Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dive into human resilience, comparing Arctic survival—where indigenous groups rely on seal, walrus, and muskox—to the Fertile Crescent’s ideal conditions for early development. They explore how animals like goats and horses historically revealed both benefits (caffeine, cordyceps) and dangers (poisonous mushrooms, oleander), then contrast raw skill mastery—from Rogan’s archery to Callen’s comedy—with modern ideological battles over gender pronouns and wolf hunting, exposing rural-urban divides. Debating mental illness, they weigh forced treatment for psychosis against environmental cures like "Rat Disneyland," while Rogan highlights psychedelics’ potential in addiction therapy, linking creativity to altered states. Ultimately, the discussion frames survival, curiosity, and adaptability as timeless human drives, overshadowed by today’s polarized distractions. [Automatically generated summary]
And I think, because they've done some studies on what happens when you're in those situations.
you create anxiety actually creates oxytocin and Oxytocin is a bonding chemical So when you're going through the shit when it's raining and you're cold and you're like fuck man This is gonna suck we gotta go find a deer It's actually a bonding experience and what happens is when you think back on it like What are you gonna do when you're sitting there freezing in the rain?
Well, you know, what else you gonna do and I think well with you and I Yeah, but you and I have a good attitude for that stuff We can both just accept the fact that we're in a bad environment.
There's some people that just can't accept it and they freak out.
If he left and started some global powerhouse of a company like Tesla Motors or something like that, and went on to make a billion dollars in the next two years, I would say, yeah, that guy probably did the right thing.
Mike Swick used to work for some government agency.
I forget what it was.
I want to say Secret Service.
But they were in Moscow, and they discovered these listening devices that the Russians had placed in their buildings.
And they were so sophisticated that they were powered by the movement of the building.
Because every building has subtle movement.
Like, if you've ever been in a building that is in an earthquake, it's a very weird feeling, because you feel the building, like, rocking back and forth, and it's disconcerting, you know?
It's like, whoa, this thing fucking moves, man.
But there's a constant moving and swaying with the wind, and it's very minute.
And sometimes you can feel it, like it's a heavy storm, but most of the time you can't.
Well, the Russians had figured out...
How to make some piece of sound equipment power by that.
So it had no external power source.
It was completely powered by the movement of the building.
Well, I don't know the specifics, but I know that it was a very sophisticated device that was powered by the movement of the building.
I think a lot of those are voice-activated.
I used to have a voice-activated tape recorder.
At one point, I was trying to hook it up to the tank, my isolation tank, so that when I'm in the tank and I have a great idea, I could just say it and record it, but I never, I just didn't use it.
Because the ideas were just coming at you.
Like, when you're in the tank, the ideas are just coming at you like wet fish.
But this guy, Swick, when Swick was telling me these guys, whoever had set this equipment up in there, they were using sophisticated equipment that the U.S. government didn't even know existed.
You're always going to have problems whenever there's a country where people don't have the motivation to succeed and achieve because they don't get financially rewarded or they're constrained by that sort of...
They have this sort of imperialistic...
Russian sort of economy.
It's a very different way of achieving success.
You achieve success if you get in with the right group of people and you have to play the right politics.
When you have a government like that, when you don't have property rights, when you don't have due process, when you don't have objective law, what happens is, who in the world is going to work really hard to create a company when the guy with the biggest guns can come along and take it?
Again, I'd love to sit Putin down and ask him how he thinks that strategy makes any sense.
Russia's biggest problem is that their history has either given rise to czars, kings, or a different kind of czar, which is the communist dictator.
You know, the Russians are...
A very industrious people and, you know, you wonder what they would be capable of doing if they lived in a society where the incentive structure rewarded you for your work and your ingenuity.
Unfortunately, they have always lived under some kind of an autocracy, some kind of oligarchy.
It's never been different.
I mean, Putin is essentially a czar, and he has his small group of people around him.
So I believe that it has nothing to do with the United States.
In fact, it has everything to do with the philosophy.
I don't know the intricacies of that, but I do know that one of the reasons it went from $100 to $40 a barrel was fracking in this country where we had our own access to massive oil shales.
You know, fracking, though, seems like, no matter what anybody says, I mean, there's going to be debate.
Anytime there's anything controversial, anytime that there's any sort of environmental risk with something like that, it's hard to separate the facts from the noise.
There's some undeniable aspects to any kind of energy technology, because the fact of the matter is civilization and feeding the civilization and energy source is going to be at this point polluting.
And I think the way out of it is, you know, a lot of people favor legislation, and I think they might be a place for legislation, of course.
But I think what's really going to get us out of that kind of an issue is technology, is just create more incentives.
I don't care if it's through the government or, you know, government grants or private enterprise, create incentives for smart people to come up with clean technology.
Yeah, it's not like there's going to be some sort of an instant solution for the pollution of the atmosphere or the ocean, but it seems like with people, people are really fucking smart.
There's these giant leaps that they make every now and then, and a lot of them are due to pressure.
There's some real pressure where people are worried about the environment.
It's like some gigantic fucking skimmer that's going to go over the Pacific garbage patch, and it sucks the plastic out, and I think it puts it to use.
See, the thing about plastic is, if you could actually get it out of the ocean, it's valuable.
Well, the problem with it is the dead zones, the ecological dead zones in the bottom of the ocean, the trawlers, where they drag for shellfish and stuff.
They drag these giant sort of claws that collect everything the size of semis.
And they just do that.
And there are areas in the Atlantic that are massive dead zones.
There's some crazy amount, like areas the size of Western Europe that are literally dead zones.
Dude, there was a New York Times article that said that he killed so many people, something around 10% of the world's population died while he was alive directly because of his decisions.
And these people are out there and they hunt for this thing called a muskox, which is this enormous beast of an animal, which I may go hunting in Greenland With Cam Haynes, we might do an archery muskox hunt, because apparently you can hunt them in the dry green.
You don't have to be an asshole and be out there in the middle of the fucking snow.
Sam Sheridan was telling me that they went to rescue them.
I think they were hunting muskox, but they went to rescue these guys who had been out on a hunt, and they were already, they were so cold, they were already dying of hypothermia, and when they got there, they were taking all their clothes off.
Because what happens, you know, the blood rushes to your, yeah, you think you're burning.
Yeah, although the Fertile Crescent was even where you want to be, like Iraq, where numbers started, because you had grasses that grew like barley and millet and wheat, and it was easy, just the way, and you could domesticate animals.
The myth I've heard, and tell me if this is right, the myth I heard was that Ethiopian goat farmers were watching their goats eat these berries, and they would get a pep in their step and have more energy when they were done eating the berries.
Yeah, and based on their other types of cooking, the way you would, you know, cook something, they said, let's try to roast these beans and see what happens.
I think there were several people that died in a nursing home because this old guy or old gal, I forget which one it was, went out in search of mushrooms and brought back some mushrooms and cooked it for everyone in the nursing home.
The guys who didn't get those girls in high school and college and then what happens is they get famous and they're 38 and 40 and they're kind of dorky.
It's this incredibly technologically sophisticated rocket ship that Nissan's built.
It's almost like a...
Proof-of-concept vehicle like they almost like them.
They lose money on it.
It's a flagship vehicle, and it's so fucking unbelievably Ridiculously competent and fast that car right there goes zero to 60 in less than three seconds.
It's not like well, it's it's Everything's functional that car as it's not about like I think it looks cool because it looks like a spaceship.
Yeah But everything about it is about aerodynamics and about keeping the body pinned to the ground.
It's heavy.
It's about 3,900 pounds.
So it's like 900 pounds more than my car is.
And it's four-wheel drive, which race car drivers traditionally like a rear-wheel drive car because they like the feel that it's pushing.
Instead of pulling, they like the control that you get because you can kind of steer with the throttle.
If you know, as you're going into a turn...
There's a thing called oversteer, right?
So if you're going into a turn, and as you're going into a turn, you can hit the gas, and your SN will kick out, and it'll change the angle of your entry into the turn.
You've got to know how to do it just right.
You have to have this feel.
It's more fun than anything, because really the correct line, if you're on a race course, is to have no ass end kick out.
You want everything to be glued.
Every time your ass end kicks out, if you're racing, you're going to lose seconds.
But for fun, guys who love those kind of 9-11, like a 1970 9-11, one of the things they like about it is the ass end will kick out.
Chris Harris is a very famous automotive journalist from the UK, and he takes it to the next level.
He likes to power slide around corners.
It's amazing.
Well, watching him do it, he's an artist at it, and he's going around corners in these cars.
Every car he reviews, he takes and he power slides everywhere.
It's just power sliding these fucking things.
Google Chris Harris GT3 RS, 2016 GT3 RS. He's literally going sideways around corners with a 500 horsepower, $200,000 Porsche that they let him borrow.
I mean, obviously it costs money for the batteries and the setup and the maintenance and all that jazz, but at the end of the day, Once the money is spent on setting it up and the operating costs are fairly minimal in comparison to what it would cost to get electricity off the grid, you can be totally off the grid if you choose to be.
And you can also power your fucking car with all this shit.
And if the grid goes down, you can keep your power.
What's interesting is when you put solar panels in your house, which I did, just try getting, it'll take you, the electric company, it's been three months now and they still haven't converted us.
Like, as far as conspiracy is concerned, I believe more in ignorance.
So, you know, government, as my buddy who works, I just was at his wedding, and he said, he goes, if you think the government's really efficient, and he's talking about intelligence or any of that stuff, he goes, I've been in the inner circle.
He said, it's not.
You just have to work for the government to know.
Yes, we do some cool stuff, but this, a lot of it's just not as organized.
I'm not like Dan Carlin, but I try to, you know, read my history.
I was thinking about this.
You know, this new Harvard study just came out, and it said that 170,000 veterans from our recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, starting in 2003, we have 170,000 people that are 70% or more disabled.
That is probably going to cost over their lifetime in the American economy $6 trillion to care for those people, which according to the study, you could purse out to be $75,000 of an American family.
Forget the cost.
Forget the cost.
Think about 170,000 people that are 70% or more disabled.
These are veterans.
These are people that answered the call and they're all fucked up.
I was thinking about how if the more you read about this war and how we got into it, a lot of it was because we didn't know the history of that country.
And a lot of it was because we didn't know the history of the entire region.
And I would make that argument.
And my point is that it's really easy for all of us as voters It's to go about life without doing the right investigation.
So when you vote for somebody and you vote for a policy, most of us vote along party lines because our team is over here or because we're not a liberal or we're not a conservative, we're not a Republican, we're not a Democrat.
Instead of looking at the world as, wait a minute, we're going to go into Iraq?
Hmm.
That's an interesting thing, man.
How much do we know about the history?
How much do we know about how that country is structured?
And how much do we know about what's going to happen when we destabilize that regime?
And when most of Congress didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia, which is so important in Middle Eastern politics, that schism.
And we're voting in these policies, and I think that we could have avoided some major tragedy.
I don't know.
I'm just saying that the more you know, the less likely you are to make these major fucking mistakes.
His children, there is a story about him and his children from, I forget what magazine it was, maybe like Esquire or something like that from back in the day, GQ, something.
But it was a terrifying story of all the atrocities that his sons have committed, including taking women on their wedding day as they were being married, kidnapping them, raping them, and then feeding them to dogs.
Uday Hussein used to do all kinds of sadistic things, but think about the untold misery that that entire region now over the past 15 years, or actually 13 years, has dealt with.
Think about how many children and how many people, think about the Yazidi women sold off into slavery by these ISIL assholes and the spawning of ISIL. I think they need to fucking come up with a standardized name.
He's a junkie when he was younger, like almost overdosed and died, smoked cigarettes until he had a kid, had the kid said, you know what, I gotta quit smoking cigarettes.
At this wedding, I had some salmon and some steak.
And salmon and steak is pretty standard.
And I've been alive a long time.
And I ate that salmon and that steak with a certain sauce on it.
And I stopped.
I stopped.
And I went, alright, hold on.
Something is going on here.
And I'm having a little issue because I've never had salmon like this.
And for me to say I've never had sandwich I've eaten one million times or I've never had steak that tastes like this, that's a big fucking deal, especially because I really pay attention.
And I ran down there and I saw this cook with a ponytail, kind of a skinny dude, and I was like, what are you doing?
And I said, and correct me if I'm wrong, sir, but you cut small pieces here, and you are taking into consideration the relationship between the meat and And your crazy delicious yam cake.
Yeah.
And this sauce that looks like it was made in heaven.
I've never seen green that you kind of spill just so.
I did a show at the Moody Theater, which is insane.
Probably one of the best shows of my life.
It was amazing.
It's crazy.
Goddamn, I love Austin, Texas.
So do I. Fuck, I love that place.
But we did this place, this Moody Theater, and before the theater, we worked out at the Honor Gym and then went to the Zero Gravity Float Spa that they have there.
This guy I work out with, Lou Parada, who is an old school bodybuilder, strong man.
He's 60, almost 59. How's he look?
He looks fantastic.
He's originally from North Italy, so he's got that Austrian, like he's just got huge hands and a big kind of strong jaw.
Still works out like Oh, yeah, he's but but when you say crazy like he's the guy I'll take you for 20 minutes and Work you out and target your muscles in a certain way and you're like this isn't doing I just feel like I could do more and then the next day your source shit like he just he's a scientist He knows he's got 160 clients and it's because he just knows what the hell he's doing and you're in and out in 20 25 minutes Well, if you could still look good in your 60s.
There's a way to stretch, I think, and I do agree.
I think it depends on the kind of movement you're doing and stuff.
But they say the first thing you want to do is warm the muscle up, but also overstretching.
Like a lot of yoga people develop arthritic conditions because the tendons are genetically, you know, you either have longer tendons or shorter tendons.
So in other words, like a hinge of a door.
Some people can only open their door this much, other people can only open their door this much.
You have very flexible, you're really flexible.
And so when people overstretch those tendons, what happens is if the tendon is shorter and you're trying to make it longer, what will happen is the joint will start to compromise and you'll pull more of the joint apart.
Therefore, you get water or air into that joint, which apparently is what creates an arthritic condition.
So when you're constantly expanding and not doing some contractual work, that's where you run the joint.
When you're cold and you're stretching, and then you go and play soccer, a lot of girls, especially, were tearing their ACL. And then when they had them start changing the way they trained, more weightlifting, more warming the muscle up beforehand, that's how they were avoiding more of those ACL tears.
Yeah, because he figured out a way to take nitrogen out of the air, create ammonia.
This is from Radiolab.
And that ammonia is what they think that half the population of the world today has Fritz Haber nitrogen in their bloodstream.
The reason we can feed 7 billion people and soon 10 billion is primarily because the process Fritz Haber invented, which is getting nitrogen out of the air and into the soil, which is how you create fertilizer.
Problem is, it's also how you create explosives and poison gas.
So while he was being awarded a Nobel Prize of Science for creating the Haber Method, he was also being wanted for war crimes by the United States by gassing people.
And the way they died, apparently, if you listen to the Radiolab podcast, they drowned in their own phlegm.
Well, how about what they do, how they end it, which is he created an insecticide called Zyklon A, which is an insecticide, and the reason it has Zyklon A is because it has a certain smell to it.
You put a scent in it so you know when it's in the air to avoid that area, the way they do with gasoline.
Gasoline doesn't have that scent.
They put that scent in there.
That's an artificial scent, so you know if there's a gas leak.
And the same as Zyklon A. And when the Nazis were figuring out what to do with their quote-unquote Jewish problem, and they talked about the final solution, they said, let's use this Zyklon A and take the scent out.
It'll be Zyklon B. And the irony is Fritz Haber, who was a secular Jew, who was a patriot, a German patriot, who figured out a way to feed half the world, His technology ended up killing his extended family and his friends.
It's going to be a real problem when people do do it, because there's going to be no regular people left.
I think we're looking at life now as, if you go back to the early forms of life that were on this planet, just single-celled organisms turned into multi-celled organisms.
They evolved from random mutations and natural selection, all the different various factors that cause a person to come out of the You know, primordial slime that we originated from.
If you look at what we are now, we look at all that, this is like how it progresses, you know?
This is how a dinosaur turns into a bird, and this is, oh, we can see these are the early primates.
So when we're able to control exactly how we look and what we develop into and what we are resistant to, it's kind of like what we're doing with crops.
And I think, I also, I feel like we are going to be able to take this machine, which is what we are, which is kind of a fascinating and incredibly complex machine, but technology is going to render this machine...
Kind of obsolete, I feel like.
I feel like ultimately we're gonna trade in this machine for something that works a lot more efficiently and lives longer and all that stuff.
I think if we create artificial life, we create some sort of an artificial thing that somehow or another profits on its staying alive.
Like, there's a reason why we want to stay alive.
We want to procreate, we want to keep the human race alive, and we want to react to all of our instincts, all of our natural instincts and the natural reward systems that have been put in place over the eons to make sure that we keep breeding and keep staying alive.
That's where you reach.
That's where your ego comes from.
That's where lust comes from and greed and jealousy.
All these things are motivating factors for you to improve on your condition.
Because they want to fuck that bitch and shoot some loads into her and make a baby with her.
Gotta make babies!
You gotta keep going!
I think that's a really shitty design and I think it ultimately its main goal is to for it for the biological entity to create a more sophisticated and Much more efficient entity and that's what it's going to do There's a this is the caterpillar and this caterpillar is going to become some indescribable butterfly some butterfly that can manipulate its environment like never before some butterfly that literally creates worlds and If you extrapolate that,
and if you then say, look, all my biological needs are taken care of, so I don't have to worry about disease, I don't have to worry about food, and I'm optimal.
Am I optimal?
My machine can adapt, and it probably won't die.
You're still left with something that's very interesting to me, which is now Now if you've taken out the equation, that sort of rudimentary need to procreate, that rudimentary need to replicate yourself, that rudimentary need to sort of, or rudimentary might be the wrong word, but the need to be immortal, to keep your genes through whatever it is going.
But then there's another side, which is play you could define as that what you do for the sake of doing, right?
And that's probably when you're most yourself.
So if play is the case, then it seems like we were just talking about this, like people say, I don't know what to do with my life.
And I always say to younger people, I'm like, look, man, I don't know what to do with your life either, but I do know that it's really fun to get good at a language.
Like watching you play pool, that's a language.
That's something you've come from.
Very close to being really, really good at.
And you have a deep understanding of it.
You gain a deep understanding, this great pleasure in being fluent in a language like, say, pool, or jujitsu, or boxing, or even another language, or in an instrument like guitar.
I think you develop an understanding, and sometimes that you can't necessarily put into words.
I think, well, I don't have the answer, but I think it may lie in the area of understanding and coming closer to something maybe people call consciousness.
Coming closer to something that's bigger than yourself.
Communion with something that is without measure, but that you know is there.
Don't you think, though, also, that if you don't look at it like in some sort of spiritual way, but look at in terms of just biology and natural reward systems that are put into place by success, success leading to procreation, people that are really good at things, you get good at things that are difficult to solve, like solving puzzles is integral to survival.
It's integral to innovation, leads to more efficiency, more efficiency leads to more food, more food leads to people staying alive.
The better you get at something, the more you're rewarded with those positive feelings, those natural reward systems that are put in place to make sure that people figure out their fucking part on this world, figure out their way through this life, until they can invent artificial life.
Get them hooked on material possessions.
Get them hooked on this idea of getting the newest, greatest, latest shit.
Get them hooked on technology.
You need a watch that you can swipe and you need all these different new crazy things.
And the more these things get fueled, the more the technology grows.
The more the technology grows, the more the inevitability of an artificial life form exists.
When you talk about technology, most of us are talking about a tool you can use for the here and now.
And that technology allows you to speak to people more clearly and faster and get places faster and all that stuff.
They're all tools.
But then there's another side to fucking reality that I'm fascinated with.
And I don't know why it's there.
But there's something that goes beyond experience.
There's a reality that is beyond experience.
And you know what I mean by that?
I'll tell you.
The number infinity...
is not something we'll ever see, but it's something we imagine and something we use in mathematics.
Negative numbers, negative integers and things, are mathematical constructs that you can't actually see and don't have material measurement necessarily, but they are theoretical and we use them and benefit from it.
Here's another great example.
The mathematician in 1860 Who spends his whole life thinking of some weird mathematical equation.
It's got no bearing on the material world whatsoever.
Until 150 years later.
And now we're using it to measure the difference between fucking, you know, the crater on Mars and how it relates to things like that.
And I just think that sometimes whatever human beings have an imagination, it's put there.
The imagination is put there somewhere.
And I'm not getting into this mystical stuff.
I'm just saying I am curious to know why we have what separates us from animals is potential.
Is anything we can imagine seems to be within our reach in terms of reality.
Eventually.
Yes, and I think that nostalgia, that need to go physically further than we've ever gone before, and mentally further than we've ever gone before, there's no limit to human potential.
There seems to be zero limit to human potential, to the point where we will render ourselves, our very biology, and even our mental paradigms obsolete, where we will achieve immortality.
She's in her 50s, lives up in Alaska by herself in this fucking...
You can't even have buildings up there because it's on this land that has to have temporary structures because of whatever goofy fucking law there's in place.
So she has tents.
They're these giant tents with hoop wires and very thick canvas.
But they're fucking tents, man.
And she's out there with grizzly bears and wolves.
And everywhere she goes, she's strapped.
She got attacked by a bear.
God damn it.
Fucking bit her head, broke her hip, fucked her up.
Jamie, go to my Twitter page, and there's a tweet that I posted today about this woman from Kentucky that is, the Kentucky clerk denies marriage license under God's authority.
There's a video of these guys.
Did you see the video?
This is a new one.
This is from today.
This is a new person.
There was the other person.
This is a new person.
This woman is talking to these gay guys that want to get married, and she won't let them.
I mean, it's a difficult thing, though, because if somebody has a strong religious conviction, for example, and they're pro-choice because they think that...
I mean, pro-life because they think that abortion is murder.
You can say Allah and Yahweh, but Yahweh among the Orthodox is to trample on their sensibilities because when you give a name to God, okay, when you give a name, when you say God is, this is what's heretical about the idea of Jesus Christ to Jews and to Muslims,
because if you create parameters around God, if you suggest God is a man or a woman, if you suggest God has a name, Then you are assuming to understand his greatness and his infinite presence.
See, I think some religion, I think Christianity is a powerful religion when used.
So a lot of Christians just preach love and doing unto others as you'd have them do unto others.
It's got powerful conversion ability of some people who saw nothing and find inspiration and love through God.
Listen...
I'm not a religious guy, but I respect whatever that conversion can be, because a lot of good things are done in the name of Jesus Christ, just as a lot of suppressive things can be done in the name of your God.
Speaking of Kentucky, there's a thing that I posted that was fucking fascinating about the dangers of misgendering someone that Gad Saad posted it and I retweeted it.
It is Adorable.
And it's the fucking lunacy that's going on in colleges these days.
You're supposed to walk up to someone and say, Hi, nice to meet you.
There's a tyranny to how you have to walk around and speak.
They even want to control what you say in the bedroom.
It's called tyranny.
In the name of equality, and in the name of tolerance, and in the name of protecting the disenfranchised and the marginalized, we have created a fucking tyranny.
What they do is they exist in a very insulated world where they take classes from people who have also gone through the system, then they become teachers.
And when they become teachers, then they have this oppressive power over the people in their class.
And the people in their class have to listen to their ideology.
They're living under a protocol, an academic protocol.
If you ever try to get an academic to talk about anything that he's not 100% certain about, boy are they terrified.
And the academic world is about the nastiest place.
Talk about a battlefield of ideas.
When you come up with an idea that's controversial, like Steven Pinker who said that human beings are not born a blank slate, or that aggression is rewarded in indigenous cultures.
Or a girl who decides she's a boy and she wants to be referred to as a boy.
She wants to be referred to as a he.
Okay, well, once you tell me that, I'm okay with it.
I don't mind.
You know, if you say your name is Greg and your real name that you were born with was Donna, it doesn't bother me.
I'll call you Greg.
It doesn't bother me.
But to say that I'm the asshole because something that's completely outside the norm...
Weird and sticks out.
No, no, no.
That's that's wrong.
Yes, you know like it's it's like I don't like this vitiligo thing that I have on my hands.
It's weird And if I get really tan, then it really shows up.
But I'm white, so it's not that bad.
But when people go, like, what's that on your knuckles?
I don't like that I have to tell them.
But of course I go, oh, it's vitiligo.
It's a disease.
I wish I didn't have it.
But I do have it.
So I don't get upset if somebody asks me a question.
It's a normal question to ask.
My knuckles look different than the rest of my hand.
It makes sense that they would want to know what's going on.
This is not like a microaggression.
This is human curiosity at something that's abnormal.
It's not a bad thing that it's abnormal.
It's not a bad thing that there's a gender issue, that you wish you were a woman when you were born a man, or you wish you were a man when you were born a woman.
And I think that what we're experiencing now with the transgender movement, and even to an extent the gay movement, is the pendulum swinging All the way in one direction.
And it's a reaction to the fact that, and this is just a fact, when you were a man or a woman and you felt overwhelmingly like you were a different sex and you took measures to correct your current sex or you just dressed up in a way that made you feel more yourself, so if you're a man and you're dressed in drag or whatever as a woman.
Or, for that matter, if you were gay and you started having feelings when you...
The problem was that in most of our history, you got the fucking shit kicked out of you.
If you walked into a room full of retards and you had a rifle in your hand and you said, sit the fuck down, I'm running this town now.
Okay?
Because you retards have been out shooting my cows and fucking my dog and lighting my house on fire.
Everybody sit the fuck down.
Well, in a lot of ways, to a guy like Donald Trump, when he's talking about all these people in Congress that didn't know the difference between the Shia and the Sunni, when he's talking about all these people that did make these decisions based on shitty evidence, when he's talking about all these fucking people that are secretly playing poker on their fucking cell phones and they're making gigantic decisions or jerking off under the table and they get caught, he knows that!
A big chief concern always in elections is the economy.
And I'm always fascinated that we never hire economic studs.
Guys who actually made a lot of money in the economy and competed, instead we hire government bureaucrats.
And I don't know what the answer is, but it seems very counterintuitive for voters to vote for, say, a guy like Barack Obama, who actually...
Didn't leave any—he never really worked in the—he was a community organizer.
He never had a real job.
And then he was—he went to—he had kind of okay grades, I think, at Occidental, and then I think Columbia.
And then he taught at Harvard, left no academic papers or legacy, and then was kind of greased into being a senator and didn't leave any legislative legacy.
And you look at the guy, and he's a really good speaker, and he seems sensible and fair, but— It's interesting that we voted for him, and I voted for him, primarily on the idea that he was black and different and sent a good message to the world, or a thousand reasons.
But I know I wanted to show the world that we weren't a prejudiced nation after the war and that we were a progressive group of people and that Obama did seem really sensible and he seemed fair and he seemed thoughtful.
So I'm criticizing myself for this, but I I think it makes sense to vote for somebody sometimes like, you know, Republicans make it fucking so hard to vote for them, but I just feel like if you really care about the economy, vote for a guy who had to really compete and win in the economy.
They might have a better understanding and perspective.
And also, if you look at the president, like, if he relies on Congress, and Congress relies, I mean, all those laws that are set up in place to make sure that he, you know, doesn't have, like, ultimate power, although he can...
Ultimately, the responsibility of the president is when you have six different sources, the State Department and the intelligence and all these people coming to you with the options.
Yeah, but he also, at the end of the day, I think, you know, he says he's a big free market guy, but I think Obama really does believe in top-down authority.
I do think he really believes that, ultimately, a central group of smart people should be making most of the decisions.
Yeah, huge factory farms, corporations, and the corn industry.
There's a fucking fantastic documentary called King Corn.
Ooh, it's fucking nuts, man.
These guys, they set out, I mean, I've mentioned it several times in the podcast, so I apologize if you've heard this before, but if you haven't seen it, just check it out.
This guy, they do like an analysis of their own bodies and find out what percentage they are of corn.
Some ridiculous percentage of all the carbon in their body has come from corn.
And then they go through the aisles of the supermarkets and they start looking at the corn syrup and corn starch and corn this and corn that and you realize how much fucking corn is in everything.
They pecked at it, but it wasn't dead for very long before we found it.
Point being, when I don't let them out, their eggs don't taste as good.
Their eggs look different their eggs become more yellow and I buy the best chicken food that you can buy the healthiest chicken food You could buy but really they want a free range and when you let them go And then they run around the yard and they peck grass and they eat bugs their eggs are much more delicious sure Sure.
The other day I took a photo because I had eggs, and two of them were from an egg from when they were grazing, and two were from a little bit later when we had them in the coop for a few days.
And when they're in that coop, their fucking eggs come out yellow, like supermarket eggs.
Not quite that yellow, but pretty close.
Whereas otherwise, they're a dark, dark orange, and they literally taste different.
That was when I did the ravine comer and then I ate, uh, The Ravine Comer makes me sad to this day.
Yeah.
Because one of the funniest things that happened on the trip with Brian and I when we went to Montana with Steve Rinella and crew is that Brian created a character called the Ravine Comer.
If we just had, like, a sponsor, like rifles that we use or, you know, products that we use like Hoyt bows or something like that, just a sponsor that could help us defer some of the costs of production, It would be so much fun.
I agree.
Because these trips, like the trip that we had when we went out to Alaska and we went out to Prince Edward Island, fucking fantastic time.
Horrible rains.
We were talking about earlier with like fun that's like fun while you're doing it.
If it would stop, it would stop for like 20 minutes.
Then we'd shoot some video footage of us being out there for 20 minutes looking for deer that we never found.
And then it would go right back to raining.
It was horrible.
We had so many fucking laughs.
Just the time that we were in the trailer, or the tent rather, and we had one indication of that is the podcast that we did from there, Steve's Podcast, which was one of the best ones that we did, you know, one of Steve's that we did, where it's not censored.
If you love something, whether it's elephants or rhinos, you love some exotic, crazy animal that we don't have in North America, and you want to pay a lot of money to shoot it, and you're not even going to eat it.
I guess they do eat elephants.
Which I didn't know.
But I guess it tastes good, man.
It's fucked.
Because they're intelligent and they're not traditionally thought of by great memories.
They remember family members from like 20 years ago.
They reunite them.
They hug.
It's trippy, man.
I've seen a video of a mother and a child reunited after 20 years, and they're hugging.
We don't think anything of a child leaving a family, because that's what we do.
If you live with your family and you're 40, you're a fucking loser.
But if you're an elephant and you have children, those children stay near you.
The structure, that's their natural structure.
We don't think anything of separating them, taking them off here, taking them off there.
It's one of the most damning things about something like SeaWorld.
They have the balls to have these commercials where they say, We haven't taken an animal from the wild in 35 years.
Wolves, to me, are this amazing creature that is...
I respect them deeply.
I love what they represent.
I love looking at them.
But they feel like a trap, man.
I think the love that some people have for animals in this really...
Distorted perception of what a predator like a wolf truly is has allowed people to import these things and put them into Idaho and all these different areas and I'm reading all these stories about what's going on now how they're decimating the elk populations and people really terrified of them and when I was in British Columbia and I was up there with my friend Mike who has a business up there a guide business and he has a farm and His fucking neighbors,
they had a cow that was killed in the middle of the night by wolves.
We've gone so far away from recognizing that and remembering that, that people have brought these things back in some sort of a weird attempt to balance the ecosystem.
And when they open hunting seasons, there's all these protests.
And the protests are almost invariably from people that live in the cities.
That's the issue with the difference of Vancouver and British Columbia being a province.
Somehow or another, people would figure out who he is.
But he was talking to me about his business.
We were talking a little bit.
And he asked me what I was up here for.
And I told him I was up there for a hunting trip.
And then he started talking to me about how much he hunts wolves.
Right away, he goes into this, yeah, we hunt wolves all the time.
And he goes, you got to.
I own a piece of property up there, and we've seen them chase down calves and kill them.
He goes, we've seen it.
He goes, we've seen the wolves.
He goes, there's just so many of them that what we do is they take garbage bales, like a big garbage pail, and they fill it with meat.
And then they pour water into the garbage pail.
So it's filled to the top with water and meat.
Then they freeze it.
And once they freeze it, then they take it, and they put it out like a popsicle.
Wow.
And then the wolves can't take it all at once, so they'll definitely keep coming to it.
So they get a little bit of the meat, and they'll come back for more, and they've got to chew through the ice, and there's meat inside the ice, and then they'll shoot them.
The Inuit used to take, because wolves were such a nightmare for them, they'd steal their food, their seal, and they would put a razor blade, like a knife with a piece of meat on it, and the wolf would eat the meat and then lick the blade.
Have you ever seen the Toronto protests where these feminists There was some guy who was promoting something that had to do with men's rights.
They completely distorted what he had to say, completely distorted what his message was, and promoted him as this evil person who supported rape and hated women.
And so they shut down his performance by turning on a fucking fire extinguisher, a fire alarm.
They set off a fire alarm and all cheered.
They were protesting in the hallways while this guy's on stage speaking.
Well, that's why it's important what you're saying because they'll do whatever they can, but what it's not based on is reality.
So, like, if there really was a person that was at this campus that was promoting raping women and doing horrible things to them and this is what you should do and he's trying to rally them up, absolutely everyone agrees they should be treated the way these women were treating that guy.
The question is, is what he's promoting that or are you turning it into that in order to make it justifiable for you to go fucking crazy?
I don't think they're being honest with themselves or with what the real problem is.
And that's another issue, is that if you're too ideological and religious, you're going to be placing your energy and your anger in the wrong direction.
And there are real challenges and problems.
And it takes sober thought, sober thought, sober analysis, and an open mind to finding out and developing a very informed point of view.
So that then you can actually tackle what's really going on.
Now, when you have a debate, and I'll give you an example.
Very important in my opinion, the problem with debate in this country is this.
Let's take gun control as an example.
The first thing you hear is, I'm in favor of guns, I'm in favor of gun control.
But what you actually hear when they start the debate is this.
You're a gun nut, and I don't like you.
You're a hippie liberal, and you don't know what this country was founded on.
And that's where we start.
And the minute that happens, there is no way anybody's going to have a discussion, because it starts with, I don't like you.
Oh yeah, I don't like you.
Instead of saying, hey guys, We're both good people who have a different point of view, and we're trying to solve a problem.
Nobody in this room thinks that somebody should be allowed to go in and massacre a school or a movie theater.
We know we want to solve that problem.
Now, this side believes everybody should have guns.
This side believes they shouldn't.
Where is the middle ground?
Let's have a real discussion.
It never starts that way, unfortunately.
A lot of times it just becomes this crazy sort of, this is my camp, this is my idea, and I'm more interested in being right based on my ideology that's immovable.
And it's very difficult to kind of step back and be sober in these thoughts, in these situations.
For example, like gun control is interesting, because when this guy came up and shot these two reporters, And this psychiatrist...
But he had something really interesting to say, and it was a really interesting debate I'd never heard before.
He said, look...
Mental illness.
There is an idea that maybe if somebody is exhibiting psychotic behavior and talking about wanting to hurt other people and himself, a lot of people who have mental illness are not willing to take their drugs because they don't think there's anything wrong with them.
So how do you deal with that?
Well, he said, what about in some instances outpatient care that is mandated?
And we're like, wait a minute, that steps on my civil rights.
You can't tell me to take drugs.
And he said, but wait, if you have tuberculosis...
You are mandated by the Center for Disease Control to take your drugs because you're contagious.
And you're not allowed to not take antibiotics when you have tuberculosis.
And usually it's a nine-month regimen.
It can turn you colorblind like it did my buddy Jimmy Burke and all that.
But what about those questions?
What about stuff that kind of throws things in the air?
Yeah, that's a mental illness, and I think it is a good idea to treat it as it is an illness.
And the problem with the mental illness stigma, and Cara Santa Maria, who's been on this podcast a bunch of times, she's A neuroscientist, very smart, and she's had mental illness issues herself with depression, which is also a mental illness.
It's not well.
We treat them differently than we treat any other illness.
Like, there's no shame in having diabetes.
You know, we find out that you have a disease, we don't go, you got fucking diabetes, bro.
Like, it's a disease.
So we treat it with medicine.
You know, same thing with virtually every disease except mind diseases.
And when someone has a mind disease, we automatically assume that they're being weak.
We automatically put them into this box.
Oh, you're depressed?
Oh, poor fucking baby.
Think you're gonna be fine, dude?
What are you gonna be?
unidentified
You're happy, you know, fucking born in the 1600s.
Which is one of the weirdest things about taking antidepressants.
But whatever the case, It's some form of medication for a disease.
And when someone doesn't want to take that medication, this is one of the episodes, the episode I was talking about called Elements on Radiolab that was talking about lithium.
This woman who can't take this medication anymore.
When she takes it, she's her.
It is a mental illness.
She has a mental illness.
Being bipolar.
It's an absolute disease.
And when she takes this stuff, she's totally normal.
So, this idea that we have about medication when it comes to mental illness, I think it's the one illness that we have this, like, criticism of or this prejudice of that we can justify.
And there is criteria and there are experts that can say, I think, in some instances, hey, this dude is exhibiting classic psychotic behavior and he's going to hurt somebody.
And I think it would behoove the authorities to mandate some kind of a drug regimen or something.
And then this experimenter came along and said, why don't we change the rat cage?
I'll create Rat Disneyland.
And he created a utopia for rats.
They had plenty of sex, friends to play with, lots of things to keep themselves occupied.
Do you know how many rats kept going back to the cocaine and heroin bottle?
None.
After a while, from what I was told, the experiment yielded no addiction, and they all started drinking water and went back and they kind of said, I'm done with that drug thing.
Well, also, okay, let's think about that for a second, because if we're living the way we're living today, it's because people before us have figured out how to build houses and electricity and cars, but how many generations?
How many generations in relationship to the DNA that's in our body that supposedly takes like 10,000 plus years to change?
I mean, how similar are we to people that lived 10,000 years ago?
Maybe the reason why people are into drugs and constantly trying to alter the state of their consciousness today is directly connected to these rats being willing to do this experiment, or being willing to go back to the cocaine until they fucking died in this experiment, as opposed to the way they were in the wild.
Like, maybe if we were living in the wild, maybe if we lived the way people lived thousands of years ago, it's hunter-gatherers.
Maybe if we did that, we would have no desire to do coke I would agree with you if I didn't know that pygmies in certain parts of the Congo smoke copious amounts of weed.
Stop and think about the drugs that you just described.
Copious amount of weed, which makes them more sensitive, more paranoid, maybe keeps them alive more, more community-oriented, more loving, and maybe even more creative.
So you're talking about marijuana.
If you're talking about the people that live in the indigenous tribes in the Amazon, you're talking about serious psychedelic drugs that are ego dissolving that remove the world around you and bond you inexorably as this tribe.
But I do think that the new science of like Portugal decriminalized all drugs, all drugs.
And what they did is a really interesting thing.
They think by some measures in 2000, 1% of the population was hooked on heroin, which is incredible.
Huge addiction issue.
And you have to be careful with these statistics, but this is what I heard on TED.com.
And when the government said, I'll tell you what, instead of spending all this money on enforcement and rehab and stuff, we'll take addicts, we'll decriminalize it, and what addicts need is connection.
So what we'll do is we'll say, we'll get them in rehab and we'll take care of that, and then we'll get them a job and we'll say to their employer, look, train this guy, we'll pay half their wages.
It'll cost you half as much to hire this addict who is going to take your program.
We have our own programs.
They're managing their addiction.
And they've had huge success because what happens to the addict is that they develop connections and they develop purpose and they develop an entire infrastructure of support around them.
And that apparently...
From what I understand, a lot of addiction specialists talk about that being very important, man.
Connection is a great antidote to your addiction issues.
I think one of the big problems with addiction specialists in this country is they're only allowed to use methods outside of drugs There's some people that get some spectacular results in other countries, especially in Mexico with ibogaine, people that are hooked on pills.
They say that what destroyed the Haight-Ashbury movement, that wonderful psychedelic movement, was when musicians went from weed and psychedelics to heroin and cocaine.
And the heroin and cocaine was what actually destroyed a lot of great musicians.
Yeah, Stephen King said in his book, which I read, he said, there are a lot of, yes, there are a lot of creative people that have substance abuse problems, he said, but they happen to be very creative people with substance abuse problems.
He said they were creative, and then they had a problem, but it's not what made them creative.
That's possible that he's right, but it's also possible that he's saying that because he's not an addict anymore, and he doesn't want to go back to it, and so he's made this sort of connection in his mind that it wasn't the alcohol that allowed him to be so free and creative.
It was his own free creativity that he had in his mind, and he had a problem.
People that are creative and have great imaginations and allow themselves to have a great imagination may also be, to some degree, may be a little self-destructive or at least searching for different states.
And so maybe...
Maybe, you know, the kind of person that's imagined enough to write a book like Cujo also likes putting himself in something other than his sober state.
Dude, when we were doing The Ice House one time, I was, one of the first times, it was in a small room, and I smoked a bunch of weed, and I don't do it, and I got high doing your podcast, and I drank some scotch, because you forced me, peer pressure.
Here's the late Oliver Sacks said something incredible.
Do you know the story about Philip Plaginett?
I think it's Jason Plaginett, I think his name is.
Furniture salesman, 1994, comes out of a bar, gets savagely beaten, and starts having sort of deep mathematical geometrical thoughts.
And the next thing you know, he starts drawing these geometric relationships and shapes.
A physicist walks by one day and goes, "Do you know what you're doing?" And he said, "No, I'm just trying to figure out the relationship." And he goes, you're drawing high math.
Long story short, he'd never been interested in math at all, and in 2015, he is considered a math genius.
He got beaten.
Oliver Sacks did a great thing on a guy named Tony Sioria.
Gets struck by lightning.
He's an orthopedic surgeon.
The lightning goes through his cheek, comes out his foot.
Winston Churchill always had some alcohol in the system.
But listen to this.
Tony Sciuria, who Oliver Sacks studied, basically gets struck by lightning.
All he can hear is piano music and becomes a composer and a high-level composer and a piano player because all he wanted to do after that was play the piano.
And he was never interested in music.
So the idea is maybe sometimes certain things that happen to your brain can open...
Pathways and channels and circuitry that was blocked or wasn't activated before.
In this case it was a beating and lightning, but there are examples of something traumatic happening to someone's brain where it opens up an entire new passion and interest in that person.
And that's documented by the late Oliver Sacks and a lot of other people.
Well, I think that the mind is some sort of a device, and this device relies, like the rest of the body, on all the different elements that keep a human being alive.
Human neurotransmitters are flowing around, there's neurons firing, there's all these cells that are alive.
I mean, the mind is just like this fascinating place.
Now, when you introduce things that are psychoactive to the mind, whether it's caffeine, whether it's nootropics, whether it's alcohol...
Nicotine.
Yeah, sure.
Whether it's marijuana, there's an effect.
And when that effect happens, there's a cascade of effects.
The effect of marijuana, there's a lot of different effects.
But one of them is your creativity absolutely gets a kickstart.
Something happens.
You get a weird way of looking at things.
You get a strange, altered perspective on things.
Alcohol does the same.
It gives you a strange altered perspective on things.
You know, it does it in a douchier way, makes you a little louder, makes you a little bolder, releases inhibitions.
But occasionally someone will write something while on alcohol that is just brilliant.
And it comes out of this don't give a fuck thing that alcohol allows you to look at something from a different angle.
You know what else, too, that I think is very important and I've monitored in my own life?
I don't have a problem with depression, but I do have days where I feel better and days where I don't feel as good.
And a lot of that is dictated by how I choose to think.
A lot of that is dictated by how I manage my life, whether I'm happy with things that I'm doing, and how I choose to pursue my thinking.
You know, and I think there's a certain amount of what that is that makes you feel happy and makes you feel sad that is manageable.
And I think, too, there's definitely a danger in putting it all on a disease and all on a pill.
And for some people, it most certainly is a disease.
But there are people that have some wiggle room in their life, and they can turn their life into a much more positive experience for themselves if they just choose to manage it correctly.
This is not...
Excluding people that have a legit medical condition and have legit medical depression and some sort of a chemical imbalance.
Not at all.
But I'm saying there's a lot of us that aren't depressed, like me, that you can manipulate the way your mind feels.
You can manipulate the way your view of the earth is.
How you manage what you choose to think about and the perspective that you take.
My God, they've done, you know, anxiety.
Behavioral psychologists used to always say, you've got to get rid of your anxiety.
And now what they say is, if you think of anxiety in terms of just your body getting ready for action, As opposed to, oh no, this anxiety is going to kill me, your blood vessels look very differently.
So how you view your own anxiety and the attitude you take, your blood vessels will either constrict, which is not good, but if you look at anxiety as, here I go, my body's getting ready for this, I'm getting ready.
Your blood vessels and your heart looks exactly the way it does in moments of joy and courage.
And that's from a fucking great TED Talk story.
Again, I can't remember.
I wish I could tell some people could watch it, but really interesting.
How you look, how you choose to think about your own anxiety has everything to do with whether it's healthy for you or bad for you.
And if you choose to think about anxiety in the right way, there's a lot of evidence, measurable evidence, based on a study that followed, I think, 30,000 Americans over nine years, that suggests that it actually can be good for you.