must have been hitting the bong hardcore and you decided that the real conspiracy...
dan carlin
I look at things from multiple angles, baby!
joe rogan
Hey, you may be right.
dan carlin
I'm not asserting that.
I'm saying it's a possibility.
joe rogan
You've got to throw it into the mix.
dan carlin
You do.
joe rogan
You're going to play the game where you throw all the Jack Ruby had a direct connection to the mob.
The mob had a direct connection to Cuba.
Those three things are...
That's a fact.
Those are facts.
And so Jack Ruby was assigned to go kill Lee Harvey Oswald in front of the police, thus sacrificing his own freedom to do so.
He knew he was doing it while he was doing it.
It was a total suicide bombing.
That alone is a direct connection to Cuba.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, I'm old for...
joe rogan
What is that noise?
dan carlin
I'm hearing it too.
joe rogan
Someone's car alarm.
dan carlin
I'm just glad your studio is not a whole lot better than mine at stopping noise.
joe rogan
There has to be something like a car alarm for us to hear, but how fucking dumb are car alarms?
Nobody goes out and looks.
When they were first made, people were like, this is it, there's going to be no more theft.
They're going to hear this alarm, and everyone's going to run out with a gun.
Nobody fucking pays any attention to car alarms anymore.
They yell out, shut it off!
Like if you're in an apartment building and it's going out, people open up their window and yell out, shut it off.
That's all.
They don't yell out, someone's breaking into your car!
They don't believe in it.
They've cried wolf too many fucking times.
It doesn't work.
daniele bolelli
I agree with what you're saying, though, because I'm all for thinking from multiple directions, but I stick with Joe's theory about the bong on that day.
No, I agree.
What I don't understand is the...
What Joe was saying is an objection, the idea that if you're trying to avoid the communist connection, to avoid World War III, why in the world, then, would you want everybody to know that the guy responsible is a guy who has communist connection?
You know what I mean?
dan carlin
Well, I think you're stuck with that.
I mean, you know, if they capture Oswald and they arrest him, you're stuck.
The trial, if there's going to be a trial, is going to bring all this out.
And imagine, that trial would have taken a It would have been on TV. The people are just going to fume.
You know, the communist thing is going to be brought up by the prosecution.
You know, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I try to figure out, we always assume that when government covers up, it's to hide something from us we'll be angry about.
Are there ever occasions where they cover something up because we would want to if we were in the same position for the good of things?
Are there ever times when government covers stuff up for a good reason?
joe rogan
I don't think they're smart enough to do that.
I really don't.
dan carlin
Well, you might be right.
joe rogan
I don't know.
I think that this Lee Harvey Oswald case, what it may very well be, is one of the best examples possible that we're living in a simulation.
dan carlin
Yes!
joe rogan
Because it's so theatrical.
dan carlin
Nick Bostrom's idea, yeah.
joe rogan
It's so theatrical.
I don't know how many people have had that idea, but a lot of really legit guys.
dan carlin
Oh, physicists.
Oh, yeah.
They actually have a mathematical formula that says it's more possible than not.
joe rogan
Yeah.
dan carlin
That we are.
joe rogan
Isn't that weird?
Well, if you just look at the progression of technology and you think, like, where is it eventually going to go 1,000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, it's inevitable.
If we don't blow ourselves up, we're going to be able to recreate reality and it will be completely...
dan carlin
It's an ant farm.
But here's the way you know it.
We already play games on our computers that are really, really primitive versions of that already.
Yeah.
If somebody came out and said, hey, we've got the brand new version of Civ, and this time you'll have real people!
I mean, you'd be like, how much is that?
I'm on that right now.
joe rogan
That's why it leaves that opening.
If that was real, where would it be?
And if it was here already, would we know?
If you were going to make it indiscernible, how do you not know it's not already there?
And then there's things that are just so dramatic and so ridiculous, like the Kennedy assassination.
It's so...
Such a perfect piece of theater.
The way it ties up so loosely and leaves you with a bunch of confusing facts.
And how about the fact that within the decade after the assassination, more than a hundred witnesses to the crime are dead.
Like, some of them died.
They were murdered.
People died in car accidents and strange diseases and they were poisoned.
I mean, the odds are staggering that that would happen.
That a hundred people who saw the assassination would die.
dan carlin
Okay, but you just said you don't think the government's smart enough to do this, that, and that.
joe rogan
They're smart enough to murder people.
dan carlin
That's pretty easy to do.
I think if you're going to defend government competency, you've got to go one way or the other.
Either they're really competent or they're really incompetent.
I could go with either one of those.
joe rogan
But that's just tying up loose ends.
I don't think that requires an extreme amount of intelligence.
I think the average person knows that if someone out there knows something that they shouldn't know, Or they can contribute to some sort of a case that you believe might be coming down and eventually put people that you know in jail, the people that are hiring you in jail.
If there's some way to stop that data from being shared, that's how you cut it off.
You cut it off by killing the people that were witnesses.
dan carlin
There are a lot of people they should have still killed then that they didn't get.
joe rogan
Is that true?
Because they killed a hundred.
dan carlin
They killed a hundred people?
joe rogan
Let's assume that they actually did it.
More than a hundred witnesses were dead within a decade.
dan carlin
Well, you should have gotten some of those guys writing those books that sold so many copies.
Just get them early.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, and by the way, just in the sense of the interest of fairness, there have been arguments against this.
dan carlin
Gerald Posner and Bugliosi both wrote good books on the other side of that.
joe rogan
Yeah, but not that good.
Those books were not that good.
dan carlin
You didn't like books?
joe rogan
I thought they did not leave open the possibility.
First of all, they did not leave open the possibility for conspiracy.
And the reality is, you do not know.
To call it case closed is nonsense.
If you weren't there, if you didn't see it happen, if you weren't a part of it, I think you're guessing.
I think you're doing a lot of guessing.
dan carlin
But that's always the case.
joe rogan
Yeah, but if you're guessing, you can't say case closed.
You're full of shit.
dan carlin
Okay, I see that point.
I can see the calling it case.
joe rogan
The way those books were directed were very clearly directed in a presupposed idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted well.
dan carlin
Well, they were written, and this is the thing I always try to tell people, is that don't read those books.
If you don't know about the Kennedy society, don't, because they're not directed at you.
They're directed at people who already know a time.
It was one of the few books I'd ever read where they didn't footnote stuff.
They said, you know, you remember this book, and they addressed other people's books without telling you about them.
So you had to just, they figured you read all that stuff already that they could address.
Bull Yossi is such a good prosecutor, though.
He told me on the phone, he said, it would have been a slam dunk convicting Oswald.
joe rogan
That doesn't mean anything.
dan carlin
No, it does.
If you're saying, does that mean he could?
Absolutely not.
joe rogan
See, he's thinking about it as a person trying to win a game.
He's not thinking about it as a person trying to find the truth.
The reality of the truth is he doesn't know.
I don't know, you don't know.
dan carlin
That's true.
joe rogan
The only people that know are the people that were there that played a part in that murder or didn't.
Whether it's Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators or the other conspirators and Lee Harvey Oswald being the patsy that he claims he was.
Whatever the combination of things were, whatever number was correct, those are the people that know.
Everyone else, there's a giant amount of guessing.
And to pretend there's not a giant amount of guessing means you're an asshole.
If you're pretending that you've got it nailed, you're an asshole.
It's just a fact.
And so the people that are arguing it online, I mean, I'll argue it online as well, but the people that actually believe that they know for a fact one way or the other, it's not true.
And the magic bullet theory, there's a lot of problems with the way people describe it.
A lot of the trajectory, the angles of the bodies, wasn't nearly as magical, the path they were attributing to.
If you look at the fact that Kennedy was above him, that the seat was actually raised, and that Connolly was actually leaning and turning around, and the idea of their What's much more damning is Connelly's fucking testimony himself that he was not hit first and that when Kennedy was hit he turned around and he heard the gunshots and then he was hit afterwards.
His own testimony refutes the idea of the magic bullet far better than anything else.
When you see Connelly talk about the series of events and how it played out inside the limousine, he throws the magic bullet out the window.
The reason why they came up with the magic bullet theory in the first place is because there was a bullet that hit a curbstone underneath the overpass.
They had to attribute a bullet that Lee Harvey Oswald shot or someone from that direction of Lee Harvey Oswald shot to that bullet because that ricocheted and hit a man and the guy went to the hospital.
So because of that, then they had to come up with one bullet doing all this damage.
But it doesn't mean it's logical.
dan carlin
Ballistics are weird, though, Joe.
Bullets do weird things.
joe rogan
They do do weird things, but you know what they don't do?
dan carlin
And when you talk about witnesses in a car, remember, this is faster than the speed of sound.
The sound hits at a different time.
joe rogan
I mean, it's a little weird.
You're absolutely right.
However, if you look at the possibilities, is it possible that a bullet hit these two bodies and smashed bone, did very little damage, actually left more fragments inside the bullet than were missing from the bullet?
Is that possible?
I don't know.
I mean, you could have a freak bullet that had extra shit on it, and maybe they're attributing certain things.
Maybe it's poor science, and they're attributing certain things to being pieces of the bullet that weren't actually pieces of the bullet.
But the odds are that that was not a bullet that smashed bone.
If you've ever seen what a bullet looks like when it hits bone, it doesn't look like that.
Can it look like that?
Man, it may be under some really freaky circumstance, but that's the aberration.
That's not the norm.
The norm is a bullet distorts wildly when it hits bone.
That's part of what they're designed to do.
They're designed to break up inside the body and do more damage.
They're designed to hit things and spread out.
dan carlin
You know what Bugliosi's and Posner's books, though, did that I thought was fantastic?
And it goes back to that Kim Dvorak-Michael Hastings thing we talked about a minute ago.
They showed what a lot of the conspiracy writers deliberately left out of their work because it messed up their theories.
Right.
One of the big pieces of evidence that really kind of changes a lot of minds is the idea that Oswald took a shot at a general in the weeks before he shot president, or maybe allegedly shot president.
And when you realize he's out there trying to kill people already, it makes him look a lot less like a patsy and a lot more like a guy who was, God, I missed the general.
Hey, guess what?
President Kennedy's coming into motorcade, and I work in a building along the route.
I don't...
I guess I remember myself being upset with some of these conspiracy authors whose work I liked because they left this out.
And I remember thinking, well, that bastard left this out.
He knew that this was there, but it makes his theory look bad, and he left it out.
That's where I started to get real angry at people whose work you're reading because you want to believe it and trust it.
joe rogan
That's a very good point, and it is certainly possible.
But you know what?
It's also not an either-or.
unidentified
I agree with that.
joe rogan
It's also possible that Lee Harvey Oswald acted in conjunction with some other people.
daniele bolelli
Absolutely.
joe rogan
There's a lot of variables.
dan carlin
Maybe many people wanted the president dead that day.
joe rogan
That's the real issue.
The real issue is, did the president at the time create enough enemies where there were a gang of people that wanted him dead?
And that is uncontroversial.
unidentified
Right.
dan carlin
Do you think so?
Wait, now I'm not even going to say it.
joe rogan
Incontroversial.
dan carlin
Well, because here's the thing that I think Oliver Stone did a great job of distorting.
Was this idea that somehow President Kennedy had upset the military-industrial complex and all this, when in reality, the guy had just done the biggest peacetime military buildup in American history.
Remember, he campaigned on something called the Missile Gap.
So when he got the job, he increased military spending by a ton!
joe rogan
But he still wanted to get out of Vietnam.
dan carlin
He didn't really want to get out of Vietnam.
He was going to move assets to Laos and Cambodia.
I guess my point is that he was not an enemy of those very forces that Oliver Stone had him being the enemy of.
joe rogan
I see what you're saying.
dan carlin
He was a hawk.
joe rogan
But was it that black and white?
dan carlin
No, no, no, it was not that black and white.
And you don't know what other things they may have wanted that he was pushing back on.
See, we just don't know.
joe rogan
Well, you do know that he said he wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve.
dan carlin
I don't know enough about that.
I can't comment intelligently on that.
joe rogan
I mean, I can't comment intelligently on almost everything I say, but it doesn't stop me.
dan carlin
Some of us stop at the membrane.
Some of us are more competitive.
joe rogan
JFK Federal Bank.
daniele bolelli
But I mean, that's the thing though, that when you...
What's funny about these arguments is when you see people who are...
Really good at pushing forward all the evidence, supporting their conclusion, and the stuff that doesn't fit with their conclusion, it's not there.
It's like, poop, I just forgot about it.
dan carlin
They do just the same thing that they accuse the government of doing, right?
unidentified
Exactly.
dan carlin
Hiding and omissions and all that stuff.
daniele bolelli
And that's why you read one book and you're like, it looks really convincing and all the points they are making looks really good, and you're like...
Wait, why the hell did you leave this stuff out?
dan carlin
And when you find out they leave it out, you start to distrust them too.
daniele bolelli
Absolutely.
dan carlin
I don't trust the government or some of those conspiracy writers.
joe rogan
See, the idea the conspiracy theorists cite is this Executive Order 11110. And this was issued by Kennedy on June 4th of 1963. And this executive order delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the President's authority to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act as amended by the Gold Reserve Act.
And the order allowed the Secretary to issue silver certificates if any were needed during the transition period under President Kennedy's plan to eliminate silver certificates.
So the idea was that he was moving in on the institution known as the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve, as most people realize, isn't really a federal kind of a thing at all.
It's not a part of the government.
Oh, look, it's the horn again.
Hopefully, the police are on their way to stop this dastardly person from stealing someone's pens and change...
You don't even have car radios you can steal anymore.
They're all integrated into the system.
If you're not going to steal a car, and if you do steal a car, good luck trying to fucking hide it.
Everybody's got a goddamn GPS in their car now.
You stupid fuck.
So the idea that they espouse is that this is the executive order that started at the beginning of the end.
I've also seen a lot of people say that they think Lyndon Johnson had something to do with having Kennedy killed.
dan carlin
Somebody just sent me that book.
I haven't looked at it yet, but the Lyndon Johnson killed Kennedy book or something.
joe rogan
Is it a new one that's out?
dan carlin
I had Jesse Ventura on my show a couple times, and now I get all those books without even asking.
joe rogan
Oh, you poor bastard.
dan carlin
Yeah, it's bad.
joe rogan
I did a show with the people that did his show.
And there was a couple of times where we had these sort of discussions about conspiracies.
And I'm like, they're all juicy and salacious, but the idea that if you look at too many things as being a conspiracy, you do a huge disservice to what might actually be a conspiracy.
dan carlin
Yeah, you're playing into the hands of the people.
joe rogan
Exactly.
Whether you realize it or not, I mean, to be like a crazy right-wing, radical, like the fire and brimstone sort of a guy, you play directly into the hands of the government.
dan carlin
Well, people slam me.
I'm getting this slam like I'm an anti-conspiracy person, and they're all saying, Dan Carlin.
Somebody even wrote a review on iTunes that said something like, he doesn't understand how the world works, and he's just giving you the pablum line.
Yeah, but there are conspiracies out there, but like you said, you do yourself a disservice when you buy all of them.
joe rogan
Dan Carlin, you've got to stop listening to critics.
dan carlin
I do.
joe rogan
You've got to stop listening to those internet comments.
dan carlin
Joe was telling me that before the show.
He goes, heck, I don't listen to anybody.
joe rogan
Listen, you can learn things from people's criticism.
dan carlin
Feedback is good.
joe rogan
Yes, I've learned a lot from people's criticism.
But you also have to understand human nature.
And there's a lot of people out there that are sad as fuck.
And they want you to feel sad, too.
They want you to hurt.
And instead, I mean, it's...
dan carlin
Because their water is lightable on fire and flammable and yours isn't.
joe rogan
It could be that.
It could be that no one wants to fuck them.
I'm going with the latter.
Most of the time it's no one wants to fuck them.
And you have a deficit.
You have a desire for attention.
unidentified
Well, I wish they'd put that in the review then.
dan carlin
I'm probably only saying this because...
joe rogan
I'm 496 pounds.
I shit my pants on a daily basis.
No one's touched me in a decade.
But Carlin's wrong about those conspiracies.
Dan Carlin doesn't know shit about how the world works.
unidentified
He's out there confusing us.
joe rogan
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
I think that you can get a lot out of it in terms of you can get other people's eyes.
I think it's helped me a lot with my stand-up.
It's helped me a lot.
Even negative criticism.
Like, okay, I can see how you see that.
I think it's good.
It fires you up.
It makes you want to perform better.
It makes you want to analyze things under a more critical eye, under a non-indoctrinated eye.
I think it's good.
But I also think you've got to know when to listen to them and when not to.
Right.
dan carlin
Well, and I do think it shuts people down.
We were talking about why more people don't get ahead and the competition thing.
I think that kind of criticism does shut some people down, where they just – they're not – they can't – I mean, obviously, we all can handle it because we all do something where we're criticized on a daily basis.
But, I mean, I think there's some people that just – they don't want – It's okay if my boss does it, but I don't want it in public.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
I was reading a thing the other day.
I've been railing on about this lately, about the idea of people are going on about what they're calling fat shaming.
And fat shaming is making people feel bad for being overweight.
And I read this one article where this woman was talking about how She was being fat shamed because she went to a family function and everyone was gushing about her cousin, how her cousin lost 20 pounds.
And that they were making such a big deal out of it that it was clear to her that they were judging her for not losing the 20 pounds, so it made her feel awful.
And she didn't understand how they couldn't understand that what they were doing was fat shaming her.
daniele bolelli
Got a fucking life.
joe rogan
By complimenting someone on losing weight, you're fat shaming the person who hasn't lost the weight.
Wow.
And that it made her feel awful and that it was incredibly insensitive of them.
I'm fascinated by that kind of thinking.
I really am.
I'm fascinated by that sort of reverse victimology sort of a thing where instead of you being the victim of your own handiwork, you become a persecuted person because they don't accept you for the flaws that you have.
Or even mention the possibility of those flaws existing by virtue of complimenting someone for having gotten over the same flaws that you possess.
Hilarious!
daniele bolelli
I think without even knowing the specifics on particular issues, anytime somebody's so willing to embrace the victim role, I smell trouble right away.
joe rogan
Yeah.
daniele bolelli
I'm like...
joe rogan
You know, there's a reality to losing weight.
We have this Dave Asprey guy who's an expert in a lot of aspects of nutrition.
He's a fascinating guy.
And one of the things he was talking about was he was giving overweight people a pass because he was saying the level of addiction that these people actually have for food to say that they don't have willpower is really unfair because they're so overweight, like a lot of these folks, are so far gone that they used up all of their willpower just to get up in the morning, just to walk.
To the bus stop, just to go to work, just to get their chores done during the day.
They don't have the same level of energy that a healthy person has.
So to tribute them to having this backlog of energy they're not tapping into because they're weak-willed, it's not that.
They're already so far in the hole, it's almost impossible for them to get motivation.
They have to get something incredibly extreme that has to happen to them.
I thought that was really unique in looking at it that way.
dan carlin
You can see that in depressed people, too.
Same thing.
joe rogan
Yes, yes.
People out of shape, people who are depressed.
You can see with people that are ruining their life, too, whether it's through addictions.
You see that as well.
It's like, why can't they see it the way other people see it?
Well, it's almost like they can't.
They're so trapped up in the momentum of whatever it is, whether it's gambling or food.
I mean, I've seen people with food addictions.
You can watch the gears spinning in their mind when food is nearby.
They know they're supposed to lose weight.
They know they're not supposed to be eating it.
But the gears start spinning in their mind and it becomes the primary focus of their existence.
Get that fucking donut.
I need that donut.
That donut is huge.
It's critical for fueling whatever trouble is going on in their mind.
And it's a weird aspect of human beings.
And you don't do that any favors by pretending that encouraging someone who lost weight is a bad thing.
The idea that socially that's irresponsible because you're fat and you're near them.
No, it's actually responsible because that terrible feeling that you have, it's supposed to be the bump that pushes you towards eating a salad instead of a cheeseburger.
Should be the bump that makes you write down everything you eat that day and state some goals.
This is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to use my willpower to overcome this horrible obsession that I have with shitty food.
That's also possible.
It's also possible by you going home and blaming everybody in the blog that you've projected yourself away from any potential benefit from having these bad feelings.
daniele bolelli
Again, it's the same as about the competition.
It's somebody who never learned how to lose.
joe rogan
And the same in avoiding criticism.
You've got to look at it.
It feels like shit, but that feel like shit, correct it so it doesn't feel like shit anymore.
dan carlin
I thought this show was very disorganized until you guys just tied it into a beautiful bow like that.
It's all got a theme that's running through it.
unidentified
We meant it.
dan carlin
We planned it this way, everyone.
daniele bolelli
I have a finger in chair.
joe rogan
There's a way to bring this bitch around, always.
dan carlin
It's an art form.
joe rogan
It is.
Oh, it most certainly is, right?
dan carlin
For sure, actually.
joe rogan
Podcasting is an art form.
dan carlin
It is an art form.
joe rogan
Look, I tell everybody, and I'll say it even though you're here, your fucking podcast is one of my favorite things that I listen to.
One of my absolute favorite things.
It is a national treasure.
It's so interesting.
It educates people on aspects of history that were completely ignored, and it does in a really entertaining and dynamic way.
It's so important, dude.
dan carlin
Dude, can I just tell you, I don't get it.
I've never gotten it.
I've never, ever gotten it.
joe rogan
That's why you can do it.
That's why it's good.
dan carlin
I mean, I'm grateful, don't get me wrong, but I've never quite seen it as others see it.
joe rogan
Oh, that's good.
dan carlin
You just like Mongols.
That's what I do.
joe rogan
You know I do, man.
dan carlin
It's all about the Mongols, baby.
That's where you got me.
unidentified
I know!
joe rogan
That's how you got me, because I've been a fan of chaos.
dan carlin
He's a Mongol guy.
joe rogan
I've been a fan of chaos since I was young.
It's not a fucking coincidence that I'm a stand-up comedian, and I'm also a cage-fighting commentator.
That's not a coincidence.
I'm a massive fan of chaotic events.
I'm a massive fan of these explosive things that throw the norm into question and completely change the paradigm of the existing reality that we operate under.
And when you listen to something like a podcast on the Mongols, it's like, Jesus, that was only the 1200s.
It wasn't that long.
I forgot to bring this shirt.
I got this badass...
Genghis Khan world tour shirt.
dan carlin
That's great.
joe rogan
In the back it has all the fucking towns that he sacked and all the people that were murdered.
dan carlin
Oh, now you gotta send me a photo.
Tweet it out.
unidentified
Tweet that.
joe rogan
I'll buy you one and I'll send it to you.
dan carlin
Yeah, you owe me for all these appearances I've done for you.
joe rogan
I do, you son of a bitch.
I do.
Listen, we all owe each other, man, but I definitely owe you for many, many, many hours.
dan carlin
Wait, I have to stop you.
I have to say, I hope this doesn't embarrass you.
Did you read what that one comic said about being on Joe Rogan's podcast or having Joe Rogan endorse him?
Was it Bill Burr or someone like that said, you are the Oprah.
Of podcasting.
If we come on your show, all of a sudden, everything is rainbows and unicorns for us once we're on Joe's show, which is true, by the way, but otherwise, the favor you've done to all the rest of us, not to kiss anybody's ass here, but it really is.
I mean, you've made a lot of people aware of what we do.
joe rogan
Well, I'm honored that I could do that, but from my perspective, all I've done is let people know things that I found that are awesome.
That's not that difficult to do.
dan carlin
The Joe Rogan Book Club.
joe rogan
Well, if you're honest, if you're an honest person, and I pride myself in being insanely honest, to the point where, you know, I'm like, one of the reasons why I'm really good at accepting criticism, because I'm insanely self-critical.
I mean, I'm good at avoiding going nuts.
dan carlin
I think I think we all are.
You can't do what we do without being that way.
joe rogan
I agree.
I agree.
But my recognition of the role, I'm aware of it.
I'm also honored, and I feel like, without a doubt, I have an obligation.
But I also feel like all I'm doing is letting people know about amazing shit that already exists.
It's beautiful to be that sort of a conduit, to be sort of a funnel point where people can know they can, a portal, where they can go here and they can learn about all sorts of cool shit.
But if the cool shit didn't exist, I would have run out of things to talk about a long time ago.
daniele bolelli
No, that's true, but it's also true, the fact that what you have done for so many people is unreal.
When I think about you and Duncan, for me, in my life, the impact that it has had coming onto your show and Duncan's show in particular.
It's fucking unreal.
That's why I always say as a joke, but maybe not as a joke, but like, you guys ever need help moving a body somewhere?
Call me up in the middle of the night.
joe rogan
But again, it's important that you guys are out there.
You guys are out there providing us with information in entertainment form that expands my view of the world.
You're personally responsible for expanding my view of history above and beyond where it would have ever been without you.
That's a fact.
And when I looked down on iTunes and I saw your show rising through the ranks, I mean, I was so happy for you.
dan carlin
You were the Oprah book club pick of the month.
joe rogan
Yeah, what was the highest you got on iTunes?
Fourth.
That's insane.
That's all of iTunes.
dan carlin
And that's your help, baby.
And your listeners, too, by the way.
joe rogan
Before you ever came on the show, what was the highest you'd ever been?
dan carlin
We got up to like eight a long, long time ago before we had any of this competition we have now.
And I don't know if folks understand that.
It is so competitive now.
There are so many things out there with so much promotion that to reach 20th now is a bigger deal than reaching 7th or 8th, 5 or 6 years ago.
I mean, it's much more competitive.
But, you know, I mean, we hover around 12th, 14th, 15th, something like that.
joe rogan
The numbers of people making podcasts right now are staggering.
dan carlin
It's crazy.
But I think that's a great thing.
joe rogan
Absolutely.
dan carlin
And I've become an evangelist, and I tell people all the time, if you've ever thought about doing it, you ought to try it.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah, why not?
dan carlin
Yeah, try it out.
You never know.
joe rogan
I mean, I would have never known if that would be something.
dan carlin
How did you start, Joe?
I don't mean to bring up a subject maybe your whole audience already knows.
How did you get the idea to do this?
joe rogan
Well, we started just putting it on Ustream.
We got an idea...
dan carlin
So that was first?
joe rogan
Yeah, well, actually, before even Ustream, there was a thing called Justin.TV, and we were on that.
We would broadcast from the green room, and take questions from the green room, and people enjoyed it.
It was fun.
dan carlin
But what made you think of even...
Because the idea of deciding to do it, especially back then, was such a weird step to take.
joe rogan
Well, there was a lot of people that had already done it.
Adam Carolla had done it.
dan carlin
No, Carolla didn't do it, did he?
joe rogan
Yeah, he had done it before me.
He had went straight from radio to doing it.
That was the first episode.
We had snowflakes on in the background.
And we just did it on Ustream.
We didn't know what we were doing.
And I did it with Brian.
We went from that to...
Also, Opie and Anthony.
Opie and Anthony have a great radio show on Sirius.
And their radio show is so similar to the way that I started doing podcasts, where it's just to hang.
It's just a conversation.
I mean, sometimes I have questions for the guests.
Sometimes it's kind of structured in that way where there's some things that I want to get to because I know that you have an expertise in that area.
But a lot of it is just a bunch of people shooting the shit and just talking honestly about life.
And I've always found that incredibly entertaining.
And Anthony started doing this thing out of his basement.
He set up this thing called Live from the Compound.
He's a nut.
He's a gun nut.
He has, like,.50 caliber machine guns and shit.
And he put a green screen behind him, and he was doing karaoke where he's singing with a gun in his hand.
He's fucking crazy.
But I was like, this guy's got, like, a professional studio set up in his basement.
And I'm like, goddammit, we should start doing something.
So we started doing it just on Ustream, and then started putting it on iTunes, and now...
In the end of next month, it'll be four years.
We're 400 plus episodes in.
dan carlin
Look what iTunes has done for the whole...
You know what I thought the greatest thing they ever did for people like us was?
Was not separating the ESPNs and the professional content from the stuff that we do, because it allows us an equal playing field.
In a way that if they said, okay, here's your professional stuff, now here's your amateur stuff in this pile over here, in this grab bag of singles nobody wants.
I feel like in the same way that we just said, you know, I owe you, I owe iTunes, there's a lot of people that made something possible here.
I don't know what I'd be doing anymore without a podcast.
I'm no longer a news reporter kind of guy.
I'm no longer a radio talk show.
I'd be like janitor, and I would be really bad at that, too.
So, I mean, there's a lot of people we owe for where we are today.
joe rogan
No doubt.
unidentified
It's crazy.
joe rogan
Yeah, and if there wasn't some sort of a form like iTunes, we could just upload it to them, and then people could download it from the RSS feed.
dan carlin
And the hosting services and everything.
joe rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're number six right now in the world, son.
You're six on iTunes.
dan carlin
I ought to be making more money, don't you think?
Number six in the world.
joe rogan
You're getting fucked.
dan carlin
Do you see what I drive here sometimes?
joe rogan
I wonder if this is America.
I wonder if it's the U.S. But it's got some BBC stuff on there.
I don't know.
I don't know if it is, whether or not it's actually the country or the world.
But whatever it is, you're number six on all podcasts.
dan carlin
And I owe your audience.
And you know, your audience is awesome, by the way.
I mean, I hear from them, and they always say the same thing.
I found out about you from Joe Rogan, just so you know.
joe rogan
Find cool shit, don't lie to them.
That's it.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Find cool shit, be honest.
Be honest about how you feel about things.
Don't be transparent in the way...
I mean, even when I talk, like if I talk about something like the Magic Bullet Theater or somewhere along the way where I'll argue something, the bottom line always is I will tell you exactly what I actually do know.
And I don't know.
I don't know what happened.
You can't know.
And I think...
Finding out about cool things and being honest about the cool things and encouraging that sort of really objective discussion about things, that's a thing that we're missing.
That's a thing we're missing in our social circles.
It's a thing we're missing in life.
People get attached to ideologies.
Like you were saying, well, people will say one way or another and then just fucking argue it to death.
I know Michael Hastings was killed by the CIA. And then your credibility is on the line and everything.
Yeah, whether it's Bigfoot or fucking UFOs or being a Republican, there's people that get on a fucking team and those people are a problem.
They're a problem to themselves.
dan carlin
They're a huge problem politically, too, because as I said, it doesn't hurt us that one party does something.
But then when we forgive it when our party, whatever party that might be, gets in power, there are Democrats who, if George W. Bush was doing what President Obama is doing, would be out in the streets with signs.
But because it's their guy, they don't.
And vice versa.
joe rogan
That's such a good point and one that I really get on progressives and left-wing people about.
Your acceptance of war crimes done under a Democratic administration, the idea of the same exact things being done in the Republican administration would be horrific war crimes.
And the acceptance of them is so gross.
And so telling.
dan carlin
And codifies the whole thing you were so against when the other guy was doing it.
Because now you don't have a leg to stand on.
When the Republicans go back in office and do this, what are you going to say?
You going to complain about it again then?
joe rogan
It reinforces the idea of this being a fucking simulation.
dan carlin
I'm liking that idea more and more.
joe rogan
It's the yin and yang.
It's the theater.
It's the two-party system.
So it's like, They brought in a fourth party, but it was too confusing.
People didn't know what to follow anymore.
They started tuning into different channels.
As soon as that Perot character came along and fucking threw a big monkey wrench into the whole situation, it's too much.
Let's go back to two and a fringy.
dan carlin
That's why we haven't had a third person at those presidential debates since.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, the Commission for Presidential Debate is a privately funded institution.
dan carlin
With half Democrats and half Republicans on their staff.
joe rogan
It's hilarious.
And they try so hard to make sure the weirdos don't get in.
The Gary Johnsons of the world, the people that are going to throw.
dan carlin
Can I ask this, though?
Why are they all weirdos?
Because I keep feeling like that's almost like part of the rigged thing, that if you have somebody who has some ideas, you go, finally, somebody's saying the right thing about this, and they also go, yes, but I'm also a secret Klan member, just so you know.
And you go, why do they always have to come with some baggage like that?
daniele bolelli
That's because you're not doing it.
unidentified
That's right.
daniele bolelli
That's why.
dan carlin
Well, my Nazi newsletters from the past will all come back to haunt me, right?
joe rogan
I think that the only type of people that have the balls to step out like that are socially a little wacky.
For everybody else, it's a big risk.
dan carlin
Didn't we talk about that?
Like if you're Anthony Weiner and you know there's more pictures out there, but you run anyway knowing they're going to catch you again and you do it anyway?
joe rogan
Right.
That guy, obviously, he's got a few fucking screws loose.
dan carlin
He's running for president next time.
Just be ready for the publicity.
He's going to turn it all around.
joe rogan
I wonder what a guy like that eventually winds up doing.
That is an interesting point.
dan carlin
He can have a podcast, of course.
joe rogan
He could probably be good at that.
dan carlin
Yeah.
joe rogan
He's good at talking.
dan carlin
Think about what you could tweet right there.
That's a good promotion.
Share it with your friends.
joe rogan
Before they caught him the first time, being a freak, there was a great video of him speaking on the floor and just really passionate and screaming and yelling and very eloquent and very articulate and like, wow, this guy's fighting for the people.
dan carlin
Same thing.
KKK letters in your past.
I mean, why do you get one with the...
I mean, it's crazy.
joe rogan
Well, I think that most people, when they get to be a certain age, they have a family, and they have obligations, mortgages, and they have certain risks they're not willing to take.
And one of the big risks is you don't want to go against the entire government and say everyone's corrupt.
Like, Jesus Christ, they'll come after you.
They'll take your house.
You know, your kid's got to go to college.
So, like, for the guys, like...
The Ron Pauls of the world, it's like they get to be a certain age where they don't give a fuck.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to shoot him?
He's fucking 85 years old or whatever he is.
His last run for president is done.
Now it's up to his son.
And his son apparently has been using cheat sheets for...
dan carlin
What's up with that?
joe rogan
Plagiarizing.
dan carlin
I gave the guy a lot of credit for that wonderful filibuster he did for the Fourth Amendment.
Got the best publicity the Fourth Amendment's gotten in so long, and then you go pull that on me?
Make me look like an idiot?
joe rogan
For people who don't know what you're talking about, apparently he had used some words...
From some various speeches.
dan carlin
That were exactly the same.
joe rogan
Exactly.
Is it possible that he has writers and he doesn't know?
dan carlin
That's what his father said the newsletters were that got his father in so much trouble.
But remember, Rand Paul, who I've said nice things about, also has as one of his main advisers, that guy who did the Southern Avenger, you know, oh yeah, the guy, one of his advisers was the Southern Avenger, and he wore a mask and had a Confederate flag behind him.
It's like a YouTube show or something.
And then when they said, are you gonna fire this guy, he goes something like, well, that's all in his past.
And you just go, what's up with this?
Why are these people all crazy?
If you talk about freedom in our constitution, you're crazy.
joe rogan
That's adorable.
Maybe it's the Southern Avenger.
Look at his photo.
dan carlin
Is that him?
joe rogan
Come on.
dan carlin
Wait.
If that guy's on your staff, and somebody...
You could honestly say, God, I didn't know he was a Southern Avenger.
Once they tell you, don't you fire him five seconds later?
joe rogan
I think it's probably a good move.
dan carlin
He didn't.
So that to me right there, you go, great, thanks for taking my pet issue of the Fourth Amendment and trashing it with your Southern Avenger guy.
joe rogan
What is the Southern Avenger's stance?
Maybe I'm on his team.
dan carlin
I don't know.
I have never watched the Southern Avenger.
I saw clips.
joe rogan
Paint him with a broad brush.
dan carlin
The confederate flag does that for you.
daniele bolelli
Yeah, it seems so sobbed, though.
I don't know.
What could he possibly stand for?
joe rogan
Wait a minute.
He's confusing the shit out of me already.
Conservative, libertarian, independent.
dan carlin
See, look what he's done!
He's destroyed conservative, independent, and libertarian in one tagline.
He's probably working for a group who's trying to discredit all those things.
joe rogan
I'm surprised he doesn't have a TM at the end of it.
dan carlin
Look at the logo.
It's a better logo than a lot of people have.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, what is he trying to do?
dan carlin
He looks like a wrestler, doesn't he?
joe rogan
He does.
Does he still have a show?
dan carlin
No, he works for Rand Paul now.
joe rogan
Still?
They didn't fire him yet?
dan carlin
Where's Bryant?
He's supposed to look all that stuff up for us.
joe rogan
He's not going to look it up.
He's just going to interrupt.
dan carlin
Oh, has he been banished?
Is this a temporary banishment?
joe rogan
But Rand Paul still has this guy working for him.
dan carlin
I can't comment on that intelligently.
joe rogan
Do we know if the Southern Avengers said anything bad?
He's to speak at the same conference as Rand Paul.
Hmm.
After neoconservative alter ego was revealed, Hunter left a post as the Kentucky Senator's social media...
That's the guy?
That's the Southern Avenger?
unidentified
He looks like a guy with the Southern Avenger.
joe rogan
Look at that photo over his right shoulder.
Or the left shoulder.
That's disturbing.
Is that guy with no shirt on?
There's like a bunch of people and one guy has no shirt on.
That's a gay orgy about to happen.
A southern gay orgy.
We just have some chicken, we're fixing to fuck.
unidentified
Look at him.
joe rogan
The guy has no shirt on.
And a big chest tattoo.
What if that chest tattoo was like some fucking conservative statement?
dan carlin
You don't know what's on his back.
joe rogan
Yeah, a big Confederate flag, I'm sure.
unidentified
That's right, I think so too.
joe rogan
The cover of the fucking, the roof of the general duke.
dan carlin
But to get back to the point, is how come whenever you get someone who's saying some important things in a halfway, you know, decent way, they have to come, you know, people say to me all the time, well, we vote all the time, Dan, the course the country's on is based on voters voting for people.
How come when we get somebody who would like to change course in a direction most of us would like to see, half of them is really fantastic and the other half of them is so crazy you'd never elect a person like that in a million years?
Why can't we have somebody who has some common sense and doesn't sound like that?
joe rogan
Two words, my friend.
Simulation theory.
dan carlin
It all goes back.
And risk management diversification.
joe rogan
Tool.
Yeah, I wonder.
dan carlin
He's hedging his bets in case white people take over the world again, you know, in a very dominant sort of way.
We'll have the Southern Avenger on staff.
He can advise us.
joe rogan
Do you ever watch those extreme preppers shows?
Those shows where dudes are fixing to prepare for the end of the world?
dan carlin
Oh, the bunker people.
joe rogan
Stockpiling water and creating escape routes and...
Battering rams, they're welding to the front of their pickup trucks.
dan carlin
They're like the opposite of the hoarders, because they're the hoarders that are doing it for a good cause, right?
joe rogan
Yeah, they believe that it's all going to come crumbling down.
I think that there's a mentality, and the same kind of mentality that is...
The type of person that wants to get in this rebellious position of power, rebellious position of, you know, railing out against the government.
They're very similar to these people that are prepping.
It's very similar to their extreme folks.
Like those are the only people that make it to the front of that crazy line.
They have to be a bit nutty.
It's not that the ideas aren't interesting to you or I, when you look at a guy like Rand Paul, the things that he says that you agree with, or his dad, the things that he says that you agree with, but it's to get there.
He's facing so much opposition, there's so much bullshit along the way, so much pressure, so much...
Back and forth debate, so much frustration, so much suppression of information.
By the time he gets to a position where the world is listening to him, he's already broken.
He broke every bone in his fucking soul just to get to the front of the line.
dan carlin
You know what's funny though?
People say to me all the time...
You know, can you get a staff together to do what you do so you can do better?
I want more history shows.
Can we help you do this?
And I always say the same thing.
I say, you can't help me because I can't watch y'all and I can't keep track of it.
That's what all these people do.
You know, what was it?
Paul said, Ron Paul said, well, this guy who wrote, he was doing my newsletter for me.
I was in Congress.
I didn't have time to do a newsletter, so he did it and he wrote all this stuff and I didn't know what was happening.
That's my fear, is that you're going to hire a bunch of people and then you're going to turn around and go, what did you do for me?
What did you...
We started the Southern Avengers show for you.
We thought it would be a good promotional vehicle for your show, Dan.
joe rogan
No doubt.
Yeah, no doubt.
I think that there's...
dan carlin
It's a catch-22.
Do you give away some of your control, or do you keep it where you know everything's cool?
But the minute you give it away, you've got rogue people with your name running around graffitiing the side.
Banksy and Carlin were here.
joe rogan
Somebody isolated the photograph.
This is the photograph.
It's all a bunch of wrestlers.
dan carlin
Why say the Southern Avengers look like a wrestler?
joe rogan
Yeah, these are like old-school Southern wrestlers.
I was probably right.
They probably buttfucked each other as soon as this was over.
And this guy's got this in the...
He's got it framed on his wall in the background of his fucking study.
So, yay, Southern Avenger.
Yay, simulation theory.
dan carlin
Wait, does it say he parted ways?
So there, so he got rid of him finally.
joe rogan
Yeah.
dan carlin
I guess the hue and cry was a little too much for a sitting senator from Kentucky to have somebody named the Southern Avenger on his staff.
joe rogan
Well, he was a co-author of the 2011 book with Rand Paul, The Tea Party Goes to Washington.
unidentified
Oh, God.
dan carlin
I maybe forgot that.
I blanked it out.
But you're right.
joe rogan
It is funny that these people, they have to be...
dan carlin
Yeah, we can't have a Fourth Amendment person who's not...
I mean, I guess you do.
You got guys like Wyden and Udall and some of these people, but when you get somebody who's a real lightning rod for this stuff, and you think, finally, we've been waiting for a guy like this forever, they come with these poison pills that you just can't swallow.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality of the control that has been exerted on the political climate.
I mean, the fact that the two-party system exists just shows you how much power the people that are running things, how much they've actually been able to exert on our system.
They've locked it down to two parties that are both often supported by the exact same corporations.
dan carlin
George Carlin said you know exactly how many people you have to bribe.
joe rogan
Yeah, Bill Hicks had the best bit.
He goes, well, I like the puppet on the left.
He's more to my liking.
Well, the puppet on the right supports my beliefs.
Hey, wait a minute.
There's one guy holding both puppets.
I mean, that's really, that was like his description of America.
That's a really good one.
dan carlin
How come we don't get it then, Joe?
This is what I don't understand, is that if we're going to work toward this awareness and if we're going to get better and more involved and enlightened, how do we not see through that scam?
That would be like the first scam you have to see through to get to anywhere, and we don't see through that one.
joe rogan
Well, smart people that are on the Democratic side are partially to blame.
I'm just as much as people on the conservative side, but on the Democratic side, I've heard so many people use the term we, like we need to get into office, or we need to get more of this, or we control the house.
I'm like, we?
unidentified
We?
joe rogan
Like Hollywood people.
I have had maddening conversations with people in Hollywood that use the term we to describe the Democratic Party.
And I'm like, they're not you, dude.
They're not you by a long stretch.
And you perpetrating this stupidity.
I understand that you work 12 hours a day and you don't have the time to investigate this thoroughly.
But you pretending to be a smart guy and going with this team, we need to do that.
How much of what they're doing are you really fucking paying attention to?
Because this Democratic Party that's in charge right now is as Republican as it gets when it comes to whistleblowers.
As Republican as it gets when it comes to...
Giving rights to corporations that are the same rights that used to be attributed to individuals.
All the things that we're afraid of during the Bush administration are all being done, the attacks on whistleblowers, to a much larger degree, the attacks on secrecy and privacy, much larger than has ever been exhibited before.
Those are all Republican ideas.
So when do they become Democratic ideas?
dan carlin
I had a famous political reporter here in LA, when I was learning about news, Explain it to me this way.
She goes, I'm going to give you the secret to what the difference between the two parties are.
And she kept it from me.
She kept it from me.
And then one day when we were going to interview Dan Quayle, of all people, believe it or not, when he was the vice president, she says, okay, the time has come to let you in on the big secret between the two parties.
So I lean forward.
I say, what is it?
She goes, at the Republican fundraisers, you get your wine in a glass.
At the Democratic fundraisers, it comes in a plastic cup.
That was it.
That was this big piece of knowledge I was waiting for.
The difference between the two parties is what they serve the wine in when you go to their get-togethers.
joe rogan
They're so deeply entrenched in money.
And when I'm saying that those are Democratic ideas or those are Republican ideas, I don't mean it as in they are actually Republican ideas.
I mean it as in the people that are on the Democratic side that believe in equality and freedom and left-wing values, they think that those ideas are only things that the Republicans support.
So when they're clearly being supported by the Democratic Party, Who's who?
What's going on?
Is up, down?
Is down, up?
Is everybody getting paid here?
What exactly is going on?
dan carlin
I think we assume these people have ideas when really they're taking money.
20% of them do, but I think 80% of them have the ideas you pay them to have.
joe rogan
And also, it's a giant group of people.
In order to play politics, you have to appease certain groups, and you have to be very good socially at this sort of give-and-take system that they've put into place.
The cronyism system.
I mean, when you look at all these people that are lobbyists live in Virginia, that's right outside of D.C., and they come in, and there's all this money concentrated on making things happen there.
It's totally against the concept of we the people.
It's totally against the concept of the interests of the individual, the interests of the greater good of the society as a whole.
It's totally against that.
It's against it, and it's transparent, and it's right in everybody's face.
daniele bolelli
But I think a lot of people do get it.
I don't think it's an issue of lacking awareness, at least now.
If you talk 30 years ago, you had maybe a different story.
But post Nixon, ever since, confidence in government has been collapsing sharply, confidence in the political system.
To some degree or another, hates it, feels like, ah, it's corrupt.
I think there is a level of awareness of that.
What there isn't is the, okay, then what do we do about it?
You know, that part is the, we have the knowledge that this thing sucks, but what can I or my neighbor, the next guy, do to change this?
What steps could be taken?
joe rogan
And that's when people go, Don't you think more people know it sucks now than ever before?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And more people know why it sucks now.
dan carlin
Well, and you know what the real—and this ties something else up in a bow.
We talked about earlier with the fracking and the environmental damage and everything else.
Part of the problem we have, too, is we have a system here in the United States that is designed to be moderate and not radical.
Which sounds fine most of the time.
But if you put off problems long enough, the solutions that are moderate to fix them are no longer useful.
I mean, if your house is slipping on its foundation and you get to it early, maybe a little bit of money and a little bit of work and you can fix that.
If you put that off 10, 15 years, the solution to that problem is a lot more radical.
We have put off a lot of huge problems in this country in solving them for so long that the solutions are so radical that That we have a system that is just geared to tampen down that sort of radicalism.
But what does that mean if that's what it takes to fix some of the problems?
joe rogan
That's a very interesting point.
And then there's the idea that we're going to come up with some way in the future to clean up all the mess that we've created in the past.
dan carlin
And we'll fix it later.
Something will be invented.
daniele bolelli
Technology will take care of it.
joe rogan
All we need to do is get our backs against the wall, because that's when America's at its best.
unidentified
That's right.
joe rogan
We've got our back against the wall.
Tell you what, we come out swinging.
dan carlin
The better mouse trap will emerge.
unidentified
Don't worry.
joe rogan
We'll come out swinging.
We're going to make some GMO fish that eat plastic and send them bitches out there, and then we've got all our problems solved.
We're going to have the greatest population of fish in the history of the fucking ocean because we're going to have plastic-eating fish that we've made in the lab.
They've got a steel lining to their stomach, and they run on fossil fuels.
dan carlin
Forced consciousness expansion.
Maybe they will prompt the awareness by putting the hallucinogenics in the water, and there you go.
joe rogan
Well, a lot of people believe that they came in asteroids, Dan Carlin.
They came from other planets.
It's a simulation.
dan carlin
There are no other planets.
joe rogan
There's a chemical, the chemical composition of mushrooms, the 4-phosphoroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine, or however you say it.
Wow.
The things being in the phosphorus in the four positions, the only group of them in the entire world, so there's no immediate ancestors to psilocybin.
dan carlin
You are talking way over my head now.
joe rogan
I'm talking over my head, too.
dan carlin
Way over my head.
joe rogan
Repeating some shit that I heard Terence McKenna say.
dan carlin
Okay.
joe rogan
The idea is that...
dan carlin
As long as we're clear on that, right?
joe rogan
Spores can survive in a vacuum.
The idea of panspermia is a well-accepted idea in astronomy, and that idea is that the building blocks from life, water even, came from other planets.
Asteroid impacts on other planets sent large bodies into space.
They landed on Earth, many of them perhaps...
You know, billions and billions and billions of years ago and actually created the oceans, actually created a lot of life itself, the building blocks for life.
So in a sense, we are all of alien composition, period.
But other things are continuing to come this way, including spores, which can survive in a vacuum.
And when you have large doses of psilocybin mushrooms, one of the weird things is you feel like you're communicating with something.
And the whimsical amongst us believe that what you're actually doing is communicating with an alien life form that has come here and wants you to eat it in order to tune into it.
dan carlin
You know, I actually have some thoughts that I agree with some of that, and this is coming from someone who doesn't talk about this very much, but I've always been fascinated with how things like that have been used by humankind throughout history as a means to open up other, you know, to use Huxley's term, doors of perception.
It's fascinating to me when you think, if you think that none of this stuff is, you know, if you think about evolutionary things, right?
So this is all stuff that evolves.
Why the hell were hallucinogenic mushrooms, what's the evolutionary benefit to the mushroom itself?
Is it supposed to ward off birds from eating it because they get a bad trip if they do?
unidentified
Right.
dan carlin
I find it fascinating how much of a role...
You know, we did a podcast once about the hidden side of intoxication in history.
Well, I think you could make a very good case that hallucinogenics of all kinds have probably played huge roles in history that we don't even know about.
Especially with tribal peoples who have played huge roles.
I mean, why did the Germans decide to migrate into Roman territory at just this time?
Well, they have sorcerers and witch doctors as part of their culture who use hallucinogenics.
Who knows that they didn't go to the chieftain there and say, you remember that thing I told you we have to do?
I was just told now is the right time.
Move into that Roman territory and all history is different.
I mean, that's the side of history we're never going to get.
It'd be interesting to find out how much of history has been determined by things like that.
daniele bolelli
That episode, by the way, was hilarious.
dan carlin
Oh, you like that one?
Well, the problem is that you can't know, so the whole thing is speculative.
But you can say, Well, Napoleon had opium the night before Waterloo and he slept late and he was sluggish.
How much did that impact history?
Makes sense.
You've got to use the little teeny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle you know about to construct a totally fictional narrative that might be true.
joe rogan
Well, there's one thing that's undeniable.
People love altering their consciousness.
dan carlin
Yes, yes, and that's true.
joe rogan
They love it so much that in this day and age...
We have Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
dan carlin
Who are bucking against the trend, right?
joe rogan
Who, not only that, are funded initially by alcohol and tobacco companies, now mostly by pharmaceutical companies.
Which is so rich and so delicious.
The way I describe it, I go that having pharmaceutical companies and allowing them to do literally commercials against marijuana is like hookers making commercials against strippers.
Right.
That's, it's like the most ridiculous things.
daniele bolelli
It is.
joe rogan
The idea behind it is, you know, it's so preposterous.
But we have, we still have a method.
And as long as you give people a method, they'll accept a certain amount of restrictions.
As long as the method is good, and the method is very good.
The alcohol method is great.
dan carlin
And think about if prohibition hadn't been repealed.
I mean, think about how interesting a world we might live in today.
Had that stayed the law of the land?
joe rogan
I don't think it can.
I don't think you can have no options for people to...
Well, the one thing that's interesting is during Prohibition, marijuana was legal.
Marijuana wasn't legal until after Prohibition.
dan carlin
Henry Anslinger and all those people.
joe rogan
Yeah, Henry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst.
They originally did it to try to suppress hemp as a commodity.
daniele bolelli
Right, because you got so much more out of hemp than you got out of trees.
And if you're in the business of making paper and you're in the business of the logging industry...
joe rogan
I mean, that's also a perfect example of the difference between controlling information back then and today.
They were able to sell this idea that there's a new drug that was forcing Mexicans and blacks to rape white women, and they even named this drug marijuana, which is a name for a Mexican slang term for a wild tobacco.
It had nothing to do with cannabis.
dan carlin
You know what does blow me away?
I can understand you making the case that this has to be illegal, whatever we're talking.
This has to be illegal because it's so dangerous and we know it's so dangerous.
What I don't understand is that we basically have a policy in this country that there will be no new intoxicants.
If something is invented in a bathtub tomorrow that doesn't hurt anybody, that has no hangovers, that nobody gets in car, we're going to ban it the day after tomorrow on general principles.
And that's what I don't understand.
joe rogan
Not only that, there are beneficial drugs that they have to attribute to diseases in order to get them passed through.
Like, there's a thing called ProVigil.
And ProVigil is this smart drug that all these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs...
dan carlin
You know a lot about this stuff, Joe.
joe rogan
I'm impressed.
It's impressive stuff.
Provigil is pretty wild.
And it gives you this buzz, but it doesn't give you a caffeine-y buzz.
It's not like a heart rate thing.
It gives you this clarity thing.
It's a very strange sort of intoxicant.
Or a sort of pharmaceutical drug, rather.
But they couldn't just sell it as a performance-enhancing drug.
So they had to sell it as some sort of a response to a disease.
So they came up with narcolepsy.
dan carlin
Okay, I've heard about this.
joe rogan
But it was originally created to benefit consciousness.
But you can't do that.
You can't have a drug, just a drug that makes you smarter.
You literally can't.
There has to be something wrong with your fucking brain.
So they have to come up with something.
That's a weird rut.
dan carlin
But here's the weird thing.
If that's how it has to be, why don't they all go back and then find things...
Couldn't you sell the old drugs that way?
Yeah, I guess they are, kind of.
I mean, if you think about it, that's what the whole medical marijuana kind of thing could be construed as if you wanted to.
Well, we found a new way to market this thing.
It's a solution to a problem.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, medical marijuana is the reason why that's the back door that gets it in.
dan carlin
Yeah, I think we all understand that.
Even if we think that there are, and I do think there are medical uses for this stuff, there's no question that it has been used as a back door to sort of open the door to what would not have been possible without it.
joe rogan
Also ingeniously getting people in government addicted to the money and the revenue that it brings in legally, which you don't get at all if it's illegal.
The money still goes into the economy, and that's been really documented in British Columbia.
That the economy is very dependent, even though it's illegal.
But the taxes that you would get from selling it, the government actually is what loses out on marijuana being illegal.
The government loses out because they're not getting any of the tax money from it being sold.
dan carlin
It's still one of the things we create and do well in this country, too.
You'd think they'd be safeguarding the few things we do well in producing in Well, they're just starting to now pass laws.
joe rogan
At Onnit, we sell hemp protein powder, but we have to buy our hemp protein powder in Canada.
It's legal to possess, it's legal to sell, it's not legal to grow.
That is so asinine, because you're not even talking about a psychoactive plant.
You're talking about the male version of the cannabis plant.
dan carlin
It's rote.
joe rogan
Yeah, the different variations, the cousins of the cannabis plant.
There's more than one different type of hemp.
But all of them, what they all have and share in common is the amount of THC in them is insanely small.
So what you're getting out of it is just a textile.
You're getting clothes, you're getting oil, you're getting food that you can eat.
And we can't even grow it in America.
We're buying it in bulk from Canada and then we sell it.
We try to buy the best stuff that we could possibly find, and it's really difficult.
Unless you can grow it yourself, it's hard to quality control.
You have to really search out these farms that are in another country that are growing this shit.
And it's so stupid!
So they're just starting to pass laws that are allowing farmers to grow it in America.
California has recently passed it.
They're trying to pass it in other states.
I believe they passed it in Colorado, and I believe they passed it in Washington state, because those are the two places where they've made it legal to consume for adults.
daniele bolelli
I saw one of the best documentaries I've seen on this.
There's this documentary called Standing Silent Nation, which is what happened a few years ago on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Africa.
joe rogan
For those who are Italian accent impaired.
He said, standing silent nature.
daniele bolelli
Nation.
joe rogan
Nation.
unidentified
See?
dan carlin
I understood him.
I don't know what you're talking about.
joe rogan
Standing silent nation.
daniele bolelli
That was really cool.
It showed what happened on Pine Ridge, which was one of the poorest reservations in the United States where prospects for economic growth are really dimmed.
And so what these guys did, they figure, you know, we are somewhat of a sovereign entity because that's how reservations are, right?
They are in this weird limbo.
And they figure, okay, we can plant industrial hemp, we'll cultivate it, we'll do this whole thing.
And you see the progression through the documentary of the The viciousness with which the DEA goes after them to just stamp it out.
And you see the facts that you are listing right now, the THC aspect, the fact that this is not a drug.
We're not talking about a drug.
You're not talking about marijuana.
Even marijuana is ridiculous, but that's a whole different story.
There are none of the THC that you find.
It's the same plant, but it's like marijuana without the stuff that gets you high.
And you use it for a million things that, as you say, it's legal to own the products in the United States, but it's not legal to grow it where we can actually make the product in the United States.
joe rogan
And there's no argument for it.
daniele bolelli
It just makes no sense.
joe rogan
It's a commodity.
It's a commodity that's being banned because of a...
Close association with an intoxicant.
An intoxicant, by the way, it's the safest known to man.
daniele bolelli
Exactly.
joe rogan
One that has massive amounts of medical benefits, documented for sure, for real, non-controversial medical benefits, and it's illegal.
dan carlin
I've never understood why we don't have, you know, because I always thought one of the arguments that screwed up kids the most was to put marijuana on this list of terrible drugs because then when they try the marijuana, they think you're lying about the heroin.
I always thought that there ought to be a checklist that the government used to decide if something should be legal or illegal.
You know, a hundred questions.
How addictive is it likely to be?
How dangerous?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then if you pass or fail, you know, if you pass, it's legal.
That also would be used if you invent some new bathtub drug tomorrow.
Okay, well, let's run it down the checklist, right?
And then you could say to the people, well, look, I mean, here's how it's scored on the checklist.
And I think the damage to that would be because alcohol might not I don't think there's any way marijuana doesn't score better than most of the intoxicants that are out there today.
I guess what I'm saying is I think it would help me in raising my own children and keeping them off these harder drugs to be able to have a decent argument.
There's a good reason this heroin isn't in general use, kids.
It'll really hurt you, trust me.
It wouldn't be illegal if it wouldn't really hurt you.
joe rogan
Well, what's mind-boggling is that that's not even Schedule 1. I know, because medical uses, that's right.
Heroin is Schedule 2. Schedule 1, the most dangerous of all drugs, marijuana is in that.
That's an insult.
daniele bolelli
Ronald Reagan in the 80s, marijuana is the most dangerous drug in America.
joe rogan
Oh, that was a great speech.
daniele bolelli
How the fuck can you even say that with a straight face?
joe rogan
It's hilarious.
You know, they found that cone snail venom, they can make a drug out of cone snail venom that is 100 times more potent than any existing pain medication and is completely non-addictive.
So it works a hundred times better than all of the Oxycontins and all that other shit, and it's not addictive.
Listen to this.
unidentified
The message this evening is not my message, but ours.
Despite our best efforts, shortages of marijuana are now being reported.
dan carlin
This is a parody.
Fail.
joe rogan
Fail hard, dude.
dan carlin
That's what I have to say to my mythical producer all the time.
unidentified
Fail.
joe rogan
How dare you.
Yeah, it becomes an insult.
And it becomes one more piece of evidence that we're getting fucked.
And it's bad to have that out there if you want to run a government.
Because it fuels the resistance.
It fuels people's...
dan carlin
It turns the citizens into the enemy.
joe rogan
Yes.
dan carlin
That's what it does.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's millions and millions of fucking Schedule I criminals in this country.
dan carlin
It turns the buttocks-clenching guy who run the stop site at Walmart into the bad guy.
Well, he didn't even have any marijuana on him.
That's the part I like.
But marijuana was the...
Do you know that that's what they suspected him of having?
So here's the thing.
So I'm walking, I'm in my car, and I've got some marijuana I want to smoke later, but I'm afraid if it's in my car, you'll find it.
So I shove it up my rear end so that I can smoke it later.
The whole thing is so insane.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's beautiful.
dan carlin
We're living in a simulation, right?
joe rogan
It's not real.
Wiener, he's not real.
Wiener showing his wiener.
Come on, none of it's real.
It's not real.
We're all mad.
We're mad as a hatter.
And we're just alone by ourselves somewhere, linked up to some computer, trying to pretend that this fucking simulated society we've pieced together makes any sense.
dan carlin
I'd be very interested to hear what they're writing on Rogan's message board about this wide variety of interesting topics.
unidentified
No, what do you mean?
daniele bolelli
It's all scripted.
dan carlin
That's true.
I'll get right back to it.
Let me see what it says here.
joe rogan
Don't read it, they're savages.
Well, we're a New World Order mouthpiece here at the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.
I don't know if you know that.
I became a New World Order mouthpiece once I started doing that Joe Rogan questions everything.
Oh, of course.
And I wasn't really willing to question everything.
dan carlin
I thought the eye rolls that you did were absolutely artistic in some of those scenes.
joe rogan
Thank you very much.
Well, it got to a certain point where I was like, you know what?
I can't do this anymore.
I can't keep talking to liars and pretending that we're putting together a TV show.
When I was talking to a guy who told me he saw a bulletproof wolf that popped out of a vortex of mist.
dan carlin
Somebody told you that?
joe rogan
Yeah, it's true.
By the way, he also told me he saw a UFO, sees them on a regular basis, and went and found Bigfoot the very first time he went looking for it.
I was like, oh, criminy.
Like, what am I doing with my life?
We're so far off of the reality road that I'm never going to find my way back.
dan carlin
It is hard to maintain the straight-faced thing.
joe rogan
It's not worth it.
At a certain point in time, you're like, oh, this is just a broken idea.
This is a person with a...
They're chasing down thoughts that are bad, and they don't stop chasing them down.
And they're reasonably intelligent, so they can argue the way around these things when confronted.
And Michael Shermer had a quote about that, about really smart people who believe in really dumb things because they're smart enough to argue it.
And I think that's the case with a lot of these folks.
And the flaw in the thinking is so obvious.
So when I didn't believe in chemtrails, that every fucking airplane that you see a contrail that's persistent is the government spraying us with evil chemicals, all of a sudden people are like, you're a fucking mouthpiece for the New World War.
dan carlin
I told you, I got that too, though, for questioning the Hastings thing.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, you're going to get that.
daniele bolelli
That's the problem when you have a worldview that's nuanced, when you have something that's...
dan carlin
Wonderful word, yes.
daniele bolelli
Thank you, by the way, for putting it in a way that now the public understands.
unidentified
No, no, no.
dan carlin
When I first said it, you got it.
Everybody got it.
daniele bolelli
But yeah, because the fact is, like the reviews you get or the feedback that Joe is getting about this stuff, to me is not surprising because anytime you have a position that's not stereotypical, where you're not clearly in one camp, 150%, where he's the...
Oswald did it, or no, that's total bullshit.
How can you believe that?
Or, you know, about anything, right?
When you start asking questions that poke holes in one line of thinking, but then at the same time, when people start feeling reassured that, oh, then you are on this side, then you start saying, well, kind of, but wait a second, because also there's something here that's problematic here.
And you're just keeping an open mind, right?
It doesn't mean that you can't commit to an idea.
It doesn't mean that you are...
Flip-flopping.
You're just considering the pros and cons, and sometimes it's not that black and white.
It drives people crazy.
dan carlin
And the media doesn't want you to do that either, because they used to tell me on the radio, a listener has to know where you stand on every issue within three minutes of turning you on.
And I said, that's a cartoon character.
That's not a real person.
And it's the same thing where I had just done a show recently where we were talking about...
Go ahead.
Wrap this up.
The point is that whole idea that nuance is a bad thing.
Somebody call me, I'm being called a moderate and a realist more and more today, which is coming from like tinfoil hat, crazy radical territory, and I haven't changed my views at all in 20 years.
Well, a couple things, but basically it means that society, like you said, has started to pick up on things and has moved in a direction.
I used to say to people, the NSA is spying on everyone, and they said, no, they're not.
You're crazy.
Get your tinfoil hat out.
Now I say the NSA is spying on everyone, and they go, I know.
You know, so society has just sort of moved in a different direction, and nuance, that's what society's missing today, gray areas.
joe rogan
Yeah, I've been called a conspiracy theorist with good reason for theorists for a long time about a lot of different subjects, but I've always found it really odd that the idea...
That people haven't conspired on things is so attractive to people.
People want to be able to debunk things just as willingly as other people want to find conspiracy in things.
And there's some things that are not debunkable.
There's some realities like the reality of the fucking central bank, the realities of the influence of the Bilderberg group, the realities of We're good to go.
Even if it's 50% correct.
That 50% is fucking terrifying.
And every one of those examples that they showed, if those were the only examples, and I don't think they are, we're doing something crazy.
And it's all being done because of money.
We're ruining this world forever.
Whether it's the ocean patch that's bigger than Texas that's all plastic that's floating out there and choking birds and whales.
A beached whale just died.
His stomach was filled with plastic.
I mean, what we are doing for real that we're doing bad is fucking insane.
So anybody who's not willing to look at the other possibilities, like, man, your rigid view of the world is fucking your head up.
There's some weirdness afoot.
Simulation theory, goddammit, I'm telling you.
dan carlin
Short-term gain, baby.
That whale wasn't doing any good for me.
Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
joe rogan
Case closed, I say.
unidentified
Done.
joe rogan
Case closed.
Listen, I think we could do this at the end of time, the end of today, but we're not going to.
This is it.
We're going to wrap this up.
But we could fucking do this again.
God damn it.
Dan Carlin, Daniel Bolelli.
Thank you for coming up with this idea.
This is Mr. Bolelli's idea.
dan carlin
I came up with it without telling either of you.
joe rogan
I felt both of you.
It was a mind meld.
And if anybody wants to listen to Daniel Bolelli's podcast, it is The Drunken Taoist.
It's available on everything, right?
iTunes and...
Is it on Stitcher as well?
daniele bolelli
Yeah, Stitcher.
joe rogan
Stitcher, and of course, Dan Carlin is not one, but two fucking podcasts.
Jesus Christ, as if you had enough free time to absorb them all.
One is Hardcore History, which is absolutely sensational.
The other one is DC Common Sense.
A little mediocre.
No, this guy lies!
They're both awesome.
lies and you can catch them on iTunes.
He gives away the first 50 for free just to get you hooked and then the rest of them you get by prescription.
Prescription?
I should say prescription because you can learn.
It's good for your brain.
Subscription but they are fucking worth it.
They're goddamn books.
They're audio books.
They're lessons on life and the history of this wacky ass country.
dan carlin
Thanks Oprah.
joe rogan
Get them bitches.
Go get them.
Go after it.
And I want to thank our sponsors for sponsoring this podcast.
Specifically Carbonite.
Carbonite the awesome backup program.
Use the code word JRE for a free trial.
No credit card required.
Thanks also to Stamps.com.
Use the promo code JRE and get a $110 bonus offer.
Thanks also to Onnit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN. Save 10% off any and all supplements.
Alright, we love the fuck out of you guys.
We have a great week next week, including...
I got an astronaut coming in, fuckers.
I got that guy, Commander.
What is it?
He was the dude who...
Let me find this email before we wrap this up.
Because I have to be...
unidentified
Hold on a second.
joe rogan
Oh boy, isn't this a fucking great way to end an awesome podcast?
Me searching through my fucking email like a moron.
Colonel Chris Hatfield.
Chris Hatfield was up in the space station until recently.
The Canadian astronaut that was in the news.
He'll be here on Monday.
And we also have, next week, we have Graham Hancock is coming in on Wednesday.
Should be fantastic.
And Anna Kasparian from the Young Turks.
She will be here on Tuesday.
So it's a fun-filled week, you freaks.
And I will see you guys Saturday night in Edmonton at the River Creek Casino with the lovely and talented Sam Tripoli.
And thank you.
Thank you to Dan Carlin.
Thank you to Daniele Bolelli.
It was a beautiful time had by all.
We love the fuck out of you people.
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