Shane Smith’s HBO show Redacted Tonight went from weekly to daily after viral success, blending raw authenticity with war journalism like Ben Anderson’s fearless reporting in conflict zones. They critique media bias—Exxon’s Rex Tillerson (now U.S. Secretary of State) allegedly downplaying climate science, akin to tobacco industry tactics—and debate marijuana’s medical potential vs. DEA resistance, despite its natural presence in the body. Rogan’s "Council of Elders" idea, featuring Elon Musk and CRISPR pioneers, clashes with Smith’s skepticism over societal readiness for tech-driven evolution like brain-to-brain communication or cloned mammoths to combat permafrost thaw. Both agree polarization stifles progress, from civil rights disputes to gut-health cures (like probiotics resolving antibiotic damage), while Rogan warns of Yellowstone’s supervolcano as a civilization-ending threat—underscoring why Musk’s multi-planet vision, though extreme, may be necessary. [Automatically generated summary]
We did our weekly show, and then that was doing well, so they gave us a daily show, and they were going to just put it on HBO Now and Go, but then it was doing so well, they put us on the air on TV, so it's every night.
It's just a bunch of hipsters in skinny jeans and tattoos high-fiving in war zones.
And I was like, if you aren't criticizing the news, aren't criticizing the truth or the facts or the stories, you're just criticizing that we have tattoos and we don't look like you, we won.
It's really interesting to see a bunch of young weirdos in war zones.
You know, there was one that you guys did, I don't remember the location it was, but one of your reporters was out there, and he had a flak jacket on, and he was surrounded by all these rebels in these bombed out buildings, and you could hear, boom!
You hear things going off in the distance, and he's kind of calmly explaining, okay, so what's going on is they're bombing the location very close to us, and they're over there, and he's pointing at it.
I asked him about it one time, and he goes, you know, I have this thing where there's like a 30-second lag between like some guy like, you want to die?
And he's got a 30-second lag between like when he realizes that.
And so he comes across as just sort of like, you know, unflappable, but it's a genetic thing.
He's also fucking the best war journalist out there.
I mean, we're dealing with this weird time where the President of the United States points to CNN and says, I'm not talking to you.
You're fake news.
And then the meme comes, you know, with the sunglasses fall down, the thug life meme with him.
And you do get a lot of fake news, though.
You're getting a lot of these unsubstantiated reports about him with prostitutes and urine, and they're talking about it on the fucking news, which is unprecedented.
And, you know, for us, when, after the election, everybody came to me and said, what should we do?
And I said, we gotta just be logical...
Fact-based, middle-of-the-road, press record, non-political, non-partisan, none of this shit.
We just go out there and do it.
The problem is, you know, we view ourselves as centrist and sort of press record, all that stuff, but if the world takes us over a giant leap to the right with You know, fake news and all this crazy shit happening, then you're sitting there sort of going, well, all of a sudden we're put in this position.
Like, for me, I always bring it up and say, like, I'm an environmentalist because there's a boogeyman there.
Like, we all get fucked if the environment gets fucked.
And there's a boogeyman that we can sort of, you know, go against, and it's good for everybody, you know, whatever.
And the problem is, is I don't know when environmentalism became a left thing.
It should be for anyone who's sane, anyone who's smart.
And, you know, I spend time, like, going back to war, like, when you spend a lot of time in war zones, the one thing when you talk to people in those war zones is war is fucked.
It's not fun, it's not heroic, it's not like a manly shot in the, you know, it's like, you know, catheter bags and you're fucked up and, you know, you're on PTSD. Half your head's missing.
Half your head's missing, your ass is missing, your balls are missing.
So, but, you know, there's this global scientific consensus of, you know, global warming, 97%, which never happens in any science, right?
Ever.
But there's all this doubt.
Not all over the world, but a lot in America still.
So we looked at it.
We said, what the fuck is happening here?
And there's now three AGs, three attorneys general, with 20 other in support who've come out for this lawsuit now against Exxon.
CEO of Exxon is now our Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.
And so what happened was they knew in the 70s and 80s that fossil fuel...
You know burning fossil fuels carbon in the air carbon emission caused global warming and was a factor for global warming and Then they realized this is gonna be bad for business so in the 80s and 90s and now they spend billions of dollars on You know discrediting the science.
That's the whole thing.
Well, there's no consensus.
There's no consensus That's the that's the thing they spend billions of dollars to do it.
There is a consensus There's a total merchants of doubt I did.
Well, that whole argument that the science isn't settled yet, like you said, it's being perpetrated by the people that can profit on the science not being settled yet.
And what gets scary is it makes it real convenient for right-wing people who just classically think and vote and behave right-wing to just adopt that thinking and then repeat and pair those words.
There was a new report that came out today about the infrastructure in terms of the water supply, the pipes that we have, that the water's being carried with, that they're all rotting out in a place in this country.
It'll cost a trillion dollars.
But they're saying that Flint, what happened in Flint, could happen in a lot of places.
Yeah, it's just old infrastructure.
It needs to be replaced.
You know, and here it is.
Nation of Flint.
America's 1.2 million miles of deteriorating lead pipes and they'll cost one trillion dollars to fix.
One thing that I like about Trump is that he has been saying that he wants to address the infrastructure and he wants to put people to work fixing all the problems that exist and creating jobs by fixing all these types of problems.
Well, it's interesting, you know, because the president, if you really look at it, traditionally, you know, their big power is right now is when you do appointees or when you get a judge through or when you do an appointee, you put your cabinet together.
And then the cabinet has power and the president goes on to opening, you know, bridges and, you know, flying around the world and shaking hands and kissing babies.
And I think that that's what, you know, what we said is we're not going to, as a news agency, look at the boombastic or the, you know, the titillating headlines or the, oh, my God, he said that.
We're going to look after policy.
We're going to look at what is the EPA's With a guy who runs the EPA who tried to sue the EPA and shut it down.
What does the Department of Energy look like with Rick Perry, who, when he ran for president, said, I would shut down the Department of Energy.
What does that look with him actually running it?
Or Sessions, who actually is now the Attorney General, who sued the government many times against climate change reform.
Or Rex Tillerson, you know, who ran the largest fossil fuel company in the world, now being Secretary of State.
So we're looking more at just policy, what policy, you know, changes because of this cabinet, etc., etc.
It's like everybody thought this was going to be this sort of get rid of political correctness, stop all these whiny, crybaby liberals.
And then once you got into office, a lot of the same people that I talked to that were kind of in support of them...
Just kind of stepped back and went, whoa, like already?
Like right away?
Keystone Pipeline, the Dakota Access, immediately, abortion.
I mean, they're cutting insurance paying of abortion.
How would you say that?
Funding of abortion.
It's like you can't get an abortion with insurance anymore.
Have they passed that?
Has that been passed?
Which is, you know, obviously for some people that don't like abortions, it's a very touchy subject, which ironically are the same people who love war.
I don't really think so much about Trump as much as two things.
I think, A, it shows a sort of generational divide.
You know, it's not just Trump, because you saw it in Brexit, you're seeing it in France, you saw it in Italy, you're seeing it in many countries around the world, where you have the largest cohort, the largest demographic now is Gen Y. But the socio-economic and political power is mostly still controlled by the boomers.
So you have this sort of generational, you know, divide.
And what happened in America was, you know, the Gen Y was more fractured.
You know, we talked a little bit about this.
It fractured because of Bernie Sanders and Hillary and people just didn't like Hillary.
And so, and by the way, she's, you know, an older generation as well.
And then Trump was the sort of baby boomers, like, living in the gated community, saying, we don't want all that bad shit to happen.
I understand why people don't want to believe in environmental change, because it's scary and it's bad, and it's like, fuck, I don't want to believe in that, so I'm not going to believe in that.
I know a lot of guys who are former SEALs and guys who work for Blackwater, and now they're fucking holding guns at weed shops because they got a million dollars in cash in the back.
I don't know these guys because I only did it once and I'll never do it again.
It's a farce.
Okay, this is what they give you.
They give you, you know how those old ladies that take pills?
Like if you're, like someone else take your arthritis medication and you have like seven days and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, those little things.
And they're passing around bongs and pipes and cookies and cakes, and they had security there to make sure no one didn't come, and they had it all blocked off.
They did a smart job, like the way they handled it, but as far as actually judging what's the best pot, get the fuck out of here.
No one has any idea.
It's like giving you seven glasses of whiskey and then telling you to drink some wine.
Because what's interesting to me is when people who don't smoke it, smoke it.
Then I get to see.
Because our tolerance is so high.
I smoke it almost every day.
At least five days a week, I probably smoke weed.
So when I see people that tried for the first time, and you see that terrified look in their eye, they're confronted with their own mortality, and they feel the earth spinning, and they're like, Jesus!
Okay, but the thing is, I got a question because I was thinking about this the other day, because I'm like reading all about, you know, how it stops cancer, and this is great for this, and great for that, and all this other stuff, so I'm like, fuck yeah.
I'm worried that Trump has such incredible connections to money, and that all the good parts that's going to come from that, like his no-nonsense approach to infrastructure, wanting to rebuild a lot of things, put a lot of people to work because of that, and a lot of people benefit from that.
What scares me is that money connection with the pharmaceutical companies who have just gone way, way out of their way to just try to stifle marijuana research at every possible turn and legalization at every possible turn.
Because when you make something illegal, it's not just making something illegal, which is why I had to drill this into the head of a friend of mine who is pro-Hillary, and he's asking me why I'm upset with her.
And I said, look, dude, there's a fucking email that was leaked, the WikiLeaks email, that said she's against marijuana in every sense of the word.
She was making a promise.
To some organization, I don't remember who it was, but they were asking her, what is her stance on marijuana?
She's against it in every sense of the word.
How could you be?
That's like saying I'm against peanut butter in every sense of the word.
You know, like, what are you, a monster?
You want people to go to jail for peanut butter?
You know?
Like, the problem is, it's not just that you don't like it, which I'm fine with.
The problem is, you can make people get locked in a cage.
That's a crime.
It's a crime.
We know this is innocuous.
Like, I just hit We're having a conversation.
There's no problems.
This is not some devil weed.
It's not going to ruin lives.
I pay taxes.
I have a family.
Everything's fine.
Wake up when the alarm goes off.
We're being fed bullshit.
And when someone who's in the position of running for president, like Hillary, Says something crazy like that.
She's against marijuana legalization in every sense of the word.
That means people are going to go to jail.
That means people are going to get shot.
That means more Mexican drug gangs are going to ship more illegal product over here.
If it doesn't go in that direction, we're going to have a fucking revolution.
And they need to understand that what you saw with that women's march, the day after Trump was inaugurated, when you see millions of people, there was a million people in LA, they expected 80,000.
970,000 fucking people showed up.
Whitney Cummings sent me some pictures when she was there, and I was like, holy shit!
This is crazy!
That kind of movement is not just connected to women's rights, and it certainly is at that day, but it's a mindset.
It's a mindset of protesting and fighting what they think is wrong.
And it's going to spread across the board.
So we're in a weird fucking bipolar situation in this country.
Well, actually, it's good because I think Americans had forgotten how to sort of protest.
Americans had forgotten that this is part of democracy and all this stuff.
We've been sort of...
Talk radioing our anger in quiet.
I think it's good to go out and protest if you believe in it, A. B, if you sort of look at what's happening politically.
I did a thing on House Divided.
What's interesting is if you ever do anything on Israel, then the Palestinian, pro-Palestinian people go after you.
If you ever do anything on Palestine, the Israeli people go after you.
You can never do anything right.
It's the same thing when you do politics here.
We thought we were incredibly even-handed.
We gave Republicans the same amount of time as the Democrats.
The Democrats were like, you made the Republicans look too good.
The thing is, when you look at it, you say, You know, it's so broken that it used to be just like, you know, pendulum swings, pendulum swings.
But now what's going to happen is that Trump gets in.
He's going to undo a lot of the last eight years.
Then the Dems, when it swings to them, will undo what he undid.
So it's not doing nothing.
Now it's going backwards.
And so you're sitting there saying there's a lot of shit that we've got to solve.
And we can't solve it if we just keep going backwards politically.
And I think that's why there's so much frustration, is because you're sitting there going, let's unwind what they did for the past eight years, and then someone else will get in and unwind what we unwound.
And so you sit there and say, okay, well, everyone's moving far and far...
It's best when we're all just fucking working together.
The economy's doing well, we're all getting it done, and we're sitting in the sort of logical middle.
That's the problem with going too far to any side.
You can be on either side on issues and all this stuff, but if you go too far and you're too sort of dogmatic on either side, that's when it gets scary.
Yeah, and that influence, the problem is like, this is what people have to realize, a lot of your opinions, and my opinions too, are not really my opinions.
They're opinions that I've decided are good, that I've heard from other people.
And a lot of our patterns of behaviors, from accents to the way we approach culture, the way we think about women, the way we think about religion, a lot of that is learned.
Okay?
And we have these two deeply ingrained patterns in this country.
We have the Democrats and we have the Republicans.
And the Republicans are these no-nonsense, get business done, you know.
And the Democrats are, you know, we always think of, oh, these people are all crybabies, and they're all wishy-washy, and they're bleeding hearts.
And this is like ingrained.
It's sort of ingrained in our system, these two different patterns of behavior.
And they're severely problematic.
Because you could exhibit a lot of traits on each side and still be a very good person or a lot of ideas on each side and still be a very good person.
But if you look at, I remember when, you know, looking at sort of the Clinton administration, he took the largest deficit in history, made it the largest surplus in history, shrunk government, you know, basically the tenants of the Republican Party.
W gets in, takes the largest surplus into the largest deficit, expands the government, etc., etc.
So that was my question because it seems to me, what I'm getting the feeling now, like humanity when they have a big thing, like a war or something, it's just like we're all getting together and we're all going to fucking do this together and we're going to, you know, science and we're going to work hard and we're going to do all this and we're like, yeah, fuck.
And then when, you know, this has been the largest or longest period of peace and prosperity the world's ever known.
Right now, we see things in Syria.
I'm talking about sort of, these are sort of isolated conflicts, but I mean, overall, globally.
And so anyway, we can go on for our, but I think, you know, both you and I are sort of coming to the same point that you can put any name you want on it.
What you're coming to is a sort of dysfunctional relationship.
What I'm hoping, and this is totally possible, that Generation Y, like you're talking about, Generation X, all these people that are growing up right now and just sort of waking up as adults, like realizing, like half those people that are wandering through the streets when you look at the Women's March, half those people are, you know, in their 20s.
I am really hoping that this message will get out that it is high time we abandon this fucking goofy system and that we demand a better system for running 350 million people and one figurehead and all of his cronies that he stuffs into some office and has massive influence over all of us.
I'm an environmentalist, but I think he's too far over there.
I think you need to sort of...
If it was me, you want someone...
You know who I like?
I like, there's a guy named Eric Schmidt, and he's the chief, or one of the head NASA scientists.
And these guys are just super smart dudes, right?
Men and women, actually, because the chief scientist at NASA, I met as well, and she's fantastic as well.
But you just need like a common sense...
unidentified
person who just goes in there with no rhetoric or no politics or anything just saying look we have to reduce emissions by 80% if we don't we all die so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna get a lot of batteries and we're gonna put the things on because the batteries can finally do it now and this is what we're gonna do you need someone to do that because when it gets hyper politicized and stuff and everything gets fucking lost in the bullshit you just need a commonsensical person who just says this is what needs to happen because this is what the fucking science says The
logjams that you must have at a big corporation, say if you worked for Under Armour, the logjams you must have if you want to get something done, they're probably monumental.
It's probably a million people, you're trying to talk about this and you have to have design meetings and sit down and try new fabric, oh this fucking sucks, let me try this.
Well, I was watching, actually, ironically, I was watching the LBJ documentary.
And what was interesting about that was that, you know, here's this guy who's basically a political mechanic.
You know, who's sitting there, and everybody wants something.
Everybody, you know, is trying to get this, and basically, it's completely fucked, and you can't get anything done.
And the only thing that came across there was he got everything done by lying to everybody, by just saying, I'm going to give you what you want, and I'm going to give you what you want, and I'm going to give you what you want, and then just sort of figuring it out at the end.
And I was just watching it.
It was fantastic, because you're like, that's probably the last era When you could actually get shit done.
And he was like...
I mean, who knows?
Because it was a movie.
But he was just sort of...
He was like the last of the...
Because I look at Frank Underwood, and I always call him...
He was a political mechanic.
He was the guy who could go get the votes, and he could drum up the votes, and he could do it.
There's a guy that I would take to, if you're looking at that kind of thing, this guy, Taylor Wilson, he built a fusion reactor in his garage when he was 14. Oh, yeah, I heard that story.
Well, now he's 23. But the thing is, he's into dark matter, dark energy, and he's going around the Hydron Collider and CERN. And I'm just like, this kid...
And the weapons that we have to store, which we can't store for more than 100 years, but they need to be stored for 10,000 years, he can take little pea-sized bits of that, put it into a fail-safe reactor that sort of drains into a salt thing, whatever, and it can't be, whatever, it's fail-safe.
They're small, but they do like 50,000 houses or 100,000 houses.
And just by using the fuel that we already have that we can't store, we can power the world for the next 10,000 years.
So when I hear this, and this is his thing, and by the way, he's being backed by Elon and all the big names and whatever, but the thing is, I'm like, I want that kid on my side.
Well, it's always made sense to me that if we're putting carbon out in the atmosphere, and carbon's valuable for construction and a lot of different things, there's got to be a way to...
It's really hard to find people that are open to the facts, that are willing to change their mind, aren't attached to their ideas, and willing to look at every side of things before they form an opinion.
Most people don't have the time to do that.
That's part of the issue.
Part of the issue, I think, when anyone's talking about anything related to the environment or politics or gender or race or anything is there's only so much fucking time in the world, so it's so much easier to form this prejudiced opinion or this predetermined opinion on everything across the board, which is why, like, being on the right is so popular.
It's so easy to dismiss everybody as a bunch of babies and shit on them, you know?
He was worked, and he was worked towards the end by the Reagan administration when they were coming in, the Reagan campaign, because they were the first campaign to ever use the rights connection to Christianity.
This is the first time they had organized the hardcore religious base.
You also had, I mean, there's also an economic timing issue, and you had this oil crisis, and you had a recession, you have all these bad things happening, and you're like, well, that's Carter's fault.
Well, also, same thing, every time there's a gas crisis, so that's when the Japanese cars became popular, that's when they became popular.
It's the exact same thing.
You know, the SUVs were the highest sellers before the last oil crisis, or when they went through the roof, and then that's when the Prius, they couldn't make them fast enough.
It was exactly the same thing that happened in the late 70s.
Now, here's the other thing, is the Council of Elders for the world or for the country, because then you also need some military dudes to say, we can't.
The one thing that is sort of, whatever, a truism, is that you have to preach that sort of There is no democracy without safety.
Right.
It's true.
And you have to have guaranteed sort of protection.
And if you look at Europe, it's quite interesting because when they sort of said, okay, we're going to protect this area and there's an economic benefit for this area, you had all the little groups start to say like Scotland or the Basque countries or Catalonia or all these different say, well, we want to split off.
Right?
Because it's more democratic to have smaller sort of runnable countries that – and they're like, well, we want to have our own thing because we'll be part of this bigger thing, but we want to be more democratic.
And I think that's quite interesting because you have these supranational political entities that sort of guarantee safety and economic security, and then therefore it's much more democratic.
So you sort of sit there and say, okay, well, if that's the case, then you have to have that guaranteed security.
Don't you think, though, that if Mumbai goes away, Miami goes away, New York goes away, whatever, all the sea, the big sea next to the sea cities go away.
Now, this is interesting, because when we were shooting this doc on Sea Level Rise, One of the things that's damning to oil companies is they're like, well, we didn't know.
Science has not decided.
We didn't fucking know.
While this was happening, they raised, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, more, billions of dollars, they raised all their oil platforms by eight feet.
I think it can be done if we're facing extinction.
I don't think it can be done otherwise, because what I see happening, to go back to if we don't have war, like global war, we have this eating ourselves thing.
And if you look at the world, you have half the world, roughly.
Saying, technology can fix us.
We're going to go to Mars.
We're going to have little pellets of things which are going to feed 50 houses.
We're going to do this.
And then you have the other half of the world that's saying, fuck reading.
You know, fuck technology.
We're going back to, you know, another time.
And not just the Muslim world.
You have lots of different groups in Africa.
You have lots of different groups in obviously the Middle East.
You have different groups who are saying, fuck that.
We're not doing that.
And so they're moving away from it.
So you have this sort of duopoly in the world of people who are going one way and then people who are going the other way.
And I don't think that unless you have a common goal, which is, by the way, we're all going to die unless we do this, that everybody does it.
And it's like Star Trek.
In Star Trek, they did this thing where everybody from the world is finally together and then we're all working together for this great thing, which is exploring space.
And I think we need that focus and that goal, which is why, again, to go back to war zones, when you go to war zones, you say, oh shit, we shouldn't be fucking dropping bombs on each other.
And then when you go and talk to scientists, they go, oh, it's coming.
And it's coming fucking now.
And I'm not like this crazy dude or whatever.
I'm just a regular dude going, oh shit, it's because I talked to these scientists.
Like we just did this thing in Russia.
Where, I don't know if you know about this, but the permafrost, have you heard about the permafrost?
One is, we went up to lakes in both Russia and the Arctic, and you pop a hole in the lake, and you put a torch in front, and it shoots out like an oil flare.
And the permafrost is like frozen ground, like dirt and shit.
It's also frozen water.
And so when it melts, the water goes away, and the ground, which is left, sort of slumped.
And it goes down like 20 or 30 feet.
And so you just have these, all over Siberia, you have these huge, like, two, three, four mile wide, just like, craters.
Jesus Christ!
You know?
And so...
He's there and he's like the sort of foremost expert.
And what's interesting about it is he goes, look, in the Ice Age, here's what happened.
There were not that many humans, but there were millions upon millions of animals.
And there were like elk and there were, you know, caribou and all this shit.
And there were woolly mammoths.
You know what they did?
They ate all the fucking shrubs and the trees and shit, which actually, you know, made the ground...
It'll freeze much deeper because, you know, there's a lot of things like dark sort of, you know, brings in heat and it, you know, takes the insulation away, all this stuff.
With the South Koreans, they're cloning mammoths in the hopes that they're just going to put all these clones of mammoths up there and it's going to freeze the permafrost.
The amount that they would make versus the amount of methane that's going to be released from the permafrost, which has been collecting this shit for fucking millions of years, is de minimis.
Because we actually talked to NASA and said, is this guy crazy?
Is he like Don Quixote, like tilting that windmill?
And he said, actually, the environmental or the organic solution, rather than dropping ice cubes at a helicopter, is the best solution because it used to be that 40,000 years ago this shit regulated itself, and this is when the planet was cold.
Now it's too fucking hot.
So this is a way to get back to being cold, so it actually makes sense.
You know, it's like this Black Lives Matter going after the Women's March thing.
Like, everybody relax.
On one hand, though, I got to admit, though, I read the thing and I was like, why would they complain about people supporting this Women's March?
Why would they complain about something good?
And then the other part of me went, well, imagine if you were them.
Imagine if you were them, you're protesting against people getting shot and killed by cops, and you're trying to make a movement out of that, and you don't get near the kind of traction, nor near the kind of positive press.
Then, the other part of me goes back to the Women's March, you go, you know what's crazy about the Women's March?
Not a single fucking arrest all across the country.
I think that's important because, you know, you sit there and you say, okay, look, you know, people can do this and we can do it peacefully and we can do it rationally.
And we're all, at the end of the day, we're all...
I think we will submit our Council of Elders idea to the world via the internet and see if we get a billion votes, then I think everybody has to adopt it.
You know, Joe Biden, we used to have Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club back in Boston where we would plagiarize each other's material because Joe Biden got busted doing Kennedy speeches when he was running for president back in 88. Really?
Yeah.
Everybody's kind of forgot about that.
He seems like a fairly decent dude, although a little odd.
But I think that what I'm saying about technology is...
I think we're way more connected as human beings than we ever have been before.
And I think a lot of this crazy super social justice warrior progressive shit that you're seeing today where it's getting...
The far, far, far outreaches of it are so out of hand.
I think all of this is possible and all of this is because of this newfound opportunity we have to communicate with each other that just previously just didn't exist.
I don't know if everybody knows what it is, but right now it's glasses.
And once you get over the fact, which is weird, that it's like holograms inside your eyeball.
Yeah.
Like, they put them in.
Now, I'm like, I'm a fucking, like, germaphobe freak.
And I'm like, oh shit, that's going to give me cancer of the fucking eyeball.
But apparently it's not.
But in any case, after you get over that fear, you're like, oh, you put these things on.
It's this room, right?
And you're like, oh, there's a TV and you're watching TV in your room.
Okay, great.
And they're like, but it's only a TV because your brain is used to it being a TV. When you get used to it, we'll just flip a button and you're on the 50-yard line.
It can be anything.
It can be any size.
You can do the art in the room.
Now, that's for TV watching.
It was developed for a media thing.
It could be movies or TV. But they're like, oh, it could be your phone, it could be your computer, it could be everything.
So everything is going to be in your glasses.
A camera, everything.
You control it with this little thing.
And it's...
So you're going to be...
You know, all your media is there.
Your phone is there.
Your computer is there.
Everything's there.
And it's just this connectivity that's always there.
It's always on.
It's fucking crazy.
Now, there's all kinds of ethical things.
And how's that going to change humanity?
All that stuff.
But who cares?
It's going to happen because technology is there and it's fucking better than a phone.
Now, once that connectivity happens, to go back to your point, there's a power in there for positivity and all this stuff.
But if you look at, for example, social media, you know, one of the things that is destroying Twitter is they can't keep, and by the way, the fake news on Facebook and all this stuff, they can't police it.
It's too many people, too much shit, and it's like bad people, it's this people, and everybody's got an opinion.
And by the way, when you're across the table, the reason why we eat, the reason why we have feasts, the reason why we do all this shit is because when you're eating together, you form social bonds and all this shit, and you're like, oh, I'm not going to kill you because we had a beer together or whatever.
But when you don't, and it's just this anonymous, I can say and do whatever the fuck I want, it just becomes like...
They're Bob-55-2-2-8 asshole, and then they decide to fuck with you.
It's fun for them.
It's a little game.
I was listening to this Radiolab pod.
No, it was an article I was reading.
That's what it was.
And it was about this guy who had been stalked online by his friend's son.
And they were, I mean, it got to the point where this guy was just, they were doing all, he was doing all sorts of horrible shit and sending them horrible, evil messages.
They were terrified.
They were all having horrible anxiety.
And it turned out that it was his friend's son.
Why?
The FBI found, for fun.
He didn't think about what he broke down crying when they confronted him and it was it was awful, but it was like wow There's like some sort of weird perverse thing that people enjoy doing just fucking with someone as a game And that all takes place because of that lack of social interaction, right?
The problem with that is is as those tools let's say augmented reality get more and more powerful than that sort of Unless it's unless we look at that aspect of it.
There's an interesting point though, which is when humans are hungry and thirsty, our immediate reaction is no.
And when we're fed and when we're a bit boozed up, the reaction is yes, which is why everyone says let's have a business lunch or a business dinner or whatever.
And also if you look at how we socialize with the family, how we socialize with each other, if you actually look back At your history and say, oh, I'm that guy's buddy, or I'm, you know, my family, whatever.
If you look back at the majority of the positive memories that you have, they're generally, you know, we got Thanksgiving with the family, or Christmas with this, or we got drunk with this guy, or we had burgers late at night, or whatever it is.
Because that's, you get these sort of endorphin, you know, rushes, and oh, we're bonding.
So I think once you take that out, and I, it's interesting, because I was talking to someone the other day, I was saying...
The more technology gets sophisticated, the more you kind of have to fly.
Because to have that meeting, like we have the technology, I can call you.
But now you have to fly and you have to have the meal.
Because if you're doing a big deal with somebody and you don't do that, even though it doesn't make any sense at all, it's become a thing.
Everyone's flying way more, ironically, because the technology is seen as...
But what I'm thinking is something even crazier than that, where you close your eyes and you're transported, you know, like, what was that movie with Arnold's work?
So interstellar space travel is hard and impossible because people will die before they get to where they're supposed to be going and all this stuff.
So, theoretically, what we can do is we can, you know, have clones in other places, and you download your brain into, like, a computer.
You send that Brain to another computer through laser beam traveling at the speed of light, and then it gets downloaded into the clone on the other side of the thing.
You come home, there's 15 of you in your house, you know, and they all want to watch the game and scream the same things, and you're competing to see who says the witty shit first.
And so because of that, we said, okay, well, we're not going to do that because we're playing God and all this stuff.
But they have places in China already where they're going to do that.
Now, if you extrapolate, because they're already experimenting on human fetuses.
But if you extrapolate and you say, okay, they start doing this and everybody comes out genius plus IQ and seven feet tall and super strong and whatever...
Yeah, I've heard that, that they're going to live to be 150 years old.
That's going to be really common.
But the thing is, that's just saying that today.
They might come up with something in five years from now that makes people go back, like reverse aging.
That's entirely possible.
I mean, it's just a process.
It's a biological process.
If you can stay alive...
Long enough for them to figure that out, how to turn it back.
And, you know, that's the real playing god.
Turn you back, go back to when you were younger, and then you're going to be a younger you dealing with a new super race that's been developed, where everyone is 300 pounds of solid muscle, and every Olympic wrestling match is between two enormous gorillas.
Well, I've got to tell you, you know this, that your evolutionary clock stops at 40. At 40, you don't continue on saying, oh, we're going to try this and ourselves will keep on making new shit.
It just stops.
And if you could go in and say, I'm going to go to the clinic and keep my evolutionary clock ticking, would you do it?
I would do it just because it would be a better experience.
Like if they all of a sudden gave you something and your immune system worked better, your body fat was lower, you had more vitality, you got more things done, you're more energetic, and you don't have to lose any experience.
You don't have to lose any understanding of the world.
Yeah, well, I think the China factor is huge, because I think if China really does start doing that with CRISPR and make these super athletes and super humans and make people that are just infinitely smarter than what we have today, that...
That also plays into my idea of technology-induced evolution.
I think symbiotically introduced, where it's like human beings interacting with technology, but I think also that technology being applied to our biological being.
But basically, he sort of foresaw all of this stuff happening.
And by the way, it's interesting because he gets credited with a lot of the tech stuff because a lot of people who were in college read him and then used those ideas to invent the things that are coming out now.
All the shit we're talking about now, just you and I talking about potential technologies, those thoughts between people like you and I that are not technologically savvy at all, those thoughts can get into the mind of someone who is, and then they can project that idea in their own way and start working on it.
But if you have someone who's mentally deranged and they just haven't committed a crime yet and you read what they have to say about life and about people and they're racist and sexist and crazy.
But it's also problematic because here's the problem that's happening.
It happens all over the world, but let's say in America.
Because everybody's up in arms about Trump, and there's protests and all this stuff, and all the media is going, "Can you fucking believe this guy?" And you only realize that that's what the rest of the country was saying every time Obama opened his mouth.
And so you sit there and say, "Hold on a second here.
Half the country believes that crazy people in California and New York voted, and then now I in Texas and Oklahoma have to fucking suffer.
And the other half of the people are saying, hold on a second, these people in Oklahoma and Texas and Ohio...
Voted and now I have to fucking, you know, listen to all this shit.
If it's dysfunctional, in fact, it's worse than dysfunctional, you're just going back to undo what they just did, why wouldn't you just say, fuck it, California's going to go off and do our own thing, and Texas is going to do its thing, and Oklahoma's going to do its thing, and by the way, if you don't like it in Oklahoma, you can move to fucking California.
If you guarantee that economic security and you guarantee that sort of, you know, political and military security, then it kind of makes a ton of sense to just say, well, if we're like-minded people in New York or LA or whatever, like, Okay, California.
What's the stat?
It's like California would be the eighth largest economy in the world.
You know what's really interesting, too, is they're almost universally leaning left.
If you look at all these powerful tech giants, and even social media companies like Facebook and Apple, they almost predominantly lean left despite the fact that they're worth billions of fucking dollars and they're a main driving force.
If you have a real problem with- I got a gay neighbor, these folks that live down the street, they have a kid, they adopted a kid, they have a fucking dog they walk by, they're the nicest fucking people in the world.
Yeah, and a lot of that is also because they need to get ayahuasca because dimethyltryptamine, the active compound of it, is illegal in the United States, even though your body produces it.
If you have someone who you know who has an opiate addiction, my friend Ed Clay, he runs a center down in Mexico, and he started it out because he had a problem with them.
He kicked them by using Ibogaine, and now he's like...
Part of the problem is all these fucking people that have already made a fuckload of money and they're trying to protect those investments...
They're involved in these gigantic organizations, these corporations.
It becomes this diffusion of responsibility situation where you have all of these people acting in the benefit of the group or for the benefit of the group, not thinking about everybody as individuals and justifying what they do by the fact that, hey, this is just business.
This is how it's done.
This is how it's always done.
There's enough fucking profit already.
There's enough.
And if you're in a business and your only way to make profit is by eating babies, and you go, look, my country, we've been eating babies over here for a long time, and we're not going to just stop eating babies.
No, you have to stop eating babies.
We know it's not good now.
And I feel the same way about fucking SeaWorld.
They need to stop having dolphins and whales and orcas in captivity.
Cut the shit.
You can't do that anymore.
There's a lot of things that we know are bad, but we allow them to go on because they've gone on for a long time.
It's one of the more interesting things about this time, is that because of all the information that's out now about opiate addictions, that's the reason why doctors prescribe less and less now.
That's the reason why they're under more and more scrutiny.
Whatever company that's making that, and the fact that the government hasn't stepped in, Trump immediately steps in and fucking stops the protests in the Dakota pipeline and starts that back up again, and he doesn't do anything about fentanyl?
I think that's what I had read, that there was 39 million prescriptions, which is 1 out of 10. But it's not really, because how many times do they refill it, right?
Is it that?
When you say someone has a prescription, are you saying it's prescribed to you, or are you saying I write you a new prescription when it runs out?
And there's that whole thing of like when someone dies of a heroin overdose, everyone goes to their dealer and buys from them because, oh, then it's really strong when I'm not going to die.
And so you're like, basically, you know what it reminded me?
It reminded me of, like, Platoon, when Elias' dudes were all smoking pot, and they were like the freaks, and then the other dudes were drinking whiskey and beer and whatever.
And it's sort of like...
And the crazy guys were smoking the weed and the good, you know, hardcore guy, you know, whatever his name was, the Tom Berenger character.
Because somebody must have looked at it at some point and said, fuck, there's a lot of hippopotamuses getting their livers removed here in New York City.
And, you know, if we believe in Moore's Law, then it's going to just go...
Like you're saying, we have this technology now.
We can't even...
Like, it used to be like, oh, 50 years from now we'll write about...
Five years from now, we don't know what the fuck's going to happen.
All this shit is just like, well, we can map the genome, and now we can edit the genome.
Now we can reverse aging.
Now we can do this.
And you're just sitting there going, holy shit, this is happening in real time.
So quickly.
And because of that, the speed is ramping up.
Kind of like it though because you know, I do a lot of medical research and I'm like You know one of the reasons why I'm not drinking here is because I got to go for my annual physical and I'm you know Gotta go in and not you don't have too much booze or whatever my body But it what's interesting about it is they map your shit and they check out your shit and they say well This is gonna happen or that can happen whatever else, but you sit there and you go in five years You're gonna have Aggressive therapies, if not cures, for many forms of cancer.
So you're just sitting there going, please, for fuck's sake, just get me another fucking 10 years so that I can get to this sort of stage.
And I think a lot of people with a lot of diseases that hitherto have been incurable are sitting there going, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Yeah.
Because it's going exponentially.
And when you can map the genome, then you can figure this out and we can rewire that fucking thing.
Well, there's also more understanding about nutrition now than ever before and the causes of all these illnesses, and a big part of that is inflammation.
Yeah, I was listening to this podcast today where they were discussing, this one was discussing having, she had some sort of an illness and they gave her two, oh she had an ear infection, and they gave her two big doses of antibiotics and she was fucked up for a decade.
She had constant pain, chronic pain, all these illnesses and injuries.
And then finally she went to a homeopathic doctor.
And the homeopathic doctor sorted it out with probiotics.
And she thought it was bullshit.
She was saying like the woman, her name was like Snowflake and her child was Moonchild.
Well, I took super strong, super, super strong antibiotics.
And afterwards, I was like, I'm fucked up.
Like, I'm seriously fucked up here.
I can't get out of bed.
Like, I'm messed up.
And this guy goes, he's like this internist.
You gotta go see him.
So I go see him, and he's just like, you need a ton of probiotics.
You need to rebuild your biome, right?
And so I did.
I just took a ton of probiotics, and he put me on this shit and whatever.
I was a new man, right?
Because all your immune system, everything is there.
Now they found out.
So, you know, what was happening was C. diff and Crohn's disease and all these things were happening because there was superbugs in hospitals because they were over-prescribing antibiotics.
And that's another thing that apparently has a giant effect on people with autism is medical marijuana.
Medical marijuana, especially edible marijuana.
I have a friend and he moved to Washington State particularly because of that because when they they made it legal and another friend who this kid was also autistic moved to Colorado for that reason so he could get it easily.
And people with cancer we have a story of all these parents who are like Bible thumpers who found the only thing that worked was CBD and they're like fuck it we're moving from Texas and wherever to Washington and Colorado because it's the only thing that helps my kids.
And they came out with this machine called the decorticator that allowed them to much more effectively process hemp fiber.
It was a machine that processed it.
Hemp makes a superior paper.
It makes superior cloth.
It makes superior...
You can eat it.
The hemp seed's nutritious.
It has essential fatty acids, all the amino acids.
It's an amazing plant.
It's like an alien plant.
He decides to demonize it because he doesn't want to convert his wood, his trees that he's turning into paper, he doesn't want to convert it to hemp and spend millions of dollars.
So instead, he starts publishing stories about Mexicans and blacks that are taking this new drug called marijuana and raping white women.
This drug, marijuana, wasn't even the name for cannabis.
When they made cannabis outlaw, when they made it illegal, when they made marijuana illegal, they didn't even know they were making hemp illegal.
They didn't know.
The general public did not know it was the same thing.
Because this word marijuana was never associated with hemp or with cannabis.
Marijuana was a wild Mexican tobacco, totally unrelated to cannabis.
They called it marijuana so that they could demonize it, and that's when they funded Reefer Madness and all those crazy propaganda movies and posters.
And we are still, to this day, trying to shake off what William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger did in the 1930s.
It's a very interesting anecdote that sort of is very pertinent to what's happening today, where you can just make up a story about something and then it's fucking, it's the truth.
They have thousands of earthquakes in Yellowstone every year.
It's a giant caldera volcano that at one point in time blew up and killed everything on the continent.
Every six to eight hundred thousand years it goes and when it goes that's a wrap baby and the last time it went 600,000 years ago and we they have thousands of earthquakes every year in Yellowstone and you go there and you watch Steam shooting out of the ground because the fucking boiling magma is so close to the surface that the rivers and streams and the underground water runs into it heats it up and shoots it up in the sky on a regular basis It's fucking bananas!
But that's why, just speaking about technology, that if you ever talk to, for example, our guy on our Council of Elders, Elon Musk, he's like, why are we a single planetary species?
Why wouldn't we just hedge our bets and be a bi-planetary species?
Because if something does go wrong, at least you've got your data and your culture and your people and whatever.
And why wouldn't you do that if you could do that?
And when they put it that way, you're like, well, that sort of makes sense.
Because everyone's like, oh, I want to live on Mars, those crazy nerds.
It's a good argument, and it's also arguable that with all this CRISPR technology, they might be able to figure out some sort of a medical solution for people that do move to a...
You know, like the moon has one-sixth Earth's gravity.
You know, there might be some way that they could figure out a way to colonize the moon and, you know, develop some sort of a new technology.
What I always just think about that is, you know, they get the equation wrong, and then something's like, oh, fuck it, it throws that, you know, the gravitational pull off by four centimeters, and then you're like...
As soon as the air comes up, those, like the actual alien from the movie Alien with the big fucking head, those things, they just camp out right over there and start building spaceships and plan their attack.
What kind of problem, Shane Smith?
I don't know if we're going to solve them by moving to Mars.