Bryan Callen joins Joe Rogan to recount brutal five-day hikes on Alaska’s rain-soaked Prince of Wales Island (160+ inches annual rainfall), where wool’s warmth—like First Light gear—outperformed cotton, mirroring Inuit survival tactics. They pivot to taboos, debating Islam’s apostasy punishments vs. secular laws, and the absurdity of unchecked societal revulsion, like California’s "yes means yes" law, which Joe argues stems from Puritan double standards. Callen reveals his own molestation as a child and confusion over co-star Stephen Collins’ later abuse confession, sparking debate on pedophilia’s neurological roots and whether safe havens could prevent harm. The episode underscores how extreme environments and unexamined beliefs force uncomfortable truths about human nature, ethics, and systemic hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]
October 16th, 17th, 18th, the Atlanta Improv, if it's like any of the other Improvs, it's awesome.
The Improv is the premier comedy club chain in the country.
And...
If you're nowhere near Atlanta, if you happen to be in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., I'm at the Tower Theater on Friday, October 7th in Philadelphia, and then I'm at the Warner Theater on Saturday, October 18th.
Both of those gigs...
October 18th one in Washington, D.C. The Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. Both those gigs are with Ian Edwards.
So the 17th in Philadelphia.
He's awesome.
He's a fucking legit high-level headliner.
So Philadelphia, October 17th, and then Washington, D.C., October 18th.
That's for me.
And Brian Callen is October 16th, 17th, and 18th.
And Brian Callen is back in motherfucking civilization!
unidentified
Yes, ladies and gentlemen.
Five days in the rain, sleeping on a slam, pooing outside.
Also, when you're hiking through that terrain, you'll cut through the woods and, like, just cut into this rainforest, and then you just come across this clearing with another little pond or lake.
Well, I got a little bit better at figuring out how to deal with the rain, but at one point, you know, we wore these headlamps, so they're like a mining hat sort of thing on the top of your forehead.
You have this light, and it's attached to a strap, and I turned it on.
I turned my strap on inside the tent, and It was like a sea of dew.
Like the inside of the tent.
Like everywhere you look, it was like it was raining, these microscopic drops of water.
It was like looking out into a downpour, a microscopic drop downpour.
So there's these tiny little drips everywhere.
But the inside of the tent was filled with moisture.
Yeah, because you sweat, and then you get wet, and then you get freezing cold.
We were in a constant state of when you're hiking, first of all, we're following, you weren't, but I was, Following Steve the Billy Goat Rinella, okay?
This fucker does this shit 365 days a year.
I'm lucky that I'm in good shape and lucky also that I work my legs out like crazy.
Those poor guys are like, oh, I guess you skipped leg day.
And you came in, and I was like, I knew you were too much to say anything, but I was literally like, get him a thermos full of hot water to put in his jacket, because I actually got a little protective over here.
Like, if I wanted to, like, while I was freezing, I could have just went, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, and just went running up a hill, and I would have been warm by the time I got to the top of the hill.
But the art, there is an art to learning how to, like Matting said, you climb the mountain, he'll climb the top of the mountain, t-shirt and one layer, sweats, takes that t-shirt right off and puts two layers on that are dry.
And look, we did this shit on purpose, we did it for fun, for the adventure, because we love Ronella and we love the show and all the guys on the show, but those fucking cameramen, those guys who work on that show, Mike and Dean and, well, Dodie's the producer, but Dan Doty's also a cameraman.
Those guys that work on that show, Doty's a director too now, and a producer.
I'll deal with like grizzlies, like okay, there's a grizzly, you'll be scared, but bugs are the intangible, like some huge stinging wasp that can, fuck that, or a spider that puts you in a necrosis, like the brown recluse, your skin starts to decay.
Well, Remy Warren, I don't know if they've ever tested Ranella's cardio, but Remy, who's also a big-time hunter, he hunts 300 days a year, he's got that show Solo Hunter, and he's got a few shows that he's working on right now with Dan Doty.
Fascinating guy, but his cardio is so good, it's at elite endurance athlete levels.
They tested his cardio, and his VO2 max is off the charts.
And it's because he's usually got 100 pounds of elk on his back, and he's climbing uphill, and it's 9,000 fucking feet elevation.
So he's constantly climbing, which is great, because he can give you all the tips on, like, gear and what kind of...
It makes a big goddamn difference.
I had two different types of shoes.
One, you know, because I knew that they were probably going to get soaked, and one, which worked out really good, the Schneez, and these other ones, I won't name, that sucked a fat one.
They were terrible.
They just were slippery.
They just didn't have the same kind of grip.
And, you know, if you listen to Renell, he'll give you like the lowdown.
This is the shit to wear.
Get this because of that.
Get that because of this.
But his body, he doesn't have a lot of mass.
You know, I weigh 30 pounds more than him.
So I'm shorter than him.
I weigh 30 pounds more than him.
And I'm carrying a pack and a gun and all these things I'm not used to.
And you're constantly trying to go.
If you're bigger than that, like a big power builder guy, a big power lifter, one of those 250 pound characters, that extra 50 pounds will fucking sap your heart, man.
I mean, I think, unless Kelly Starrett says that it's not...
He's probably right.
I've always felt like people who walk like that, it's just the way they're born, but I bet that could be corrected.
He thinks it's emulating.
Kelly, who created this crazy ball that you're supposed to roll on your back, this wad, I forget what this is called, workout of the day, I forget what this is called, supernova, that's what it's called.
This is the latest and greatest of those things that you roll on to massage your back.
One of Mark Delagrate's students gave me this, and I just started ordering them.
They leave them in the office, they leave them around the house.
They're amazing.
Awesome.
But anyway, Sylvia, who is not a bodybuilder, he's not a powerlifter, he's just a really strong guy, he fought Pujanowski and beat the shit out of him.
Do you think that dudes who have, like, medium-sized dicks are going to take a chance and get their dick lopped off and get a new one put on, hoping that their body's going to accept it?
I've been in enough acting classes and seen enough nude scenes, and there are some dudes, and one dude who was just a macho guy, he was a hairdresser, and he did a naked scene, and I am telling you, I am telling you, I can see just the head of it in a sea of black hair.
Well, that would be like those crazy girls who have breast implants that are just unbelievably ridiculous, like basketball-sized, and they want to get them bigger.
There's a lot of guys in, I don't know if it's just the gay community, but the special they did was two guys in the gay community who were shooting their dicks with silicone.
Have you ever, like some of those medical journals, I sat next to a dermatologist, oh no, a plastic surgeon, and she was going through her iPad and she had pictures, and I was sitting next to her, she was asking me about acting, and I was, she was showing me, and some of them, she was really, she was covering the faces of these patients with her hand so I wouldn't see their faces, because she was that professional, even on a plane.
She was trying to protect their privacy or whatever.
I saw this guy had a growth on his body, on his shoulder.
It looked like a shoulder pad of skin, of cauliflower.
And I said, how do you take that off?
And she said, you don't.
And I said, what do you mean?
She goes, it's just too full of blood vessels.
He would die.
This is part of his body, and he has to have it.
I go, so he just leaves a giant flap of cauliflower on his back and shoulders?
Well, that's one of the things that I realized when I went to Anchorage with Ari when we went fishing and then we did some shows up there at the Bear's Tooth.
The thing about Alaska is that there's this insane wilderness around them, and there's not a shit ton of people, so they develop this different kind of community.
Even though Anchorage is a real city, there's a nice bond.
You know, you get a sense of people, like, in these communities where they're...
It's not like the hustle and bustle of New York City where there's a million rats all stuck in a maze and everybody's fucking fighting for the last crumb of cheese and jammed up in traffic.
It's unfortunate, but that always happens in those goddamn shows, man.
They run out of shit to do.
But Life Below Zero, they follow five different people, or six different people, and there's always something that these people are doing, because they have to prepare for the river rising, they have to prepare for bears coming into camp, they have to prepare for all these different things.
Nature, you know, it's interesting because if you look at anything in nature, including human beings, whether it's, you know, an ant or a spider rolling something, a web, whatever it is, everybody in nature is constantly fighting nature.
It's a fight, just to survive.
If you want to survive out there, you can see why man has always kind of pitted himself against nature, just the constant struggle of trying to push yourself back.
Into a situation where you don't have to deal and contend with nature.
We've done a pretty good job of it, you know, by figuring out ways to innovate and ways to control our environment and stuff.
But if you had to scratch out a living, and look at animals.
I mean, you can watch deer who don't move very much because they have to conserve energy.
And they have to stay in one area and they eat in that one area, then they move down to lower land.
But a lot of times, guess what happens that people don't realize with deer?
Most of these people that are against hunting or that think that somehow or another that nature is supposed to be this peaceful thing, they don't understand what the reality of the life of these animals is.
Teddy Roosevelt had a great quote on people who don't understand hunting and people who have a problem with it who love nature, and he wrote that death by violence Death by cold, death by starvation, these are the normal ends of the noble and stately creatures of the wilderness.
The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not understand its utter mercilessness.
Life is hard and cruel, And these, oh, okay.
Wow, this is a fucked up speech.
And in what these sentimentalists call a state of nature.
Well, Ranella was saying also that, you know, the Native Americans that lived there were, you know, hundreds of years ago, whatever, stayed on the coast.
They ate a lot of shellfish and fished.
They didn't really go into the interior to get deer.
Even with a compound bow, a 40-yard shot is very difficult to be accurate with.
And those old bows, a lot of them just didn't have the amount of power to pull.
The Mongols had these crazy fucking bows.
But they require like 160 pounds of pull.
Like you could probably shoot at a reliable 50-60 yard distance with those if you got really good at it, but you're fucking practicing with those goddamn things every day.
And it would be frozen fat, and then the polar bear would come, eat the bone, and the bone would open, expand in the polar bear's stomach or throat, and suddenly it would basically take three days to die, and they would follow it until it died, and then take just for the coat, because that's how they kept warm.
Well, one of the ways they used to kill wolves, they would take a knife, like a razor-sharp knife, and they would embed it into the ground and put blood on the knife.
So the wolves would come along and lick the knife and cut their tongue open and bleed to death.
There's a gigantic supervolcano, I think we said in Indonesia, that they think is responsible for the reason why there is only...
You know, they believe that 75,000 years ago, this supervolcano in Indonesia exploded, and when it exploded, they think that that's why all human beings have some sort of a relationship to each other, that we all came from an original group of human beings.
74,000 years ago, Toba, it's a caldera volcano in Sumatra.
No, I don't know if they are or not, but it's in Sumatra, Indonesia.
And it's the only supervolcano in existence that can be described as Yellowstone's big sister.
74,000 years ago, Toba erupted and ejected several thousand times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980. Several thousand times more.
Some researchers think that Toba's ancient super-eruption and the global cold spell it triggered might explain a mystery in the human genome.
Our genes suggest that we all come from a few thousand people just tens of thousands of years ago instead of From a much older, bigger lineage, as fossil evidence testifies.
So, we have the fossil evidence, which shows a much older...
But the people of today all come from a few thousand people that might have been the only fucking human beings that survived this goddamn supervolcano 74,000 years ago.
Simi and G. But I think that there's debate as to whether or not humans interbred with Neanderthals and that's why or whether or not we have a common ancestor.
I don't think it's been completely figured out yet, but if Neanderthals were around, for sure somebody would fuck one.
A fleshlight is something that resembles flesh that's made out of, like, some sort of a rubber, whatever, epoxy.
I don't know what the fuck it's made out of.
Polymer.
You're putting your penis in that because it feels like flesh.
Well, how green would it be to take an actual chicken cutlet, use it to jerk off with, warm it up in a microwave so it feels like flesh, or let it sit at room temperature, whatever.
You jerk off with it, and then you cook it and eat it.
That's like you're making best use of all the materials.
That would be, probably they couldn't do anything to you.
But if you fucked a chicken, they could probably do something to you.
He used that example, then he used another example where he says, if a brother and sister in the woods use protection and have sex...
It's the same idea.
We immediately go, oh, that's wrong.
Oh.
But he says, okay, it's wrong.
It is.
That's taboo in most cultures.
But, again, they're not having kids, they had sex, and nobody's getting hurt.
They're both, you know, they go on with their lives.
What is that?
Why do we have this revulsion?
We have this built-in, we as a society, as people, universally have these very interesting through lines in culture.
One being that all cultures recognize, all cultures, no matter how primitive, recognize humorous insults.
Every culture, no matter how primitive, has a form of humorous insults for each other.
They make fun of each other.
Every culture?
Yes.
Even Japanese?
According to Steven Pinker, every culture they've ever studied, 100%, has a place for humorous insult.
So making fun, ribbing each other, right?
And you're talking about the most primitive tribes or the most aboriginal tribes and the most technologically advanced tribes all have always had some form of humorous insults.
The other is a recognition for certain things that are...
Yeah, and that's also like, we know that when people molest children, that those children who have been molested often have this very distorted idea of sexuality and sometimes become abusers themselves.
Yeah, and that this could have easily happened on these small island percent, but these are large groups of people like thousands of people practice these this new guinea semen warrior ritual is still very small in relation people need to read about this because I mean we're not going into depth about it I mean it's it's an incredible fucking bizarre thing these new guinea warriors are They take these young boys away from their mother at a very early age, and they start having sex with them.
And they do it because they say that the boy needs semen in order to grow up strong and healthy.
By ingesting semen, either through their mouth or through their butt.
We were talking about the New Guinea people when we were on our trip, about eating their dead bodies and the way they would explain this insane fucking thing that they...
Yeah, well, I had Jared Diamond on the podcast and I said, tell me about, you've seen them cannibalize.
And he said, you really want to know about it?
I said, yeah.
He said, well, you asked for it.
And he said, some tribes, when they would have warring, they'd have a war and they'd kill somebody, they would eat, they'd chop it up, cook the body.
But, there are tribes in Papua New Guinea that will take the body, like if a relative dies.
They'll take the body, they'll lay it out naked on slats of wood, so there are slats, so there are holes, and they put buckets under the slats, and they let the body just putrefy and gel to the point where it starts to drip into the buckets.
And then they take their sweet potatoes, and they dip their sweet potatoes into the human goo.
And they eat it.
Oh, and here's the other problem.
The reason a lot of...
Life expectancy for most of them in the Highlands was like 40 years old.
Most died by violent deaths from interwar and from infection and things.
But they would also, when they would do that, they would get what they called laughing disease.
While we were in camp, I watched the documentary King Corn.
I had it on my laptop.
It was one of the days where we couldn't go anywhere.
I just sat and watched this.
I was worried that my laptop was going to cook and explode because it was like in a sea of dew.
But my laptop is tough because it's been spilled on.
So many times I've spilled coffee on it, it's tough with my laptop up.
But this fucking documentary is an amazing documentary.
King Corn, if you've never seen it, if you're interested at all in what the fuck is going on with corn and how many things corn is in in our country, you gotta watch this documentary.
These guys did an amazing job.
These two guys, they got out of college, Yeah, we ingest so much of it.
You eat so much corn that your body's made out of corn.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
So these guys, they rented or leased an acre of land on this guy's property in Iowa, and they grew their own corn.
And grew it from the time it went to the ground, to adding pesticides, to taking it to market.
They went through the whole thing and then explained all the different things that corn is in.
Ethanol, which we don't really need anymore, but ethanol is used, and now there's a very strong lobbying presence in Washington that's not going to let ethanol go away.
Ethanol has a cottage industry around it.
People make money off of growing corn for fuel, and there are a thousand examples of that.
Where corn has a very strong lobby, the sugar lobby is very strong.
There's another documentary called Fed Up about when the World Health Organization came along and said only 10% of your diet should be sugar of all kinds, whether it's fruit juice or just sugar.
It's just not good for your body.
We have the science to prove it.
And the sugar industry and the corn syrup industry came along and said, well, if you want your, you know, put a lot of pressure on the Bush administration to tell them, World Health Organization, if you want your $450 million this year, you better leave that out of your report. if you want your $450 million this year, you better Because we have people believing in our school lunch programs and stuff that 25% of your diet can be simple sugars.
And, you know, I've got to watch that documentary because it's amazing how many interests, powerful interests get involved in getting you to eat corn, getting you to eat foods that, you know, in their byproducts that they make a lot of money off that may not be so good for your body.
And I'm really wondering, what would happen if hemp became legal worldwide and especially legal in the United States because we sell hemp food, we sell those hemp protein bars that I brought with us on the trip, those Onnit Hemp Force protein bars and Onnit Hemp Force powder, but we have to buy our hemp from Canada and there's a bunch of different grades of it.
We buy the highest grade stuff.
It's very expensive and one of the reasons why it's very expensive is it's hard to grow and it's growing up in Canada.
Morse was a painter, a very successful oil painter.
Very successful.
And his wife, he got a...
Before Morse code...
It's very important to remember that the only way to get a message to somebody throughout history, Alexander the Great and George Washington had to use the exact same methodology, which was horse, boat, or foot.
And they sent a message in as much time as it takes electricity to get there.
It was instantaneous.
And it was, of course, a bigger revolution than even the Internet, some would argue, because before that time, And throughout all of human history, the only way to get a message to somebody was by foot, boat, or horse.
And it just had never been done before.
It was a complete revolution.
And it started because the guy was heartbroken over not being able to say goodbye to his wife before she died.
Well, it's fascinating when you think that there was people a long time ago that if something was going on 10 miles away, there's no way of finding out.
Think about what the world would have done if the Mongols were coming into the Middle East and just killing people wholesale in Russia the way they did.
Think about what the world would be doing.
We'd be like, we've got to stop these assholes on horseback right now.
I mean if time travel becomes reality where you can't mess up the timeline like say if all timelines are completely independent say if you could go back in time and you could have like have at it and do whatever the fuck you want it would have no bearing on the future if they find out the timelines are completely independent and that if you do go back in time it has literally no effect on the current future You go back to where you were, and nothing's changed.
Even your actual actions never really took place.
They took place in an alternative timeline.
How much would you love to fucking suit up with some, like, Navy SEAL-type bulletproof armor, lock yourself down in a fucking giant tank, and go roll into the Mongol Empire?
They had electricity that was coming from, wait for it, nuclear power, these fucking idiots.
They had developed these nuclear sites where they had these generators that they could never shut off, and they kept them running, and when anything would go wrong, the power would go out, it would melt down, and they would have to clear everyone out of the area for $100,000.
But we have massive, massive amounts of solar electricity that no one's tapping into.
And we got a fucking ocean that we could just desalienate.
Why haven't they figured out how to do that?
They say, well, it takes an incredible amount of power.
What about fucking solar power?
How about use solar power, figure out an efficient way of using solar power to process the salt out of the water, and we have the most green, lush landscape ever.
And that was basically saying that the Catholic Church was a sham, or at least they didn't need all this money, and it was corrupt, and if you want the Word of God, all you need is the Bible.
That wasn't actually Martin Luther's contribution.
Martin Luther's contribution was to say he was a Jesuit priest, I believe, who said that you can be just as holy as the Pope, as a common man, if you are religious and you follow the Bible.
You don't need this huge infrastructure and hierarchy of bishops and priests.
The project, yeah, the Luther Bible, a German language Bible translation from the Hebrew and ancient Greek by Martin Luther.
Yeah, it was.
So the New Testament was first published in 1522, and the complete Bible containing the Old and New Testaments was 1534, and the project absorbed Luther's later years.
Thanks to then-recently invented printing press, the result was widely disseminated and contributed significantly to development of today's modern high German language.
And so what had happened was when Luther...
This is all from...
The reason why I know it is because of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on it.
I don't remember the exact episode.
I'll try to recall it.
But it's amazing, this episode on Martin Luther and how...
Luther had created this movement, and this movement had actually gone far and beyond his ideas and gotten completely, totally radical.
That was real heresy to say that you as a farmer, if you follow the word of God, can be even less corrupt and be in more favor with God than even the Pope.
Well, I don't remember exactly specifically what the events were, but his take on it, Dan Carlin's take on it, I think, goddammit, I'm going to find it here.
Priests also would give you, you would do things for the priest, and they would grant you, I can't remember the word for it, but you'd basically get points in favor of going to heaven.
So when that happened, the buffalo just grew out of control.
And what he talked about is how the early settlers, the early Europeans, they documented all these different things that they had seen.
All the deer, elk, all the different animals they see.
They didn't talk about buffalo.
They didn't document it.
But then, hundreds of years later, after the Native American population had dwindled, like, substantially, 90% of them had died off because of smallpox, the buffalo were out of fucking And he also talked about how the introduction of the horse changed the way they were hunting, because the horse even preceded a lot of European settlers because of theft.
And what Dan Floor is apparently saying, I'm going to try to get him on soon, is that the Native Americans, just with the horse and the firearm, were on their way to eradicating the buffalo.
Or extirpating.
Meaning, you know, extinction and local extinction.
So what had happened was when the Western people came and killed millions of buffaloes and stacked them on top of each other, and the reason why there were so many buffalo in the first place is they had gotten widely out of control, or wildly out of control, because so many Native Americans had died.
Really, I mean, we're doing a really bad job of explaining this, but apparently this guy Dan Flores has some really interesting information and a deep, deep base of knowledge on this subject and all sorts of historical points of reference that he can point to that explains why these animals had died off and what was going on.
But it's amazing when you think that this country, like, you're talking about the very earliest European settlers, 1400s, 1500s.
But I also do think that the way they were living, by taking everything from this animal, utilizing every piece of the animal, utilizing the bones, utilizing the hide...
I'm talking about our legacy in 2014. If we're not careful, our legacy may very well be that we destroyed this earth or made it a lot worse.
And that's really hard to stop with the onslaught of technology and all the growth of our population and how many resources we need and the byproducts and the wastes.
But that's a huge challenge, man.
And I don't know the answer to how you stop it, but...
is that what gives us meaning is all of us no matter most of us at least unless you're a crazy person but all of us are always working Even Dawkins and people who are sort of nihilists, people who say, well, we're a grain of sand and none of this means anything.
It's all meaningless.
If that were the case, they are still writing books to tell us how meaningless it is.
Everybody is very busy working very hard at their own expression.
And I think it's because, and we were talking about this, some people want to score social brownie points.
But for the most part, human beings work very hard to try to at least influence, for the better, The people that we love, the people we're connected to, the people that we are...
Our planet is going to no longer be able to support life.
Everything is temporary.
It's just the timeline is enormous.
It's like, does it have meaning?
Sure, it has meaning currently, but that's what we need to concern ourselves with.
What holds meaning to you and the people that you love?
Those things are important.
But the reality of life on this planet is, first of all, the reality of human beings.
You know, we're joking around about one of my ancestors fucking a monkey.
But the reality is, we are going, if human beings stay alive, okay, if civilization continues to innovate and we continue to get to this insane progression of technology that we're currently involved in.
If that keeps growing and keeps happening, we will laugh at how goofy and ape-like we were in 2014 in our search for meaning.
Well, Ray Kurzweil said, well, look at our bodies the way we look at a cell phone from the 80s.
As you're able to, like, mesh your body with machines and you become more efficient in everything from holding your breath for an hour underwater or red blood cells that keep you warm or whatever it might be.
Technology, tissue regeneration, nanotechnology, robotics, and biocompatible machinery like that is going to change our very biology.
I've seen people criticize his ideas saying those things won't be possible, but I think what they're missing is that we can replicate it without even totally understanding its processes.
The thing is we don't understand all the complex processes of utilizing proteins and this and that and how many steps and phases it takes to create a human being.
They could recreate what it is to be a human being without all those processes if they have a different mechanism.
So instead of a biological mechanism of cells and proteins and vitamins and nutrients and neurotransmitters and all the different things that grow into being a person, if it's silicon-based, if it's some sort of computer-based system that emulates all of the processes of being a human being...
And the idea of a dream in and of itself is a very fucking strange thing.
You shut your brain off every night, you close your eyes, and your mind starts a process that we don't totally understand.
We know there's a bunch of things happening, like REM sleep, rapid eye movement.
We know now that there's neurotransmitters that are moving in and out of the brain and Fucking around with your consciousness while you're out, and we know what processes are shutting down and turning off, but we all totally understand what dreaming is.
You know, I was watching this video before you got here with Richard Dawkins arguing with his Islamic people, and this guy was talking about how moral Islam is and how it's important and ethics and this and that, and Dawkins just kept hammering this dude.
He said, what is the price that you must pay if you abandon Islam?
And the guy didn't want to answer it, the guy didn't want to answer it, and then he went back to it.
Well, but I have to, just having lived there for a long time, I do have to come to the defense of the fact that That those, just like with the book of Deuteronomy and Judaism, which says exactly the same thing, by the way, most Muslims...
But the point I was making is that most Muslims, I would...
Guarantee, I promise you, don't believe that adultery, that you should stone a woman to death.
Most Muslims aren't even that religious.
And there's this misconception, and also Islam is very, very, the religion, if you look at the difference between Indonesian Muslims, for example, and Wahhabi Muslims who are in Saudi Arabia, it's vastly different because of the way they interpret the Quran.
The Quran can be interpreted, it's the most easily and widely interpreted religion as well.
It's very, very open for interpretation.
So, and that's what Islamic scholars will always tell you.
Right, but isn't that like saying that most Christians believe in evolution?
I mean, it's like, what is the religion based on if you start deviating from it and adding in a bunch of your own thoughts and then just sort of ignoring the old stuff, like Old Testament stuff.
And that's a very good point, a very good question, and an important question to ask.
I also think that there is also value in Islam to a lot of Muslims because it is a blueprint for how to live their lives and it works for them.
For example, be charitable to people.
Charity is a very big part of Islam.
You know, there are a lot of examples of that.
Modesty, charity, and things like that.
It's when people interpret these things literally, i.e.
fundamentally, or if they take it as symbology, as suggestions of how to live your life.
Just like you could be a Christian fundamentalist, and you're going to be a very different person than if you are a regular Christian who takes this symbolism.
Jamie, pull up, just Google not radical Islam, and then pull up a video.
Pull up videos from Not Radical Islam on Google.
And it's the very first video.
It's called, It's Not the Radical.
It's Islam.
I don't know what the word is.
S-H-A-Y-K-H? What's that word?
I don't know how you say it, but anyway, this guy is being interviewed, this guy is communicating with this group of people and they're all these other Islamics or other Muslims and he's talking about how people are confused about what radical Islam is and what's just actual Islam and what the law is and what you're supposed to do.
Watch this video.
unidentified
How they always attack the Muslims or Islam in particular.
They always attack us and the teachings towards this matter, for example.
While in Christianity, in Judaism, it's the same punishment that exists.
It's haram.
So while they're always, for example, focusing on Islam and not Judaism or Christianity, while, for example, also in Jerusalem, For those who've been to Jerusalem, in the bosses in Jerusalem, for example, women sit separate than men, for example.
So why, like five minutes ago or early, we were asked about why Muslims have to be sitting separate, you know, men and women, but they never ask these questions to Jews or Christians, why specifically Muslims or Islam?
Didn't we answer this question yesterday?
And you said that you need to ask the media.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
But he needs an answer.
He was not here.
But the other people were here.
The other people will suffer because of you.
The answer is very simple.
Islam is the truth.
And Christianity and Judaism are not the truth.
So that's a comment regarding this topic.
May I, Sheikh?
You are the big boss.
Yep, but you are the Sheikh.
You are the big boss.
You are the doctor.
Yes.
Masha'Allah.
Can we have the camera?
Can we have this camera focusing on all the audience, sir?
Can we have this camera focusing on all the audience?
Because every now and then, every time we have a conference, every time we invite a speaker, they always come with the same accusations.
This speaker supports death penalty for homosexuals, this speaker supports death penalty for this crime or this crime or that he is homophobic, they subjugate women, etc, etc, etc.
It's the same old stuff coming all the time.
And we always try to tell them, I always try to tell them that, look, it's not that speaker that we're inviting who has these extreme radical views, as you say.
These are general views that every Muslim actually has.
Every Muslim believes in these things.
Just because they're not telling you about it or just because they're not out there in the media doesn't mean they don't believe in them.
So I will ask you, Everyone in the room.
How many of you are normal Muslims?
You're not extremists.
You're not radical.
Just normal Sunni Muslims.
Please raise your hands.
Everybody, MashaAllah.
SubhanAllah.
Okay, take down your hands again.
How many of you agree that men and women should sit separate?
How many of you agree that the punishments described in the Quran and the Sunnah Whether it is death, whether it is stoning for adultery, whatever it is, if it is from Allah and His Messenger, that is the best punishment ever possible for humankind.
Well, I don't like those kind of videos, to be honest with you, because I happen to think that if you took a cross-section of people from all over the Muslim world, you'd find very different points of view.
You'd find people who were way more liberal than that guy.
And I think it's because people are living their lives.
They don't even have time to go to mosque, just like you see with Christians, just like you see with Jews.
There's a great deal of debate.
I think the problem with the Muslim world today is most moderate Muslims, and that's most, are just Okay, but what does that mean, though?
Just taking a, I'm not saying you are, I'm saying if you took that and you look at one video and decide that's how Muslims think in general, I think it's a mistake.
All I'm saying is that that to me, that video to me, leaves non-Muslims with the impression that all Muslims are extreme.
And what I'm saying is I don't believe that they are.
I mean, this country, a Christian country for all intents and purposes, puts a great number of people to death, and we have a lot of people on death row.
Yeah, but because it's a Christian idea, it's not based on the Christian faith, meaning you have to be a Christian to ascribe to it.
These ideas are very different.
No one's saying that God says that we should kill people for adultery, so we have to kill people for adultery in this country.
We're talking about crimes against other human beings.
That's the reason why people are killed in this country.
I mean, when you're killing someone in Texas for murder, you're not doing it because it's a crime against God.
What you're seeing in that video is a religion.
You're seeing a representation of a religion.
Are there more moderate representations of that religion?
Unquestionably, there certainly are.
But, at what point in time, what is the religion then?
I mean, if it becomes more moderate, if you don't ascribe to certain things that are in this ancient text that tell you there's very clear laws and rules that you're supposed to abide by.
If you just decide, well, we're going to morph it because it's 2014 and we think that the new evidence shows that homosexuals are actually born and it's not their fault.
It's just a part of genetics and it's part of life itself.
You're a believer who believes not in the letter of the law, but rather in the symbol, in the suggestion and the idea that we can reach to be as good as we can be, and that some laws that were written 1,400 years ago in this case, or whatever, I think that's how long it was, are outdated because science, etc., is starting to show us that a lot of those laws do not hold relevance in our everyday lives, and in fact are probably unethical or immoral.
Very important questions to ask and very important for the Muslim world to debate.
And they're going through that debate right now, just like Judaism and Christianity went through that debate.
I mean, how many people were burned at stake in the name of witchcraft in Salem and all over Europe, for that matter, because they were not, what?
Good Christians.
So I think this is a product of a religion.
I think, actually, that these debates and the questions you're asking, which are also being asked in the Muslim world, are crucial because it's how a religion...
You know, it's the process a religion must go through and contend with.
A lot of those countries, I would imagine, are also very poor, and I don't know how they're polling, but I think a lot of those countries, when you've got nothing, you turn to religion.
Absolutely.
And the way you solve that problem is with commerce.
It is a scary thought, though, that we're in this part of the world, there's a giant chunk of human beings that have these ideals.
I mean, these are ideas that are incredibly common in giant chunks of the world, millions of people.
And when you're talking about what a religion is, and there's so many moderates, well, what is this religion, then?
I mean, if there are moderates who don't believe that you should be stoned to death, who don't believe that you should be killed if you leave, who don't believe that you should be killed It should be killed with rocks if you're an adulterer.
What is that religion then?
At what point in time does it sort of dwindle off?
That statistic is very surprising to me, and I'm not sure I believe it, because Iraq was, remember, it was basically under Saddam Hussein.
You weren't really allowed to even bring a Koran to school or to a public place.
The Shi'a are a little bit more...
Religious in some ways than the Sunni, although that's a big...
Actually, with ISIS, they believe in Wahhab and Wahhabism and stuff, but...
I think that, you know, Iraq, from what I understand, was essentially, they were Ba'athists, which was, the idea was that you were secular, that all Arabs should band together and there should be sort of this belt of Arab unity, which was what Nasser was trying to do in Egypt, etc., etc., unify the Arabs under one sort of, but Saddam Hussein was very sort of, until later on, was very anti- Islam, in a lot of ways.
Go do your little squirt and we'll talk about this.
Because this is fucking really spooky stuff.
There was a show called Seventh Heaven.
And Brian was on it.
I don't remember the exact nature of the show, but it had something to do with religion.
So anyway, this guy, whose name is Stephen Collins, he played a pastor on this show, Seventh Heaven.
He confessed to his estranged wife that he was a child molester.
And it's all on tape, apparently.
She recorded...
They were having meetings with a counselor.
And she recorded him talking to this therapist...
And she was asking him all these questions about these incidents and he was very specific about the answers and she taped the therapy session.
And apparently it's legal to secretly record a conversation because In California, you're allowed to secretly record conversations to gather evidence that the other person committed a violent felony.
And molesting a child under the age of 14 is considered a violent felony.
This is amazing stuff.
He confessed to molesting an 11-year-old girl, a relative of his first wife.
That's so sick, man.
I mean, he was talking in great detail about these things.
He did it a few times to this one girl when she was 11, 12, or 13. And this guy, I mean, he was playing a pastor.
Well, what's crazy is that I have on my acting reel, there's a scene with him and I doing this scene.
It's one of the best scenes I ever did.
And it's really weird because I knew him really well.
I know him very well.
And...
Usually when you read about this, you go, well, that guy should be put in jail right away and all that stuff.
And it's an interesting thing because I've been thinking about it.
I feel like, and I want to be careful how I say this because I know him well, I feel like this is a guy who's a good guy with a sickness, like a compulsion and a sickness.
So when you say good guy, I think that...
I don't know, man.
I find myself shaking my head and scratching my head, but I know Stephen well, and I think it's possible.
Is it possible that you mean good to everybody, your fellow man, yet you have a compulsion and a sickness that you don't know what to do about?
And this article that I was reading to you about when we were on the plane and there was an article in the New York Times written about pedophilia and how a lot of pedophiles have these urges.
They don't act on them.
They live in fear.
They have no control sometimes.
And this woman was saying, if those people, because all of us want to punish somebody like that, right?
The minute we see that, I have a daughter, you have a daughter.
It's like, I don't want that guy on the street.
I don't want that guy near kids.
We understand that.
And we all go, we've got to get that guy in jail.
But there's a bigger question to say, and that is this.
If you have these feelings, you're a pedophile, and you have these feelings.
You just have these urges.
Shouldn't there be somewhere for these people to go where they can say, I'm having these feelings, I need help because I feel like I'm going to touch a child?
That seems to be creating a place for those people to go and somehow seek help I feel is more important than if they don't have anywhere to go for help and they know if they go anywhere, they're going to lose their job, they're going to lose their life and everything else.
They're not going to go anywhere and they're going to touch a kid.
So the end result here is we've got to figure out a way so less kids get molested, right?
It raises a very difficult debate and question, which is, if this is indeed a sickness, and there's a lot of evidence that maybe it is even neurological, like there's an overwhelming number of pedophiles that are left-handed, an overwhelming number of pedophiles that have trouble with spatial relationships.
But I do think that it's a very important debate to have.
If it's considered...
If it's a mental...
A form of...
A mental illness.
Should they have somewhere to go to say, hey, I have these urges, I don't want to touch a kid, please help me.
Should there be a safe haven for pedophiles to get help so that they don't touch children, or at least it lowers the chances that they will touch children?
Yeah, it's some scary shit, you know, to think that you could be a person that is, in all other ways, a normal person, but like a crackhead around crack that's compelled.
Like, you have an alcoholic and you set a glass of whiskey in front of them and you pour a glass of whiskey.
Because, first of all, I think there is a difference between anal rape and vaginal rape and being touched.
When I was a kid in camp, I was 11, I was, I guess, technically molested by my camp counselor, who was a man in his 40s, and he was touching me and fondling me.
I woke up and he had his hand in my pants, and he was playing with my piece.
I kind of see that they don't want someone to feel like they were overwhelmed by someone and they didn't know what to do and they couldn't say anything.
And so they think that by forcing people to say, yes, I want to have sex with you, that this would...
But there's also feminists want to be able to withdraw consent after the fact if they feel like they were tricked.
So they want to be able to cry rape if you manipulated and lied to them.
Like I said, I love you, make love to me, and they have sex.
Well, that's fucking lunacy, in my opinion, and I think it's a real insult to people who've been held down and raped by strangers or somebody they know in a violent manner.
I do think that there are times when somebody can be...
You know, a woman is so overwhelmed she doesn't know what to say and she gets raped.
Well, there's also times where you really wish you said no and you don't like when it's happening and you don't know what to do and you just sit there and a guy has sex with you.
He was a professor at this college where These two kids, they were both freshmen.
They were both young.
They got drunk.
They had sex.
And the girl decided that it was rape because she was drunk when they had sex.
Meanwhile, on her text messages, she's sending a text message to her friend.
She sent a text message to him.
He's saying, come over here.
She says, do you have a condom?
He says, yes.
She texts her friend, I'm about to go have sex.
She went over to his house, she had sex with him, and then afterwards the college decided that this was rape because she was intoxicated.
But he was intoxicated too.
They're both intoxicated, they're communicating back and forth with each other, but somehow or another he's responsible for his actions, he was expelled from college, she wasn't.
But the real problem is, one of the women at Occidental College that Thaddeus Russell referenced, who counseled this girl, said that he fits the profile, ready for this?
For being a rapist, because he came from a good family, because he's a valedictorian, and because he's on a sports team.
A woman having these responsibilities that she has to worry about becoming impregnated, you know, where a guy can just fucking shoot loads all fucking willy-nilly till the cows come home and not worry about a goddamn thing happening to his body.
A woman has to be concerned every time she has intercourse that she might have to raise a child, drop out of school, or have an abortion.
Those are the real cold, hard facts.
And so this ground is very uneven.
But now you add in birth control, which is like a lot of people believe one of the radical changes in society, in this culture, was in the 1950s when they invented, or 60s when they invented, when did they invent birth control?
But a massive change, massive change in the way human beings interacted, males and females.
Because all of a sudden, the women's liberation movement happened.
Women were allowed to have sex and not worry about constantly having to worry about being impregnated and having babies with these dudes.
Well, they just wanted to fuck.
They were just young people wanting to live their life and wanted to do what their hormones were telling them to do.
To enjoy it.
It's one of the great...
Fun things in life is a man and a woman having sex.
And this idea that two people having sex if they're drunk is rape, the problem with it is it's only rape for the girl.
It's not rape for the guy.
No one is ever going to argue that if a guy and a girl get together and they have a couple of drinks and the girl gets on top of the guy and has sex with them that the guy got raped.
No one is ever going to argue that.
You can't take it to court.
You'll be laughed out of court.
So that's really unfair and really uneven.
And it's a response to the really unfair and really uneven views that we have about men and women and their sexuality.
I mean, we're seeing a reaction to the sex that's been marginalized, that females have been marginalized, that they've been oppressed.
And look, rape is fucking real as shit, man.
Like, we're in Alaska, and one of the things that we talked about when we were in Alaska with people that live there is how many people get raped up there.
And that these women who live in Alaska, you're dealing with high rates of alcoholism, you're dealing with isolated populations, and you're dealing with a lot of rape.
And also the kind of sex they watch on TV because a lot of the women, girls, think they have to keep up with the boys' fantasies because they've been watching all this porn.
And boys get really bored too, apparently.
I've read studies or heard about studies where a lot of boys will...
Like when you and I were growing up just seeing a naked girl, we weren't looking at imperfections.
Boys now have access to these women that have been surgically enhanced and photoshopped and all that stuff and with makeup and their appreciation for linear lines and all that stuff is way more heightened.
They're way more picky.
And so a lot of women, they'll go with one girl and then they'll go to the next girl and there's a lot more of that apparently.
It's amazing, though, that we have all these weird hang-ups in this day and age when it comes to sex.
And I think a lot of it has to be because it's like sexual attraction is not an even thing.
I mean, have you ever been around a woman who is not sexually attractive, but she has a friend who's sexually attractive?
There's a lot of the women who are non-sexually attractive get fucking aggressive.
They don't like men.
They try to keep men away from their friend.
And they try to protect their friend under the guise.
But it's not.
They're cockblockers.
They're hardcore cockblockers because they're angry that they're not sexually attractive.
And a lot of it is just a fucking genetic roll of the dice.
You have perfect bone structure, your nose is the perfect shape, your body's perfect shape, and everybody's gravitating towards you.
But you go to the person on the left, and this person, their dad was goofy looking, their mom was goofy looking, and then they made goofy looking kids.
There's nothing that goofy looking kid can do about it.
But when you're talking about these radical feminists who are coming up with these laws or whatever, again, this is the lunatic fringe.
This is an example, if we can bring it back to the Islam debate.
I believe that these people are unreasonable.
And there are a lot of people in religion that are unreasonable.
And I think that these feminists who are pushing these laws are very similar to fundamentalists.
They are religious in their own way.
They have their own orthodoxy, their own fundamentalism, their own very strong ideas of what rape is.
And rape is anything, anything that they deem it to be in this case.
They put rape, they put somebody who didn't necessarily say they wanted to have sex on the same ground as somebody who was violently raped by some stranger in a parking lot at knife point, whatever.
And it's the same kind of...
Some people have this need to be unreasonable, to be fundamentalist in their beliefs.
And it is, in its own way, a prison of belief.
It is very similar to the kind of, in the case we were talking about with Islam, the very similar mindset as an Islamic fundamentalist.
But we were talking about dominatrixes while we were in camp.
And one of the things we were talking about was how weird it is that people, like a lot of really rich and powerful men especially, pay to get dominated by women.
Like women will tie them up and fucking rope their balls to the ground and all that shit you were talking to me about.
And that's okay.
Like, somehow or another, that's okay.
Like, that falls...
Because the guy is kind of being brutalized, like, it's okay.
Even if it's, like, sexual, it's okay.
It's, like, weird.
But if it's just straight sex, you know, if the woman puts her mouth in the guy's penis for ten minutes...
And so that, again, is what I'm saying about we live in a very religious country in many ways.
And whenever you look at Islam or you look at Christianity, I believe that the majority of people from any religion, if you really talk to them, we have a lot more in common.
Americans have a lot more in common with… I bet a lot of the average Arab on the street, if you really get them alone, a lot more in common than you think.
I mean, my God, I guarantee most of them want some saying who governs them.
Most people have doubts about their religion.
Most people don't want to see people suffer and be hurt even though their religion might say you should stone somebody, etc., etc.
Most people are reasonable.
Most people are that way.
And it is the loudest lunatic fringe that tends to sway the debate.
Look at this country.
Look at the parties, the Republican and Democratic Party.
Yeah, and it's also, if you grew up in that environment, the reality is, if that was your standard of behavior, if you were around people like those guys in that video, you know, how many of you belong to a regular mosque?
If you were around that guy, you'd be like that guy.
That's the reality is we imitate our atmosphere.
Or you would assume the position when you're in church, and then you go about your day, and life is busy, and you're like, And in that sense, I can see, I totally see this pendulum shifting back and forth, and this yes means yes.
I kind of see the origins of it, and I kind of see, like, I see the whole thing from a larger perspective, but I just feel that as human beings trying to engineer our society, that what we should really be trying to do, if it is at all possible...
Is approach each other and approach these situations with kindness and compassion and love and dignity and friendship.
The idea that we could establish friendship.
And establish that people who are in certain situations do things that they regret.
Whether it's a woman getting drunk, having sex with a guy she didn't really want to have sex with.
After the fact, when she realized, like, what have I done?
Blah, blah, blah.
But let's approach this with compassion.
Let's counsel these people to not get drunk and make poor choices.
Let's not turn the men into rapists or use that term where there are real rapists.
There are people that fucking hate women and they want to hold them down and put a knife to their neck and fuck them just so they can say they did it because they're evil cunts.
Those guys should be in jail.
But the guy who gets drunk and has sex with a girl who says, do you have a condom?
And the guy says, yes, and then texts her friend, I'm coming over.
And to say that this young 18-year-old guy is supposed to have more responsibility in that scenario than the 18-year-old girl is totally sexist, completely illogical, totally unfair, and evil.
It's evil.
That's really sexist.
I mean, that's like one of the most sexist approaches to two human beings enjoying each other's company that I can even imagine.
Because you're dealing with a completely even scenario.
A guy and a girl communicating that they want to be together.
You know, Francis Fukuyama, who's like, you know, Harold is this incredible intellectual.
He just wrote this book now.
It's coming out.
He said that if you look at history, it's been man's quest for dignity.
Like every culture, every person.
That's what people really strive for as nations, as people.
Just the idea that they want some dignity.
They want some governance over their own body.
They want fair play.
They want to be heard.
They want to not be humiliated.
All those things.
And it's kind of an interesting thing if you think about it, under one word, what human beings really, that human history has been sort of a march and a quest for dignity by peoples and by individuals.
We're trying to engineer a more idealistic society.
Slowly but surely from the dark ages on to 2014, from the beginning of writing shit down on animal skins, trying to establish a set of moral principles based on the word of God or Allah or Buddha or whoever the fuck you want.
We're trying to figure out a way to do things better.
And that's what we're still doing.
And so a law like this, the yes means yes, what are they trying to do?
They're trying to stop sexual assault on campus, which is a real issue.
There's ones that you get together and one person says something stupid and the other person says something stupider.
And you're like, oh, fuck.
We're in a fucking quagmire.
No one's getting out of this.
Yeah, personalities clash, and it doesn't always work.
But when it does work, God, it's magic.
And to try to quantify that magic with a conversation of consent, and people say, well, your romance is not as important as a woman's sexual sovereignty, and you need to establish it.
But when a man steps in and starts saying a bunch of really illogical shit, when a man starts taking radical feminist points of view, that shit becomes very offensive to me.
Because then, that's when I know...
What you're really doing is you're trying to earn favor.
You're trying to establish this really unusually moral position.
He goes that impostors, when he created his image of hell, which was a cone, inverted cone, and the very worst, the bottom of the center of the earth, are, you know, murderers and sadistic killers and impostors.
And I agree with the sentiment, and I agree with the fact that you should be protesting.
It's just my point is it's Washington that should be the recipient of the protest.
You guys should be marching on the White House and the Federal Reserve demanding your freedom back.
Look, Steve Jobs just passed away.
He made billions.
How many people here have iPhones in their pockets?
I feel like what you want is...
He's not a humanitarian.
He's a businessman.
But he enriched the lives of millions of people pursuing his own self-interest.
I am not a ramp so that you can do an ollie in front of your camera.
I actually want to have a conversation.
The what?
The 99% to 1% meme was just one meme out of many memes.
What's a meme?
I'm so sorry.
A popular turn of phrase.
Okay.
So the catchphrase, 99%.
This is not 99% park.
It's Liberty Plaza.
And the 99% catchphrase is not...
Definitive of everyone here.
It makes sense why a popularity meme would be popular.
I understand you have to make money, but there's got to be regulations.
Because I believe in democracy, but I also believe in regulations.
The market has to grow at a sensible rate, right?
It cannot grow too fast.
If the market grows too fast, it will crash.
See, the regulation we want is the market.
That's the regulation that works.
The same thing is with labor.
A corporation just can't take advantage of its workers and pay them as little as it wants because businesses compete with one another to buy labor.
Here we go.
What does slavery have to do with what we're talking about?
We're saying there is a role for government in our society, and corporations cannot do everything.
But slavery was wrong to begin with, so let's not even...
It was government that created it.
Government is there to protect property, life, liberty, and that's it.
You mentioned Walmart, so what are you afraid that Walmart's going to do to you?
What am I afraid they're going to do to me?
What is Walmart doing?
You should go and ask the employees that are working in sweatshop-type conditions that don't get enough hours, that don't have healthcare.
Wait a minute.
Then why don't they quit?
I mean, Walmart doesn't hold a gun to their head.
If they can get a better job...
So why did the rape victim get raped?
What was she doing out late at night?
Do you want to go back to 1920, 1930?
What is this golden year that Republicans want to go back to?
What year?
The 60s?
The 70s?
What year?
I don't want to go back to that technology, but I want to go back to that level of freedom.
I want...
There was more freedom for who?
Some women couldn't vote at some point.
African-Americans and others had to ride in the back of the bus.
You want to go back there.
We don't want to go back there.
I'm telling you, there's more economic freedom.
There was more economic freedom, but we're not social freedom and social justice.
There's been memorials for Steve Jobs all over the place, at every Apple store.
There's reporters that are all around the world that never asked one single question to Steve Jobs when he was alive.
Why are you manufacturing your iPhone in China and you don't have any of your manufacturing here in the United States?
Do you think that's fair to the American people?
Wait, the American people don't own those jobs.
Steve Jobs has a right to manufacture where he wants.
He does have a right to do it.
And the problem is we have made it too expensive for him to manufacture here.
Oh, we did.
Because the American workers want too much.
Because we want too much healthcare?
Oh, it's the government's fault.
Remember, the reason that employers want to lower wages is because their customers want low prices.
Everybody in this park wants low prices.
You can't have low prices.
No, we don't!
No, we don't!
Do you believe that the federal government has a right to exist in the government's lives of American people?
It has a right to exist, but not in the form it exists today.
It's operating outside the Constitution.
Do you believe the EPA should be disbanded?
I think it does a lot more harm than good.
Do you believe the FDA should be disbanded?
Yeah, I'd like to get rid of it.
What about the FDA? Uh-huh.
The Board of Education?
What about the Board of Education?
I want to get rid of the entire Federal Department of Education.
Yes, it is wasting our money.
And it is running up the cost of education.
Sir, what I've learned...
Let me finish.
What I've learned over the years is to never argue with a fool.
And you, my friend, are a fool.
Okay, so I'm foolish, right?
So I just stumbled into all my wealth.
I run all these businesses.
How could you disband the EPA and the FDA and the Board of Education?
Because it's not the Board of Education.
You're an idiot.
You're talking about the Department of Education.
No, no, no.
It's emotional arguments.
30% of the homeless people in America are veterans, so when everybody says we support the troops, that's a lie.
You support the troops when they're out there getting killed or shot, but when they come home and they're homeless and they got no jobs, you don't support the troops.
I didn't even support a lot of these wars that put those troops over there in the first place.
This guy's great though, this guy's Schiff.
That is the problem!
You'll be like, hey, can I be Secretary of the Treasury?
If they had no power, there'd be no lobbying.
There'd be nothing to give out.
We don't want the government to be able to pick winners and losers, to say, you get a bailout and you don't.
Well, not only that, you can't have a conversation like this where one guy has a microphone and he's going back and forth, handing it to you and you, and you do it in a video.
To really establish what is wrong with the Department of Education, you have to have a long, nuanced conversation about what they're doing, how they're funded, what the problem is, how they subsidize college tuition so that it costs so much more for you to actually go to college, the reason why it's so goddamn expensive, and it would be different if this didn't exist.
But yes, it's why there are some very important and very challenging problems in the world.
And there are people out there that are coming up with good answers.
But unfortunately, and one of the things that's beautiful about a podcast, what I try to do with mine and what you certainly do with yours, is that a lot of really good ideas are stuck in books.
And I think that technology, podcasting, if it's done responsibly in a lot of other venues, is how you get those ideas out of those books.
Most of us don't have that much time to read, man.
We don't.
And I sympathize with that.
I get it.
It's really hard to formulate an educated opinion on shit.
You know, like how many opinions that we'd have when we started doing podcasting and then I'd get corrected on this podcast, my podcast, I'd come up with a point of view and say something and people would be like, by the way, you're a little bit wrong on this.
And I'd go, I've been holding that belief for 10 fucking years.
And when you start to really investigate and try to come up with a really sound, strong, political philosophy, business philosophy, life philosophy, it takes a lot of fucking work and trial and error.
Yeah, it's also when people are having conversations, a lot of times they're not just expressing each other and exchanging information or expressing themselves and exchanging information.
Like a person who doesn't know how to fight who gets in fights.
I mean, have you ever seen a person who doesn't know how to fight?
We all have.
I've talked about it on this podcast.
This terrifying scenario that happened one night in front of the comedy store where I saw this guy get in a fight with this guy who didn't have any fucking skill at all.
He didn't know what to do.
He didn't know how to handle panic.
He had eyes closed and he was flailing and a bus pulled in front of him.
I couldn't see what happened because they were fighting on one side of the street and the bus blocked my vision.
And then when the bus passed, he was out cold on the concrete.
So obviously somebody punched him, but the guy didn't know how to fight, but yet he was still fighting.
And some people will get in arguments about some shit they don't have any information about.
But they have an opinion and an attitude that is based on something that happened to them, an emotional thing.
We all have some of that in us.
I certainly do, and I've worked very hard to try to...
Let go of that shit when I'm in an argument and sometimes I have to check myself and go, man, I'm arguing to be right here because this person's attacking something else inside of me I'm not even aware of or whatever.
And you see it in relationships.
I got to check myself in my relationship sometimes.
We'll just start having an argument and I'm just pissed off and I want to have an argument because I feel like I want to be right about this subject.
And when I take a step back, a lot of times it's really hard to do, but it's really important sometimes you go, you know what?
Yeah, and sometimes someone will say something crazy to you, and instead of saying, wait a minute, you'll say something crazy back, and the next thing you know it's a fucking avalanche of crazy.
Both of you are swinging, swinging into the air, and emotional, and fucking can't breathe good.
It's also really important to identify what you mean by X. What do you mean by God?
What do you mean by religion?
What do you mean by, first, before we start, let's know what we agree on.
The argument now that I have with politics is this.
I don't talk about Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative.
I like the question of, we know that you need some governance.
Of course you need some governance in this society.
The debate really revolves around to what percent?
How much do you want government running your lives?
There's an answer, and some people want more.
There's just an answer.
To what degree, in what aspect?
It's a complicated question, but start the debate and the discussion that way, and you'll get it further along.
I like having my mind changed.
I like having my mind changed.
I like listening.
You were talking the other day, and you were explaining where technology was going, and I had a lot of opinions because I'd been reading the same shit.
I was about to jump in with a bunch of my points as well, but then I was like, wait, let me just listen to this.
And I learned some shit that I didn't know before.
A little bit, like to really listen and key into what somebody's saying and look for something new and look for something that you might not know instead of trying to add to the conversation.
Hey, by the way, guys, this is something I know as well.
We all do that.
We fucking do that all the time.
Everybody does that.
Oh, Joe's saying this?
Let me add this to it.
Let me put a cherry on that sundae for you guys to show you that I'm also knowledgeable and smart, you know?
Instead of just keying in, maybe not saying anything.
You know what I like?
You know I like what answer I like from people a lot of times?
I've had that happen to me where people will say something and you go, you're really smart at a lot of stuff and you just stepped into a different arena.
You're in the middle of the ocean with no boat right now.
You want to see something amazing, though, that is real, some real martial arts shit that is kind of like magic?
Yes.
Jamie, there's a video on my Twitter feed that's from today, and it's from a long time ago, from I think it was the 1950s, this fucking old man doing judo with his top students.
And this old dude is like, I don't know how old he is at the time, but he's fucking old.
And these are like great judokas that are in mixed martial arts today.
You know, and there's a lot of, like, their explosion, their ability to close the distance and execute techniques that can be attributed to this power and athleticism.
But, like a lot of these people that maybe did some questionable things that made them get larger, maybe something, they lose weight, and then they become smaller, and, you know, maybe it'd be easier for now to drop that weight.
I mean, I don't know.
But it's certainly a very fucking compelling matchup, because Cyborg...
But I think that he's probably the biggest example of a high-level guy that's fought.
Obviously, Machida went on to be the light heavyweight champion and is a contender right now in the middleweight division, and BJ just fought as a featherweight.
He decided that that was a stance that he was going to adopt because in keeping his legs wide and pushing off with his legs that it would require too much energy.
He's always had a problem with stamina.
That's been his problem.
He was ferocious in the first round of the second fight with Matt Hughes or the third fight?
Second fight?
Whatever fight he lost.
Second fight.
Third fight, he knocked Matt Hughes out.
He was ferocious in the first round and then ran out of gas in the second.
Matt Hughes started beating him down in the second round.
And it was because Matt Hughes was in better shape.
BJ, at his best, was when he was training with the Marinovichs.
Because Marinovichs were fucking animals when it came to strength and conditioning.
And they got him in unbelievable shape.
He was just shredded.
He had abs.
He's fighting at 155 pounds.
He was strong.
And when he beat Joe Stevenson, when he beat Diego Sanchez at 155 pounds, he was the best.
He was at his best.
And he was just in incredible shape.
He was a monster.
But it was conditioning.
Just, you know, lives a good life.
He lives in Hawaii.
He's got plenty of money.
He's a hero.
He goes to Hawaii everywhere.
He goes, BJ! BJ! He's awesome.
They love him.
It's very difficult for a guy that lives in silk sheets to get up and go to war every day.
That's the reality of life.
It's hard.
And a really loved guy who also is supremely physically talented.
People don't know that BJ, you know, that nickname, the prodigy, it came because he won the world championships after three years of training in jiu-jitsu.
Well, I don't want to say he was a natural fighter, but that was something that he had a lot of passion for and he was very focused about it and it came pretty quickly to him.
But there's a lot of other guys that have slowly dropped weight.
McVitor fought as heavy as 240 at one point in his career.
When he fought Randy Couture, I think he was like 240-something.
Yeah, his neck was so ridiculous.
And now he's much thinner now, man.
Now that he's off the TRT, he's really looking thin.
Well, we were watching Rory McDonald knocked out Tarek Safedine this week, and we were watching the highlights of it.
My friend Robin Black, who also has been on the podcast, did a breakdown of it.
And he did an awesome breakdown of it and really highlighted some of the things that Rory did really well in that fight and things that Safedine did to try to throw Rory off that didn't work.
But Rory McDonald is another one at 170 that's fucking terrifying.
And interesting, interesting guy, man.
You know, was training with GSP for a long time, and then as they got further along in their career, it started getting the talk about, like, these guys might eventually fight.
Now that GSP's retired, and he's, like, one of the number one contenders now.
And Dan Hardy was talking about, you know, Dan had a heart condition.
Not a real heart condition.
It's a very controversial situation where he's very fit and healthy, but he has like an extra heartbeat, something wolf condition.
I forget what it's called.
But he was talking about how when he was fighting, it was a lot of wrestlers that were dominating the 170-pound division, and now there's a lot of kickboxers.
Well, it's very smart to avoid strikes to the head, especially if you know that a guy is throwing head punches.
And a lot of these guys, they're not throwing the type of really long-form combinations that you'll see high-level Muay Thai or high-level Dutch kickboxers throw.
They're throwing one or two techniques.
And a lot of it's because you're worried about takedowns.
What we're seeing is just an evolution of the game.
We're seeing the sport evolve.
I love it.
I mean, I'm a huge fan, but it concerns me.
Brain damage is a very, very real thing, and there's no turning back.
I'm at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia October 17th with Ian Edwards and I'm at the Warner Theater October 18th with Ian Edwards in Washington, D.C. That's it.
Lots of podcasts this week.
I got Honey Honey Anthony Cumia is going to be here, and Keith Weber as well, the guy from the Kettlebell Cardio Workout that I talk about so much that I love.
He'll be here.
So, until then, enjoy your lives, my friends, and it's great to be back at Civilization.