Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dissect America’s political dysfunction, from Clinton-era scandals like the $50M Mark Rich pardon and Uranium One’s Russian ties to the two-party system’s failure to curb corruption or address shared crises. They contrast this with Switzerland’s multi-party model while debating R. Crumb’s surreal art and the blurred lines between sexual misconduct and systemic accountability, critiquing campus investigations like Occidental College’s flawed processes. The conversation then pivots to industrial farming’s unintended carnage—buzzards feasting on Iowa’s crushed wildlife—and the extinction of Ice Age megafauna, from seven-foot terror birds to short-faced bears, alongside British explorers’ disciplined Antarctic logs. Ultimately, Rogan and Callen argue that systemic change demands both expanded consciousness (like psychedelics for politicians) and ruthless efficiency, questioning whether rigid ideologies or overanalysis stifle progress. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't think there's anything wrong with someone who is supervised, who is 18, who is sort of mentored into having a couple of drinks with an intelligent and very disciplined parental figure.
Like someone who's a smart dad or a smart mom who says, I don't want you to be...
I don't want this to be something that's so out of reach that you wind up doing it and getting obsessed with it because it's the forbidden thing and it becomes a big deal.
It's fun to be a mature, and we are, and to be silly geese, but I think the difference is you become a real adult and you become mature when you have other people that rely on you and where other people's happiness to some degree is more important than your own.
You know what I mean?
And their development causes you concern, angst, and requires your time and sacrifice.
It's really tough to be a silly goose if you're behind your taxes, or if you have massive credit card debt that you're ignoring, or there's these stacking stress Things, these events, these factors in your life that can really get involved in your happiness and your silliness.
So as long as, you know, your ducks are in a row, then you can kind of laugh a little bit.
Well, we've taken for granted the fact that we have...
We figured out a way to preserve our biology in most countries in terms of, like, we have life-saving medications or sort of preventions for keeping us from things like malaria and diphtheria and all those things that used to really...
Because they always talk about when you go into a country and you want to get that country on its feet and you want to help develop that country...
The first thing you have to make sure of is that people aren't suffering from chronic illnesses, parasites, diseases that just make them feel shitty.
They've got the right nutrition.
So the first thing to do is take care of your biology.
Take care of that sort of...
That thing that you live in, that machine.
Because otherwise, if you don't feel good, there's a little rudimentary things.
If you don't feel good, like hookworm in the South after Civil War was so endemic, it would get in your feet.
Hookworm gets in your, enters through your feet, because kids, people always use the, they wouldn't use outhouses, they'd use the great outdoors, and then you'd walk around on your bare feet.
So what hookworm does is it gets into your, I guess it goes through your feet, and then it causes you to become anemic, because it latches on to, I don't know, it has some mechanism where it latches on to the intestine or something.
Either way, Huge portions of the South after the Civil War were anemic.
I mean, huge towns.
And in fact, it was so bad that they started running campaigns saying, use an outhouse or die.
Use an outhouse or die.
And they solved the problem, but it was a major issue in Reconstruction after the war.
One of my most vivid memories was my sister screaming and crying, and I run in, and there's a giant pink worm coming right out of her Four-year-old ass or whatever it was.
If you want to look up something, look up this video that Red Band was showing me the other night at the Comedy Store about some guy who had an insane amount of worms removed from his gut.
He went to the doctor and was complaining of stomach pain and all these issues.
If you got fucking worms, you got a problem, period, right?
You're not supposed to get worms.
And just because you get sick because you get worms and then the worms have food to eat because you eat a certain diet, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat that certain diet.
You still have a fucking worm living in you, buddy.
However, there's also the fact that you irrigated and grew your vegetables in human shit and animal shit as part of the fertilizer.
When that fertilizer got on a piece of lettuce or something that was raw or got on your hands and you ingested, that's how you get things like hepatitis A. That's how you get other parasites.
And for a long time, meaning, you know, a couple of decades, it was awesome.
So people partied there.
Sonny Bono and Cher had a fucking house there.
They would boat.
They would fish and swim.
And there was all these, like, beautiful vacation videos.
Like, visit!
The beautiful Salton Sea, California's inland riviera.
Greetings from the Salton Sea.
So they filled that fucking place up with water, and there was tilapia in there, and people would boat, and all the hip people from the 1950s, they would go to fucking party at the Salton Sea.
Yeah, Sonny Bono, before he died, before he went skiing and whacked into a tree, his goal was to find some sort of a desalination and filtration method for taking all the runoff and all the pesticides and bullshit out of the salt and sea.
When I was in Seattle a couple months ago, I talked to this gentleman who runs, there's this salmon thing down there where you can go underneath one of the bridges and actually see the ladders where the salmon pass through, and you can see the salmon swimming up the river.
When you were talking about all those salmon that died, but they're swimming in one direction, I had this image of all the actors that come to Los Angeles over the years.
I would always feel that way sometimes.
I remember driving in traffic to an audition or something, and I would always get this image of being a salmon swimming upriver.
And more importantly, I wasn't really sure...
What I was doing it for?
The guy was like, I wonder if I'm doing this so I can see if I can win at this impossible game?
Or do I really want to be on set acting?
Like, what's really going on?
And what is acting anyway?
And why did I get into this in the first place?
And who are my heroes?
Oh yeah, De Niro and Walken and Pacino.
But did I know what they're really doing?
Do I just want to be in the movie and be the guy in the movie?
Or do I really want to be an actor?
And why am I spending so much time doing jujitsu and other things when I should be working on my acting?
I met him when I did the Joe Rogan Questions Everything show, and we were talking about chemtrails, which he has worked really hard to try to explain to people that are ultra-paranoid.
He calls them the training wheels of conspiracy theories.
No, they won't listen, but...
What he had to say and what I saw from the people that believe in him, it's pretty obvious what's going on.
And the problem with everybody freaking out about these fucking artificial clouds that are made naturally by jets as they pass through the air with the moisture in the air, the problem with them freaking out about that kind of stuff is the government does do shady shit sometimes.
But you've got to be able to differentiate between when it's actually doing shady shit and when it's just a chemical reaction or just a natural reaction of the superheated jet engine hits the cool air and it creates this cloud.
But I think my experience with people who are conspiracy theorists is not so much that they're looking for the truth.
I think it's a little bit more, and I want to be fair, but I think it's...
I always notice that they are...
More interested in belonging to a club that is in the know.
There's an identity attached to it.
So it no longer becomes really about the search for...
See, if you're scientifically minded, right?
If you're somebody who says, like Michael Shermer, who says, I believe in the scientific method, what that really means is you start with doubt.
Doubt is always present because you're always trying to prove your assumptions.
And your assumptions are usually assumed to be wrong until they are proven otherwise through...
Trial and error, independent lines of inquiry that come to the same conclusion, all things being equal.
That is how we live.
That goes into the medicine, the computer that you use, and everything else.
There is a way to get to a result that actually has tangible, mathematical, measurable reality.
And I think that conspiracy theorists are as attached to being a conspiracy theorist Regardless of what that means, as they are, as someone who would be, I don't know, it's an identity, as opposed to a search for truth.
And you show them, they're like, where do they get those photos, man?
I'm like, come on.
I know there's a lot of shady shit the government has done, but this one has been tied up.
It's obvious what this is.
Now, here's the problem.
When you pretend that those are clouds and that these clouds that are coming out of the back of these jets are some sort of a chemical spray that the government is launching indiscriminately down on civilization for mind control or some nefarious purpose.
Well, what I think is really awesome about the internet and about all this is that I think all you hear lately, and I agree, is that the mainstream media is not really a reliable source of truth anymore.
They're not objective.
They're just not objective.
I don't like Trump, but I will admit that the New York liberal media, who I rarely agree with anyway, has given him a fucking...
I mean, he's his own worst enemy, of course.
But there's no question that a lot of it's either bought off or influenced by its owners and influenced by the fact that it has to be entertaining to compete for ratings.
But it's also not objective.
When I was watching Hannity on Fox News, he wouldn't even let this woman get her point of view out about Hillary.
And I think what's going to happen and what is happening is you have things like Viceland...
And different independent movements that are saying, you know what?
Let's get integrity back into journalism because it's very needed.
And let's get out there and get real stories that are going to take guts and let's do some real investigative journaling.
I think there will always be a marketplace for that.
We want to know the truth.
We want the truth.
I know that Fox News and CNN give a lot of news to a lot of people, but I think as they continue to discredit themselves with certain behaviors, people are going to be looking for more advice.
CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS, the big ones, everybody that's putting out these gigantic shows that are being viewed by millions of people, there's a small handful of you.
And if you're full of shit, it's a giant problem.
So if you're full of shit, it doesn't matter all the good stuff that you do.
It doesn't really matter, because you're fucking us.
And I watched Fox News and I watched CNN the other day, and I'm going back and forth between the two of them, and I would just watch one for an hour and then watch the other for an hour.
One of them just wants to talk about nothing but sexual assault, and they were talking about how important it is that we don't use certain language in the workplace, and Don Lemon was telling people, I've had to check people.
But look, the sexual assault allegations and everything, they're all serious, right?
You don't want a guy who's a sexual assault attacker who is in the White House.
You don't want that.
Nobody wants that, right?
But it's also important that you look at all the fucking corruption that's been shown about the Democratic Party, about what they did to keep Bernie Sanders out, the way they conspired.
Grievances and corruption has been well documented as a mile long It's almost like if I was Hillary Clinton and I knew that I had like there's a lot of dirt on me like goddamn I did some shady shit now the internet starting to Expose my financial dealings and these two hundred and fifty thousand dollar Speeches that she did you know what I'd like to run against someone who is so fucking terrible Someone's a horrible person Maybe I can get Donald to do me a solid.
Well, I don't think Donald Trump was anything but Donald Trumpian.
I mean, I don't think that Donald Trump has an ideology or a philosophy because that would require...
Oh, he does.
He has an ideology and a philosophy in terms of what he can see and what he has experienced and felt.
But if you think Donald Trump actually has...
A philosophy and an ideology that was based on him sort of really thinking and reading and stepping outside himself, reaching beyond himself, you're out of your mind.
There's never been a character like this running for president.
I'm so torn.
Watch this.
Go full screen and press play so we can hear it.
unidentified
Light moves with a certain velocity.
If you take the various constants that appear in Maxwell's equations and put them together in the right way, you get the velocity of waves moving down an axis.
But he was also, as a real estate developer, he gave to whatever political party was going to get him the tax breaks he needed or give him the favors he needed.
I think there are a lot of Trump voters that might be ignorant or not interested in, you know, but I think it's unfair.
I think it's unfair to categorize somebody who wants to vote for Trump or not vote for Hillary.
I think it's very unfair and condescending to consider them to be dumb or rednecks.
I think the problem with that is this.
Hillary Clinton is talking in very much the same way and along the same parallels that Obama did eight years ago.
If you are a working class dude, if you are somebody who has been left behind through globalization and through, I guess, just how the country has moving technology, so if you're a coal miner, if you're, I don't know, there are a lot of industries, You are listening to this woman speak exactly the way Obama did eight years ago and your life has gotten worse.
It hasn't gotten better.
It's gotten worse.
Why in the world would you not...
Why in the world would, out of desperation...
Would you not try this very entertaining, giant white guy who's got confidence, who wants to break Washington apart, and who's saying, I'm going to make America great again.
That appeals to our emotions.
And I do a lot of reading and stuff.
I don't think I would necessarily be that different if I didn't know what else.
If you take acting and stand-up away from me or whatever, what am I going to do?
Teach?
I don't know what I'd do.
Either way, I'd be pretty desperate for a change and I wouldn't be voting for Hillary.
But don't you think there's a giant issue in deciding that you're going to vote for someone who says they're going to go after someone and lock them in jail?
The short answer is yes, the president can appoint an attorney general from the Justice Department, his own attorney general, I believe, to investigate a special case.
He was a fugitive who had fled the U.S. during his prosecution and was residing in Switzerland.
He owed $48 million in taxes and was charged with 51 cases, accounts of tax fraud, was pardoned for tax evasion.
He was required to pay a $1 million fine and waive any use of the pardon as a defense against any future civil charges that were filed against him in the same case.
Critics complained that Denise Eisenberg, Rich, his former wife, had made substantial donations to the Clinton Library and Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign.
What a surprise!
That Mark Rich, who lives in Switzerland, and you're going to give him a pardon.
Do you think they're connected?
It was so blatant, it was ridiculous.
But you can keep going with the pardons.
There are a lot of examples of that.
So to call Hillary Clinton not corrupt, the Uranium One deal.
And Bill Clinton helped with his influence, a well-documented influence, helped this Canadian businessman buy those uranium fields.
But here's the problem.
That Canadian businessman gave $31 million to the Clinton Foundation with a pledge for $100 million more, and he gave Clinton a $500,000 Check for speaking, for a speech.
Then when it came time for the Kazakh oil fields to be sold to a Russian company, a Russian company that the State Department and everybody else in our intelligence community said, guys, the Soviets are going to have a lot of access to uranium, some of the biggest reserves in the world, and this Canadian businessman is going to sell it to a Russian company.
Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, and she okayed that deal.
She was one of the people that had to give her okay.
So now the Russians own a lot of that, a lot of those oil fields.
Oh, and by the way, look up the U.S.-Russian Technology Initiative, where one of the movements is to have...
Russian citizens and American citizens share technology and technological sort of ideas and stuff.
The problem with that is that that requires American investors.
28 of them were chosen.
60% were...
Oh, I'm sorry.
And Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was spearheading that.
Of the 28 U.S. partners that invested, 60% gave to the Clinton Foundation.
I can give you a definition, but for the most part, a slush fund typically would be A place to put money that under certain auspices is said for this, but it's actually used for other things.
I mean, what I was going to say earlier about tuning back and forth between CNN and Fox News, it was one of the best examples I've ever seen of the fact that these guys are playing a game and this is just the propaganda news network now.
No one's having this conversation that we're having where we're saying, look, maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to get someone in there who's some crazy rich guy who's this gigantic figure that'll stir things up.
Maybe having a guy like him would be a doorway to having someone who has some next level view of running government and including people in the process and moving it away from this The system's too restrictive, and it's too restrictive based on the times in which it was creative.
The representative government model that they needed in 1776, it's a very different world today.
When I say I'm a libertarian, what do I mean by that?
Because I'm not a total libertarian, right?
So here's a better way.
It's exactly what I'm trying to say.
Here's a much better way of...
Establishing sort of where you stand and rather than say these people over here are wrong and these people over here are right or these people are left or right, what you're doing is categorizing people and we know that people are all over the place.
Well, we do this, let's just take the fact that women are victims of sexual assault.
We've established that sexual assault is, first let's define what it is, but we know that for the most part it's a problem and it's a terrible thing when it happens, right?
I'm talking about rape.
Now, we know we want to solve that or make it better or make women safer or make the world safer.
I think what happens is a lot of times, the one thought process in solving that problem is as follows.
Well, let's find out who's doing the raping.
It's men!
It's men.
So what we're going to do is make it better because the way we're going to make it better is we're going to take the power away from those men.
And we're going to give it somewhere else.
And how are we going to do that?
Well, there's only one way to do it.
You need a big, big...
Powerful authority to actually be able to enforce that.
You need laws and you need regulations and you need restrictions.
So the idea that you will make someone else who's not powerful more powerful by putting down people that are already powerful, by taking that power away from them financially or with laws, as if that is going to make the people who have been oppressed It's going to make their lives better.
I think that's a faulty way of thinking.
I don't think that empowers women.
I don't think that empowers black people.
I don't.
I think rather personal responsibility and making it so that that group can figure out how to empower themselves.
And the way you empower yourself is not by taking power from somebody else.
I mean, unless they're a sadist and they're keeping you in a cage.
But for the most part, I think that's a very important distinction and discussion to have.
That's the discussion.
That's the debate I'd love to hear between CNN and Fox.
Yeah, there are different schools of thought, but let me keep going.
Why the fuck would we fight Russia?
Why are we in Afghanistan?
Why would anybody do any of these things?
At what point in time is it going to be ridiculous for the idea of giant groups of people to go over and try to fuck up other giant groups of people that are all in on it together for the profits of some person who probably doesn't give a fuck about you and is super happy to let you go to war for them so they can get more oil?
I think the problem is with having anyone being a figurehead.
I think once you have someone who's a figurehead, then that figurehead position becomes a coveted position.
It's hard to get to.
It's very important.
It becomes a goal.
And once it becomes a goal, you're going to get the super competitive people that are trying to achieve that goal.
And then along the way they start realizing that they can sell influence and speeches and that Bill Clinton got paid half a million bucks to talk to these people for an hour and Hillary Clinton got 250,000 to talk to some bankers for an hour.
It's like there's so much money in it that they start realizing like that position carries with it an incredible fiscal windfall.
And the first three parties that win are voted in they get to choose two presidents each Whoa, and those and then they're the fourth party the party that comes in fourth place with the fourth number of votes They get to elect one president.
So you actually have seven Presidents way better idea And not only the F7 presidents, they all have regular jobs.
It's not their only job.
And so they meet and they discuss legislation.
But guess what else?
Those groups are the ones, those parties are the ones that elect their own presidents.
The big fear in the conservative conspiracy theory world is, this has been explained to me, that they think that they're going to start a war with Russia to distract us from the WikiLeaks.
Beautiful beauty is without a doubt, as the old expression goes, in the eye of the beholder.
Certain people like certain things.
Certain people like certain kinds of art that I find disgusting.
They love it.
They love certain kinds of music.
They love certain features on people.
They love certain looks as far as clothing goes.
It's whatever the fuck you think it is.
If it's beautiful to you, it's ridiculous anyway.
Physical beauty in a human being, the difference between a person whose cheeks are this wide, like, you know, like five inches wide or seven inches wide, that extra two inches can make you look like a fucking weirdo.
Not that it throws you off because you're looking at the Fibonacci sequence of a person.
That's what happens when someone gets a nose job.
If they have a naturally huge nose and they get that bitch chopped down, something will look weird about their face to you because your brain is used to looking at things in a very distinct sequence.
The Fibonacci sequence, which exists on nautilus shells and sunflower seeds and all these different versions of it in nature.
But also, you can use that sequence, you can use those measurements to show roughly what a person's facial features would be like.
Yeah, you fuck with the whole outline of your face.
That's like when you see someone and their lips are way too big and their mouth is stretched too wide, so you know they've got fillers and some sort of a neck job where their face is pulled back.
You're immediately, like, your math is off on them.
Like, you're looking at them, you're like, my math's off.
But it's weird how like there's certain things that people just decide are beautiful and there's certain things that are beautiful to certain people that just don't resonate with others at all, you know?
And certain people are into certain looks, you know?
There's guys that are legitimately into morbidly obese women.
I listened to that podcast and Gadsad was talking about how even congenitally, he went through a whole litany of reasons why hip-to-waist ratio and breast size and all that stuff and symmetry and proportion are biological triggers for men and the idea that there isn't a standard of beauty that turns on men in general.
Well, I knew about him because our neighbors, when I was a kid, you know, my parents were hippies.
We lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. I lived in San Francisco.
And we had these crazy neighbors, these gay guys.
My aunt used to smoke pot and go next door, and they would go get naked and play bongos together.
This guy was black as the sky on a moonless night.
And he would get high as fuck and take all his clothes off and he was gay and his boyfriend, they would live together and they would all just get naked and play bongos together.
My aunt would go down there and get baked with him.
But anyway, they had these comic books.
They had R. Crumb.
And that was the first time I was ever exposed to R. Crumb.
I wonder if, though, those kinds of examples are...
First of all, I think everybody, though, regardless of what your aberration, your perversion, your fetish is, whatever you want to call a word, I think, though, that that still doesn't mean that they don't and can't recognize what would be considered harmonious.
I mean, that has been in the past, but that's less what's interesting.
I think when I see a CrossFit woman, like a woman who's just got a blowout ass and powerful legs and all that, and a back on her, maybe I want to breed with her, so maybe primordially I want to breed with her so my kids are studs, but I just find it physically very attractive when a girl's got a Well, you should find Art Crumb.
Because then there's the other side of me that likes a super feminine, petite, curvy woman, and that might be who I'd rather cuddle with And date, whereas the other one I just want to have animal sex with.
Well, that's part of the problem with being a man, is that genetically you're designed to spread them genes around as much as possible to ensure the survival of the race.
However, that's not really necessary anymore.
Like, we used to die real young, we were eaten by things left and right, so we have this fucking insatiable instinct to fuck all the time and get rid of loads and make people.
But there's a lot of us now.
Like, we figured it out.
Somewhere along the line.
But we still have the genes of people that lived 10,000 years ago.
When your survival, it wasn't guaranteed at all.
And it was most likely that something would go wrong.
And so the likelihood of you staying alive past 30 or 40 was very low.
So there was like a frantic urge to live.
I think if we knew that we had way less time and that death was way more common.
I think we decided somewhere along the line, rightly so, that's not healthy for our species.
It's not healthy for our culture.
It's not healthy for children to be burdened down by the responsibility of being a parent while they're still trying to figure it out.
And they'd probably do a way better job if they waited.
So all that stuff is sort of balancing itself out now because people are becoming more and more aware of it.
But we're still in the same genes.
We're still in the same fucking caveman genes.
The genetics have to be like constantly managed by the psyche, constantly managed by discipline, constantly managed by thinking, you know, whether it's yelling at somebody in traffic or whether it's all the other ridiculous male instincts that people have to, whether it's to start wars or to kick their ass because they're rooting for the wrong team and all that stuff, it's based on like these ancient reward systems that we've got stuck in our bodies.
But if you had a fight for your life, if you were in a hotel ballroom, you got locked in there with her, and she's coming full clip, and you realize this is for real.
Yeah, I was talking to this woman from South Africa recently at this party.
I told you the story about all the kids that, well, she grew up in, she lived in South Africa for a while, and it's really funny because she was talking about mountain lions and how hilarious it is that people are worried about mountain lions.
But she was talking about kids in Silicon Valley that are having problems dealing with their hyper-successful parents and the lack of time and attention that's being paid to them.
And there's a gigantic...
Epidemic suicides and all kinds of crazy shit.
They're cutting each other and it was a really disturbing conversation.
You know, like, that somehow or another the money that these kids have, you know, when they're 16, they have a fucking fresh BMW. The money provides connection and love and that you mean something to your parents.
Well, because it's so unattainable for so many folks, money and being rich like one of these kids seems like, well, they hit the lottery.
I'm supposed to feel bad for them.
But you don't realize that they didn't ask for that.
First of all, they didn't ask to be born that.
And it's not ideal.
It's not working out well.
You'd be way better off with happy, healthy parents that were around and went to your sports events and hung out with you and did things with you and were there all the time and gave you a feeling of comfort while you're growing up.
So you can grow up with a sense of security.
There's a lot of these kids that are growing up and they are all fucked up because their parents are never around.
The amount of kids that are doing pain pills today is apparently just off the charts.
They're doing Adderall for studying and for examinations and they're doing pain pills all the time.
It's just become an epidemic with people.
They're so fucking easy to get.
I know they're trying to curb that.
They're trying to make them more difficult to get, but there's still a ton of money that's being pumped into the system from the manufacturers of these.
As you were talking about before, about the use of influence in politics, the company that makes fentanyl, is that how you say it?
I never figured out how to say it.
Fentanyl.
They spent a half of a fucking million dollars on ads in Arizona just to try to make medical marijuana illegal.
Try to do ads against them in their recreational...
Why would they give a fuck?
Why are they doing that?
Why would the makers of a pill...
Google that, too, because that's another thing I keep wondering about.
And the company that makes that shit is trying to put out ads or pay for the campaign against marijuana being recreationally legal, which is just fucking crazy.
It's crazy.
You know, I know that they think that they're gonna lose profit from marijuana being legal, so I know that they're acting out of a business purpose.
That's just what businesses do.
But you just expect them on something that's so fucking important culturally and such an important precedent.
Like, that any company that's against marijuana becoming legal, that it is such a damaging position to take.
And if you get away with it today, By the time people examine this, and by the time it's looked back on five, ten years from now, whatever it is, you're gonna look preposterous that you spent any money to try to make marijuana illegal.
There's no reason.
There's no reason why anyone Should step in and try to make it illegal.
It's the will of the people, and there's no medical evidence whatsoever that shows that it's even remotely as dangerous as a million different things that are already legal.
But see, that's sort of another example of what I was talking about before, which is that you can try to legislate and pass laws and enforce sort of your view of reality of what you think is good for people.
But it seems to me a better way to go is to win the idea.
The idea that marijuana is not as destructive, for example, in many ways, I'm not an expert, but in many ways to say alcohol, which is legal.
Well, a big part of that was because of Richard Nixon.
You know, Richard Nixon funded studies.
They put studies together to try to find out what are the bad things about marijuana.
They couldn't find anything.
No, this was way before that.
Well, Reefer Madness was the 1930s.
The shit that Nixon did, Nixon passed the sweeping psychedelic act of 1970. That made everything Schedule I. There was DMT and mushrooms and all that shit.
And when the studies came up with favorable results, they buried them.
And this has also been proven fact.
So this is shit they knew for a long fucking time.
It's just a team thing.
It's going back to that same thing again.
There's pro and con.
There's right and left.
And even along this marijuana thing, there's a bunch of people that are scrambling to try to keep it illegal as long as possible so that it continues their profits with painkillers.
Painkillers are worried.
That if marijuana becomes legal, if marijuana, especially edible marijuana, which is incredibly potent but doesn't have any of the fucking downsides, doesn't have any of the negative effects, no one's dying from it, which is the biggest one.
And it's been shown to help so many people with seizures, so many different diseases, people that have AIDS, people that are on chemotherapy.
There's hundreds and hundreds of different things that it's been shown to help with, people with What is it a glaucoma?
What is that for the ocular pressure intraocular pressure relieves that it's amazing for inflammation for people that have back problems and all sorts of other issues Regarding pain and inflammatory issues that people have but these The things that would profit from keeping it illegal Are the same things that are killing people.
And the idea that they're allowed to do that and that no one steps in and no politicians talk about it being a huge evil and a real problem, it's one of the things that's left completely off the debate.
It's not to diminish sexual assault, because obviously that's really important.
It's not to diminish bribery.
Obviously that's really important and all this pay-to-play stuff and all these accusations of corruption on both sides.
Well, that is, and also learning how to distinguish.
And learning how to distinguish what you should label, for example, a psychedelic.
Well, not just that, but sometimes I wonder if...
If, when you call for the legalization of marijuana, which I would do of course, and I've always said that ultimately it's all about letting people make their own choices, but I wonder if it's important to distinguish between drugs, like do you think It certainly is.
I think that guy who's a groper, I think it's terrible to be a groper.
I think it's certainly something that should be discussed.
That's not the problem.
The problem is they're not discussing this other thing.
They're not discussing how many fucking people are hooked on painkillers.
It's a giant, massive epidemic and the idea that the same people that are selling those painkillers are actively working to make sure that marijuana stays illegal.
It lets you know that you're in a crazy system when the protectors and the politicians don't bring that up at all.
I think they suffer from collective madness, in fact.
Well, gender mania.
I think, look at this.
Let's take Trump.
I actually resent the fact that, first of all, Obviously, I've never been a fan of this, guys, but I resent the fact that people seem to be equating, equating, groping, and even kissing somebody or talking about it as Rape, sexual assault.
And you work for the guy, and you're scared to lose your job, and he grabs you, and he puts his fingers in your mouth, and he goes, come on, baby, give me a kiss.
And because you're so afraid and so overwhelmed, you don't know what to do, and he starts kissing you, and you're like, oh, Jesus, let this be over with.
I'm sure that's happened one million times in life with women.
This is why women, when they see that shit, they go, I've met a guy like that.
I've met 10 guys like that.
And that's why the reaction for women is like, fuck this guy.
He's going to fall by 14 points.
However, as citizens, and in this discussion in the law, you have to make a distinction, even the media, because if you start calling that rape, Or if you start calling that sexual assault versus, I don't know, sexual misconduct, or I don't know what the words are.
You're violating their humanity because you're choosing to enforce your wants and needs over what they want.
Would you equate that with- Here's the problem.
Fucking you know and I know that there have been times in people's lives when someone has grabbed a woman and kissed her and she loved it and they wound up getting married and having kids.
You never fucking know.
Who the hell knows?
I mean, like, no one wants sexual assault, right?
No one wants anyone to have anything done to them against their will.
No one does that's rational or kind in any way, shape, or form.
But we all know there's crazy moments in life.
You know?
Weird things happen with people.
People have had sex without saying a word to each other.
Dan Bilzerian was just talking about it the other day.
Sure.
He met some girl in Paris.
He purposely went out of his way to not say a word, see if he could do it, and had sex with a girl.
There's no consent there.
It's just implied consent based on physical movement.
Yes, but my point is, you shouldn't compare worst versions of rape.
And say that this version of what you would call sexual assault is not that big of a deal.
But you're kind of saying that by saying that you're diminishing the horribleness of the other people's experiences by actually getting physically raped and with a knife to their neck and getting fucked by a group of guys.
He's suing the shit out of them, and I hope he gets enough money so he can live in a Jay-Z video for the rest of his life.
Fuck them.
Right.
Look, any goddamn person who has ever been 18, or however old these people were, and been away from your parents for the first time and been drunk, And hooked up with a girl, like, you don't know, there's nothing evil going on there.
This is like two people that want to be together, that get together.
Like, to call that rape in any way, shape, or form, that's crazy.
And I think one thing as men that it's easy to think of is it's easy to forget that When you're a chick, there's a whole other element when you're dealing with men.
And that element is size, strength, and even though violence is highly unlikely in any workplace scenario, you still feel like your body knows that if the shit went down, Donald Trump could choke you to death.
Let me stop you there because we're going to go back and forth because you and I agree on this.
But here's the question.
All right.
How do you stop campus sexual assault?
Now that we know that there's a lot of it where they're trying to stop or getting people in trouble for shit, that's not really sexual assault.
But we also know that there's a lot of guys that are fucking douchebags and guaranteed someone's going to get drunk.
It's happened before.
They've caught them on tape or people are passed out.
There's a train of dudes out the bedroom.
How do you stop people from doing shit like that?
That's the real question.
It's not like accusing more people because then you're going to get people that are even more frustrated with the opposite If you find out that guys are getting locked up in jail for doing the exact same thing their girlfriend was, both being drunk and both having sex, and the guy all of a sudden is a sexual predator because he's drunk...
This is a good question for you because somebody wrote this the other day about how when what we call ISIS, when we first started having conflicts in the Middle East after the Iraq War, it's a Sunni and a Shia in Iraq, and then there's all these other groups and factions.
There's the Taliban, there's Al-Qaeda, and there's Boko Haram, there's all these different factions.
We sort of kind of lumped them all together and decided they were one big enemy.
That's a fact?
And I want you to say this like that guy in the drug commercial that's eating the salad.
And the guy goes, see, you're saying that if I buy drugs, I support terrorism.
I think these are names that were given to themselves.
And then Boko Haram, Haram in Arabic means bad.
Like you say, like in Arabic, a lot of times when something happens that's bad, you always say, Ya Haram, you know, like that's fucked up, you know, almost.
So Boko Haram is sort of a slang, I believe, loosely translated idea that everything Western is bad.
It also happens to be the fact and the case that these are all Islamic movements.
But when you say Islamic movements, be careful because what you're really talking about is puritanical.
The notion that there is a puritanical strain.
There's only one form of Islam.
And that Islam is the Islam that Muhammad the Prophet preached in the...
What century is it?
The 13th or 15th or whatever it is.
So...
That is, if there's any glue to those groups, it is that they essentially adhere to a very strident puritanical form of Islam with no room for interpretation.
There is only right and wrong.
They are willing to resort to what they would consider to be jihad, the root of which means struggle, but what they consider to be, you know, violence is the only option, and Islam must sail in on a sea of blood, because that's the only way it happens.
So, there's all this sort of idea that, you know, we'll use this word.
Not only that, when the casualties are so one-sided in terms of like all of it is taking place in one part of the world versus in our part of the world where we're engaging in a completely different spot in the country.
It makes martyrs.
It makes a lot of people get excited about joining the cause.
They also see, though, that when they go through Istanbul Airport and they get into Syria and they die really quickly, they're starting to realize very quickly that it's also a death sentence.
You don't want to fuck with the Peshmerga.
You don't want to fuck with the American special forces.
I think that the problem with Islamic fundamentalism is not as much a worry because they're not offering anything.
Communism had something that lasted, that ideology lasted 70 years.
But I think it lasted so long because communism was something that you could kind of, there was a compassionate Element to it, you know, don't believe in God, believe in reason, and let's live on communism and all share and be nice to each other.
That idea is pretty potent, especially the young people who are trying to figure the world out and who love each other.
Sometimes I think that Things start to happen by default.
So if you started, let's just say we could kind of scramble everything up and go back to set point zero.
I feel like in 30 years, we'd be right back to where we started.
Somebody was talking about factory farming.
I was talking to a guy who has been in the food business forever, and I was talking about, there's a book called The Dorito Effect.
About how food flavoring, when scientists figured out how to make a corn chip taste like a taco, it kind of changed everything because we were able to isolate flavors.
There was a machine that allowed us to...
Because we didn't know why a strawberry tasted like a strawberry or an orange tasted like an orange.
And I had this guy on my podcast on the Brian Callen show.
And the guy writes this book about how food flavoring changed everything.
The way we eat, and it allowed us to take very non-nutritious food and make it nutritious.
And he was talking about how we need to get back to sort of, you know, family farming and heirloom farming and stuff.
But I talked to this guy who was in the food business, and he said, you know, the problem with that is that family farms are a great idea, and we do probably need more family farms, but what would happen is, probably in 20 years, we'd be back to factory farming.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, what would happen is that some farms wouldn't be as efficient, or they wouldn't be as good, and another farm's better.
And that farm would say, let me buy you a farm.
I'd do a better job.
And in that, he'd say, let me buy this farm.
And then all of a sudden, he'd buy all the farms in this area because he's really good at organization automation and everything else.
And that would start to happen.
Then a bigger company would come along and say, let me buy all your farms, man.
You've got market share here.
And I can do this even better because there's a better way to do it.
And not only that, keep the prices stable because we're going to have a lot of eggs.
So when IHOP, IHOP doesn't have to say, well, today, since we only get our eggs from a local source, today the eggs are...
Five dollars, whereas yesterday were $3.99.
That's kind of what would happen because it would depend on production, yield, and distribution.
And so he was kind of saying, you know, it's nice to think that we need family farming, but chances are, with such a huge population that we have to feed the way we do as quickly as we do, we'd probably be back to, hey, we're running out of chickens.
Who can make a chicken that can mature in six weeks?
They do their best to try to figure out how to pollute the least and consume the least and leave the smallest carbon footprint.
Some people are very conscious about it, but there's a lot of things that people overlook.
And one of them is all the vegetables that you get from the grocery store.
No matter what, if you think you are somehow another karma-free because you're only eating vegetables, man, I hate to tell you, but that whole thing of growing vegetables in mass is only slightly less controversial than growing animals in mass.
It's all weird.
There's a lot of displacement of wildlife, there's a lot of pollution of the environment due to pesticides, the runoff from the salt and sea that I was telling you about.
That's all directly attributed to farming and most of it is, you know, agriculture.
It's fucking pesticides and shit.
It all flows down river and you're fucked.
And there's a lot of other issues.
First of all, it's not natural.
It's not natural to keep growing things in one spot.
That is just not how the world is supposed to be designed.
It's supposed to be a gigantic cycle of animals dying and their bodies rotting and their bodies fueling the plants that they actually eat and then animals eat them and they die and their bodies rot and fuel the plants that grow around them.
We've circumvented that thing with these giant things we call cities.
We figured out a way to stack all these people on top of each other and then we had to figure out a way to get them all food because the fucking buildings kept growing and the people kept needing more and more and more and they're running out of room.
Fuck!
And so that's the problem.
The problem is we got the cart way ahead of the train.
We're way ahead of it.
And we didn't anticipate for seven billion people.
We didn't anticipate for 300 plus million Americans.
And we're kind of doing it right now.
But even with our vegetables, we're fucking up giant chunks of land.
You know, even with our vegetables.
And you think it's not easy, like this idea that it's easy to feed a bunch of people, like 20 million people with a vegan diet.
Goddammit, it's not.
It's not easy to feed 20 million people with any kind of diet.
That's another creepy thing is those ag-gag laws, where it's illegal to film these horrific conditions that pigs...
The chickens have to live in.
You can go to jail for letting people know about animal torture that's being taken place where they're hitting a fucking cow in the head with a wrench.
I saw this crazy video where this guy crowbars a cow in the head.
The first time I ever learned about factory farming was there was a pamphlet in my college and they were talking about how smart pigs are and how they showed a picture of a pig chewing the bars in the pen it was in.
And how pigs go crazy because they want to roam, but they're too smart to just sit in that pen.
And I got so claustrophobic that I didn't eat bacon for a year out of compassion.
Well, vegetarian is way more healthy than just going straight vegan.
When I say way more healthy, meaning that it's easier to be way more healthy.
You can pull off the vegan thing if you're super on the ball with your essential fats, and you make sure you take, what is it, DHEA? What is the omega-3s and 6s that you can get from, what the fuck is that stuff called?
I mean, there's a thing called the Lobster Liberation Organization that break into restaurants and they take lobsters and they throw them back in the ocean.
That's why if you eat cricket flour, like that was a thing in protein bars, sometimes if you have an allergy to shellfish, you can break out into hives.
That's a really important point to bring up whenever we're all so...
Pro hunting and talk about how great it is to eat animals that you've harvested yourself.
You know exactly where they came from.
You knew they're wild.
You know, they've never been abused.
They've never been, you know, raised in slavery and fed antibiotics and hormones.
They lived wild until you shot them.
Yeah, but...
Everybody can't do that.
There's a problem with that, too.
Of course.
Even admitting that, even saying that, for me personally, it's the better option, I enjoy that option, I think it's the best option, it's still everybody can't do it, so we're fucked no matter what.
Of course, but we just went back to what we're saying.
You know, factory farming, that's how they did it.
I mean, they figured out how to do it with large-scale agriculture, indiscriminate combines that chew up the amount of animals that die when they chew up the fucking grain and corn and all the different things.
It's a fucking horror show.
My friend John Dudley, who lives in Iowa, he has a farm.
And he says when they run those combines, when they pick up whatever grains or whatever they have, they run these big giant-ass machines.
And he says you'll see the buzzards just circling in the sky.
But there's a bunch of different kinds of machines they use for that same kind of purpose, meaning for whether it's they're just going to replant them or whether it's they're harvesting them.
There's got machines running over that ground all the time.
Like, see if you could find the big combines.
They spread out like a T. It's like, so there's a truck, and then to the right and the left, they spread out on either side with these just...
There's gears that chop down the plants and then get them ready for harvest.
And they also do it when they're making hay.
You know, they do that.
They have these machines that they drive through and chop everything down and they roll it up for hay.
Like, here it is.
So that's a combine.
And that thing, as that guy pulls it, that thing is chewing up every fucking thing that's down there.
Everything.
And animals, especially fawns, it's one of the weird things about deer fawns, when they're really young, they just stay put.
So if they hear things, you could literally walk up to a baby deer fawn, and if the mom's not around, you could touch it.
Because their instincts, until they get old enough to run away from stuff, their instincts are to stay put, just to ensure survival.
So a lot of them get chewed up in this.
And there was some estimation that I read when they were talking about the problems with this, Ways they were trying to figure out how to mitigate wildlife loss from use of indiscriminate combines like this.
And they were talking about each pound of grain, how many animals has to die.
I don't remember what the number was.
Oh, this is the video of the pigeons that get shoved into this...
So the point is, to make gigantic groups of people happy and fed, even just with vegetables, you need a lot of that stuff going on.
So it's not nice to anybody.
It's not nice.
I mean, this is, again, this is not defending factory farming, which is obviously disgusting and horrible and it's, uh...
It's one of the darker aspects of human civilization, the fact that's standard in the United States.
That shit is really, really, really common.
And that's how we can afford meat so cheap.
But even vegetables, even vegetables, it's not like growing your own shit.
Ideally, what we're supposed to do is we're all supposed to grow our own shit.
We're all supposed to have a piece of land, and you're supposed to have vegetables on it, and you're supposed to have a few animals that you raise, whether it's for milk, Or for cheese or for meat or for whatever.
But if you stop and think about the requirements, like the food requirements of all these people, it's so easy for someone, you and me included, to say, I don't have time to fucking gather and hunt.
Someone go get my food.
I gotta do comedy.
I got a set I gotta do at the improv.
I'm gonna go to the store and buy a sandwich.
You want that access.
And it seems like the only way you can get that kind of access to supermarkets and to fast food restaurants, the only way is this system that we've got now.
Like where you've just got massive amounts of animals that are getting slaughtered.
It allows for thought and things that you see if you have to live if you have spent so much of your time just feeding yourself and your family or whatever.
The somebody was talking about well where why did Greek philosophy what philosophy come out of Greece where they had all that time to think.
Well a lot of like certain I think was the historian William McNeil said well they were able to export timber olive oil and wine and so they made money their economy you could actually have some leisure time.
You could buy leisure time, because they would trade for those goods that were wanted everywhere.
So what happened was, you had, you know, there were people that made a lot of money and they could sit around and think because somebody was there to feed them.
And they didn't have to worry about things.
The climate was temperate.
So you didn't have to really worry about the winter as much.
Yeah, so it's like we need these kind of situations, like these city-type situations where we have massive amounts of resources, but we're doing it on a scale that no one else has ever done it before.
We're doing it on this really bizarre scale, and we have to recognize that this is all incredibly recent in terms of human history, to jam millions and millions of people in cities.
I mean, there had been a few cities in China that had done it.
There's a few places around the world that had done it, but they were essentially primitive You're talking about what they've done in terms of developing a city where it had a million people in the year 1200 versus what has to be done in the year 2016. First of all, you have electricity.
You have power everywhere.
You have sewage lines running everywhere.
You've got all these people shitting and pissing into tubes and then pumping water through this fucking pipe that gets rid of it somewhere.
You've got to get rid of all that shit piss water.
You've got to figure out a place to put it.
You've got to have treatment plants for it.
I mean, you have to bring in trucks over bridges and the same places where everybody else is.
And they're filled with chickens and pigs and fucking cabbage.
And you've just got to constantly just keep bringing them food and bringing out their shit, bringing in their food.
You know what else that does for agricultural communities?
The benefit for...
Because when agricultural communities would go to war with nomadic tribes, or with the exception of the Mongols, but with nomadic tribes and Native Americans, for example, is that when you come from a tradition of agriculture and cities like that, where you have contact with animals, nasty diseases.
Nasty diseases.
And then you build an immunity to it, but guess who doesn't?
The people you come into contact with.
So many of the people, like the Native Americans, they were killed by bullets, but they were mainly killed by things like influenza and the European diseases that they had zero contact with.
Well, that's interesting because Dan Flores wrote a paper, I think it was called Bison Diplomacy, Bison Ecology.
I read in his book right now about coyotes and he wrote this book about the buffalo And he said that the mass numbers that people had seen of the buffalo when there was you know millions of them roaming across the plains It coincided with the Native American population dwindling Substantially because of disease by Europeans sure when the Europeans came over and brought diseases it wiped out a giant percentage of the population And he his contention was Spanish, right?
They came over and they brought a bunch of dirty, dirty, dirty pugs and their pigs.
And also horses, of course.
But he said that the Native Americans with the firearm and with horses were already on their way to extirpating the buffalo from a lot of its range before they got hit with these crazy diseases.
Hmm.
So that when you saw these millions of buffalo, it was in a direct response to a lack of a predator.
They got jacked by wolves, and they got jacked by mountain lions, and they never got jacked by a horse.
Like, what is this horse with a dude on it with a fucking spear on my side?
Dude!
They would just run up on them and kill a ton of them, and then they would all feast, and they would follow the buffalo herd around and just keep jacking them.
Most likely, this guy Dan Flores is saying, they were on their way to diminishing the populations greatly.
And he points to the early European travelers who came through.
They didn't talk about the buffalo.
There's no mention of the buffalo.
They talked about all these other animals.
They talked about elk.
They talked about deer.
They talked about bear.
They talked about antelope.
They talked about all these plains animals that they discovered and encountered.
And then they would take the tarps and stretch them out, and it'd cover like a square mile.
some crazy, not that, but like football fields of just tarps that were spread out and then rubbed with oil, I guess, to make, you know, so that the tarp, so you created a buffalo skin, a hide.
And at night, you'd hear the coyotes fighting and snarling over the sort of the licking the hides and chewing that to shoo the coyotes away.
And then they figured out, they said, why don't we just lace the buffalo before we kill them?
Let's lace the buffalo with strychnine.
So we'll skin them and lace the meat, some of the meat with strychnine.
And those animals eat the strychnine and they'll die.
And then we can take those furs and send them back east as well.
There's a great video from a guard booth in Alaska, where these guys are inside one of those park ranger guard booths, and they're watching this bear walkthrough that's the size of a bus.
It is a fucking tank.
It looks like a VW, like a VW bus.
And they're in there and go, oh my god, look at them, look at them, look at them, look at them!
And the thing just strolls right past the guard booth.
Rinella was telling a story about a friend of his.
I'm going to fuck the story up, I'm sure.
But I think the gist of the story was they took this guy out for his first time hunting ever.
He got attacked by a 500-pound predatory black bear in his tent while he's sleeping.
The bear comes in the tent, mauls him.
Somebody wakes up, shoots the bear, hits him in the wrist, breaks his wrist, and then the bear gets out of that tent, runs into another tent, and they shoot it.
And when you were an aristocrat in Britain, you had a duty.
You had a duty to essentially use your free time to make the world a better place.
And so he is famously stiff upper lip, grew up on a life of discipline, never showing ever your emotions, probably carted away to boarding school at six years old, as they always were.
As he knew he was going to die, his foot apparently was very gangrene, and he looked at his men and he said, I'm going for a walk, and there may be some time.
And he just, rather than inconvenience him with his death, because that would be very un-British, he walked off.
Because keeping up, and if you read some of the letters as they were dying and starving to death, their letters are incredibly formal, and still poised, and always taking into account that they had to keep up appearances, and that they had to...
Always remind themselves that they were there for a bigger cause and that their personal discomfort was just not something you inconvenience anybody with.
Dude, if you want to see the antithesis to the emoji in the American culture as it is now, YouTube, a debate between James Baldwin, the great African American author, and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. Everybody who's listening, please do that.
Do you think that the reason why that formality was so appreciated and accepted and it was so highly regarded was because that was the highest level of civilization that they had before technology?
Before technology and before...
I mean, there was a limited amount that you can influence the environment back then, and you could more influence yourself.
You could more educate yourself.
If you wanted to go somewhere, you had to get on a boat.
You had to get on a boat like everybody else.
You had to get on a train.
If you wanted to get across the country, you had to get on a train.
If you wanted to write something, you had to use a quill, and you had to have a little thing of ink, and you had to dip it in there, and that's how you wrote.
Period.
And it was a limited amount that you could do.
You couldn't just go home and sit and watch television.
There was less distraction and the level of ability that you could, where you could express civilization at its highest level.
It was basically like code, a few machines that people had built, a few combustion machines, the trains, things along those lines, and then the rest of it was just like houses and rules.
I think that's part of it, and I think that's a valid kind of description of maybe part of what was going on, but I think something else was going on with those debates.
I think that when you...
The reason something like Firing Line...
Watch Firing Line with William F. Buckley, a popular show.
It's molasses.
You're listening to men speak about long ideas.
It's actually one of the things I really appreciate about your show, because you're having such smart people and having real discussions.
It feels like political commitment and winning these arguments between right and left, as they were known, had actual ramifications because it feels like politics and whatever happens in an election today means less to people and has less of an effect,
at least an immediate effect, Because back in those days, 65, the wars that were going on with ideology and wars, I mean, fascism and communism and capitalism, people were actually dying and having real wars.
There were national wars that were set to defend not only resources, but those ideologies, an entire movement.
And I think that there was this sense that if this side wins...
Then that side over there is going to come over and take us over.
There was this real ideology between this.
And so I think that those debates people took very personally because they probably knew somebody who died defending the world against fascism.
They were afraid of the Red Scare or they were committed communists and they were being persecuted for it because they couldn't get a job in Hollywood.
I mean, there's a real culture war that had Actual tangible ramifications that you could see every day.
My god, the Vietnam War!
Americans were dying every day because they were sent out there to make the world safe for democracy, right?
Yale was 1701. 1701 incredible incredible Wow so like back then amazing and that was the so you think of so let's just go to 1701 in 1701 the intellectuals were the highest expression of Civilization because it really wasn't that much Technological expression there really wasn't that much that had been done.
There's where there was guns there was some machines I don't even know did they even have a printing press?
I don't believe they did in 1701 when was the printing press?
This is something that I've been talking about on stage is How recent all that was it seems it seems so far away for us But this is the way I describe it like people live to be a hundred and That's 300 years ago.
In the 19th century before it was mass produced with the industrial age when you could make a lot of them for cheap enough for the populist to buy, I would imagine.
It does work, but it's not the fastest way to do it.
And some people are dorks.
No.
Some people are dorks and they learn the other way.
What's the other way?
Dovrax or something like that?
See, find the most efficient typing configuration.
There's a second type of configuration that's more efficient, and a friend of mine tried it.
He tried to learn it, and he said it was, but it took him too long, and he would have to, like, reprogram computers when he got them, and he'd have to buy this certain keyboard, and if you had a laptop, you were fucked.
While we're plugging things, because Brennan Schaub will beat me up if I don't mention that Fighter and Kid live will be in West Palm Beach November 11th and 12th.
And in New York, Ramsey Hall, I think we're almost sold out, November 3rd.
Well, I'll tell you, when my daughter was little, if she drank milk at all, she would throw up when she was really little.
She could not drink milk.
You know, it's hard to gauge when you have a little kid, see what they like and what they don't like and what agrees with them, but goat milk went down like that, like nothing.
It was really interesting.
I mean, we're talking like she was a really young baby.
She loved goat milk.
But whatever reason, we stopped buying it and now we buy just regular cow's milk.
They did a really interesting experiment with goats and kind of proving that when you eat a food that's super delicious, like say you eat a peach and you love peaches.
Then you eat another peach and you love peaches.
But there's somewhere along the line where with foods that are also giving you nutrition, you stop.
There's a trigger.
So, whereas when you flavor food that doesn't have any nutritional value, you'll just keep eating it like Doritos.
You keep eating it, keep eating it, keep eating it.
So this guy did this experiment where this professor at this university took these goats and he starved them of phosphorus.
He didn't give them any phosphorus in their diet.
And they started doing weird things like drinking their own urine and drinking each other's urine and pawing at the dirt and weird shit because they need phosphorus.
So then he would feed them two different stables of food, but the coconut...
The coconut flavored and there was maple flavored food.
And so the coconut flavored food, when he'd feed them the coconut flavored food, then he would put a tube down their throat and fill their stomachs with the phosphorus.
And all of a sudden, the goats were...
Instinctively going for the coconut-flavored food.
Now, the thing you'd say is, wait a minute, maybe they just like coconut-flavored food.
But then he took the maple-flavored food and the coconut-flavored food in another control group.
And when those goats would eat the maple food, he'd stick the tube down their throat and fill their stomachs with phosphorus.
Now, the goats didn't know that they were getting...
And so that control group would always go for the maple food.
Because even though they didn't know they were getting phosphorus, they just somehow equated the fact that they were going to get the phosphorus from that.
So they think that human beings have this strange mechanism in their brain and body where once you are eating a food that has nutritional value, so if it's sweet like dates, It's got nutritional value as well or whatever it might be.
Somewhere along the line we get satiated no matter how delicious we find it.
Chickens, because we grow them so fast, so usually, like after World War II, the fastest chicken they could grow, they had a contest to get it to the point where you could eat it, was 14 weeks.
I used to do this joke about when we did our live podcast, Brennan and I, about how I called it Rogan's Gift when you bought me that bow and arrow.
And first I talked about when we hunted turkey and I was like, we killed this turkey.
We dressed it in the field, man.
And we cut it and it was...
I mean, I didn't shoot it, but I secured Joe's hips when he shot the turkey.
And I go, we cut it, we fried it up and it tasted just like...
Turkey.
You know, and they don't laugh.
And then I go through this whole fucking thing.
Remember when you gave me the bow and arrow?
And I was like, I looked at it, I was like, I didn't know what to say, because I don't know anything about boys, but I think I saw the Hoyt thing, and I went, you got me a fucking Hoyt?
And you were like, carbon fiber.
I go...
The whole thing?
100% carbon fiber?
You know how you try to show somebody you really appreciate the gift, but you don't know what to say about it?
Teaches you and you guys could all make a video we can make a video of you guys shooting bows for the first time when but he's like it has to like he's like I can't do that and work with you because work with me I'm Many years advanced not not saying that I'm really good.
Yeah, I'm not nobody I'm so far advanced from you guys like he would have to work with you so specifically on every little thing There's so many different things you have to think of when it takes a long fucking time like me So give me an example because I would imagine how you stand, how you breathe, how you pull back.
There's a ton of different things.
It's how you hold the bow, what technique you use to draw back, what muscles you're pulling with.
You have to be super conscious of pulling with the muscles in your scapula.
Where's your elbow position?
How are you torquing the bow?
How are you gripping the bow?
Crossing the lifeline on your hand.
If it is, that's a problem.
You've got to readdress it.
How are you gripping it with your fingers?
Do you have a death grip?
Do you have a loose grip?
Is that affecting the actual trajectory of the arrow?
Is it torquing when you release it?
When you release it, do you punch the trigger?
Is the arrow flying randomly left and right in all sorts of different directions?
I think there are elements from anything you get really good at that apply to life.
The idea that learning something, getting really good at it, you learn about life, has been disproved over and over again by extreme winners who are gigantic fuck-ups in their regular life.
I think when you get obsessed with something to the point of excellence, to the point where you're the best at it, or one of the best at it, or you're in the running to be one of the best at it, your fucking brain does not have much room for a lot of the normal shit that everybody else has stuffed in their head.
You're not going to be online, on forums, gossiping about celebrity bullshit, or talking shit about the latest movie, or talking shit about the latest song.
You will be obsessed with one task.
And that does not necessarily make you a balanced person.
You might not have time for your family.
You might not have time to talk to your friends.
You might not have time to have friends.
I mean, you might be in recovery, training.
You might be doing a million different things to try to accentuate your abilities in basketball and football and boxing.
Well, that's why when someone like Ronda Rousey comes along, you go, oh, look at that.
There's one of those.
There's a female version of the super winner.
They exist.
And they seek out male versions of those super winners.
And they have super winner babies.
That's standard stuff.
But to me, I don't think it's indicative of learning about life.
It's learning how to get really awesome at one thing, and that might translate, if you can step away from the madness and the momentum of whatever the fuck it is you're obsessed with, that ability to really completely focus in on one thing might aid you if you can completely focus in on life.
But the idea that an athlete or an archer or anybody else who's doing anything obsessively is actually focusing on life...
He was, like, one of my all-time favorite musical artists.
So, you know, when I found out that Prince had all these, like, issues with his health and he's taking pain pills and he was addicted to pain pills, I was almost, like, in denial about it.
I was like, no, that guy's too smart for that.
Like, that guy's, like, he's smarter than the system.
He figured out how to make a symbol to get out of a contract because they had to use his name.
So he was the artist formerly known as Prince and became a symbol.
But then, when you hear Prince, like, interviewed, which you rarely do, like, you see his art, which is amazing, you know, I'd still, to this day, think that Purple Rain, you know, like, it's one of the greatest songs, one of the greatest, it was a great movie.
He was heterosexual, and he wasn't even really like any gay people.
That was one of the weirdest things.
He kind of said some homophobic shit that people got really mad at him about, about one of the reasons he was trying to equate.
Okay, stop.
He was trying to equate all of these different things that were going on in the world with people not following God's way and sticking their dick in any place they want.
But there's also a problem that when he said that, he was probably 50, and when he got famous, he was probably 20. So 30 years of being completely insulated and isolated, people kissing your ass, and you saying a bunch of poetic shit while you're alone in Minneapolis.
Apparently there's a great new documentary that I've been hearing about called Holy Hell about some guy who got involved in some really nutty cult in 1985 and was in the cult for like 20 years and documented a bunch of crazy shit and is going to put a documentary out about it.
Who's that rock historian who said that rock and roll was the greatest when they were doing psychedelics and they were smoking weed?
When cocaine and heroin came in, it was when the music died.
That's when Lou Reed and that's when all those guys, the Mamas and Papas and all those guys, after Haight-Ashbury, I think 1968, when heroin and cocaine came in, the music basically died.
And meanwhile, an effective dose, it's 5-MAO-DMT is in more potent psychedelic ounce per ounce, gram per gram, than NN-DMT. It's the most potent.
It doesn't have the visuals.
It doesn't give you the visuals, but as far as like effective dose, it's the most potent.
So a small amount can get you fucked up.
And you used to be able to buy that stuff.
Where pot was illegal, you used to be able to buy 5-MeO-DMT online.
And if you smoked it, you just got shot through a cannon to the center of the universe where you ceased to exist.
It was a terrifying trip because you absolutely thought you were dead.
Like you absolutely cease to exist and you became one with everything and it's a very weird non-visual experience.
Whereas DMT is filled with all these patterns and this beautiful feeling that you get.
The 5-MeO DMT is like this powerful white geometry.
It's all just pale white and all these weird sort of microscopic fractal geometric patterns that are sort of dancing around you but all almost invisible.
I think there's a lot of benefits to any experience and extreme experiences give you more benefits You you take in more data knowing that that psychedelic experience is possible Just knowing that that experience that you can hit You can hit that note that you can get into that that dimension and whatever the fuck it is in a psychedelic experience It makes you look at the reality that is unchanging around you without drugs and it makes you go.
Oh Thank you.
Oh, this isn't all there is.
Like, there's another thing that you can get to really easily.
You can get to this other thing really easily.
And although it's not regular every day, drive-through Starbucks, stuck in traffic, waiting for your phone call, you know, alarm goes off in the morning, you don't want to get up.
It's not that world, but it's still an accessible world that's right there that's mind-blowing.
Even prior to that is the idea that it shows you what is possible or what is out there.
That's...
To me, the most important element for change in a person's consciousness.
When you are shown that there is a higher bar, or you're shown that there are other possibilities, more illuminating possibilities, because a lot of times you can live in a world where your vision of reality that's given to you, and that you're privy to on a daily basis, is so limited.
That you don't even...
You need to be shown that there is something higher to aspire to.
I think it's probably good for people to try to run a marathon.
I think it's good for people to try to rock climb.
I think it's good for people to go on long...
Difficult hikes.
I think you learn from that just like you learn from education and I don't think it's I don't think they're mutually exclusive and I think that they combine together for a balanced person a person who tries to do and tries to accomplish difficult things along with becoming educated the problem is that this whole competitive thing that arises amongst people where you want to be the best at something like we were talking about which sort of defines you in this way that requires a lot of tunnel vision and And it requires you to not be
fully balanced and not be...
You know, one of the things I had a problem with when I was teaching, when I teach martial arts, I noticed that smart people were way more nervous before fights.
Like, whereas these dumb people that you would teach or the people that weren't as smart or weren't as curious, they didn't have nearly as much of a problem with competing.
I'm like, this is really fascinating.
The really smart people are aware of almost too much.
Yeah, well, David Foster Wallace in this incredible essay called How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.
It's really a story about Tracy Austin when she won Wimbledon at 14!
and he said then she wrote a book like on her experience and trying to get a physical genius to describe what they do part of the reason that they perform so well under pressure sometimes is not because they're dumb but their brain they don't have the kind of mind that say a writer would have Ask a thousand questions to be introspective to the point where you're, you know, essentially neurotic or going around in a circle.
You can't have that.
You've got to be able to shut that down.
That's why when they ask great athletes to describe what was going on in their mind when they got that ball over the end zone, it's invariably kind of disappointing because they never really know how to explain it.
What they say is, I just knew I had to get the football across the line and we just executed and my team was there.
I think he's real light and long and thin and strong for that kind of stuff because he does it all the time and he just knows how to climb and he knows what he's doing and he stays super calm while he does it.
That's one of the things that he emphasized.
This is him at the very top.
See look how every movement is like really measured.
Dude, he's the master.
He's the master at that kind of stuff.
And he lives in a van.
He lives in his van.
He drives around and just finds places, parks, and climbs.
When I read that book, The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Masashi, like I got the same sense that that was the experiential, like his life, the margin for error in a sword fight, and also he said how you practice has to be almost life and death, like until you're no longer doing it, like the extreme notion of living always on the edge.
And that feels like the exact same path, mindset, and probably result.
I don't know if God forbid he dies, but it would be interesting to see sort of when that becomes necessity or that becomes, I guess, How you, or what you crave, this sort of intimate relationship between life and death.
Knowing that there's a massive risk behind it, but still being able to execute flawlessly.
Like, that's what he craves, you know?
And instead of it being a sword coming at him that he has to check, instead of that, it's him figuring out how to climb a 45-degree face that's hanging 2,000 feet above the ground, or whatever the fuck that is.
How many feet do you think that is, above the ground?
When you look down, you see those trees in the background?