Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dive into Europe’s wine pretensions, Formula One’s "educated ass" precision, and how obsession with skill—like ballet or chess—shapes life. They debunk obesity myths via Gary Taub’s Why We Get Fat, exposing mid-century sugar/flour shifts and insulin’s role, while critiquing Fritz Haber’s Nobel-winning fertilizer vs. chemical warfare legacy. ISIS’s conscription cycle and ideological violence reveal deeper grievances; rural colleges breeding liberalism clash with evolutionary survival instincts in nature’s brutality—like ducks’ anti-rape anatomy or human adaptations to aggression. Ultimately, innovation thrives where safety isn’t a crutch, but harsh environments force creativity through necessity. [Automatically generated summary]
I was at a restaurant once, a very fine restaurant, a very fine Italian restaurant, and a gentleman walked in with a briefcase with two bottles of wine and velvet in the briefcase.
I had to resist the chimpanzee urge to leap over the table and smash him in his fucking head with that case.
But when Senna died, if you look at the streets of Brazil for his funeral, it was something that you would never see in the United States.
If a great race car driver, like say a great NASCAR driver, you wouldn't see, I think it was some crazy number of people that showed up in the streets of Brazil.
So when someone comes along like Senna, who dominates something that's traditionally a European-dominated sport like Formula One, and he was a wild man.
But that is something that I don't know anything about it, but I'm sure when you follow it and that sort of those millimeters, those differences are what make everything, you know, when you have a cultivated sense, when you know what you're looking at and what looking for, it's...
Like, if you had, like, sciatica or something, your ass went numb, which I would imagine it would be a real problem with someone who sits down all the time.
Because I think horseback riding, if you watch high, high level jumpers, they, you know, or dressage guys, they, they, it's the same exact thing.
It's all feel and it literally looks like they're doing nothing.
So the difference between the best in the world and the number 300, you and I could never tell the difference because they don't look like they're doing anything.
Right.
Literally, they just, they look like, for me, they look like they're sitting upright, very still, is why I could never ride a horse, and just, there's nothing going on.
But the details, those little, like, where they place the micro, how they micromanage that saddle, and the signals they're sending to the horse with their hands, their legs, and their ass, is a whole different thing.
That's so often the case though with things where things look effortless because the people that are awesome at them do it so smoothly that you can't appreciate it unless you actually do it.
That's literally what I love about, you know, and it sounds silly, but you can touch a little of that In anything you do when you practice something you're not good at.
So tennis, I always talk about tennis and boxing.
Am I good at boxing and tennis?
No.
Do I obsess over where my feet are?
Do I obsess over my grip?
I swear to God, maybe the actual activity is secondary to...
How I love to work on the little details and get better through daily attendance, through daily practice.
Because something happens to me that reaches beyond that sport.
So when I do something that I'm maybe a little afraid of or maybe I'm not good at, it forces me to think in a way that informs the other things in my life that I make a living at.
I do better at stand-up.
I write better when I push myself in these other areas.
Yeah, it totally makes sense, because I think very difficult endeavors, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to do, anything, fucking dance, if you were trying to be a ballerina.
But there's a lot of people that just try to get good at it, they never get good at it, that probably would do better if they had better pathways to think.
Well, I think first, what someone like Tony Robbins does, because I've listened to a lot of his tapes when I was younger, I was all set to make fun of him, because I was trying to write this parody on him, and then I listened to him and I went, oh, this motherfucker knows exactly how my brain works.
I mean, in a lot of ways, he simplifies, and he has tools that help me...
And by the way, we're just talking about regular pornography.
There's certain pornography that you go, okay, what the fuck is that for?
Like, why does anybody need to see people spit in people's eyes and cum in people's noses and stuff?
Like, there's a lot of really fucked up pornography.
But I always equate that to, like, the same thing was, like, if you watch certain violent movies, it's almost like they are the product of the ramping up effect.
Every other violent movie that's come before them, they've had to go further and further and further to the point where it's just totally ridiculous.
The guy who wrote the double helix, quote-unquote, for a serial killer, for the making of a serial killer, a guy named Richard Walter, who's an FBI profiler, brilliant guy, he said that...
Serial killers will typically, and this is from literally interviewing 20,000, 30,000 prisoners, many of whom were murderers, violent criminals.
And he put together this profile, which was that serial killers many times start with fetishes.
They'll start with, you know, feet.
Well, a lot of times it can be as innocuous as rubbing against people in public places.
And then you graduate.
Then that doesn't do it for you anymore.
And then you have to go into a store and cut leather jackets with a razor because you might get caught, but it's like skin, all that stuff.
And what he said was that once you get to one level, you never can go back.
You have to go forward.
You don't see them go, alright, this is too much.
Let me go back to rubbing against people on a subway.
Well, that was the argument that the Japanese had, or some Japanese scholars had, about pornography.
Is that Japanese porn is, I might be wrong about this, that it's more embraced, and that when you look at deviant behavior, it's more embraced in films and things like that, and that sort of keeps them from doing it in real life.
It's wild when you go to Italy, and especially Rome, and you're standing in structures that have been there for, and were living, and had, you know, people died on that.
It's kind of like the octagon, the original octagon, you know?
They discovered some sort of artwork or some writing that indicated that these boat fights took place for a very short amount of time, like a couple of years.
They would fill up the bottom with two meters of water, six feet of water, and have these boats and float these boats around, and they would fight to the death on boats.
Well, they had to figure out how to do it, too, because they would get these animals in there, and most of the time they'd let the animals out, and the animals would be just fucking scared.
So they realized that by keeping them down there with no food and no water and getting them to a complete state of desperation and hysteria, that would allow them to ensure that when they pop that trapdoor, the lions would come out and just try to jack people.
It was also sort of what gave food to the Reformation when Martin Luther, this German Jesuit priest, said, hey man, all this money that's going to, you know, idolatry essentially, like building these incredible statues and these incredible cathedrals and we're starving over here.
How about if we just read the Bible?
If we just read the Bible, then maybe we'll be, you know, just as in favor with God as you guys.
And maybe we don't need a hierarchy of bishops and all these and popes and all this sort of rank and file that also needs a salary, that's also taking money.
Okay, but when you look at like wage slavery today, when you, I mean, there's no slavery today, but if you can imprison people in a state of poverty, right, and it's not against their will, right, voluntarily, you get people hooked on buying things and you get them hooked on credit,
So they need to work, they constantly need to work, and then they're in these jobs that are completely dead-end, low-wage jobs where they can't go anywhere, and then they perform these menial tasks until we figure out robots that can do those tasks far better and far more efficient.
It's not slavery, because they can quit and leave anytime they want.
It has gained traction in most of the world, and even in parts of the world where it isn't, they try to defend it as it being so.
And that is the idea of universal human rights.
Universal human rights was not an idea that was embraced by most of the world, even as far back, probably you can make the argument, as 1940. Slavery was alive and well.
Think about this country in itself, this country until 1964, was it, where there was separate but equal.
The idea that you had black and white water fountains.
And so the idea that, and of course that had to be defended along biblical grounds and all these kind of shoddy ideas, but the idea of Universal human rights.
Even though the Judeo-Christian ethic and even Islam talked about sort of everybody being of the same moral worth because we're all from the same father, right?
That's the monotheistic notion and where value comes in those religions.
We're all the same as long as you, you know, read the Bible and follow these tenets.
Universal human rights is something a little bit different, and it's a modern concept.
And that, like, say, germ theory, the idea that these things you can't see, but you still have to wash your hands or you can spread bacteria and things like that.
Those things that move very slowly, but that is, I think...
I was just talking about how both those ideas are ideas that took a long time to gain traction, you know, even though they were good for us.
But let's stick to universal human rights.
I think that that idea is just that mindset and the fact that you have to defend it as a society is why there's such a stark difference between...
I understand what you're saying by being at bondage to your lifestyle, to having to make a living because you got people to depend on you and stuff like that.
Right, and that's where the conspiracy theories fall into play, where modern capitalism is thought of as being some sort of a new way around that.
That instead of having people slaves, like literally bonding them, putting them in chains, keeping them against their will, instead you just set up these honey traps.
And you allow people to get sucked into these things like having massive debt from student loans and making credit cards easy and allowing people to mortgage a house they can't really afford, knowing full well that eventually the bank's gonna foreclose on this and reap some sort of a profit.
And that all these things, this is where conspiracy theories fall into play, That all these things are set up to enact a modern form of slavery, and that there's always going to be people that are taking advantage of people below them and putting them in very disadvantageous situations for their own gain.
I would say that that's literally the state of nature.
And what I mean by that is that, let's just take, for example, the marketplace.
If you just let people go, let people do their thing.
They are going to, for example, there's going to be a marketplace for differences of opinion.
This is what I mean.
There's a company.
It's about to start up.
You start a company.
I don't know what it is.
Let's just say it's a gadget.
You have groups of people on this side that are going to say, that's going to be the next big thing.
Joe Rogan's company is going to be the next Apple.
And you're going to have a bunch of other people on the other side who are going to go, you know what?
Not a shot, and here's why.
So you have these differences of opinion.
There's a marketplace.
There's a marketplace for what essentially is a derivative or a swap.
There's a marketplace there where people say, I will bet you.
I will short that.
I will basically say, I'll buy it at this price.
Right now.
And I'll sell it to you.
And if it goes up in value, you pay me the difference.
That's how marketplaces work.
So for me, capitalism is just a bunch of people with different opinions who are trying to make money, who are coming up with ideas.
And if you create a society where you can enforce contracts and make people keep their promises, and you can ensure that people have what's called property rights, which is really important, You know, courts essentially that have integrity, that can't be bought off.
Then that's, as far as I can see, what you'd call a free market capitalist society.
And it seems to be better than most of the other sort of systems that require central oversight.
Not because central oversight is such a bad thing.
I just think it's impossible to control You know, the way people think on such a macro scale.
And I see what you're saying about capitalism, and I see what you're saying about society.
But I think that all these things, when we point to ancient Rome, we point to how fucked up their world was, and slavery as recently as a couple hundred years ago, I think what we're saying is things are getting better.
We're evolving.
We're figuring out a way to make a society that is more beneficial to more people, but still not to everyone.
And then the point is, is it possible to create a utopian society where it's beneficial to virtually everyone?
And then the way to do that, the only way to do that is like, here's a good example.
People love to tout socialism as some sort of a cure to what ails us.
You know, that somehow or another that if you get people and you give everybody money and everybody shares wealth equally.
But the problem with that cuts out incentive.
Incentive for madness and excellence.
And the incentive for madness and excellence is why you have Tesla motor cars and Elon Musk and all these fucking- Steve Jobs.
If you did something wrong, if you put a one instead of a zero in a line of code and the fucking phone crashed when it hit a thousand emails or whatever, you'd probably beat the fuck out of you.
If you have all those eyeballs on you, you can say, hey guys, I know you're all looking at me and you do this all the time.
How many people download this podcast?
You're very aware of the responsibility that comes with, so you do two things.
You try to keep it really honest and true to yourself, but you also try to have really smart people on who have different perspectives so you can kind of figure out a way to get those ideas out into people's heads.
That's one form of power that I would consider a positive use.
I believe that Russia, which is such an amazing group of people, they could do anything they wanted, and a strong culture.
But I think the mindset of Russians, and in many ways, maybe it's not their fault, maybe it's a product of their history, their mindset is that they admire Russia.
The first example of power, control and strength and dominance more than they admire the power that influences and inspires.
I remember being amazed that the United States voted a man by the name of Barack Hussein Obama in when our public enemy number one was Osama bin Laden.
Well, there's that, but there's also the fact there's a two-party system where if you are on the left, you have to support whoever's on the left.
That's why all these people are lining up to support Hillary Clinton and ignoring left and right all the crazy evidence against her just being completely full of shit.
We played this video the other day where they were showing the difference between what the FBI has said about her trial, about them looking into the email server, the illegal use of the email server, the fact that top-secret documents were shared, cut and pasted, and shared with people that did not have the status to be able to check those, and that multiple devices were used to access these.
And then compared them to what she has said about it.
They consider her to be funny, thoughtful, and very intelligent.
Now, that was an interesting...
My eyes were a little bit open.
I said, well, the people that are close to her that have worked with her had more...
Favorable things to say, and I'm not a Hillary supporter, but they had more favorable than negative, which I thought was pretty interesting because I never thought of actually interviewing people that have worked closely with her.
They're angry that she's choosing to become healthy.
So they're saying this is in direct contrast to who she was before, who we loved, is this fucking cartoonish fat lady.
And this cartoonish fat lady who we want to pretend is healthy.
You know, there's a fucking slew of people out there that have blogs out there talking about different things that are healthy about being fat.
And I went down a rabbit hole one night because some woman was writing, she was this obese woman, and I was really sad when I was looking at her photos and...
You know, people like to highlight things that people say about them on social media and, you know, like, you know, all these people are harassing her for being fat.
But she's putting out a blog, right?
When you're putting yourself out there and you're putting a blog, you're just gonna...
You put some honey out there, you're gonna attract a certain amount of bugs.
There's just no way around that, right?
But she was talking about...
Different aspects of being overweight that are healthy.
And this is one weird phenomenon where healthy people that catch a disease sometimes don't do as well as fat people that have the same disease.
I guess because maybe, and this is bro science, but from what I remember reading, your fat can actually absorb or store more, I don't know, or you have reserves when you're not eating and stuff.
This book by Gary Taub I just love called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It.
And he traces the genealogy of the obesity epidemic.
And he goes all the way back to the 30s in New York City.
And he looks at how ineffective all these obesity clinics and even the signs of obesity has been.
It's been so difficult because a lot of times they treated it like it was a psychological disease, like you eat too much, so you'd go to a psychiatrist.
Or they would put you on these very restrictive diets, 1200 calories a day, and you would lose weight, but at the end of the day you'd descend.
So what he traces and he looks at the Native Americans that had to sort of get on government rations when their land was taken and they all blew up like balloons because they were given white flour.
And the thesis of the book is essentially that when you eat simple carbohydrates and a lot of carbohydrates, especially things like white flour and sugar, your body produces a lot of insulin and for a whole bunch of metabolic reasons, It's insulin that causes you to retain fat molecules and need more sugar for energy.
And he does a really great job in the book of explaining it.
But that sort of, you know, when you look at it that way and when you look at the fact that it's just a question of changing what you put into your body...
You know, you will then eventually have this keto diet, for example.
It's a really good way to lose weight and not have to restrict your calories.
I don't think there's any question anymore scientifically.
But one of the things that's hard for very fat people, obese people, who have trouble with this, who may have gotten caught into that pattern as kids, and it's very true that some people genetically do put weight on, they don't process carbs the way other people do.
But for a long time, what I'm saying is that there's always been and still is a stigma, which is you're fat, which means you are of weak character or you have a faulty character.
And that's why they take so much shit.
Whereas Gary Taubin's book said a lot of it was just the fact that people didn't know how the body worked.
And a lot of this information came out in Germany before the war.
There were these Austrian and German scientists that were really closing in on what insulin does to make you gain weight.
But guess what?
When the war was over, No American scientists were going to use German data.
It was kind of like, no, we'll come up with our own data.
There's a fucking thing about Wernher von Braun being a great American.
And, like, Wernher von Braun was a fucking Nazi.
The guy who ran the NASA space program was a straight-up Nazi who the Simon Wiesenthal Center said if he was alive today, they would prosecute him for crimes against humanity.
Because when they, in fact, Einstein, I believe, emigrated after a number of, or I think it was two scientists who were Jewish, were assassinated, were shot on the street.
And so all these, like, brilliant Jewish scientists said, let's get the fuck out of here and go to the UK and go to the United States.
The guy figured out a way to extract nitrogen from the air.
And it's one of the...
They say today that there's a fantastic Radiolab podcast on this.
I think it's called The Bad Show.
I think that's what it's called.
Because they did a good show and a bad show.
I think that's what it's called.
And what they just showed is that sometimes, and we've all known this, sometimes people that have done horrible, horrible things are also amazing at something that benefits a lot of folks.
And you know, also, if you take a sympathetic approach to a man who was a patriot, he was a patriot.
His country was at war.
He had benefited from this country.
He had a legacy in this country.
He had standing in this country.
And his country was under direct threat.
And he said, I think I know a way to help this war effort so we can stop the enemy.
And you know, we should all, again, it's not what you think, it's how you think.
We should all put ourselves in his shoes.
If I had a way, and I think I'm right about that, if I had a way as an American, as Brian Callen, To save my country from people I thought were going to actually take it over or kill a bunch of people, including my family, I'm going to gas the fuck out of them if I can invent a technique.
I'm going to gas them and I'm going to come up with a way to shoot a rocket at them.
Well, isn't it crazy, though, that this guy was literally receiving the Nobel Prize for the Haber Method at the same time for being wanted for crimes against humanity.
Giant scale war is like that and and Europe what was it was it?
50 million people at the end of World War two that were dead maybe as many as 80 million put that into context and that from those ashes from these experiments like fascism and The idea that you can perfect human beings and perfect society and create utopias from those experiments Came ash and 80 million graves, and so...
I mean, the idea, like, if you just wanted to improve upon human beings without killing people that you thought were inferior, if you just wanted to create the ubermunch without making everybody else die, But you need to re-educate.
But you have to create, you're right, you still have to create some respite.
You know, the great Matthew Arnold who said that the United States is the land of stock market and big guns and powerful, you know, and agrarians that can feed the world.
It's also the land of What he also said, I was going to say, he said, we have to always remember to create safe haven for our gentler spirits, our weirdos and people that think differently and act differently, because that's where you get Prince, Little Richard, Marilyn Manson, and all the things that make our culture interesting.
And that's a very important thing to keep in mind.
But again, look, when you talk about bombing and how we're getting better, think about for a second the methodology in our brain of how we, a lot of people, think of not only terrorism, and I'm guilty of this too, or even say something like cancer.
So if you have cancer, there's one method of treating it, and sometimes it works, which is there's a tumor, let's cut it out.
So you're talking now about the duality, is what I'm saying, is that we fall sometimes into the mindset that every problem can be cut out and removed, right?
What you just said, what you just said is there's another, there might be another tact.
In every issue.
So when we talk about the bad guys, and we talk about we have to...
And listen, there's a place and a time to take out the bad guys.
There's no question.
Of course.
But we have to be careful that we don't fall into...
One way of thinking and one way of dealing with what we consider threats, right?
Right.
Because we could make the problem worse.
And instead, sometimes we might want to say, maybe this time, maybe this is a problem that doesn't require cutting and radiation and, you know, removing.
Maybe it's what you just said.
Maybe we should approach it systemically from a different angle that's not as violent, not as physical.
And when you get, by the way, when I was in Italy, one of the weirdest fucking things about it, and I've never been there before, so I don't know, but the people that were there were describing to me how everything has changed.
I was talking to this one cab driver, he was a really interesting guy, and he was, we were commenting, I was asking him about, everywhere you look, they have these Land Rover Defenders that are in camo with these military people standing out there with fucking machine guns.
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
And I said, is this normal?
And he said, no.
He said, this is the new way.
He's like, the world is changing.
He said, this is not a good world.
He said, this is not good.
And I said, so this is a direct response to the terrorist threats and the things that have been happening in Paris.
He goes, yes, yes, yes.
He goes, they don't want it to happen here.
So all the places where there was tourists, whether it was the Vatican, whether it was the Colosseum, you saw these camouflaged Land Rover defenders and these public displays of guns.
And a woman.
I saw a woman.
I was thinking about punching her and taking her gun.
Well, this is the other thing is, again, not only do they do that because they're fanatical, they think they're actually gonna change something and make the world a better place by behaving in this mad fashion, by killing children.
You have to understand that that's not like they're all camped out in one area.
They're in a town the size of, let's say, Baltimore, and they have safe houses, but for the most part, they're all over that place.
But more importantly, as ISIS fighters die, what they do is they come to families that are peace-loving families, and they say, listen, we need to conscript your son.
And your two other sons right there.
They now belong to ISIS. Now you can say no and die or you can bring them over for the cause because you better be down for the cause.
And I think the argument against that, that you should not have that because you're more likely to kill someone in your family, that's not a great argument either.
I think on both sides, the real issue is mental health.
The real issue is inequality.
The real issue is people growing up.
And when I say inequality, I don't necessarily even mean rights.
I mean in the environment in which your soul enters this world Like what what what is the environment that you and I entered?
Well, we have really nice parents and we got really lucky We got born in America and you didn't you born America one of the Philippines born in the Philippines, Jesus Christ I lived overseas until I was 14 years old.
If you were born in Iraq, or in Saudi Arabia, or in Afghanistan, or in any of these places where they're dealing with these ancient ideologies, you're fucked.
It's like there's a race, and the race is 30 miles long, and you're starting out at mile one, where some people are at mile 29. There's no way.
It's no way this is fair.
There's no way.
It's just not fair.
And there's got to be a way through either time or effort or just the sheer expression of ideas that permeate through this world.
Where slowly but surely things have to even out to the point where people realize the correct way to behave and treat people.
Look, you could say religious tolerance all you want, but when there's a fucking woman dressed like a ninja at the mall, that lady is not in a good place.
She's being forced to dress like that.
This is not her idea.
There's no way it is.
This is an idea that was stuck into her life when she was a small person.
And she grew up with that idea.
Now she's married to some guy who enforces that idea.
And this guy's walking around with a fucking golf shirt on.
You're wasting a lot of human potential Yes, a lot of people with ideas that can make the world a better place You also you're stifling the debate and the discussion look there's a lot of people that think different than me man a lot of people whether they're From different parts of the world or whether they have different likes or dislikes and they have different Art that they appreciate and I I like hearing their point of view There's a lot of people that I don't agree with what they're saying and I like to hear what they say there's Radical
feminists that I listen to their ideology and listen to what they're saying and I try to figure out where the fuck they're coming from and I try to figure out, okay, is this a direct response to something they've experienced in their life?
Like, how much of this has to deal with them being persecuted?
How much of what people say has to do with their direct experiences with the opposite sex?
At a bunch of feminists, right?
And some of them have pink hair, and they weigh 300 pounds, and you know life was not fucking awesome for them around men.
You just know it wasn't.
Well, how much of this anti-male sort of ideology that they're espousing, like how much of that comes from their direct experiences with men, and how different would it be if they grew up looking like Julia Roberts?
My buddy Hunter is really good at reading everything and putting it into context where I can understand it.
You know what I mean?
He can create a useful...
He can turn it into a useful...
You know what I mean?
You can read a bunch of books, but you don't have to put it together.
This motherfucker can put it all together and contextualize it and everything else.
And we read this book...
We'll read a book and then talk about it.
So we read this book called The Secret of Their Success.
The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich.
And the book is...
The theme of the book is basically this...
And it's to your point.
Human beings are smart because they borrow culture.
Human beings are smart because societies that excel have to be open and have to be open enough so that they can borrow the best things from other cultures.
So, for example, if you and I are put in the middle of the Arctic, Unless we find a bunch of Inuit, we're dead in about three days.
If you and I are in the Amazon, if you take an Inuit who can kick ass and find seal meat and everything else and put him in the Amazon, he doesn't have the culture.
Human beings survive and grow and excel because we are really good at learning from each other, borrowing ideas.
It's called the diffusion of innovation.
That's the most important thing.
And when you have societies that have these strong...
Rules and these strong ideologies that keep people essentially restricted, you are not going to have the free flow exchange of ideas.
Look at, for example, mixed martial arts.
Think about where martial arts has come once the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the Gracies created this crazy thing where everybody got to fight everybody else.
Pretty soon, everybody starts sharing secrets.
Everybody starts to kind of like go, well, this works, this doesn't work.
And you were putting it in an arena where you were actually, it was just a very open place.
That's how societies, that's how innovation happens.
That's the best way to get ideas to move forward.
And again, the problem with this sort of countries that are restrictive, like Russia, like Saudi Arabia, with these strong sort of either cultures of power or cultures of religion, is that they create It's a very difficult atmosphere, not only to be open with your ideas, but to benefit from your ideas.
You are not going to start a company like Apple in Russia when you know that the government, like Putin or whoever, could take it anytime they want.
Let me ask you this, because this is kind of an interesting thought that's going through my head.
Do you think that one of the things that's going on today that just really wasn't going on...
I mean, in the 70s you had...
The Iran hostage crisis with Jimmy Carter and all that jazz.
But if you really go back and think about what that was all about, and if you really look at the history of the United States intervention in the Middle East, it was really about controlling resources, controlling natural resources.
But that was also about resources, too, because they were trying to...
The Mujahideen, they were trying to control Afghanistan, and they wanted to get the natural gas pipelines.
And there's a lot of it that deals with monopolizing natural resources and the amount of money that you can get from there.
And then also the amount of natural resources that could be used to strengthen military regimes.
There's a lot of control issues in that.
But you didn't have the kind of terrorist activity...
That you're having today, which also coincides with the freedom and expression of ideas and information at an unprecedented rate that we're all experiencing today.
And the areas where this is not true, the areas where the freedom of expression and the tolerance of ideas...
I mean, if you look at the United States, there's some nonsense that's going on today with political correctness, and there's some complete The left that's taken so far left that it almost becomes right because they're just completely...
Controlling.
Not just controlling, but so infatuated with the idea of enforcing their version of what...
This is the boiling point of all these ideas where things are changing at this radical rate.
And this is the world that is also being attacked.
And really being opposed by this completely constricted world that really doesn't feel like it has a chance.
Like, this world is trying desperately to cling to these old ways.
I mean, if you look at what ISIS is, they are desperately trying to cling to these ancient religious ideologies that were established in a way that does not allow for the even exchange of ideas and information.
And this new way is also attached, of course, to the military-industrial complex.
It's also attached to the idea that there's hundreds of different military bases in hundreds of different countries where we're in control of massive amounts of people's safety.
You know, terrorism, by the way, in the 70s, and I remember being in Rome Airport, they had plenty of guys with machine guns because of the Red Brigade.
There was communist terrorism.
There was Palestinian terrorism back then a great deal.
Because when you say there wasn't anything like ISIS, you're right.
But, for example, in Indonesia, which was essentially an American ally, Indonesia had...
Take a look at how many people in one year died during the communist purge, and I think it was 1965. By many accounts, there were probably one million people, most of whom were Sort of take the commando oxy.
They were the sort of civilian conscripts that the military kind of recruited and said, find us the communists in your villages.
And they were marched down to the river.
They had their heads chopped off.
And by many accounts, almost a million quote-unquote communists in a period of about a year in Indonesia were slaughtered.
He got banned from Twitter for writing a bad review about Ghostbusters, which essentially confirms what he said about the regressive left, is that they're trying to stifle ideas.
And then they're saying that he's responsible for the harassment of Leslie Jones, which is horrible.
What he did was make an incredible amount of sense when he was describing that you cannot make fun of this movie, you cannot criticize this movie, if you do, you're labeled a misogynist.
And he talked about how preposterous this movie is, that these women are all out kicking ass, and every man in the movie is a buffoon, and the women don't have any negative traits or qualities at all.
They're super powerful and super awesome and hilarious, and the humor is non-existent because they put them in this restrictive box.
If you can stop people from being shitty to people, and you say, well, here's someone who's using Twitter, and they're going after people in a very shitty way, but...
The problem with that is, look at how many fucking people have made shitty, horrible, evil comments about police officers.
All police officers.
Trust and safety counsel.
When it comes to safety, everyone plays a role.
Please make that larger so I can read it.
Twitter empowers every voice to shape the world, but you can't do that unless you feel safe and confident enough to express yourself freely and connect with the world around you.
To help give your voice more power, Twitter does not tolerate behavior intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user's voice.
When they did that, he gained 20,000 new followers immediately because there was a massive backlash.
So now they're in a place where there's even more backlash because if you look at the actual words that he typed, Versus what they're accusing him of and it just doesn't stack up It's clear that they don't like him because he's a Republican.
He's a Trump supporter He and he is a fucking troll.
I love him.
I think he's hilarious He's a troll but in the marketplace of ideas, you should be able to combat his trolling behavior without gagging him Engage him In a debate, in a vigorous spirited debate, don't gag the guy.
And if he's actually harassing people, if he's actually saying, hey, go find Leslie Jones and throw dog shit at her or do something horrible to her or slash her tires or something like that.
He thinks Trump is a master troll and he thinks that the plagiarism was on purpose because now more people are talking about it and then more people are...
I don't know if that's true, but I think it's hilarious that, did you know that his tweet, Trump's tweet that he put out to congratulate his wife for speaking is exactly verbatim the same tweet that Obama put out to congratulate his wife for speaking.
That's another thing that they did with Leslie Jones, which she was really upset, is that trolls were taking words and putting them, like they were taking a photoshop and making her, like her name, like what she had, you know, her Twitter name, and then writing horrible shit about gay people.
She said some kind of fucked up things on Twitter herself.
And, you know, things that can be construed as racist.
One of the things she said about white people being shit.
Fuck white people shit.
Like, something like that.
It was on Breitbart.
See if you could find the actual things that they were saying.
Like, how could Leslie Jones get away with saying this?
But...
Milo gets banned for writing an article.
And I'm not...
But I think what Leslie said, like, white people shit, it could have been that she was saying, like, someone did something, and goddamn white people, this is some white people shit.
You know, Otto and George, if you don't know, Otto was this fucking great, hilarious comedian who had a puppet named George, and his puppet was evil, and these bushy eyebrows.
And the puppet would say these fucked up things, and Otto would go, ah, I can't believe you're saying that.
Like, what the hell?
And the puppet would say, he goes, I don't understand where all these fucking queers are coming from.
unidentified
For a group of people that can't breed, where the fuck are they all coming from?
There's a limited amount of information that we can kind of like keep in our heads.
So actually stereotyping was something that kept us safe.
You're talking about, when you talk about stereotyping, what you're really talking about is pattern recognition and chunking information.
You're looking at something because you don't have a lot of time.
You're looking at a dude.
It's like Dov Davidoff's joke about, you know, he said he was sitting there and this guy walked up to him.
He's already done this joke, so I'm not ruining it.
But he said, you know, look, we assume things all the time.
He goes, I saw this guy with teardrop tattoos.
He had a knife.
And I was like, I don't want to hang around here.
And the girl goes, don't assume.
He could be a chef.
I'm like, that's fine.
He could be a chef.
But if you pull your pants down and you got a bunch of blisters in your genitals, I'm not going to assume you got stung by a pack of bees.
You know, at the end of the day, you do stereotype.
You make choices based on how you, you know, what the information you get.
And you do it very quickly because sometimes that information can keep you safe.
A cop, a lot of times when they see, they can tell if somebody shouldn't be somewhere because they'll look for certain things.
That person's driving and they're on their way somewhere.
There are lots of different little signals that cause you to profile.
Because sometimes profiling is what's called good police work.
We all do it.
When I'm driving and I see a dude in his car and I see the back of his head, I can make a lot of fucking assumptions on how he's driving and whether or not he's going to signal.
So as a Jew, when you actually don't have, you know, a country, I'm just, you know, as an example...
Guess what your security is?
Your fucking security at the end of the day is how thick your wallet is because money, money is how you survived.
You know the reason that a lot of Jews- That's a good point.
The reason Jews were into the jewelry trade?
Diamonds?
Well, diamonds are something you could pick up, put in a pouch, and run the fuck away really quickly.
You could transport your wealth.
So they were like, well, we're kept out of banking, we're kept out of all these things, but we can make clothing?
And we're jewelers.
And they came to this country, those immigrants came to this country with those two skills.
The Irish came to this country with, hey, I got two hands.
I can work a farm.
What do you need me to do?
The Jews were like, I can make fucking really nice clothes and I can label them and I can get you to think that they're even nicer because I understand a little bit about marketing.
Oh, and by the way, I got diamonds.
There were certain things that they were forced into and they came to this country and they had a skill set.
So I look at that and I go, ooh, that's just cultural residue.
That's just cultural residue.
You were taught that that's how you get ahead.
And you were taught that holding on to your money is, by the way, also a way to ensure your survival.
So the more you learn about, you know, the more you learn about a people's history, the more you learn about our biology, the more we learn about brain science, I think, the more compassionate it makes us.
Well, that's also why a lot of people feel that some Asian folks are bad drivers because they're used to minding their own business, not looking left and right.
And when they walk, they walk straight ahead and they bump into each other all the time.
See, people are like real easy going, let everybody, and I realize like, what you're dealing with in Los Angeles, like I felt it the moment I got off the plane when I went from Montana to here, the moment you get here, you're like, you gotta go, gotta go, cut this guy off, get ahead, gotta get it.
There's a feeling in the air.
And they did a study, and one of the things that they did a study on was they put up cameras in cities, and they measured the amount of footsteps that people take, like how quickly they walk.
And then they measured how many syllables people say in a minute, how quickly they talk.
And through those two numbers, they were able to accurately estimate how many people lived in that city, down to like a thousand.
Well, Gail Collins, who's a columnist in the New York Times, always says that right-wing and left-wing people, it's all about space.
You become more of a socialist when you have to contend with all your neighbors.
So you live in a building and it requires cooperation.
It requires waiting in line.
It requires all these things.
When you live in Bozeman, Montana and you have all that space, you can preach self-reliance.
You can sort of talk about the value of sovereignty, personal sovereignty, self-reliance and all that stuff.
So it does play a real factor in your psychology.
It's like...
No, I was going to say Malcolm Gladwell in his book.
I think it was Blink where you mentioned when people would come to his office and if you mentioned Florida, raisins and orange juice, people left the room a lot slower.
Well, there's also something else about liberal towns.
They're small liberal towns like you're talking about.
I don't think they turn them liberal.
What they really do is they take away any existential threat for the most part.
They make those towns super safe.
There are a lot of rules that would penalize anybody, for example, young men for misbehaving by punching each other in the face or imposing their aggression on a weaker group of people.
I think that's also how I characterize a liberal small academic town.
They are safe, for the most part, safe environments for you to figure the world out and express yourself.
And he said, what I would notice, and everybody would notice, is that when the shootout was about to happen, or a fight was about to break out, he said there was almost like this...
Like, whatever it was imagined or not, there would be this calm before the storm.
The air would change.
Things would settle.
And then, boom, something would happen.
And he said, everybody felt that.
He said, because we were talking about how my friend walked through the savannah with his wife, who grew up in Kenya.
And the people in the village, man, it was fucking horrific.
They would go through this village with cameras and people would be showing, like, this guy's missing an arm, this guy's missing a leg, this guy has a bite taken out of his head.
Great Whites, they played, they had, this guy, Paul DeGelder, who did our podcast, Fighter and Kid, and he ended up losing his arm and his hand and his leg to a bull shark in Sydney Bay.
There's another thing they've found out today, there's an article today, there was always these myths about mountain lions being loose in England, in the countryside.
When you listen to Dan Carlin's Wrath of the Cons or you read History, And it was always, here we come, we're knocking down your walls, and we're selling everybody into slavery.
History is a history of rape, right?
So most women basically were like, ah, shit, walls are coming down, our men are going to be killed, we're going to be raped.
I mean, it just happened over and over and over.
I would imagine that most of history is a story like that.
And women were basically just forced to be taken by either a group of men or whatever.
It's really interesting how, I guess, women had to adapt and evolve.
And this woman wrote an article, and I can't remember her name because it was pretty controversial.
And she said that because, you know, so much of history, women had no choice.
They were forced upon by men.
One of two things happened.
First, they had to find the man who was the most aggressive and strong who could protect them from the other men.
So for women to be attracted to aggression and strength is not so uncommon.
But the other really controversial thing she said was that there are cases where women are turned on by aggressive sex, you know, being held down and all that stuff.
And it's probably the fact that they had to evolve because otherwise they'd get injured if they didn't get lubricated.
I read that and I was like, well, good luck with that.
But she was a female anthropologist.
I can't remember her fucking name.
But I was like, well, can you imagine coming up with that article?
And this is my thesis in anthropology in Amherst College, everybody.
There's a New York Times article they wrote where they were saying that he altered the carbon footprint of human beings on Earth, a measurable altering of the carbon footprint because it killed so many people.
You could measure the difference in the amount of people that were there before him and after him by core samples.
Very controversial, but of course, with everything, it goes back to exactly what we were talking about, where Where when you come up in the ghetto, you might just create Miles Davis.
I mean, there's a lot of heartache and terrible things, and from shit is the brightest flower, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, and once there's enough time passed, then you can sort of look at it with this distance, and you can kind of objectively look at it and go, well, you know, here's the benefit of that.
In other words, story and talk about hardship and separating a child from his mother and all that stuff.
Gerard Butler, 300. And kicking people into wells.
But yes, there's a mythology, a warrior ethos that you can, you know, kind of, I'm a Spartan.
But Athens, the Acropolis and the writings of the great philosophy, the butt-fucking, the idea of demos, democracy, demos the people.
These are ideas.
Look at, in today's world, the amount of innovation that's coming out of a peaceful society, and a society that respects other people's ideas, and a society that, for the most part, at least from a historical perspective, gives a great deal of freedom and benefit to those that have the guts to come up with their own ideas.
Well, that's the interesting aspect about what the United States is as this Experiment and self-government and what it is what it started off as what it is currently Is that this is the most recent of countries and it's also the one that has overwhelmingly the most innovation the most artistic Contributions we're pioneers, but there's so much that comes out of here in terms of comedy Film.
I mean, obviously the rest of the world has its contributions.
I'm not saying that the United States is the best.
I mean, the Beatles came out of England.
There's a lot of amazing works of art that come out all over the world.
But this country is a hotbed of artistic expression and innovation.
I mean, what he did to Baghdad in 1260. Yeah, well they say that to this day Baghdad maybe still hasn't recovered from them invading and they said that the rivers ran red with blood and ink, black with ink, like all the amazing works.
They were like the head of math, philosophy, of course.
And a lot of people say that the Middle East has never even recovered, has never quite recovered from that.
But, you know, there are so many important things for why a nation, you know, for example, one is that your political parties that lose Live to see another day.
That is very important.
When you lose an election in a lot of countries, like the hardliners, and somebody said to me, I said, why are the hardliners in Iran such a pain in the ass?
He goes, because if they lose, they will die.
That's a very important thing to keep in mind.
So when you have power and your survival depends on holding on to power, you're going to have a secret police that basically is pretty brutal when they sniff any kind of insurrection.
This country is pretty amazing.
What's so unique about the United States is after the Revolutionary War, after every Revolutionary War, the country always breaks into civil war, always.
And the Founding Fathers had incredible restraint and wisdom to allow the election after that war to go as it would.
They didn't resort to violence.
That's so unique in history.
But our country and the UK and Australia and Canada and a couple other countries, when you lose, democracy is built on the idea that when your political party loses, you live to see another day and fight on.
Very important.
The other is property rights.
You need property rights.
The other is courts that mean something.
And the other is the scientific method.
You have to embrace the scientific method.
A society has to say that it's not about superstition.
This is not a theology.
Let's base reality on what you can measure and what you can see.
Those things are so fucking important.
If you don't have those Those central principles as a through line, if that's not the scaffolding of your society, you're just not going to do as well as a country like the United States.
You're not going to have people that innovate because there's no fucking incentive.
There's no incentive in it.
You're not going to benefit from it.
You could get it stolen or you could be killed because you think differently or all those things.
Yeah, so the irony, the ironic thing is when you're sensitive and nice to people, when you're empathetic, and when you're respectful of other people, even the ones you disagree with, You make a stronger society.
Your society is stronger in every way, including militarily.
Yeah, we've been talking about that recently, that I think that people have a massive overestimation, massive, of what they can and can't do with their body.