Bryan Callen and Joe Rogan dissect societal biases—from rain-linked "rooftop encounters" to Hollywood sexism, like Rose McGowan’s career decline—and question whether nature (e.g., A Billion Wicked Thoughts’s uterine androgen theory) or nurture shapes attraction. They contrast tribal instincts in relationships with systemic prejudices, like the 13-year Middle East war’s cultural scars, while debating uncontacted Amazon tribes’ survival despite primitive tools and modern items. Callen links sudden cultural disruptions—like the Mongols sacking Baghdad—to existential fears of regression, speculating future civilizations might view today’s humanity as "primitive." Rogan insists on objective analysis over conspiracy theories, advocating skill mastery (e.g., boxing, deadlifting) and Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow to navigate life’s distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
They say on rainy days that people are a little bit more devious.
So if you have an honor jar where you got to put like tips, you know, if you take a bagel at the office and you're supposed to put like a dollar in there, on rainy days, some people tend to not do it.
I can tell you that when I take girls, when I would take women shopping back in the day, it even happens with my wife now, I get a little horny because I'm the man.
With my wife, before we got married, she wanted these shoes and they were fucking high-heeled sneakers, right?
I'm like, some asshole named Ted calls himself Christian Louboutin, and now I gotta pay $800 for a high-heeled sandal.
I mean, the amount of leather that goes into a sandal...
But the two women are saleswomen, and I'm the man.
And I'm the man, and I think I was in a linen shirt, and I had a blazer on, a linen blazer I spent too much money on, and I'm taking my girl on a little weekend in Santa Barbara.
I'm the man.
I'm the man.
Probably not even working at the time, but whatever.
And she tries on these Louboutins, or whatever the fuck, Jimmy Choo's, and she goes, God, they're so amazing.
And the woman brings out another pair, That bitch.
Yep, that bitch is right.
And she goes, I can't decide.
And the saleswoman goes, get them both.
And she goes, oh my God, I'd never do that.
And I go, if you want them both.
And she goes, and she, this bitch, God bless her, my wife, she hides behind her own hand and she goes, you're going to ruin me for other men.
And I was like...
Get both the fucking shoes.
unidentified
I won't eat meat for the month, but get the fucking shoes.
Well, basically what you're doing, Brian, is just perpetuating these gender stereotypes that have been essentially boxing people into these behavior patterns for years.
It's not that they're natural.
It's totally cultural.
It's totally something that our society has constructed.
Rose McGowan, who I think is sexy as all get out, was on the cover of some terrible magazine, and she's in a leather jacket, dressed like a man, of course.
It's interesting how when you want to shatter the patriarchy, you're dressed, you know, she's in pants, and I think she had gloves with the fingers cut out.
Hey, sometimes we're so flummoxed by your beauty and power that we want to say, we'll just say anything.
Most of the time, you can't even look at her, and when you want to get to her, you just want to say anything just so she looks at you, and it's clumsy!
When a guy's pursuing a woman and he's saying things like that and he's kind of gross and clumsy, we think of it as like a dude being gross and clumsy to us.
But a guy being gross and clumsy to you, you don't feel like you might get raped.
People get into things and they might get into activism and they might get into the response they get from other people because they embrace activism.
That's as much of an addiction as anything else.
And sometimes those addictions lead to really great work because people do get addicted to the adulation that they get from doing good things so they continue to do good things and it becomes their thing and letting everyone know about how much good things they're doing.
That's why it's so amazing when you find out about someone who does things quietly.
Like someone who donates money quietly or helps people quietly and is not trying to get any attention whatsoever for it.
Truman said something like, I read a quote, he said, you'd be amazed at how much you can get accomplished if you're not worried about who gets the credit for it.
Yeah, there's, well, I mean, I guess it's as long as good charity gets done.
Charity to me has always been a very strange thing because it is super important, you know, that people help people out.
But when you find out how much of these organizations actually spend the money on the charity itself and how much of it goes to the structure of the organization.
They had something—they don't know yet, but it was pretty astonishing at how much went to running the corporation and how much was—it's going to be really interesting to see how much the Clinton Foundation can raise now that both of them have no political influence anymore.
But then again, that's a dumb thing to say because I don't fucking know.
I read an article.
I don't go to schools and, you know, draw lines on that.
There are a lot of things that are hard to figure out, right?
There are a lot of things where you're like, you can draw these broad-based conclusions.
Like I read one article in the New York Times about how doctors are in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and the reps are cheerleaders.
And I got a fucking email from this guy who was a former Green Beret friend of Tim Kennedy's and he goes, hey dude, just so you know, I sell drugs to doctors.
That's just not fucking true.
I'm just telling you the reality on the ground versus what you're reading from the New York Times is so diametrically opposed, it's ridiculous.
Well, in his circumstance, but he's one guy working for one pharmaceutical company.
The industry is gigantic.
It's huge, and its practices vary widely, especially depending upon what drugs you're selling.
My wife's mom is a nurse, and she used to work with pharmaceutical companies.
They would take them out to steak dinner, and they would woo them, and they would literally do everything they could to get you to be super high on that company.
And it's what they do to gain influence without actually paying you to say shit to the patients.
Say if there's a company that you like.
Like this hat I'm wearing, Vortex, Optics, nice people.
They make good binoculars, right?
So if I meet them, and I know them, and I talk about them, and I talk about them to other people, people perhaps will buy their stuff.
Well, the same kind of shit happens in the pharmaceutical world.
Now I think that there are a lot of strident laws or stringent laws, whatever, against sort of influence peddling and giving gifts even in the form of any kind of a trip, any kind of a dinner.
A lot of that stuff is there's a wall now being sort of around.
Well, how about the fact that pharmaceutical companies are bankrolling, you know, scientists, food companies bankroll scientists to do research on, you know, on simple sugars and how your diet can be made of 25% simple sugars, you know, according to our scientists that happen to also be on the Coca-Cola Nestle Kraft payroll.
I'm talking about the fact that the food and board nutrition, the food and nutrition board or whatever, the bodies of government that set the nutritional standards for what mothers with dependent children eat, what the military eats, what our school programs are.
Take a look at what their nutritional guidelines are and take a look at the corporations, the people that are actually providing the food.
Who has a huge interest in that?
Nestle, Kraft, these companies that make millions of dollars, billions of dollars on feeding our school children in public schools, right?
I think that's what they call it, food and nutrition board.
But he, I can't remember, don't quote me exactly, but he does a very good job of tracing the genealogy here.
He's a vegan, so I don't really agree with him, but he does an amazing job of kind of showing you just exactly how the big food companies are very influential.
In getting their products into the mouths and bellies of people who are relying on the government to feed them.
It's not that scientific because insulin is a big thing to talk about, like how food reacts, the kind of hormonal response food has in your body, what dietary cholesterol really does, all those things.
The real combination, the real correct combination should be all healthy things.
Rest in peace China study.
Okay, this is Chris Kresser who's actually been on the podcast.
The China study should put the issue to rest.
Please consider the information presented here.
The methodology is impressive.
Okay, scroll down.
Campbell recommends a vegan diet, no animal-based food at all.
He claims that population studies demonstrate that vegan populations do not suffer from the high incidence of cardiovascular disease and cancer that we in the West do with our diets heavy on animal protein.
He says, when I first started analyzing the original China study data, I had no intention of writing up an actual critique of Campbell's much-lauded book.
I am a data junkie.
Numbers, along with the Strawberries and Aubrey Hepburn films, gay, make me a very happy girl.
Oh, it's a girl.
I mainly wanted to see for myself how closely Campbell's claims aligned with the datas he drew from, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.
But after spending a solid month and a half of reading, graphing, sticky, noting, and passing out at 3 a.m.
from studious exhaustion upon my copy of the raw China study data, I've decided that it's time to voice all my criticisms, and there are many.
Campbell conveniently fails to mention the county of Tuoli in China.
The folks in Tuoli ate 45% of their diet is fat, 134 grams of animal protein each day, twice as much as the average American, and rarely ate vegetables or other plant foods.
Yet, according to the China study data, they were extremely healthy with low rates of cancer and heart disease.
So they didn't put in anything that is contrary to that data.
And there's plenty of that.
There's plenty of that out there.
I really honestly believe that the two The real problem is the ideology, because the vegans are absolutely not able to get over the idea that you should ever eat or kill an animal.
Well, one day we're going to have this factory-made meat.
It's on the way.
I mean, they're really close to being able to do that in mass.
Right.
When they do that, if they can get factory made meat and factory made fat, and if it turns out in any way to actually be like the same thing, like you can eat it and it's healthy, vegans should eat it.
He basically eats gay meat, nuts, berries, and some vegetables.
And he said, after 37 years, he goes, I've never seen it.
I've never seen it.
I've never seen anybody on a vegetable-based diet actually be able to compete in strength, explosion, those kinds of things, to the level that other people do.
I'm just saying that, you know, according to Pollacklin, for the most part, his athletes, he thinks, have to eat meat because it creates a more, you know, better for recovery, better for strength, better for all that stuff.
I'm sure that that is dependent entirely on the athlete.
Because I think there's some vegans that will tell you that they do a vegan diet and they feel better.
I know John Fitch did a vegan diet for a while, but then he felt weak.
We just got to a point where, you see, this is one of the things that Chris Kresser talked about on the podcast as well, that there's some initial positive benefits from changing your diet to a nutrient-rich, nutrient-dense diet, like a vegan diet, as opposed to a standard American diet.
Now, a smart vegan would tell you, well, that could be mitigated by better planning of your meals and making sure that you get all these healthy things.
But the problem is that you walk and it looks exactly like a rock.
And if you're walking around in like a, you know, kind of down there in the ocean or, you know, you walk on that, you can get one of those in your foot.
What the fuck information is being passed from animal to animal and from nature to animal that allows these simple animals like a fish to just change its body shape Over time.
Like when I was in Tahiti, I was in this—because survival's a motherfucker, right?
I was in Tahiti, and they had this incredible—it's where all the sea turtles would lay their eggs, and we would watch them hatch, and all these adorable little babies would run down to the ocean.
Everybody would be like, woo!
And all of us would be sitting there going, yay!
And the kids would be like, look at how cute they are, and stuff like that.
And as I'm watching them, and there's so many of them, I go, there's so many!
But then if you take yourself out of that context of familiarity and you just get a look at what that life form is, that thing is a shield on its back.
When we were done scuba diving, we saw this pod of beautiful little dolphins, not bottlenose porpoises, but the kind of dolphins, the little gray ones you see that you swim with.
And it was a group of them, and they swim with the boat.
They know you're there, and they'll swim with you, and they swim with the boat, and they jump out of the air, and they flip, and they're literally showing off for you.
There's no question about it, right?
And I said to the guy, I wish we'd seen them when we were scuba diving.
I could have played with one.
And he said, you would never see them when you're scuba diving.
I read that a guy got bit by a crocodile, not a big one, and he reached behind the crocodile, stuck his hand up the thing's ass, and pulled whatever he could out, and the crocodile let go of him.
It's because people and things and turtles like to fuck, and if they like to fuck, they make too many of them, so we have to have around crocodiles and alligators and lions and everything else that eats shit.
I think that's the function and the biggest difference between what it is to be human.
There's a fundamental difference.
I was thinking about how we create beauty for its own sake.
Well, why?
You know, a lot of times, even at our own expense, that famous, whether it's true or not, the legend of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and going blind because the paint was in his eyes, inspired by something bigger than himself.
Now, part of that's this, you know, people just went blind and blamed it on the paint.
Well, he was on his back for a long time, but they said, you know, sometimes, well, human beings have this need to be immortal, right?
We want to leave a mark, whether it's through our children or through our work.
That's a very deep, deep drive.
But I don't like, as I get older, I don't like just, you know...
Breaking it down to simple constructs like that.
Maybe because I'm a romantic.
I'd rather believe that we have something inherent in us that is, I don't know what it is, maybe an inherent inspiration, a nostalgia to create something that's much bigger than ourselves, that moves people to tears, brings them to their knees, drops their jaw in awe.
I've had this kid Phil Demers on my podcast a couple times now and he's from Marineland.
He got fired from Marineland and he has gone like way out of his way to expose, it's in Canada, to expose all of these violations of animal welfare and animal safety and all of the fucking horrible practices that this place, now they're being brought up on charges.
They were just recently brought up on more charges.
Like, he tweeted something about it just a couple of days ago.
Marineland's brought up on more charges.
But he was a walrus trainer there.
This walrus named Smushi.
And he developed this, like, really close bond with this walrus that he was training in.
But he was like, this place is fucked.
Like, they don't give a shit about these things.
They don't give a shit about these animals.
And he's like, and they were getting their dolphins and their orcas, they're getting them from these, uh, Russian ships that would get them from China.
Well, this is an animal that is used to jump through hoops, literally, for fish, and to do twirls and stuff, and to pull you along as you ride them, right, or water ski on them.
And if you take that out of the equation, that seems to me to be where SeaWorld makes a lot of their money.
They start exchanging information, start reading about things that they're doing there, start reading about how long the animals live in the wild versus how long they live in captivity.
You see the dorsal fin that flops over because they never have to deal with waves, so it atrophies.
And as much as those things do jump up on that platform and do get that fish and do the flips and make everybody happy, it's fucked up.
And also, I feel like if they really wanted to have a relationship with these orcas, the correct way to do it Would be to have some sort of a meeting ground where they meet these orcas and they get them to do things for fish.
If it's 50 years from now or 80 years from now, whatever it is, the real problem is going to be when are we just going to be like a spinal cord hooked up to all this stuff?
And I said, what about, because you know that's cumming.
I said, what about fucking a robot?
And he said, there's this weird situation where we call it the, I think it was the revulsion factor or the repulsive factor.
So human beings, you can get something really close and people will fuck it.
Like you can have like just a pocket pussy, right?
A guy will carry around just like a fleshlight or a gel pussy and bang it in the bathroom in his office break, right?
While he watches porn on his phone, whatever it might be.
But there's something about a robot, when you try to get it really human, apparently, from their research, and I'm not saying this guy comes up, he's working on sexual robots, but like he said, there's something about creating a robot that's so human-like, but there's just something missing, like the expression in the eyes or whatever.
And it gets to a point when you get it as real as possible, like as real as real as possible.
People will fuck, fuck, fuck, and then when it gets surreal, they'll go, ah!
Call 1-800-HOT-SLUT. I just like that you immediately, before we got back to the fact that it was a girl, she liked strawberries, and what was the other thing?
Well, they have, you know, it's one of the fun things, I guess, about being gay is they have these female diva, like idols that they worship, you know, like shares a giant one, right?
Why all these men who love Barbra Streisand, why are they mostly gay?
Why?
Right?
And there are, according to the research that I've done in my backyard and from this book, which is a great book, and I got it from, I think it was Gad Saad maybe who was recommending or talking about it, but no, it was Jordan Peterson, so I read it.
You know, there are fundamental differences with the way a man who's gay's brain reacts to certain things in relation to how the average straight brain reacts to certain things.
This is kind of a dicey situation and territory because we don't know all the facts.
But according to the other research, why is the gay penis a half inch longer?
Apparently it may have to do with the androgens, the presence of more androgens, I guess, or more testosterone, whatever it is, in the uterus at a certain point in time, which may be why some people are born.
Gay.
And other people, because it is something you're born with.
Do you think, though, that it is possible to be born straight, but somewhere along the lines of your life, become attracted to the same sex, and be gay?
I really believe that's true, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it, necessarily, because why is that any better than being, or worse, rather, than being indoctrinated at a certain school of music?
Well, it's just a bizarre compromise because one of the sexiest things about kissing is the feeling of someone's lips moving with your lips and their tongue moving with your tongue.
And so depending on what you're driven by, there's a book written about this, and I can't remember the book, but in a very small portion, people are driven by auditory stimulus.
So your voice might be enough to get a girl going.
You could look like, you know, whatever.
Something's not attractive, but your voice is what gets her going.
So it all depends on what triggers people, what their overwhelming...
For whatever reason, it might not be them, it might be you.
It might be the two of you together.
I think that's part of the mechanism that makes this weird world work.
Human beings, the way I view them, are a gigantic super organism working towards some sort of an unknown technological goal.
I feel like if I had to do a one sentence overview of the human race, that's what I would say.
And I think that somewhere along the line, our individual personalities and our individual hobbies and obsessions and desires, all of those, although they appear to be coming from us uniquely and us as an individual, and even though we relate to tribes who are also into,
you know, whatever, jujitsu or kettlebells or ballet or whatever the fuck it is, ultimately, all these pieces fit into place as these Portions of the super organism that make things flow in a forward direction and whether you're obsessed with Architecture or whether you're obsessed with achieving peak fitness or running a thousand miles in an hour Whatever the fuck it is All of those things are working together collectively
in the entire superorganism of the human race, and they're working towards some sort of a technological goal.
Because the technological world and the world of technological innovation is slowly but surely integrating itself into our lives.
If we looked at it objectively, we'd be like, whoa, this is like a life form that's asking to be born from the husks of human civilization.
Like, it's going to go inside of us And it's going to give birth like some sort of aquatic worm that comes out of a fucking grasshopper and talks into jumping into a pond.
Well, I just think it's interesting that human beings are spending enough time creating virtual experiences so that eventually, if you look at the trajectory of this and the technology at play, You're going to be able to have experiences of what it's like to be someone else.
So now you can experience what it's like to be someone else who's been through a hard time and realize in many ways that they're very human.
Well, I have all these emotional triggers around Arabs and stuff because I grew up in the Arab world and they are very much people to me, right?
The Middle East, this strange place with all those fanatics.
When you grow up there the way I did, you lived there for eight years of your life, you have a very different point of view on the Middle East and Arabs.
What I think of when I think of Arabs is I see a smiling face and a welcoming mat.
I see somebody who's making me tea and bringing me into their house and giving me food.
I see a group of them who are laughing their ass off and having a blast, and I see people hugging and holding hands.
That's just how I grew up.
So I have an emotional trigger when I hear people stereotype Arabs in a certain way, right?
It's just an interesting thing.
So I think that's because I had that virtual experience.
And I love this idea because as we are able to experience what it's like to be someone else and realize how similar they are to us, despite all the cultural differences, hopefully it'll make for at least a more You know what the problem with all this is?
Yeah, it'll make for a more understanding world, until I gotta compete for fucking water, and my daughter's thirsty.
I think the biggest problem that we've got right now is that we've been going through a war with the Middle East for 13 years.
And when you go through a war for 13 years, say if you do something, like if you're on heroin for six years, how long does it take for the effects of your body to bounce back from being on heroin for six years?
It's like a scar that has to heal over and it has to be worked on.
I mean, you have many generations that are going to remember Grandpa getting blown up when he was in a wedding party because they thought that he was with Talk to the Jews about the genocide, about the Holocaust.
Dan Carlin talks about how there's such fresh memories.
Even if you say to a Chinese person that you have a point of view on sort of the benefits of Mongol expansion, even though that was 1260 or whatever it was, You'll get a lot of Chinese ire.
It's still somehow fresh.
That trauma lasts and is passed down through generation to generation.
But I love Americans because Americans always go out of their way.
All Americans go out of their way to be like, I don't care.
There's this idea that all the Trump supporters are these fanatics and they're anti this and that.
I guarantee, I guarantee that the majority of people in all the states, the red states, Would give any Syrian or Arabic guys, Americans, I guarantee the credo would be, hey, they're human beings.
I'm willing to give them a chance.
If they're good people, they're good people.
There's this idea that they're terrorists, these motherfuckers, and I'm just an ignorant guy with a gun.
For example, I think most of them, if somebody was Arabic and they had an opportunity to alleviate their suffering by bringing them into their house and giving them a meal.
So when I hear of a bomb going off or a guy driving a truck and running over 80 people in France, my first guess, and I'm always right, is that he's probably a young Muslim male.
That doesn't make me anti-Muslim.
It doesn't make me anti-Arab.
It just means I'm...
Pretty good or not even, I don't have to be that good at pattern recognition.
Yeah, well we also have to really take into consideration the sheer numbers of human beings that we're dealing with on a daily basis.
Where you're getting the news from.
You're getting the news from the events that happened to seven billion people.
And that's just way too many for us to make rational Discussions about it because, rationally, you shouldn't know about what the fuck is happening in France.
You shouldn't know that some Muslim guy drove a truck over all these people.
You're not there.
Right.
It's so far away.
And you know how many other Muslim men didn't run over somebody with a truck that day?
So that's where it gets weird.
Yeah.
Because you don't even take those people into consideration when you're talking about Muslim males.
You're only talking about those one males.
It's like gun owners.
Like, people have this idea of gun owners.
Well, gun owners are a bunch of fucking paranoid nuts with canned food in their basement, and they're buying gold from Alex Jones.
No, no, no.
Occasionally, one of those guys shoots up a school.
To him, it could be this one thing, but to her, look, if you're really into raping girls, and it makes you feel awesome, and you don't want them to feel like it's rape, but it is.
I'm just saying when you draw these blanket statements, like so when men own guns, right, if you hear the dialogue on the left a lot of times, it's like, well, you know, these gun nuts or these gun owners who are into all this other stuff, this macho stuff.
Or a lot of men own guns.
A lot of men, it's going to sound crazy, a lot of men own guns, like me, because it's the most effective way to protect my family in case somebody comes in my house in the middle of the night.
There's also this thing that we all do, and that you and I have worked very hard to stop doing over the last decade or so, which is to try to win conversations.
Because it's a fucking horrible impediment to learning anything.
The best way to have a conversation is, I mean, challenge ideas for sure, but...
So when someone's not right about something, like I have a good friend who's an animal rights activist guy, a vegan guy, and we were talking about the precursors for hormone development and whether or not Saturated fat and cholesterol are the essential precursors to hormone development.
Well, it's pretty much established fact, like scientific fact.
And he didn't think it was, because he was reading a lot of this ideological dogma on it, you know, plant-based dogma.
So I started sending him all the stuff.
And then he's like, okay, I got it.
All right.
And now it has to soak in.
Now we can have a discussion about it.
Well, look at all these studies.
Look at all these things.
We're not saying you should go out and be an animal eater.
This is the actual problem with not getting enough B12. This is the actual problem with not getting enough of this vitamin, that data.
Saturated fat, cholesterol, all these fucking things that we were told as kids are bad for you, which is a huge problem because most people don't learn anything I mean, that's pretty much it.
Well, one of the biggest things for me is just having been around Hunter as much as I have, and we always talk about how, and I've had to confront so much of this in my own ways, I have a fast-thinking brain.
We all do, right?
That fast-thinking brain that jumps at, that triggers at things.
If you start talking about liberalism, if you start talking about big government, if you start talking about communism, Marxism, I'll get ready to defend my free market.
And so I'll stop listening to you about five seconds in, and I've already got my guns.
I'm already loading my guns.
As you're talking, I'm going, hold on, let me get my guns.
Hold on.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
And now I can't wait to blast away at your collective ideology, right?
And then I'll drop books like F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and all the things I've read.
And all I want to do is win.
And so I've had to, and we always talk about this, like Hunter will send me articles that'll get me enraged.
And I'll freak out and I'll write this thing and he'll get me and he'll go, feel better, Brian?
Now do you want to tranquilize that big, fast-thinking elephant that you've been riding?
And let's get some slow thinking involved and take a look at how your feelings are driving your thinking.
It's a very fun exercise because as you get older, what happens is you're able to sit back and somebody says something and you're able to go, instead of me loading my guns, let me listen a little bit hard.
Let me see if I can get, take something from that.
Maybe there is a good argument.
I don't have to be a Marxist, but maybe there is some value to regulation.
Maybe there is some value to the FDA or whatever it might be.
So you have free market sort of prejudices in that regard, where you lean towards deregulation, lean towards a freer market because more money gets made.
Market farming is what did in most of the animals in this country.
After the war, one of the things that happened was there was a lot of soldiers after the Civil War that needed jobs, and one of the jobs that was available was market farming.
Well, they're way faster than anything that can catch them because they evolved during a time where cheetahs lived in North America.
Big cats lived in North America that were bigger than lions and African lions.
So when you're thinking about these times and these people that wiped out all the animals in this country, there was a host of factors, a bunch of different pressures on these animals.
But a lot of it was market hunting.
And so when hunters came along, like in the beginning of the 20th century, there was very few deer.
And to find a big deer with a giant rack, super rare.
Elk had been They had been extirpated from a gigantic segment of the population, or a gigantic segment of the country.
And so they've slowly repopulated in these groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation.
They've transplanted elk down to Kentucky and everywhere else.
We've got to figure out a spot where we can go, where we have a reasonable chance of success because you always want the possibility rather of failing.
The most satisfying way and the way that feels the best to me is public land.
Because you get a tag, you get an over-the-counter tag, you go on public land, you hunt an animal, you kill it, you eat it, everybody sits down over the fire.
It's one of the best moments in life.
Yeah, Rinell is a master.
You know, he really has a lot of the aspects of life worked out as far as being a sportsman in the 21st century and being a spokesperson for it.
Okay, so I will shoot like if I need meat and I'm running low on meat I'll hunt an animal with a rifle.
Okay, but what I'm really into man is archery I love archery even if I never bow hunted again and even if I just hunted with a rifle because it was too hard to bow hunt which it's not and I will bow hunt again for sure and Right.
But archery is, to me, it's like a meditation.
Archery is a martial art in a lot of ways, but it's a stillness martial art.
It's a martial art where you're perfecting one move, this one move of having your arm out in front of you, your hand is like in a halt position.
Like, that's where it is.
And then the bow doesn't pass over the lifeline.
You want it on this side of the lifeline.
So it never goes deep in your grip, so you're not torquing your wrist.
So it's basically just balanced up against your hand.
And then you're pulling back, and you're locking in your anchor point, and you're looking through your peep sight, and all you're concentrating on is pulling back your scapula and releasing that arrow without moving at all.
Because John Dudley, he's got a podcast that if you want to super geek out about archery, it's a podcast called Knock On.
And the Knock On podcast is John's podcast where he discusses like Intricate details about cam timing and arrow weights and front of center, like how much kinetic energy each arrow has based on what percentage of weight is in the front of the arrow.
Some people go down that rabbit hole and they go, fuck this rabbit hole, and they get an old school recurve bow and just learn instinctive shooting.
And they just get into just releasing the arrow on their own and knowing.
It's almost like you throw a rock.
If you throw a rock, you know what your arm feels like.
You kind of know where that rock's going to go.
And then you get pretty accurate about throwing rocks.
But if you want to get really accurate, you've got to throw rocks every day.
And that's the same thing with recurve bows.
If you have the exact same weight arrow, so if you have a stack of these arrows and you shoot, you know that if you bend it this way and you pull it back to here, it goes that far.
Okay.
I'll say, well, if the animal's here, then I've got to aim here.
And you just develop There's this scale in your own mind of where the arrow's gonna go.
It's interesting, though, like, I was thinking about this because I've been obsessing over boxing, you know, lately, and I like, the reason I like to spar is I don't get, you know, I'm not knocking my head off and stuff.
And like, Brendan's always like, don't spar and stuff.
But for me, what I really love is the same thing I loved about Taekwondo, which is that with boxing, it seems so impossible when you first started and then like two years, two and a half years later, if you're actually sparring and moving around with people, you'll start developing patterns if you have a good teacher.
And you'll start to learn how to get somebody to think one thing, right?
So you jab, and you jab low, then you fake Joe, and maybe fly into a hook or whatever, and you learn how to protect yourself.
And you can start developing your own sort of similar patterns that aren't...
It's a different discipline than archery because archery seems so kinetic and detailed, right?
You're getting him to think you're doing one thing and then capitalizing on sort of...
You're saying, ah, you thought I was doing this, and I'm doing this.
There's a different kind of thing.
But what I love about all of it is almost like it's not even so much about the doing of itself.
That's always awesome, but...
I think what I really get off on sometimes is the discovery.
Is the learning maybe how to control something that seems so out of control and sort of the discovery, the continual discovery of new things and maybe what it does to my brain.
Like maybe that's That's what I like.
The mindset it puts me in, and the understanding it gives me, and maybe even the fact that it takes away some of the mystery I was living under, which I felt was a little- Right, right.
If I meet somebody who's quote unquote really smart and good at one thing, Whether it's a surgeon or a brain surgeon or a scientist or a really good fighter.
Well, a really good fighter, I've talked to Joe Schilling about this and to Donald Cerrone about this.
You know, I was talking about patterns.
I'd come up with this.
I was talking about this pattern I had.
And he goes, yeah.
And Schilling said, so the difference is I'd probably have 30 of those patterns that I have deep in my memory.
It's like Roberto Duran.
I can't remember who was fighting him, but he came back and he said, the fucking guy can read my mind.
And I think his trainer said, he's not reading your mind.
What he's doing is that he knows those patterns so well, and he sees you about to set him up, and he's beating you to it.
And when I watched Henner Gracie tie up, tie up the likes of Brennan Schaub and Leota Machida and all kinds of guys in there.
I watched him just do whatever he wanted, starting on his back.
And I was like, dude, you're anticipating their movements.
You already see what their patterns are because you're ahead of them.
You're not going to be as reverential.
You're going to love the fact that life is that way, that the universe can be that way, that if you practice something enough.
And you get good enough at something.
It can seem like what you do is magic, almost.
Right?
But it's not.
It's just that you have learned how to chunk large portions of information, and you learn how to be ahead of somebody.
And more importantly, when you play somebody at the same game, you're going to see the tendencies.
They're going to make tendencies, and you're going to beat them to those tendencies.
You're going to be able to head them off.
Why?
Because you've been there a thousand times.
Because you went through the same thing.
And the difference between your practicing beginner mind and your mastery mind in that context is vastly different.
And I can always tell somebody who's mastered something versus somebody who's never taken the time to really get good at something.
I can always tell the difference.
And I prefer to be around, not always, not always, because I got some real moron friends that are so much fun, but I typically tend to find more intimacy in In conversation with people that have at least continued to endeavor down the road to mastery.
Well, there's very few people that can talk to them.
That's right.
If you're going to talk to a real master about something, pull someone aside and talk to them about their craft, about achieving an incredibly high level at a very difficult discipline, like a master chess player, for instance.
How many people do they have to talk to?
Say if Gary Kasparov is at a restaurant and somebody wants to have a conversation with him about food stamps or fucking...
I think in this time, though, he was 54. I think he went up to 54. That was because Roberto Duran had beaten Davey Moore, and I think that was at 54. Was it at 60?
Because Roberto followed all the way up to Hagler.
Well, if you watched him with Amir Khan, he'd fake low, he'd jab low, jab low, and come over to the right, jab low, and it didn't work, like, eight times.
And then finally, jab low, boom, and just came to the top and just knocked him out.
I think that's one of his main go-to I don't know.
What I believe is that when you get to a certain proficiency at lifting, then and only then should you lift heavy.
You've built up a good, solid base.
Then should you lift heavy.
I follow like the Pavel Tatsulini protocol where like say if I can do 10 reps of something, I never do 10.
I do five.
So like if I get to, like if I'm doing something heavy, like if I'm doing 90 pound clean press squats where I'm holding 90 pounds over my head, I could probably do 10 of those, but I only do four, maybe five.
What I think is that you're best off doing less repetitions more often.
So instead of doing one day where you blow your whole fucking system out and you do, one more, bro, come on, one more, argh!
And the next day you can barely walk.
I think, and this is what Pavel says, and this is what a lot of people like, there's a company called Strong First, what they recommend.
There's a few people at the front of the line when it comes to what you would call functional fitness and functional strength.
And they think that, what Pavel calls greasing the groove, which means do it more often But do it not to failure.
So instead of having one workout every three days where you blow your body out, have one workout every day, and you don't blow your body out, and you'll get stronger quicker.
If it got ugly, if Rose McGowan tried to kick your ass, if you were on a beach and you were competing for coconuts and she was deciding that you didn't deserve a coconut.
There's one side of it, which is young women are delicious and beautiful and their skin and all that.
But I think there's another psychological thing at play, which is also the idea of I'm 60. I still got it.
She still finds me attractive.
I still can get it up.
I can still please her sexually.
I can still hang with a 20 year old.
I can still make her happy.
It's a way of telling yourself you're still alive, that you still have vitality and all that shit.
And then there's the third thing, which is, look at what I've accomplished.
I can afford this shit.
This is another toy, along with my car and my boat.
But it's all self-affirmation, and it's all, at the end of the day, a manifestation of probably some shit you haven't worked out, which is still a feeling of insecurity, still a hole you can't fill.
Or you're a fat savage with a martini in your hand, a giant hard dick, and you've paid 30 Russian hookers to hang out with you for a month, because your doctor found a blemish on your tumor.
And you fuck their mouths where they're lying on their stomach so that the shoes are up in the air so they can see the bottom of their shoes while you're nutting their mouth.
What if there's so much Viagra in the body, the shark gets a boner, and the shark is just running through the ocean with a raging hard-on, flying through the air.
You know how sharks fly through the air?
They jump out of the water.
This time he's going to jump out of the water with his dick rock hard.
I know that they're the tribe that when they came back, the anthropologists in the 70s, and found that the ones that killed the most men in battle were the ones that sired the most children.
And when they came back in the 70s and told the academic world that, that aggression was inherent and that it was rewarded by females, ooh, you should have seen the politically correct, you should have seen what happened in the 70s.
And that is rearing its head again today, the idea of aggression.
Not only that, they attacked, there's a Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, they attacked the scientists, the anthropologists that came back, they attacked them personally over it, tried to ruin their reputations.
Go back up to where I was reading what it was saying there.
The tribe has moved a number of times since that sighting.
Scout expert in the region's indigenous groups, Morels, was on last Sunday's flight as well as previous missions in 2008 and 2010 that also yielded extraordinary images.
These groups change location every four years or so.
So that looks like a modern knife to me now that I'm looking at it deeper, because if you look below where he's holding onto it, there's a wooden handle lower than that.
Machete.
Yeah, that looks like a machete.
So how are they uncontacted if they have a machete?
Well, there's no way to really study them, though.
That's what's really interesting.
The real way to study them would be have a drone that they didn't know was a drone, fly it in there, and perch it on a tree, and watch, and get as much data as you can.
They must ingest the semen of their elders daily from the age of seven until they turn 17 to achieve adult male status and to properly mature and grow strong.
Homicide is, I think, the leading cause of death among hunter-gatherer tribes in Papua New Guinea because they just get in these fights with each other and they kill each other.
He apparently was married and didn't partake, but certainly Aristotle and Plato and his students and his contemporaries would talk about how we have nice boys.
Let's go back and drink some wine.
We'll go eat and kiss some beautiful boys and then we'll talk some more.
He was speaking against Athens, against the elite, against the gods, and he was a man of reason.
Not so much faith, but rather reason.
And so he was somebody who was considered to be a threat to the power structure, a threat to the religion.
And so Socrates was considered essentially an enemy of the state, and he had an opportunity.
They didn't want to kill him.
The Greek government said, you know, listen, hey, we're condemning you to death, i.e., we're looking the other way, get the fuck out of town.
Just be in exile.
And Socrates said, no, sorry, because that would be admitting fault.
If you guys want to sin against philosophy, kill me.
But I'm not going to renounce what I said, and I'm not going to say sorry, and I'm not going to leave because I've lived under these rules and these laws forever.
And if that's the law of the land, then I will take my punishment.
But you guys are wrong, but just know this is on you, not on me.
Have you ever contemplated, like, what it would be like, I mean, I assume that this is gonna be available in some sort of a simulated form in virtual reality within, you know, our lives, to be able to go and experience what it would be like to be inside of Yeah.
Greece or ancient Rome or just trying to experience what it would be like.
Like in our minds, this is normal life, right?
This is normal life being in a building, electricity, all that set.
I think it would be so fucking enlightening if we could just for a brief moment, even if we're just for a few minutes, try to experience what life was like back then and then try to put it into context.
When I'm talking about the way people look at the world, if you listen to Lenny Bruce today, it's hard to listen to Lenny Bruce today, because you already know a lot of the things he's saying, and it's not really so groundbreaking anymore.
But if you listen to him in a 1959 nightclub, you'd be like, holy shit, this is blowing my mind.
Imagine being in front of Socrates.
Imagine them being around all these people that had so little access to knowledge, knew so little about how the world actually worked.
So you died of disease that would roll through and a plague would come and then there would be a war and all this stuff would happen.
So I think you'd have a more intimate relationship with death.
But I think actually that when you say we do have access to more information, we know more, as in we know more about the methodology of how certain things work.
We know that there's a shark that lives 500 years.
I don't know if thinking people back then...
Knew less in terms of what it was to be essentially human and the responsibility of a human being.
So, in other words, if you really get down to brass tacks at the end of the day, you're left with yourself, you're left with the things you can conquer You're left with the things you can put into context about yourself.
You're left with how much self-knowledge at the end of the day.
When you die, how well did you get to know yourself?
One of the big values of putting yourself in risky situations or putting yourself into situations where you need to learn something that takes a lot out of you is you learn about yourself.
And I think the Greeks knew that and wrote about that as well as anybody ever.
And I think that they understood, like you read Seneca, you read Socrates, and though they didn't have the technological advantages we did, they didn't have the ability to get as close to the rest of the world as we did, they had deep, deep concepts and wrestled with The big ideas and questions that have never left us, that still haunt us.
The idea of what is the difference between good and evil?
How should I really live my life?
What is the right thing to do when everybody is telling me to do this and it's way more convenient?
But what's the answer?
Am I really just my appetites or am I more than that?
And if my dignity and my morality and ethics are compromised, Would I have the courage to stand there and say, I'm going to stay in Greece and not leave?
Those big human questions are as relevant today as they were then.
And if you really get down to what it means to be a human being, and if you get down to knowledge, maybe we don't know more than they do.
There's a great professor who teaches this class on the turning points in European history, which you can get at the teaching company.
He said something really awesome.
He starts the lecture with this.
He said...
I want you guys—it was the fall of Constantinople, a city that stood for a thousand years, and walls that stood for a thousand years.
And when the Turks came in with this hundred-foot gun and started blasting the walls— Jesus Christ.
And then they sold most, they killed, they sacked the city, raped and killed most of the men, and then sold about 150,000 into slavery, which means they chained them up and marched them back to one of their colonies and sold them on an open market.
And he said, and he said, remember, this is a city that stood for 100 years.
It was when Constantinople then became Istanbul, became the center of the Ottoman Empire.
He said, I want you to think for a second about what it sounded like to be inside that city or on that wall when it was coming down.
When you knew that walls that had stood for a thousand years were finally giving way to this new technology, which was a giant cannon.
That it took them a mile a day to drag, you know, and they did it for a hundred miles or something crazy.
He said, I want you to think these Ottomans are outside.
These dudes are going to take no mercy and they are going to do what they want and when.
And I want you to think, what did it smell like?
What did it sound like?
And what was really going on is you were waiting in your house and they came through the walls.
And for the first time in a thousand years, your city and everything you knew was going to be burned, raped, killed, sold into slavery and changed.
Think about that shit for a second.
And that was a reality for people.
That's a fascinating way to teach history because it brings it down to a visceral level where you go, these motherfuckers lived through that.
So I think that, the existential possibility that you and everybody you know, like Amos Oz, the Israeli writer, his mother killed herself.
And he said, my mother killed herself because in Ukraine, when she was from Kiev, I think, In one day, 25,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in one day.
He said, in her town, everybody she knew and everybody that knew those people and everything she came from for generations, seven generations, wiped away, all killed.
and now she's in sun-baked Jerusalem or Haifa or wherever it is.
Think about what that was like for a human being, where everything you knew, same thing like being a Native American, everything you knew, all the buffaloes killed, their bodies, the hides laced with strychnine, all the animals that are eating that are dying.
So your entire mythology, Joseph Campbell talks about that, all your whole mythology has been wiped away.
The buffalo that is the centerpiece of your mythology or God and all the eagles and everything else, and your God obviously is not strong enough to stop this incredibly strong Western God.
What does that say about not only your very existence, but the gods you've been sacrificing in the world?
I was gonna get to something, but my point was, imagine that there's gonna be a civilization one day that looks back on the primitive nature of us today.
With the same sort of like bizarre reflection that we look back at Socrates or we look back on the people that were on the Mayflower.
It's just hard to imagine as we're all trying to expand our consciousness and grow as a civilization and we would hope that with every new president we have like a better way of doing things and our government tightens up and our laws get better.
That's one of the things that people are so terrified about with this new administration that everyone feels like it's slipping backwards.
But one day, you know, the give and take, the flow, the ebb and flow of information 500 years from now, when they look back the way we look at, you know, the attack of the Mongols on Jin China.
You look back at the destruction that took place just a few hundred years ago and the kind of civilization that existed back then, and what would it be like to be in the felt tents of the Mongols as they were camped outside of the gates of this city that they were going to hurl flaming bodies with catapults at.
They would set their roofs on fire with flaming human beings.
So they would light people on fire, douse them in kerosene, light them on fire, and then launch them through the fucking air, and they would land on buildings and light them on fire from the outside.
Knowing what something actually means versus how it makes you feel.
That's interesting.
Knowing why things make you feel a certain way, why they could feel totally different in a different day.
Are you going into things neutral or are you going into things loaded up already with emotions and with negativity and then you immediately react from this loaded up position instead of from a neutral position where you can analyze it and decide that nothing truly has any meaning other than the meaning that you give it?
And he talks about that he did all those experiments, right?
So just about...
Getting to know how your body, how your fast-thinking brain reacts and learning that sort of getting a handle on your mechanisms and how even the way you hold your body.
So if you're smiling, you're going to think something's actually funnier than if you're frowning.
They had people hold a pencil in their teeth sideways like that.
And when they saw a joke, they thought it was funnier than if they were holding a pencil like this with a point out and they were in a frown.
They thought it wasn't as funny.
Or when they were told to take a test and come up with sentences out of the words gray and wrinkled and sunshine and bald, they moved to the next test slower because those words made them think of old people.
So the language you use, how you hold your body, all those things affect how you are going to interact with data and stimulus that you're presented with.
So the state that you are in is going to influence how you react to something.
The guy who takes that truck and runs it through the crowd.
Those are the ones that are interesting.
Forget about all the people handing out flowers and inviting people in their homes for tea.
All those things that are taking place at the same time don't attract our attention.
So it does become a real problem.
If you want to look at the experiences of seven billion people, you can find a lot of horrific shit.
But if you want to look at the experience of one person, you, Brian Callen, your interactions are almost entirely positive.
Your day is almost entirely filled with laughter and friendship and fun and joking around and getting on stage and performing and doing podcasts and being with your family and having a wonderful time.
So you can have a distorted view of the world by being too aware of the whole world.
And then people will tell you, well, hey, man, you can't live your life in a fucking bubble, man.
That's called life.
Everybody lives in a bubble, you cunt.
That's why Meryl Streep can go on TV and say that mixed martial arts isn't art.
Why is she saying that?
Because that's her bubble.
In her bubble, that makes sense.
She could say that.
If she said that, if we were all backstage at the UFC and she said that, people would be like, who the fuck?
To be good at anything, you have to create a bubble, I would argue.
Because if I want to write stand-up and I'm walking down and I start thinking about the drug cartels in Mexico and how they kill innocent people or whatever it might be, I'm going to get ramped up and I'm going to go, what would I do in that situation?
I'm going to get full of fear.
And I'm not going to be thinking about what I've got to be thinking about, which is, you know, whatever it might be.
Or maybe I can use that in my stuff.
But I find I have to really guard against unhelpful thinking.
And that's one of the reasons why I refuse to go down all these goddamn conspiracy holes that everybody wants you to go down and read this and read that.
I don't want to.
I don't want...
Man, you should know.
You should know about it.
No, I shouldn't.
No, I shouldn't.
I can't know about everything.
I fucking can't.
There's not enough time in the day.
I don't know who killed Kennedy, but it was a long time ago and...
I'm done.
I'm done.
I don't want to look into it anymore.
Maybe one day I'll change my mind.
But you can't say that someone has to go down these roads, or you have to pay attention to this, or you have to pay attention to that.
You want to find out all the threats that ISIS poses to civilization?
Jesus fucking Christ.
How much time do you have?
Do you want to find out how dangerous Putin really is?
Boy, how much fucking time do you have?
How much time do you have?
Do you want to find out all the different potential gender roles that people play and gender identities that people cling to and all the different types of sexuality that exists and perversion and how many people jerk off on feet?
But we need someone who's going to reliably do it on the internet.
And I don't think that's impossible.
I think if we find someone who's truly, absolutely, 100% ethical and objective, and also someone who's not just going to go after fantastic stories because they make big ratings, but someone who goes after stories that are actually important because they're significant events and issues, and does it in an objective way.
Everything's editorialized.
All these things that people cling to are editorialized.