Daniele Bolelli and Joe Rogan debate life’s brutalities—from Conan’s philosophy of embracing fear to Bolelli’s personal loss, including his wife’s six-month battle with a brain tumor—and question whether resilience or abstinence works better in recovery. They mock religious Twitter claims, Trump’s divisive rhetoric, and environmentalists’ selective stances on invasive species like Florida pythons while dissecting parallels between organized crime (e.g., The Sopranos) and government systems, calling alimony laws archaic. Rogan’s UFO skepticism clashes with Bolelli’s paranormal anecdotes, exposing fraud in ghost-hunting shows like the Constantinos’ murder-suicide case. The episode ends by rejecting societal absurdities—like $1M engagement rings or manipulative relationships—while promoting Not Afraid and teasing UFC fighter-turned-fanny-pack advocate Kyle Kingsbury. [Automatically generated summary]
*Eehaa* I'm here with my brother, Daniele Bellelli, one of the few men who can pull off a yin-yang bandana like some renegade biker on an episode of Grey's Anatomy.
Look at that fucking thing.
But you fucking bounce it out with a Frank Frazetta, Conan the Barbarian t-shirt.
To me, all the stuff I've written so far was kind of more philosophical in nature.
This is a bit more personal.
This is very much my life.
It's sort of divided up in three parts.
The first part is about dealing with fear in martial arts, and it's kind of like my experience of constantly Testing the boundaries, getting crushed, try again, find a way to make it, deal with that scaring feeling of when you have somebody coming at you who has been training for the last few years and wants to take your head off and you're like, shit, this is a little intimidating.
There's all the pressure, people watching you, the idea of getting physically, if you fuck up, getting physically dominated by another man, which is never a fun feeling, that kind of shit.
And so that's that part.
But then to me, that part just serves as a Springboard for the other stuff, which is, well, that's great when you're on the mat, when you're in the cage for that stuff, but what about the rest of life?
And in this case, you know, part two deals with what happened with my wife, you know, very quick, uh, get a little sick and all of a sudden, what the fuck is going on?
Your body starts falling apart, diagnosis with brain tumor, dead within six months from the time the first symptom came up.
So it was really quick, really harsh and All the stuff that you may imagine like that.
And then the part three, sort of, okay, now what?
You know, what do I do with it now?
And life afterwards, when my wife died, my daughter was 19 months old, all this shit was happening, as you may imagine.
And so it's like...
In some way, these three elements kind of go together.
It's like the martial art part was sort of a warm-up in terms of learning some things that then I would have to apply on a much bigger, more important skill in day-to-day life.
And then, you know, when shit hits the fan, and then afterwards how that changes my attitude about things, my life overall.
And, you know, when I was talking with publishers, originally they wanted a nice, pretty arc where you start out as this scared wimp, And then you discover the secrets and then you come back and you're this fearless guy who will go through life without fear.
And that's bullshit.
I mean, I like to sell it that way that would sound cool, but I'm not in the business of bullshitting myself or anybody else.
The seven steps to getting rid of fear is not that stuff.
To me, my experience of dealing with fear is a fucking constant battle.
It's like you wake up one day and maybe you learn to deal with it 0.01% better and that's a win.
And then the next day it hits you again and you have to deal with it again.
For me in particular, afterwards what happened is the reality of realizing that everything is fleeting, everything can be taken away from you, everything you care about can go in the snap of a finger.
That really freaked me out.
It's one thing to know it intellectually.
It's one thing when it hits home for real.
And so once in a while, you know, I'll have my days when I'm totally fine.
I feel strong.
I feel great.
And then all of a sudden will hit me when the paralyzing thought of, man, everybody I love will die.
I have limited control of what's going to happen in my life.
Everything I care about can be taken away from me in a second.
Shit, welcome to your day.
Now, deal with the next 24 hours.
It's like, it's heavy.
And so dealing with that aspect, finding ways to, you know, and then I find a way to do it.
And then a month later, we'll hit you again.
And maybe because you found a way to do it before, it hits you a little less.
Because if you think about the consequences of death, you're going to get nervous.
You're going to get afraid.
If you're taking any sort of risks or chances, you're going to get nervous.
It's part of being a person.
It's part of what's fun about getting things done and succeeding is knowing all the mental roadblocks that are in place to keep you from being successful.
So to me, this is just, you know, this is my experience, but it's like, it's not that I have any illusion that A, I'm fighting battles that are unknown to other people.
Because the reality is that everybody has shit to deal with in their own lives.
Everybody has horrible things happen to them.
Horrible may vary from one person to the next.
You may be slightly luckier than the next guy, but the reality is that everybody deals with it.
So the question of how do you deal with it, what are the things that help you get the job done, and which ones...
That's one of the great things about martial arts is that dealing with the fear and the pressure and stress of training, it helps mitigate some of the pressures and stresses of everyday life.
That's exactly, that's why, you know, when I went to some publishers initially, they were like, ah, you know, hold your wife, life after, we got that part, but what the fuck does martial art have to do with it?
I'm like, this has everything to do with it, you know, because those are the same dynamics, but I get to train them in a safe space in a martial art contest, and then you apply them to the real game on the bigger scale in life.
You make sure you have your meal digested in your stomach before you get there.
You have a cup of coffee before you get to the gym.
You stretch out.
You prepare yourself.
And then you go through it.
But in doing that, it definitely helps.
I've had so many Twitter messages and Facebook messages.
People that I meet after shows that told me that they started jiu-jitsu after listening to this podcast and it changed their life and that it helps them so much to deal with pressure and now in pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
Even guys like Anthony Bourdain, who was in his 50s.
I believe he was 58 when he started jiu-jitsu.
58, Jesus.
57 or 58. He was a lifetime smoker, heroin user, pretty much abused everything, alcohol, everything.
Now is way more healthy.
I talked to him off statins, off of high blood pressure medication, lost 30 pounds just from training, eats healthy, still likes to party it up a little bit.
Smoking a little weed and get a little booze on.
But the guy looks great.
He looks great and he's obsessed with jujitsu and he loves it and it sort of transformed his life.
I tweeted a quote the other day from Barry Goldwater, where Barry Goldwater, back in the 50s, had recognized that there was an issue with preachers and ministers getting involved in the Republican Party, that they would ruin it.
I know that's the scary thing, is that you go back 50 years to the guys who were considered nutcases back in the day, and they would be considered moderate centrist today.
They would be like, oh, Barry Goldwater, what a reasonable voice, you know?
He had some positions that were a bit on the extreme end, but he also had a bunch of others that were very, very reasonable, where he made sense, you know?
And today he would be seen as a fucking liberal, you know, look at that guy.
He had a whole show going on about how happy he was that Donald Trump was in the race for entertainment factor.
And also because he was making a good point because he said, look, in the primaries, for example, in the Republican primaries, the game is you have to go 0.1 millimeter more conservative than the next guy to win the primaries, but you don't want to go too far because otherwise you lose the general election.
And you have Trump who steps in and he goes like 20 yards past everybody else.
And so everybody else is like, shit, if I don't follow him, I lose the primary.
Just standing there with his moccasins on and shit.
Yeah, but Native Americans, from that point on, they're associated with sweat lodges and peyote ceremonies and spiritual things.
We have these ideas.
A lot of people, they have these ideas of Native Americans that they lived off the land and they used every last piece of the animal and they had a spiritual connection with their surroundings.
But that's the problem with all stereotypes, right?
You take something that's partially true, and then you blow it up to make it the entirety of the experience, and then you turn with the caricature that at that point is very far from the real deal.
Yeah, he told me the story of this one guy who got captured.
There was two guys captured.
One guy.
They killed him.
Killed him in front of his friend.
And then they told him, I think they might have ate him in front of his friend too.
They killed him and then they told him, we're going to take off all your clothes and we're going to let you run.
And if you can get away, you can live.
And so this motherfucker ran like the wind.
Jumped in the freezing cold river and hid in a beaver dam.
He got smart enough to climb up into a beaver dam.
Which, by the way, is a risk and a fucking half.
Because what if you climb in there and the beaver's in there?
That beaver's going to fuck you up.
People have died from beavers before.
If a beaver bites your artery, they chew through a tree.
They'll fuck you up.
And this guy, he fucking made it.
And he walked for days, some ungodly amount of miles, naked, by the way, freezing cold, lived off of whatever he'd grab and stuff in his mouth and eat, and managed to survive in some crazy way and lived to tell the story.
No, in fact, some of the, that's what I dig, like, for History on Fire, those kind of stories that are so, like, it's like, come on, the screenwriter from Game of Thrones wrote that, right?
It can be real.
And then you dig it, and it's like, no, there's real, and there's wars, and it's more intense than anything you could imagine.
It's so strange when you look at a wild eagle in the eye, you know, even though it's kind of far away.
They don't let you get that close to them.
But when you're passing by, we were on a boat, and we're passing by these trees, and there's an eagle up in the tree, and you're like, whoa, what the fuck?
They don't get hunted by people either, so they're not afraid of people.
But, you know, they're not stupid either.
But...
That place is a legitimately wild place in that when you get out of your car, you have to run to where you're going or you're going to get swarmed by mosquitoes.
This guy was robbing a house and I think the owners came back so the guy took off and they were looking for him with flashlights so he dove in this pond right outside.
And it seems like when you get to the really high levels of finance and of volume and of the amount of troops and the amount of people that you're controlling, the area you control, that's when the real atrocities kick in.
It's almost universal that horrific acts get done to intimidate your enemy and to make sure that you retain control over certain areas.
In that sense, human history is really kind of fucked up and weird if you approach it through a moral lens because you see so many nasty things take place.
And the weird ones are the ones where there really is no good solution, where you don't know what the healthy thing would be.
There's one that I was researching for a history on fire maybe a year from now or something.
I'm researching this story from the 1980s in El Salvador.
At that time, there was a right-wing government in El Salvador that the U.S. government was supporting, and there was a leftist guerrilla.
In the logic of the Cold War, there are only two options.
You either are pro-communist or you are pro-U.S. There's nothing in between.
So in the process of fighting this leftist guerrilla, the government of El Salvador is doing nasty things, right?
Anybody who criticizes them, doesn't matter whether they're a communist or not, get tortured to death, chop off their bodies, leave them in the middle of the street.
American Congress at that point goes like, oh shit, you know, we can't really keep sending millions of dollars to these guys.
We're doing horrible human rights violations.
So they passed this law that in order for any more aid to be sent to the governor of El Salvador, the president of the United States had to sign off on a document stating that these guys have made huge improvements in their human rights record, that they are on the right path, you know, it's getting better.
Problem is, the deadline is coming up.
Reagan is itching to be able to send out all these millions of dollars to the government of El Salvador.
And in that moment, the Salvadorian army goes on this offensive against the guerrilla.
They find some villages that just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
They were not pro-communist, but they were not anti-communist either.
They were like...
Bunch of evangelical Christians, peasants, who just wanted to farm their fields and be left alone.
So they would let the communists go through, they would let the army go through.
They figure if we stay neutral, everything works out, right?
Well, not in the Cold War.
In the Cold War, there is no neutrality either on one side or the other.
So Salvadorian army come in, grab every single villagers, separate the men from the women, kill all the men, rape all the women, then kill them all, kill everybody in that village.
And the New York Times did an article on it, and Reagan was like, oh shit, what do I do now?
So he said, the guy who wrote this article is some crazy communist.
None of this is true.
It's a smear campaign against our allies.
The government of El Salvador has made huge improvements on sending them millions of dollars.
Of course, years down the road turns out that the original story was true, that this stuff did happen, and they...
But other than bitching about Reagan, this is not even an anti-Reagan thing.
It's a messy situation because you do support the government of El Salvador.
You're literally supporting death squads, child rapists.
I mean, it doesn't really get any worse than that.
You don't support them, there's a chance that El Salvador could turn into a communist state, in which case he's not exactly like communism around the world as a high reputation for human rights.
It's fucking awful, right?
So he's like, what do you choose?
Do you choose to support them or do you choose not?
It's like, how do you...
You see where I'm going?
It's a situation where no matter what you choose, you're fucked.
You're doing bad things.
But clearly...
The moment you are supporting that squad, that cannot be the right solution.
But at the same time, what is the right solution?
What is the good thing you should do?
You know, Carter had the same exact problem.
You know, right before Reagan, Carter, some guy, the Archbishop of El Salvador, this guy Oscar Romero, sent him a letter saying, stop fucking sending money to my government because they are doing horrible things with it.
Carter was like, eh, I don't want to look at this because this is politically troubling for me.
So two weeks later, death squads walked into the main church in El Salvador.
This guy was celebrating mass.
They gunned him down, killed him.
So it's not a Republican or Democratic thing.
You know, it's like both sides of the game there did not know how to handle this in a situation where it's like, which mass murders do we support and which ones do we oppose?
Because that's the reality of it.
It was like...
Those are the stories that are like, what the fuck do you do?
When you're dealing with certain parts of the world that have been embattled, they've been just entangled in these horrible, Bitter feuds and rivalries, horrible things get done in war.
And when you're dealing with two horrible groups, and you can't really differentiate substantially one being more moral or ethical over the other one.
And oftentimes, if you were more moral or more ethical, you wouldn't survive in those terrible environments.
You have to do horrible things just in order to stay above water.
Well, let me ask you this, because you're a legit historian.
Was there ever a time in human history where there was like a noble, ethical government of any sort of an empire or country that didn't engage in any human rights and did the right thing?
Like, was there a utopian government at any time in history?
Some degrees, you're like, ah, that's not that bad.
Come on.
We can live with that.
But we can live with that does not mean it's good.
It's still kind of shitty.
It's just a lot less shitty than the alternatives.
Outside of modern times, what's the most utopian version of a government that ever I think what you get is in, you do run into societies where maybe, like, for example, if you have low population density, hunters and gather, but the key word being low population density, because once you have too many people, they compete for hunting grounds and they do horrible things to each other.
But if you have a relatively low population density, there's really no reason to go to war with another tribe over wealth because you are nomadic.
You have to fucking carry it on your back.
I don't want your shit.
I have to carry it then.
That's hard work.
You don't fight over wealth.
You don't fight over religion because most of these guys have an inclusive approach where whatever you do that works, good for you.
There's no competition there.
So you have removed two huge things that people do nasty things to each other over.
They're still fighting over hunting grounds.
They're still fighting over women.
So that will still happen.
So it's not an idea like utopia.
Oh, those noble hunters and gatherers who could do no wrong.
No, they did horrible things to each other.
They just had less reasons to do so than later societies.
When you become sedentary, you can accumulate wealth.
And so you do start seeing this game played out in a good way.
You know, people who have the resources to dedicate themselves to stuff other than working for a living and so on.
And in a horrible way with all the nastiness that takes place over the fighting over, I want your shit, I'm gonna slaughter your family in order to get what I want, you know?
So it's...
That's why, to me, when you read those...
And as usual with human beings, there's always a good and bad kind of logic.
You have the guys who are like, man, pre-agriculture sucked!
It was a horrible, harsh life where it was terrible, and agriculture freed everybody, and states are wonderful and all that.
There's an element of truth to that, and there's also an element that's not, and vice versa.
The guy who idealized hunters and gatherers has the best humans ever, and they could do no wrong.
It's like...
Up to a point, in both scenarios, there are some huge advantages and some huge disadvantages.
Yeah, when you get so much wealth and so much prosperity that you start getting royalty and you start getting people that accumulate massive amounts of wealth and then they have this incredible ability to control all the people around them and everyone's fearful of them because they have ultimate power.
They can have you killed instantly and face new repercussions.
I was reading this article about this guy.
Who was some Middle Eastern prince and he was living in Beverly Hills.
There was one, maybe you remember it, but there was one where the justification was, I didn't rape her, I fell on her, and I just happened to be aroused, and I accidentally penetrated.
Somewhere you're going to find a hole in the ground with a bag of gold.
Here it is.
British man who told police he may have penetrated a teenager after falling on top of her, cleared of rape.
Whoa.
British millionaire who told the police he may have penetrated a teenager after falling on top of her, has been cleared of rape.
Try saying that name.
Eshan Abdulaziz was accused of forcing himself...
Oh, she was 18. 18 as she slept on the sofa in his Lincoln apartment after a night of drinking at an exclusive nightclub.
When he was questioned, the 46-year-old businessman said he had slipped and fallen on top of the girl, which may have caused his penis to penetrate her.
I'm fragile.
I fell down, but nothing ever happened to me and this girl.
He claimed he had gone to see if the young woman wanted a t-shirt to sleep in or a taxi home.
But he said she pulled him on top of her and placed his hand between her legs.
Oh!
His semen and DNA were found inside the young woman, but he said it was possible that he had semen on his hands from having sex with a 24-year-old earlier.
Early hour, the young woman said she had woken up in the early hours of the morning with Mr. Abdullah Aziz on top of her, forcing himself inside of her.
He claimed he'd gone to see if the young woman wanted a t-shirt to sleep in or a taxi home.
Okay, I believe her.
How about that?
I think his story sucks.
Well, his story definitely sucks about slipping and falling in her.
That sucks.
But it sucks even more.
I had gone to see if she wanted a t-shirt to sleep in or a taxi home.
What a wonderful person you are.
You are amazing.
Did you also donate some money to a charity of her choice?
You know what I watched that I really didn't realize what it was when it first came out, but how it really changed, was the first episode of The Sopranos.
That's exactly what I was saying about sort of mafia and government being identical.
It's the same shit.
I mean, even like the mafia is funny because a lot of the early mafia stuff came up as a form of government, you know, when like in Southern Italy when they were invaded by the Spaniards, by the French.
So the government was not on the people side.
They were an occupying force trying to squeeze as much wealth out of the country as possible.
Because they couldn't turn to the government, a lot of the people started turning to this made-up local organization, which eventually...
Because they provide all these services, but they are also the mafia.
And so the original stuff, you can see the logic why beside the criminal element, and then it evolves completely into just criminal element and nothing else.
But it's like, there's a reason why.
There's a logic to it, and it mirrors a state in every level.
The hierarchy of it all.
The way they handle business, you know, the whole thing is mirrored on the state.
Yeah, it was a while back, but they only did two seasons, but they are five.
Fucking awesome.
No shit.
I watched every season twice, maybe even more.
It was that good.
The main character is pretty much a variation on Conan.
It's so cool.
And oddly enough, the guy who created the show was John Milius, who was the guy who directed the first Conan, was the guy who was behind part of the creative directing of the early UFC. He's the guy who wrote Apocalypse Now.
Oh, wow.
He's ending so many of the things I dig.
But yeah, that show, man, if you have never seen it, check it out.
I mean, today it looks tame by comparison because so much stuff has been done afterwards that just takes it ten notches.
But for the time, it was also pretty intense with nudity and violence and the grittiness of it all.
This podcast has been around for six years, so since 2009, 9, 10, somewhere around then.
I think we were doing it in December of 2009, so right before 2010. Well, I'm sure when you started podcasting Ward was a fraction of what it is today.
Yeah, it was real small.
Adam Carolla had one, and there was a few other ones.
You know, Adam Curry had one of the first ones and John Dvorak.
I got the inspiration to do mine from Anthony Cumia.
Because Anthony Cumia from Opie& Anthony had this set up in his basement where, you know, he had a lot of money and he had a cool house.
He lived by himself.
So he put up a green screen.
And set up a stage where he had a nice desk and some real professional cameras and started doing this thing called Live from the Compound.
And Live from the Compound was like his own little fuck around, have some fun at home show.
He had like Guinness on tap and he would just drink and talk shit and it was really fun to watch.
And I realized, I was like, wow, here's a guy...
That's on Sirius.
You know, he's on the Opie and Anthony show.
It's a very popular show on Sirius.
And he's decided just for fun to do this thing in his basement.
He's not making any money from it.
It's just for fun.
And I thought about it and I said, you know what?
I could probably do something like that.
and so we started doing it off of just Ustream.
Just sitting there with a laptop, talking shit.
So my podcast didn't become like an iTunes podcast for like a few months after the first one.
We realized, once we started collecting, we then took the audio and started putting it up on iTunes.
But there wasn't that much going on back then.
And then we got in right at the right time.
And then in the next few years, other comics started starting their own podcasts.
And then everybody, all these different people, Bill Burr, and Diaz, and Duncan, and everybody else started doing podcasts as well, and they all took off.
One thing that it does, it's fucking terrible for your brain.
At least I used to qualify that, that when I did it, I probably did a little too much.
And the next day I just was so fucking stupid.
My brain didn't work good.
I've talked to many people who don't have that problem, but they don't have to do the same sort of things with their brain that I have to do.
So it depends on what you do.
Like if you go to work and you have a normal job and you don't have to do anything important and maybe, you know, maybe it's fine.
But if you're a person who has to think for a living and you have to do, like, stand-up comedy on stage or you have to write or you have to podcast or something like that, I couldn't imagine doing ecstasy and then doing a UFC the next day.
We were chatting the other day and he had this old perfect scheme for basically having legal prostitution by using like a porn loophole that, you know, if there's a camera rolling that it's porn, it's not prostitution.
You could hire someone, sign a contract to have a porn film, and even just for your own benefit, you could have it for yourself, as long as you're filming.
The porn loophole is how porn stars get away with doing quote-unquote prostitution.
There was a girl that was at the comedy store, and she was telling guys that you could fuck her, but you have to pay her her rate, and you have to turn a camera on.
And she's like, I'm not a hooker.
I'm like, okay.
I don't even know what to say.
unidentified
I gotta go.
No, I would have entertained that conversation for a while.
Well, he was like, I didn't know if he was the boyfriend or if he's the pimp, but he didn't, I mean, unless he had a gun, I don't know how he's going to protect her.
The whole thing was very strange.
But that's the Comedy Store.
The Comedy Store is a vortex of strange things.
Somehow or another, it just drags those people to that one place on sunset.
That and the Rainbow.
You ever go to the Rainbow Bar and Grill?
That's the place where they, when Lemmy died from Motorhead, they saved a seat for him.
No, but the thing you're saying about the sacred, and to me it's interesting because...
Precisely because you hold something sacred, to me, you need to be able to have humor, to laugh about it.
Not because you diminish its importance, it's in order to avoid fucking up and turn it into a dogma.
You know, the one thing that keeps things loose.
Speaking of American Indian stuff and spirituality, I remember being at some Lakota ceremonies where it was hilarious to see people who have grown up with it, so for them it's the real thing, versus some white guys who are coming up and they have their Hollywood fantasy about what it's supposed to be, right?
That's hilarious.
During the break of this ceremony, some of the Sundancers were giving the pipes to some of the people who were supporting there, right?
And these guys will take the pipe, they will smoke it, they will pass it to other people.
And I gave it to this white lady who was clearly taking herself real seriously, right?
So she's trying to light the pipe as she can, and she fails, and she fails, and she tries.
And then taking herself super serious, she takes a deep breath, and she goes, oh...
The spirits don't want me to light this pipe today.
And there was an old Lakota lady next to her who was trying to not die laughing, but she was trying to be polite, right?
But she was like, look, it's a windy day.
Just put the hand in front of the lighter when you light it and you're going to be okay.
But that's a tricky thing that sometimes the guy was the real deal and the guy was the total phony can sound exactly the same, except that one is real and one is not.
To me, a lot of these things about spirituality, they...
They make me throw up because they are so cheesy, so made up, so fake.
But then there are the moments where you go, oh shit, that was it.
Like the other day, man, this was trippy.
This guy from Canada emailed me and he's like, oh, we had this ceremony.
It was another Lakota thing, right?
American Indian stuff.
And he's like, we had a ceremony and we prayed also for your daughter and blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, okay, thanks.
That's sweet.
And the guy goes, oh, by the way, I kind of have the feeling that she may be sensitive to things like that.
Ask her if by any chance she had a dream having to do with American Indians.
And I'm like, that's fucking weird because she doesn't remember her dreams nine nights out of ten.
And, you know, Indians, she never mentioned that once.
So there's no, right.
But I figure it doesn't hurt to ask.
So I try not to ask a leading question.
So I just ask her, hey, did you have any dream last night?
And she goes, no.
And I was like, you see, bullshit, whatever.
And then she goes, no, no, wait, wait, wait.
I had a dream.
Like, my grandpa was taking me to this place where there were Indians, and they taught me to speak Lakota, and yeah, we had a good time.
Yeah, whenever like anybody has a clairvoyant moment or a moment where they kind of have an instinct that Doesn't seem to make any sense but turns out to be true and they go.
Well, what was that?
Was it coincidental?
Like what was that and you know, there's like some Sam Harris type people that are like very straightforward rational thinking They'll they'll they'll sort of boil it down to coincidence and I'm not entirely convinced that I like Sam, and I don't mean to talk shit about him, because I like him, and I dig his stuff.
Well, I think he's right most of the time, though.
See, I think there's a lot of people that try to make things sound spiritual and connect circumstances and say, you know, it's fate and it's, you know, it's a psychic moment when really it's just total coincidence.
When you talk to a guy and he says that your daughter had some sort of a dream about Native Americans, find out if she's sensitive, and then you ask her, and she said, oh yeah, I had a dream about Native Americans.
And again, not to believe, because I don't know what I believe, right?
I have no fucking idea.
I don't know how the universe works.
But I do have enough experiences that let me think, there's no way that this is a coincidence, this is a coincidence, this is a coincidence every single time.
That it just leaves me with kind of my mind is open to possibilities.
I don't know what's out there.
There's stuff that I experience.
There's stuff that I don't experience.
I have zero beliefs about the nature of reality because my tools are very limited about what I understand.
But there have been enough of those cases where you go, oh shit, that was like once when I was, I don't know, maybe 18 or something.
I went hiking with my friends, go up the mountain.
And we go back, which was great because I was alone with these two hot women.
The other guy was with us and gone off.
I'm like, fuck you.
Hopefully you'll disappear somewhere and I get to enjoy the attention of these two hot women for the rest of the day.
This is as good as it gets.
And like at one point, I literally, it's like somebody, like a phone rang where I got up and I'm like, fuck, there's a problem.
This dude is having a problem right now.
And there's really no reason to think it.
He said he'll be back four hours later, an hour had gone by.
There's no reason whatsoever to feel that way.
And that's what I tell myself.
He's like, that's bullshit.
Why are you making, what kind of a bullshit excuse not to deal with the women?
That's beautiful.
You know, stay here.
What are you saying?
I try, I try, keep getting in my head, right?
She's like, no, there's a fucking big problem and it may not be a bad idea to pay attention to it.
I'm like, Jesus Christ, you ruined my day even when I are not here.
Fuck you, I don't like you already.
But I'm like, okay, this is bugging me.
Fine, I'll walk up, I'll start going up the mountain and see what the hell, like, none of this makes sense.
Going up the mountain, there's 15 different paths that you can take to go up the mountain.
I don't know which one it took.
Take a stab and just pick one because I don't know what else to do.
I keep going and I hear this voice calling me.
So I call back and eventually I hear my friend's voice calling again.
I find if the dude got dehydrated, had gone up too fast and he was done, right?
Man, I'll tell you one thing that changed my perception on just the supernatural and the spiritual is looking into it.
When I did that sci-fi show and when I did a show called Joe Rogan Questions, not Joe Rogan Questions Everything, a game show in my head.
And the game show in my head show was a hidden camera show where the people had like an earpiece in and we would tell them to go do things.
And we set this one up in Hollywood, and, you know, it was a game show, like, here's your task, this is what you have to do.
And one of the things they had to do was, we told them that you're a reporter for a local television station.
You're doing the news, and you're reporting on a UFO sighting.
You have to find someone and tell them, listen, I had a witness, they were here for this UFO story, we have the cameras here, but they took off.
Are you willing to say that you saw the UFO too?
Wow.
Fucking everyone said yes.
Really?
Not only did they say yes, they went right into these elaborate, fake stories on camera, and I went, wow.
It just was such an eye-opener for me.
I was like, how many of those people that you see in those UFO documentaries?
The famous one was the Phoenix Lights.
Did you ever see the Phoenix Lights?
The Phoenix Lights was a series of sightings that happened in Phoenix, I want to say in the early 90s maybe.
And it was very controversial because the governor...
Was saying he was going to get to the bottom of this.
This is all very controversial.
And then he held a press conference and made a mockery out of it by having someone dress up like an alien and say, we found the culprit and here he is.
The guy comes out and he's got an alien costume on.
And the UFO believers were really pissed off because they were like, fuck you, I saw something.
There was a triangle-shaped object the size of a football field.
It was flying overhead.
It wasn't making any noise.
Like, all these people had all these things that they said that they saw, but there's almost no evidence.
There's only evidence of these lights that are floating in the sky that they think were...
Yeah, there's the governor.
Arizona governor and the fucking alien.
It's hilarious.
But...
What people were saying that they saw, there was one explanation that made sense, and that was there were flares that the government had let loose with parachutes, and they were drifting down from the sky slowly, and they fell behind the mountain ranges, and that's why they disappeared.
If you look at the actual video that the people did get, they're just lights that are hovering in the sky.
There's no triangle-shaped black objects that are flying around, but everybody had all these...
And so as soon as you start saying, hey, there's a Phoenix lights and people saw a UFO. Me too!
Couple featured on Ghost Adventures, dead and apparent murder-suicide.
Damn.
Whoo!
Self-styled paranormal investigators.
Yeah, they don't give a fucking degree for that.
Not exactly.
Paranormal investigation.
Mark and Debbie Constantino, is that what it says?
And a third still unidentified man were killed yesterday in Sparks, Nevada.
That's where it goes down.
When a domestic violence incident turned deadly, the Constantinos killed themselves.
What?
Billed themselves as electronic...
make that larger, as electronic voice phenomenon experts and made frequent appearances on reality shows about the supernatural, notably occurring on travel channels, ghost adventures.
Oh, the couple were estranged.
Oh, okay.
He found her with a new dude.
He killed them both and killed himself.
Debbie Constantino had been living with two roommates.
Approximately 8 a.m.
Tuesday, the police were called to her apartment after one of her roommates found their male roommate dead and Debbie missing.
Yep, that's it.
Police eventually discovered that she was being held hostage by Mark Constantino in an apartment belonging to one of the couple's adult children.
Attempts to negotiate failed.
Around 1.30 p.m., a SWAT team breached the apartment door and found both people dead.
You are the one who, like, if you didn't see it, worry about what's going on with you if they were really that bad.
If they were such horrible human beings and you are the one who brought them in.
Or maybe they are not fucking bad and you're just blowing it out of proportion because you're a drama queen and you can't deal with the fact that they are with somebody else.
Well, there's definitely some people that got fucked over, like divorces where dudes have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rest of their life.
It is, but it's the same woman that you brought in your life and you didn't fucking see that she was capable of all of that.
You know what I mean?
So yes, while she's the scum of the earth and you can and should be pissed with her, I would also reserve a little bit for your own judgment of how you opened the door to this lady.
This woman, like, I have a friend who I've talked about him before.
He was divorced, and the divorce is brutal.
It took forever.
She went to all the other lawyers in town so that he couldn't go to them because she had contacted them first.
It's just brutal, brutal shit.
And she tortured him for, like...
For two years, like changing the terms of the divorce, all the while he's paying for her lawyer, he's paying for his lawyer, he's paying for everything.
She was trying to bleed him out.
Then she got this ridiculous settlement.
She got his house, massive, beautiful fucking house overlooking the ocean, like the whole deal.
And on top of that, because they were married for 12 years, he has to pay her for the rest of her life.
So he's paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for the rest of her life.
And that's not, it's, I mean, you could say, well, hey, he should have known he let that person do his life, but he used to love her.
But she, in that time of loss and pain and suffering, she had a legal option.
And the lawyer came to her and said, listen, you helped him.
She walked around the fucking Beverly Hills with a little tiny dog and got her nails done and got her fucking pedicure done and talked a lot of shit about him while he was at work.
And that guy just busted his ass all day long, but because that was his quote-unquote wife, because they scribbled their name on some paper and said, I do.
Well, he makes good money, so it's not like he's getting bled dry, but he has to pay an exorbitant amount of money every year to a person that he doesn't fuck anymore.
And now he has a wife and he has children, he has a whole new family, and still a giant chunk of his income goes to this lady that he doesn't have anything to do with anymore, and it will to the day she dies.
So she lives to be 500 years old because of modern science.
This fucking dude is paying her for the next 400 years.
But in his case, his wife has children, or his ex-wife now has children from him.
And so he is definitely financially responsible for her children, his children, their children.
And I think he should pay alimony because she has to take care of those kids, and she can't really work Like, you know, she's not like a free person who's single.
But if you're a free person that's single...
I can understand you needing a couple years to get on your feet.
I mean, say if you live with a woman and for 10 years you're married and for 10 years she doesn't have to work because you're some fucking diamond merchant in downtown LA or something like that.
And you break up with her and then you're like, get out of the house, bitch!
I've had that happen more than once and I'd lose all respect for that guy unless he's in the middle of fucking holding up a pan of hot oil that he's carrying to the stove or something and it's an emergency phone call or something.
I mean, why the fuck would your wife answer your cell phone?
What do you make of the Chris Ryan ability to instead turn off the exact thing you were talking about, sort of the DNA, like you're mine, you know, the possessiveness, the jealousy, all of that, the whole...
I mean, I... To me, the argument he lays out makes perfect sense.
I think he's right.
It's just, for a lot of people, it's hard to get over those, but, but, but, but, you know, they still are possessive and jealous and all of that, and they can't deal with the idea that somebody they love is supposed to be only me.
The Chris Ryan idea is the one that makes the most sense logically and philosophically.
But every single time I've tried to throw it out there at some lady I wanted to get in a relationship with, the discussion was invariably It makes sense.
I get your point.
But!
Sorry, it's not going to go.
And then it's a choice, right?
It's like, do I want it anyway, giving up this philosophical, it sounds cooler or not?
And the times when I have gone for it, and so it was then a monogamous relationship, I was totally fine with it.
You know, it wasn't like, oh, I spent my days thinking about what I'm missing.
I was completely happy with it.
Right.
I'm completely with you there.
To me, it's not it has to be one way or the other.
It's whatever works at the end of the day.
But whatever works means also having the flexibility to say maybe the traditional monogamous way is not the only fucking way.
Maybe there are other ways to go about it that are just as good.
So imagine that a man who doesn't want to have a baby with you, but you want to have a baby with this motherfucker.
How do I do this?
I'm going to take the condom, I'm going to stuff it in my pussy, and I'm going to squeeze it out, and I'm going to get my fingers in there, and I'm going to fucking shove it in there.
I'm sure people have gotten pregnant that way, right?
Yeah, trick pregnancy is fucking crazy, because it's terrifying that not only did you fuck up so hard that you got someone pregnant and you didn't want to get pregnant, but they tricked you.
They lied to you, and this is the type of person that you now have a child with.
So you have to raise a child with a liar, a manipulative liar, who decided to get pregnant.
Just the idea that someone would be so manipulative and so self-centered that they would decide to have a baby with someone against that person's will.
Like, you're drawn to someone, you can't live without them, the touch is so magical, you're like, oh, I'm gonna come inside you, oh, I can't believe it!
That's when you got to think that the universe has been designed by somebody with lots of sense of humor, if there is any design behind it, because it's like, so much of this shit is just funny, you know?
You know, probably a slave to these chemicals, but also talented enough that he can figure out a way to make exorbitant amounts of money and he has really smart people behind him.
Because he went from that Two and a Half Men show where he made exorbitant amounts of money to this...
I don't know if you know, but Charlie Sheen was a big part of Two and a Half Men, made billions of dollars for the network, and we can do the same thing for UFX. And so they bought Hook, Line, and Sinker into this deal, and it just fucking went right into the shitter.
It was one of those shows where people watched it, and it got like...
It's hard to do a good sitcom, man.
There's not a lot of good writers.
You have to have really good, dedicated writers that are funny, and then you have to have an actor who knows how to pull it off.
You have to have a showrunner who's got experience in putting those things together.
There's an art form to creating a sitcom all itself.
I was on one for five years, and I got to see it pretty intimately from a bunch of different levels, from the level of really talented, really smart actors.
Who can figure out how to manipulate a scene and make it funny and the level of really smart really good writers who really know how to craft a scene and then networks with good ideas and networks with shit ideas and then you got to put them all together and Good luck.
Back then, you had to have a good time slot too.
That was a big part of it because people had to know that you were on.
And you opened up first episode with that, well, not first episode, but episode, not zero, but episode one, was one of my favorite stories you've ever told, that fucked up story about the crucifixions.
There's a story, it's a complicated long story, but to go for the essential element, there's like these two Persian brothers who are princes who are fighting in this civil war for power, and the mom of both of the guys is pissed when one of them got killed, and so at one point she's really pissed off and she wants the guy who actually killed her son to be executed, but she can't really go to her other son and say, execute this motherfucker, because...
He was obeying the other son's orders, right?
So she finds a way for him to fuck up, for him to say something that will piss off her other son, the king.
And then the way they execute this dude is they put him in a box with only his head, his arm, and his legs sticking out, but his whole body is trapped in this box.
They force-feed him, horny and other weird shit that...
For the next few days, the guy is being force-fed, starts shitting all over inside the box.
This attracts maggots, like flies that lay maggots in there and stuff, and they literally start walking their way inside of him.
So he has maggots hatching inside of him and eating him for the next two weeks.
Under the file, Happy Tales from the Ancient World, the kind of crazy shit that you want to be...
I mean, what crazy motherfuckers sit down and think, I want to kill somebody, but I don't just want to kill him.
No, they found these tattoos, but they're not tattoos like artistic tattoos.
They are like dots and lines, and they are all along acupuncture points.
They are all along points where he was in pain.
So they think that it was kind of some primitive form of acupuncture that you would dig in that spot with needles and then you would seal it with like possibly like the way they do moksha, you know, where they burn herbs on that spot and it leaves.
Well, there was another new one that was saying rewrites history.
They found a mammoth, a dead body of a mammoth that had clear evidence of human predation, like one of the ribs had been shattered, they think, with a spear or something like that.
But the problem was it was 45,000 years old in Siberia, and they didn't even know the people were there back then.