All Episodes
Oct. 31, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:22:52
Joe Rogan Experience #1032 - Colin Moriarty
Participants
Main voices
c
colin moriarty
01:33:46
j
joe rogan
01:42:54
Appearances
Clips
d
donald j trump
00:38
j
jamie vernon
00:58
j
josh olin
00:02
j
justin wren
00:02
t
tj kirk
00:01
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
joe rogan
Three, two, one.
unidentified
Yeehaw!
joe rogan
Yeehaw, Colin!
How are you, buddy?
colin moriarty
I'm good, man.
How are you?
joe rogan
Good, thanks.
What's going on?
What's cracking?
colin moriarty
Not a lot.
It's an honor for you to ask me back.
I appreciate it.
joe rogan
Oh, my pleasure, dude.
I had a great time with you last time.
It's good to see you, bud.
colin moriarty
Thank you.
Good to see you, too.
Congratulations.
You were just showing me around the space.
unidentified
Thank you.
colin moriarty
Very cool.
joe rogan
Thank you.
colin moriarty
I'm very excited for you.
joe rogan
I'm excited, too.
colin moriarty
I bet.
joe rogan
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Jamie's moving shit around.
What happened?
I was out of line.
So, welcome.
And how's Colin's last stand going?
colin moriarty
It's good.
It's fun.
I always describe it.
It's not big.
It's just got its little slice of the internet, and it's attracted.
Videos do 20, 30, 40, 50,000 views.
joe rogan
That's a good spot.
That's a good place to be.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I'm happy with it.
I have like 4,500 people on Patreon supporting me, and I don't serve ads on anything I do, so I'm just trying to make it organic and see how far I can take it, and then go from there.
joe rogan
Sam Harris does his entire podcast that way.
He doesn't have any ads, which I think is amazing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's cool.
I worked at IGN for a long time, the video game site, and my old company, so we had ads, and I have no problem with them, but I was trying to just kind of say, I don't need more than what you're giving me.
This is plenty, and I'm doing fine, and so maybe I'll do ads on future products, but not with this.
joe rogan
Well, yeah, I mean, why not, right?
I mean, just, if you're enjoying it, I mean, yeah, you could do different products, you could do, I mean, different projects, rather, you could do it different ways.
colin moriarty
Yep.
joe rogan
You know, it's interesting now to try to figure out, like, what's the best way for people to put their stuff out there.
Like, I know a lot of people, like, in the podcast world, some people use SoundCloud, some people use other things, some people just go straight to YouTube.
I mean, there's a lot of experimentation going on now.
colin moriarty
Yeah, and I'm always fascinated by that particular thing about how I do a podcast now just on the side called Fireside Chats where I just have random people in to talk about random things.
And similar, but not nearly as good as your show.
And I'm always amazed that people are like, why don't you put this on YouTube?
And I'm like, you just want to stare at a static image on YouTube?
I don't even have it on video.
It's just about how people consume the content.
So maybe a spreadshot approach is probably the smartest idea.
joe rogan
Well, if you could hire someone to do images that represent the conversation, maybe that would be a reason to have it on YouTube, but I hear you.
People just get excited about a platform.
They get locked into a platform, and then they just digest everything in that platform, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or YouTube.
It's weird.
Jamie and I have been talking about this a lot lately, about what What makes it through?
Like, how did YouTube become the only one where people upload videos?
That seems insane.
It seems like that seems so straightforward.
You have it so people can upload videos, you put ads on those videos, and that's it.
I mean, it seems like there would be hundreds of those sites.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think they were just first and it was ubiquitous quickly.
I find that with a lot of social media too.
Snapchat's really faltering now because Instagram's basically stolen its entire platform and it's all about these little monopolies that exist.
Monopolies for pictures, monopolies for video, monopoly for interacting with friends and family on Facebook and stuff like that.
There's no Facebook competitor.
joe rogan
No, no.
I mean, Facebook seems to me to be a more indulgent medium, though.
It seems like...
Like, I read some...
Like, sometimes I'll see people's Facebook posts, and I just see the first paragraph, and then I see how long it goes.
I'm like, fuck, reading that.
unidentified
I just keep moving.
joe rogan
This is too much.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's like...
I find...
My girlfriend just deactivated her Facebook account, and I was like...
Yeah.
it anymore.
You know, especially after the election, I'm like, everyone hates each other on here.
unidentified
And it's not fun.
colin moriarty
I already have Twitter for that.
You know, but like you're saying on Twitter, you can't go on and on and on and on about how much you hate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
So there was like no way to retreat.
I find that I don't even use Facebook that much anymore.
joe rogan
I use it because my Instagram posts directly to Twitter and to Facebook.
That's That's how I use it.
But it's interesting that it shows that in the amount of people that engage.
Like my Facebook has a fraction of what everything else has, and I think it's because I don't use it.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think algorithmically, the more you use it, probably the more it massages you to the top of a person's feed or whatever.
Because that's what's annoying about Facebook is you can't put anything in order.
You have no idea what you've seen already.
I was just talking to someone the other day.
I only have like 700 friends on there or whatever.
A lot of people from college that I might have had a class with or something.
And I'm like, why do the same 15 people just show up?
And I don't even interact with these people.
So I feel like I'm missing a ton of stuff.
And I still find Twitter is the most useful for me.
joe rogan
People love Facebook, though, for arguing.
They fucking love it, man.
I've gone over some political arguments that people have on Facebook, and it's like, Jesus, how do you have the time for this?
Don't you people have other things that you enjoy?
colin moriarty
Yeah.
No.
joe rogan
There's something about that sort of tit-for-tat verbal exchange, like trying to one-up someone and trying to make a better point.
I feel like it's replaced sport for people.
For some folks.
I feel like it's a game in some sort of a way, like a text-based video game or something.
colin moriarty
Yeah, like an old text adventure or something like that.
One interesting thing about Facebook that I think is worth noting is that it's typically real people with real names and real pictures, so at least they're putting themselves out there.
joe rogan
Yeah.
colin moriarty
As opposed to Twitter and kind of the anonymous nature of that.
So I respect that for the most part on Facebook.
But again, I agree with you.
It's like no one's winning this argument.
It's just a repetitive, how many times am I going to see the same thing over and over again?
I've kind of just withdrawn from that entirely.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, you know, I wanted to talk to you about internet controversy because when we had you on the first time, it was kind of just after your whole thing had happened with this.
He had made this one, like, incredibly innocuous tweet.
It was like a day without woman or something like that silence like what was it?
colin moriarty
It was a peace and quiet hashtag a day without a woman.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean Which is like an Al Bundy joke maybe yeah, and but the thing is like if that happened today Nobody would give a shit.
It's weird.
It's like then like it was it was a Boiling controversy like the first bubbles Of just social media outrage, it seems like.
Or you were one of the first bubbles.
colin moriarty
Right.
Like I explained to you originally, I feel like it was partially a political hit because of the industry I worked in and all that kind of stuff.
But also, like I was telling you before we started, the more I've had time to think, after all these things happened, I launched a new company, I was working 70 hours a week, I had no bandwidth to really think about what the hell happened.
The more I think about it, the angrier I actually get about how I... I had to go through that and watch other people also kind of go through similar things as the outrage machine just eats people and spits them out as they go along.
joe rogan
When you stop and think about what you actually said and what that actually caused, that actually caused you to stop working with people.
Yeah, like this one silly joke like they don't know you They don't know you know that one joke that one thing that you said is so awful and outrageous that all of our years of collaborating Working together trying to do projects trying to be creative having fun all the conversations we've had about life and about Humans and politics and men and women those are all out the window man.
You made a joke that I find Marginally offensive.
colin moriarty
Maybe on a certain day, marginally offensive.
joe rogan
I don't even think it's offensive.
If it was a woman, if a woman said that, like, peace and quiet, a day without men, I would go, ha!
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's what I would go.
I'd go, ha!
And I'd keep moving.
colin moriarty
And move on with your life?
joe rogan
The idea, like, oh, I gotta get this lady fired.
josh olin
She's a terrible person.
colin moriarty
The only thing that I can think about is that I was at least in a position where it didn't destroy me or whatever.
I actually am doing financially better and feel happier in what I'm doing now, so it kind of backfired on the people that were trying to Do whatever they were doing to me anyway, but I feel for the people that find themselves in similar situations that don't have some sort of internet clout or some sort of community that can rally around them and lift them up, which is what my community did to me, which I'm so appreciative of.
So I just think about how it's just sad.
I don't know that I've ever been so offended by something someone has tweeted or even said that I went out of my way to make it personal and try to destroy them.
I'm not saying people don't do terrible shit.
It happens all the time.
We're seeing that play out, you know, with Harvey Weinstein and all these kinds of things.
Absolutely awful, really awful things.
And I feel like people are kind of being distracted by the shiny object in the corner when they're losing sight of what's important.
joe rogan
Well, today it feels like there's blood in the water.
I mean, it seems like there's so many people going after so many people.
It's just people are running around looking for targets.
The way I imagine, I imagine the internet and people on the internet being an angry mob running through the streets, frothing at the mouth, just looking for somewhere to point their gun.
I mean, that's really what it feels like.
It feels like there's definitely some real targets out there.
There's definitely some...
This Kevin Spacey thing is a...
It's a scary thing.
I mean apparently Rosie O'Donnell started tweeting that he had been doing this forever and that this is the tip of the iceberg and there's a bunch of boys that he went after.
I Don't know what's true.
What's not true.
I'm assuming but that's that's real.
That's a real horrible thing.
That's not a joke It's not someone with an innocuous maybe off-color joke.
I mean this is like real stuff, right?
so I think The good part is all this awful behavior, predatory, evil, you know, all the Harvey Weinstein and whatever else.
There's probably a million other ones, right?
That stuff's going to get exposed.
But it seems like the negative part about it is that people are looking for targets.
colin moriarty
Well, that's what kind of scares me.
I don't know if you're a Black Mirror fan, but I was...
joe rogan
Well, I've only watched one episode, but I loved it.
colin moriarty
Okay, yeah.
I highly recommend you.
You'll get lost in it.
joe rogan
I watched two episodes.
colin moriarty
I love that show, and what's going on now reminds me a little bit of a Black Mirror episode, where people, like you said, are targeting others.
And I feel like accusations are part of the process, are part of due process, really, that starts with the accusation.
But I feel like people aren't...
And I'm not defending anything that anyone's done, but I feel like everyone just assumes guilt no matter what.
And it scares me because now we're getting to the point where anyone can accuse someone of anything at all.
And they're automatically guilty and they're automatically shamed.
And I'm like, but aren't you curious what's true?
Maybe half or 75% of this is true, but certainly not all of this is true.
Certainly not all of these accusations are true.
The one thing that I was interested in is Mark Halperin, the political writer who was accused of things last week.
joe rogan
I didn't hear this one.
There's too many to keep up with.
colin moriarty
Yeah, no, it's happening a lot.
Mark Halperin is a famous political writer.
He wrote Game Change and Double Down, those famous books about 2008 and 2012, with John Heilman, who's his partner.
He was on MSNBC and all this stuff.
And he was accused of some sexual harassment when he was at ABC News in the early 2000s.
And he came out and was basically like, I'm sorry for my behavior and all that kind of stuff.
And what I thought was interesting about it was that he was like, not all of these accusations are true.
But he kind of just then went on and apologized and did all this.
And I'm like, but I'm interested in, like, are you going to contest any of this?
Like, what is true and what isn't true?
Why aren't we interested in what is true and what isn't true?
Clearly you are a scumbag in some way.
But I am also curious in, are you going to defend yourself?
Are we in a situation where no one can defend themselves from these terrible accusations?
And it reminds me of a black mirror a lot.
joe rogan
What were the accusations?
colin moriarty
He was basically accused of heavily hitting on women that were junior than him.
That were working with him?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think any of them accused him of sexual assault or anything like that, but apparently he might have rubbed up against some women or did some things that are- But that kind of is sexual assault though, right?
Yeah, I assume so, but I guess what I'm saying is like...
joe rogan
If a guy rubs his dick on somebody, that's essentially sexual assault.
colin moriarty
Sure.
I mean more like, I don't think they're accusing him of raping them or something.
Like something absolutely horrifying, horrific, you know.
And I'm like, well, clearly, you know, I liked him a lot.
And I'm like, well, I don't...
You know, you're clearly not a good person.
But I was also just interested in that dynamic of his statement where I was like, but what isn't true?
I'm curious what isn't true.
It almost suggests that everything is true.
But then you just never know any situation.
So I just kind of reserve judgment until more information is known about all these people.
And I don't want to jump in on it because I don't...
joe rogan
I don't even want to know.
I mean, unless it's people that are in my world.
I mean, at a certain point in time.
Look, I mean, I want to know about Kevin Spacey type situations or Harvey Weinstein type situations, but I think there's a lot of men that are in that position where they're a boss or they are, you know, the owner of a company and they have these people under them.
And these people behave in a certain way, almost like as if they are royalty.
And I think that's what Harvey Weinstein experienced.
Essentially, he was like the royalty of this enormous movie empire.
And we find that particularly offensive.
He's not just a creep trying to get laid.
He's a guy that was trying to hold that power over people and use it against them.
And then on top of that, he was physically forceful.
So you got your worst case scenarios.
And then you have guys that are just trying to get laid.
And you're like, okay.
How do you...
Are we demonizing aggressive heterosexuality?
Where does this go into sexual assault?
Rubbing up against someone, physically touching them when they don't want you to.
Well, that's sexual assault.
colin moriarty
Sure.
joe rogan
But hitting on someone.
Hmm, that doesn't seem like sexual assault or anything.
It seems like someone just trying to get laid like where does it but then when someone's the boss you go, okay, but then you're not supposed to do that when you're a boss, right?
colin moriarty
I was more I was very interested in the in the in the dynamic between what specifically with Harvey Weinstein And his people under him for many decades.
Yeah about I was trying to put myself in this position of like how does this stay quiet for so long even though there's a little rumblings like they talk about Seth MacFarlane's joke at some award show Kevin Spacey, too Yeah, and Family Guy.
joe rogan
Like a little kid was running away from...
So I was locked in Kevin Spacey's basement.
colin moriarty
It's amazing that this stuff is kind of like an open secret, but still doesn't seep out or really...
It makes you think about the power dynamics and how fearful people are in these positions, because it's easy.
My initial instinct was like, why didn't anyone say anything?
It was similar to Bill Cosby's thing.
I'm like, why didn't anyone say anything?
But then you realize people were saying things.
They were being given hush money.
They were being shut up.
But these are really, really bad people.
But I agree with you that it...
I've never been an aggressive flirter, as it were.
I've always been very passive with women because I never really believed in myself that much and all that.
But I've known people that have been very flirtatious and all of that.
And I'm like, I wonder, what is the line there now?
And is it okay to be flirtatious, to call a woman beautiful at a bar or to do something like that?
As opposed to...
joe rogan
If a girl likes you...
That's the thing.
If you meet a girl at a bar, and the girl's like, Colin is a really cool guy.
God, I'm so into him.
And Colin's like, you're really beautiful.
And she's like, oh my god, thank you.
And the next thing you know, you guys are hanging out.
Or, you meet a girl at a bar, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you.
She's sober.
You're drinking.
Your breath smells.
And you're like, you're really beautiful.
And you're like, ew, gross.
Get the fuck away from me.
You know, it could be exactly the same attempt, but the person's just not into you, and you become a creep.
colin moriarty
Right, exactly.
So I don't look at the situation now in 2017 on college campuses and all these things as desirable for anyone, because who the hell knows the rules of the landscape now?
I think a lot of it just comes down to mutual respect and all of that, you know?
joe rogan
Well, you know what I think it is, man?
I really think we're shifting culturally.
I think this is a big, gigantic shift, almost like an earthquake of consciousness.
I think that over the course of human history, we have slowly but surely become better to each other.
We had a photograph that we put up yesterday of an ad from 1911. It was a gum ad, and it was instructing a man how to go about kissing a woman.
And a lot of it was like, do not ask permission, look in her eyes, gaze dreamily.
It was really weird.
Wow.
Instructing him how to grab her face, how to lean down to kiss her.
It was very, very bizarre.
I was like, if you tried to put that ad out today, you would be fucking skewered publicly.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
Yeah, I would say so.
joe rogan
They would come after you.
But there's the ad right there.
Do you know how to kiss a girl?
Then learn.
Stand facing her.
Do not tell her your intentions.
Do not ask permission to kiss her.
colin moriarty
Do not tell her your intentions.
joe rogan
We went over this whole thing yesterday, so I won't go over it again.
colin moriarty
That's funny.
joe rogan
What's the name of the gum again?
Common Sense...
What is it?
jamie vernon
Yeah, Common Sense Gum Company.
joe rogan
The Common Sense Gum Company from 1911. And I think what's happening...
Right now, is this a really big shift?
And I think the beneficiaries of this big shift are going to be the next generation of kids that are growing up.
They're probably not going to have to deal with nearly as much shit.
And I'm absolutely not giving Bill Cosby any sort of fucking excuse at all, but I think that in Bill Cosby's day, I think a lot of men did that.
I think it was really common.
I mean, I don't think they thought anything of it.
Just like, you ever watch like an old Clint Eastwood movie when they slap women?
They just used to beat the shit out of women in those movies.
colin moriarty
Times have changed.
joe rogan
And they're changing now, like today, at an unprecedented rate.
I think ultimately it's good.
Ultimately, everyone, when you catch people at like a good static state, like a good calm state, and they're not under duress and they're thinking clearly, and you would ask them, like, what's the best way to get along with other people?
Well, treat them fairly.
Treat them kindly.
Have good friends.
Just be nice.
Be nice to everybody.
Everybody would agree to that.
The problem is maybe they want something from you.
Like Colin wants to fuck the girl at the bar, but she's sober and Colin's got gross breath.
You know what I mean?
There's all sorts of extenuating circumstances that make people behave in really fucked up ways.
But the consequences of those circumstances or that behavior was minimized by power.
It was minimized by Like a guy like Harvey Weinstein, he could put these gals in movies.
Or a guy like Kevin Spacey, he was hitting on a 14-year-old and he doesn't know what to say.
All that stuff, that ability to squash, it minimized people.
colin moriarty
It reminds me, too, not that I know anything deep about it, but I was just thinking about it in the shower this morning, actually.
It reminds me a lot of...
Michael Jackson, in the sense of, like, what was going on in the early and mid-90s with him and the accusations there.
And I'm like, was this...
I don't know if that's true or false.
I don't know what he's accused of or not.
People kind of, I think, treat him as if he was innocent.
Maybe he is.
I don't know.
But it reminds me of, like, there was, like, telltale signs of some sexual corruption in Hollywood and the music industry and the movie industry and all that some years ago.
That's kind of bubbled back to the surface with some big names.
So I just...
I agree with you.
Like, I just wish...
People just need to be good to each other and act normal and be respectful.
You don't find yourself in these terrible situations.
But then you see this desperation with Harvey Weinstein where you learn that he might have sexually assaulted or even raped a woman who then appears in a movie some years later because the gravity well around him is so strong that they have no choice.
So it's a very sad situation for those women as well.
joe rogan
It's a sad situation for humanity, right?
It's like, there's just certain things that people were able to get away with, you know?
Like, the Cosby thing to me is probably number one.
That's the number one worst one ever.
Because he represented this sort of like really moral, very ethical, you know, like doesn't swear on stage.
Like he's the last one that you would expect to be.
He's been described as the number one serial rapist of all time.
And you're like, wait, how is that possible?
colin moriarty
It's incredible.
It's just a crazy, unfortunate, sad situation.
It ruins his whole legacy.
I haven't seen the Cosby show.
I don't even know if it's syndicated anymore since all the accusations came out.
But who could watch that now and just look past that?
Especially because a lot of that's contemporaneous to that show.
joe rogan
It's still on the air.
colin moriarty
Well, I assume that they got, you know, their stuff pulled, their syndication pulled.
unidentified
I would assume, right?
joe rogan
What about Fowl and Albert?
unidentified
That would be weird, too, if that was still in the air.
colin moriarty
Yeah, again, contemporaneous to a lot of his accusations, going back to, what was that original show that he did in the 60s?
Eye Spy?
Eye Spy, right.
joe rogan
Yeah, that was the first one, right?
colin moriarty
Yeah, so it's, like, I think a lot of that's, like, 50 years worth of accusations.
Like, holy shit.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Hollywood was a different animal back then.
It's a different animal when people didn't have a voice, you know?
colin moriarty
But do you, because you have some, you have a connect.
You were on TV and you do, you know, do you hear rumblings like this?
I mean, I'm not asking you to be specific, but do you hear this?
joe rogan
Well, I haven't been on TV in a long time, but I did hear the Cosby thing way back in the 90s.
justin wren
I heard that when I was on the set of news radio.
joe rogan
I remember people talking about it.
But, and I had heard the Kevin Spacey thing, too.
But, you know, you don't...
You don't know.
It's not like, well, you should have gone to the press.
With what information?
Someone accused Rosie O'Donnell, because Rosie O'Donnell was talking about Kevin Spacey.
She's like, you're a sicko.
Everyone knew you were a sicko.
And so someone said, hold on a second.
So you're saying that you knew that he was like this and you didn't do anything about it?
And she said, well, there was always rumors, but no one had any evidence.
Until this actor came forth.
Is he an actor or a director?
jamie vernon
I think he's a Broadway actor.
joe rogan
He's a Broadway actor.
Yeah, the whole thing's fucked.
He was in a television show, though.
He was a Broadway actor with Kevin Spacey in 19-whatever-the-hell-it-was when this happened 30 years ago.
colin moriarty
What do you think about the whole misdirection thing in his statement, too, about being like...
joe rogan
Crazy.
colin moriarty
Weird, right?
joe rogan
Sneaky.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
Not good.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think very, very transparent.
joe rogan
Very transparent.
Deflecting.
Now I live my life as a gay man.
Hey, fuckface.
Nobody asked you.
tj kirk
Did you try to rape a kid?
colin moriarty
Yeah, it was very weird.
I don't know why he decided to do that.
joe rogan
Well, I think he's probably panicking, you know?
I mean, and ultimately, he probably should be.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I would assume so, especially because maybe there are more accusations.
And then the whole weird thing with Netflix with House of Cards, where they were like, this is going to be the last season.
joe rogan
Now apparently they stopped production.
colin moriarty
Oh, so they stopped it completely?
joe rogan
That's what Jamie was saying.
colin moriarty
Oh, interesting.
jamie vernon
Yeah, like, this morning I'll shuffle it up.
colin moriarty
Okay.
Yeah, because I thought that was interesting specifically because they apparently had already announced that it was the last season anyway, like in the summer, so they're making it seem like they're reacting to it.
So everyone's just playing the PR game now, you know?
joe rogan
I wonder.
Yeah, I don't know.
Because they made an announcement pretty quickly.
Maybe they made an announcement sort of just to let everybody know, you know, yeah, it is the last season, but...
Okay, here it goes.
Production on Netflix special series suspended indefinitely following Kevin Spacey allegations...
Is it allegation or S? Is this plural?
colin moriarty
Yeah, is there a second or third allegation?
I might have missed it.
joe rogan
Also, he has a Gore Vidal movie that they're filming as well.
colin moriarty
Which will be interesting.
It's an interesting guy, Gore Vidal.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Oh, man.
You know what's a great fucking film?
Gore Vidal and...
Who's the super conservative guy?
William F. Buckley.
They had a series of debates in 1960...
I want to say 68. And they televised them.
And it...
It was like a huge boom to whatever network it was.
ABC, I believe it was.
And they made a documentary about these two going back and forth with each other.
It's brilliant.
It's amazing.
And it's so interesting to see their minds interacting with each other.
colin moriarty
Wasn't that the debate series where William F. Buckley said something super homophobic?
joe rogan
Yeah, yeah.
colin moriarty
I think he called him a faggot.
Yeah, on network television.
joe rogan
Yeah, and he said he would knock him out.
He'd said something like, you'll stay plastered or something like that.
I forget his statement, but Gore Vidal said something to William F. Buckley that like really pushed his button.
I don't remember what he said to him.
colin moriarty
Because I remember watching and being like, oh my god.
joe rogan
But it was devastating to William F. Buckley.
It was like pretty much the end of his being taken seriously because people realize, well, he's kind of a fool.
And his ego and his mind is just not within his control and just got out of hand.
And Gore Vidal just sort of sat there while he said it.
Right.
colin moriarty
Yeah, Gore Vidal's an interesting...
My exposure to him initially was like he wrote, I think, some historical fiction about some various things.
joe rogan
Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.
unidentified
Whoa.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's like incredible to...
joe rogan
Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi.
Whoa.
I'm concerned.
The only pro or crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.
colin moriarty
Some people were calling each other Nazis even way back after, you know, right after World War II. Yeah, it's a weird one, right?
joe rogan
It's like, the problem is, like, what we saw in Charlottesville is like, hey, look, guys, there's real Nazis.
Like, don't call someone a Nazi because they voted for Trump, because they think that, you know, right-wing conservative values are being diminished in this country.
Don't call them a Nazi for that.
colin moriarty
It just bothers me.
The same thing with the word fascist, where I'm like, you don't even really understand what these words mean, a lot of you.
These words aren't only loaded, they have definitions, and I don't know what the...
It's like when everyone says we live in a fascist state in America today, and I'm like, I don't think so.
The courts seem to be working fine, the Congress doesn't do anything, but it's there.
joe rogan
Well, if you lived in a fascist state, then there wouldn't be an investigation against Trump right now.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
joe rogan
That's leading to indictments.
colin moriarty
Exactly, in which he actually has the power to fire the person doing the investigation.
So it's...
You know, I'm not saying we're in an ideal situation right now, but people throwing around these words very loosely need to learn a little bit more about Weimar Republic and the Nazis coming to power in 33 and what that actually looks like, what fascism actually looks like in Italy, what it looks like in Germany.
And they have no idea.
Or a lot of some people do, but most don't.
And they're just throwing these words around and they mean something.
joe rogan
Well, there's a lot of confusion today in terms of, like, why free speech is important.
And one of the reasons why free speech is important is because you don't get to decide what is correct.
It has to be debated.
You know, there was a...
I forget who said that.
It was really recent.
We talked about it yesterday.
Oh, it was that guy, the Yale professor that was on Sam Harris' show.
He had a perfect statement about the guy who got in trouble for his wife, the Greek fellow.
His wife had defended offensive Halloween costumes and the kids went crazy and undressed him in public.
He said the answer to hate speech is not no speech, it's better speech.
And that's such a great statement.
colin moriarty
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
joe rogan
It's absolutely true.
So, like, all these kids that are trying to shut down conservative speakers on campus, and then by shutting them down, they're calling them white supremacists, Nazis, and using these things for guys like Ben Shapiro, which I think is, like, patently ridiculous.
colin moriarty
Yeah, the Jewish man is the Nazi?
joe rogan
The Jewish man is the Nazi.
And a white supremacist as well, which is just...
Because he quotes statistics about minority crime.
You know, those statistics, I feel like, are pretty misleading in some ways because there's a lot of factors that lead to these people being in these situations where there's high crime rates in these communities and it has nothing to do with, you know, hey, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which is like a really common way of looking at it.
It has to do with the world that they were born into.
colin moriarty
Yeah, socioeconomically, it's a different world.
joe rogan
Yeah, and they're surrounded by the momentum of crime.
They're surrounded by the momentum of violence and abuse and to just expect them to escape that because there are examples of people that have done it in the past.
Well, you can't apply that sort of logic, I don't think.
I think that's disingenuous.
To call him a Nazi or a white supremacist, I think, is fucking ridiculous.
colin moriarty
Well, that's just such a...
It's just used pejoratively without historical context.
It's crazy.
It's exactly what it is, because it reminds me a little bit...
It's different in the context, but it reminds me a little bit of when Bernie Sanders was running in the primary, and people would be like, this is...
Look at what socialism has given you.
joe rogan
Right.
colin moriarty
And look at the roads.
And I'm like, the roads are not...
Roads aren't socialist.
The military's not socialist.
Streetlights aren't socialist.
The government spending money is not what socialism means.
So if that's what you think the definition means, then you're wrong.
And the same thing with now Nazism and fascism.
Like, look at all the parallels between Nazi Germany and the United States.
And I'm like, I couldn't...
I'm a student of history.
I don't know everything, but...
I don't see literally one parallel between the United States right now and Nazi Germany, not even one.
joe rogan
Yeah, we're not coming off a war.
We lost.
We're not, you know, a devastated and humiliated nation.
colin moriarty
Yeah, the stab in the back, hyperinflation, you know, like this charismatic man who's in prison for a while writes this manifesto, tries to actually throw a coup in the mid-20s, fails.
Like, all of these, like, what parallel are you talking about?
Yeah.
I just feel like people are playing fast and loose with these words that they mean something.
These words mean something.
So if you're going to call someone a fascist, find the fascist.
And like you said, there are Nazis in American culture, unfortunately.
But fortunately, because of our freedom of expression, they have the right to exist.
And I think that by lumping in anyone that voted for Trump, for instance, as a Nazi, you're just making them look bigger.
That actually just benefits them.
They're irrelevant.
The KKK is irrelevant.
6,000 members, maybe, in a country of 325 million people.
How many people identify as neo-Nazi, really?
Maybe 10,000 or less?
joe rogan
When you're thinking about 350 million people, it's a very small number.
colin moriarty
It's infinitesimal.
It's actually irrelevant.
Completely irrelevant.
joe rogan
But, if you're a black guy, and they're all coming after you on your Facebook page...
Then it looks real.
colin moriarty
Then it looks real.
And it is, that kind of badgering and that kind of harassment is real and it's terrible.
No one justifies that, but I'm so sick of the A history.
Like, people suddenly are experts.
It reminds me of on Columbus Day, I tweeted out and it got tweeted a bunch, I thought it was funny, where people were tweeting about Columbus and all this, I'm like, suddenly everyone's an expert now in the age of exploration today.
Now everyone knows everything about the age of exploration, just like everyone knew everything about the rise of Nazism and the Weimar Republic, and just like everyone knew about the, you know, socialism and all.
I'm like...
Stop.
joe rogan
Well, I posted this flag behind me, and a company called Iron Mountain Designs creates it, and it's a veteran-owned company, and they make these pretty cool flags, very cool flags, made out of metal, but it has a George Washington quote on the back.
And I put it up on Instagram with the photo of the flag, photo of the logo of the company, like three different pictures on Instagram in a row.
You know how you do that, where one post can have three images?
And one of them was a quote from George Washington.
And the number of fucking geniuses, George Washington owned slaves.
Like, yeah, he's an honest man who owned slaves.
And they just kept rattling on about the horrors of George Washington as if, okay.
Yep, he did.
Yeah, but this is a quote by a man who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and this is what he said.
You know, you want to diminish his entire, you know, contribution to human culture because he did something horrible back then when people were doing horrible things.
You're right, he did own slaves, but I think it's a part of a very long conversation about what a human being was, you know, back then.
unidentified
Yeah.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it goes back to the idea of historical relativism, that you can judge them based on a 21st century model, but George Washington died in 1799, so this is a man that didn't even see the 19th century, nonetheless the 20th, nonetheless the 21st, has no idea.
He was a southern planter.
Four of the first five presidents of the United States were southern planters that owned slaves.
This wasn't a totally...
Uncommon things.
So I'm not justifying it.
There were absolutely abolitionists among the founders.
There were absolutely abolitionists during the revolution and black people fought for the for the Continental Army.
But yeah, people judging based on these things, I'm like, that's fine.
But if you want to take that to its natural conclusion, you're going to find lots of problems with lots of people.
Even closer to us in history than than George Washington and what's funny about that is now they really are going after I was reading it just tangentially I didn't see it all but people are starting to now go after George Washington plaques or George Washington statues and I feel kind of bad about that in the sense that I was all for removing The Confederate statues and putting them in places where they made sense.
So take the Jefferson Davis statue, put it in Gettysburg or whatever the case might be, put it in a museum.
I don't think they should be melted down and destroyed.
But people were like, the next logical step is they're going to go after the founders.
And I was like, no way.
No one's going to let that happen.
And I was wrong.
joe rogan
They went after them immediately.
colin moriarty
So I feel a little bit guilty about that in the sense that...
I don't think we should be celebrating Confederate history, but we should absolutely be celebrating American history, even the complicated American history.
joe rogan
Well, even if it's not celebrating it, it's recognizing it and understanding it.
I mean, the Confederate war, the Civil War rather, did happen.
It's a real historical fact and it should be studied.
of all the pieces that were in place when it did happen.
And, you know, it's just as bad as the people that are saying, you know, the Civil War was about economics.
No, no, it wasn't.
That was part of what it was about.
It wasn't just about economics.
It was also about keeping slaves.
colin moriarty
Yeah, absolutely.
joe rogan
So to diminish that, that's not good either.
But to try to sweep it under the rug and smash all the statues, like, no, have that statue up so people can understand what the fuck that is.
And if someone is going to celebrate that statue, you know, the South's going to do it again, we're going to rise again, they can do that, you know, if that's their thing.
They can do that.
I mean, we can't stop them from thinking stupid.
colin moriarty
Yeah, and I think that I agree with you in the sense that it's worth, it just, it happened, we remember it, and it has always, the gray and blue have always been part of our culture since the Civil War ended in 1865, and especially since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Many people don't even know what you're saying.
joe rogan
The gray and blue?
colin moriarty
Yeah, the uniforms of the different sides.
You know, when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and our occupation of the South ended and then Jim Crow became law and there was, you know, institutional segregation, this was something that was always a complicated point of celebration.
You know, I've always been, you know, I've always been really kind of curious and really more militant about why these people actually got away with what they did.
And I understand, you know, the 10% plan, which, do you know anything about that?
The idea that Lincoln only made, or actually really Andrew Johnson only made 10% of people in the southern states basically pledge allegiance in order for the states to come back in.
They didn't execute anyone that, you know, or even really try them.
You know, Jefferson Davis Stonewall Jackson didn't survive, but Robert E. Lee and all these other guys just got away with it and actually lived pretty prosperous lives afterwards.
So there's always been this really complicated mix of remembrance that these people down there were heroes, and we don't have to support that.
I certainly don't support that, but it goes way further back than our contemporary culture, and we can't just smash it into oblivion and think you're going to remove that.
The heritage of the stars and bars and all that from what happened.
joe rogan
I think that the problem is people think that you're celebrating the Confederate Army when you have a statue up.
And in some ways, it seems like you are, right?
Because the statue is 15 feet tall, and he's got a sword in his hand, and he's on a horse, and he's marching forward.
And people look at it as if it's celebrating something that's a horrible part of human culture.
colin moriarty
I mean, I remember going to Richmond, Virginia for the first time.
A lot of my family lives down there now, and they have this thing called Monument Row or whatever, where it's like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and all that.
And then they actually put Arthur Ashe at the end to make it seem like it's not racist anymore, which I always thought was weird.
They did that in the 70s or 80s.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's just like a black guy at the end of it.
It's like, this isn't racist at all.
joe rogan
And it's a bonus that he died of AIDS. Yeah.
colin moriarty
Yeah, so we have a lot of pro-HIV culture and all that.
But I remember being really confused when I was a kid, being like, why are these statues here?
This doesn't make any sense.
And I agree that they shouldn't be in those places of reverence.
Because beyond the slavery issue, and I agree with you, slavery was the reason the Confederacy...
was founded.
It does go back to states' rights, and it has inherent economic benefits.
But it is, you know, Stephen Douglas, who was the vice president of the Confederacy, literally said that they were founded because of this, so you can take his word for it.
But I was always confused why we were celebrating these people, and why not have these pieces of art?
Because they are pieces of art, but have them in places that make sense, that give context.
So I have no problem with that.
But I was so tragically wrong about the slippery slope that we were finding ourselves on.
Because I thought people would see more that like, yes, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but also an immensely important person to our society.
But people aren't seeing it that way.
And I will fight more vociferously to protect those guys than I did the Confederate officers.
joe rogan
Yeah, for sure.
Even though those guys did own slaves too, right?
I mean, it is all weird when you're talking about slave ownership.
You know, I did this thing this morning.
My kids' school, they have this great pumpkin day and all the little kids are on stage and they're...
They have this little play that they act out.
One of the things they were talking about, the smell of applewood bacon, and mmm, and everybody's like, oh, the smell of applewood bacon.
And all I could think of, because yesterday we were talking about factory farming and about this Glenn Greenwald article, where this FBI investigation to these two people that stole these pigs from this factory farm revealed this...
Federal cover-up of these horrific conditions in factory farms and I was thinking of like one day we're gonna look at like factory farming And the horrific nature of what they do to these animals, especially pigs.
These really intelligent animals.
They stuff them into these boxes and make them live in their own shit.
And there's little corpses of piglets around them.
It was really hard.
The article in the photos were really hard to look at.
And I was thinking while I was watching this little kid's play today, I was like, one day we're going to look back at this mention of bacon.
And we're gonna think, like, how fucked up were people that they thought it was okay to shove these little animals into these crates and make them live in their own shit just so you could get bacon off of them?
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
But we've just sort of accepted that.
It's a part of our culture.
And it's not a valid comparison to slavery, but it's also, it's not an ideal way for a conscious and evolving species like the human race to behave.
It's not a good way for us to rationalize.
And I was looking at that today and I was thinking, how many more of these things...
I mean, I think we're seeing that with things like the Harvey Weinstein allegations and this outrage that's coming forth.
I think we're seeing it with a lot of the aspects of our society that's getting exposed in a way that never got exposed before.
But I think we're also seeing it...
I mean, in my mind, we were seeing it with this talk of bacon.
I was like, you know, look, bacon is delicious.
Absolutely, but where the fuck's that bacon coming from, you know?
Are you making sure you're getting free-range bacon from, you know, very moral and ethical farming practices, or are you just getting bacon?
unidentified
Yeah.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's actually very thought-provoking what you're saying because I've always found the factory farming, not that I'm an expert in it at all, I'm not, but the argument to be really interesting because it's like there's an opportunity cost.
The way we treat these animals means food is very cheap.
Way cheap.
Meat is incredibly cheap in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world.
And produce is too.
Because of that, people used to spend a third of their income before World War II on food and now they spend less than a tenth of their money on food.
So there's It's amazing.
So we've made food way cheaper, but you're right, because you could make the same argument for slavery in the sense that, well, look at all the economic benefits.
It kind of turned a blind eye to it, so you actually kind of Kind of changed my mind on it a little bit, because I've always been of the mind where, like, free-range eggs, free-range animals, that's great if you can afford that, but I don't begrudge the poor or middle-class or working-class family from going and buying their ground beef from Vons.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, if you're poor, you've got to get by.
You know, there's that, right?
And you're in a system that you didn't design, you didn't create, you're in there, and you're just trying to get by.
I understand that.
But what I'm just saying as a whole, as a culture, to just openly accept factory farming and to not think of it as a horrific ethical and moral injustice.
I mean, it really is.
This is coming from someone who eats meat, right?
Obviously, the vegan argument would be, well, you're complicit in it, and you're also complicit in a bunch of other horrific crimes against animals.
I think that what we're looking at, though, is an awakening and sort of an understanding of our impact.
Like, physically, our impact on this, but mentally, the way we think about things, the way we even think about ourselves.
If you know that your bacon is coming from an animal that was tortured and shoved into a cage, and you buy it anyway.
You know, what does that do to your mind?
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's sort of a...
It's a conundrum.
You know, like, you obviously hunt and stuff like that, but when you buy meat, do you go out of your way to make sure that it's...
joe rogan
I buy almost no meat.
colin moriarty
So all that you eat is typically something...
joe rogan
Now, it's taken a few years to do it, but now, I mean, I shot two elk this year, and elk is...
They're close to a thousand pounds of hundreds of pounds of meat.
I have two commercial freezers here.
I have two in my garage at home.
I give meat out to my friends.
I eat elk four nights a week.
When I go out to dinner, though, I do eat steak.
If I go out to dinner at some restaurant, I don't ask where I came from.
In that way, I'm a hypocrite.
colin moriarty
No, not necessarily.
I mean, I think striving is important, right?
You can't always be perfect, but being better, I think.
If everyone was better, as opposed to being perfect, then the situation would be better.
joe rogan
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
There's an economic reality.
I can take the time off.
I can take two weeks off out of the year because I went on two elk hunts.
I've been on four hunts this year and three of them I was successful and one of them I got an axis deer which is also like 100 pounds of meat and so That's most of what I eat.
But most people don't have time to take three weeks off a year.
And you also have to have the time to practice and you have to know people.
It's a lot of good fortune on my side to be able to do something like this.
But it's also a concerted effort and becoming obsessed with the idea behind it of doing that.
It becomes a different thing.
Food is just a different thing.
If you grow tomatoes in your garden, that food becomes a different thing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's like almost spiritual in a way.
Like a connection to it.
joe rogan
It's an overused word.
Spiritual is kind of a word that's sort of been hijacked.
colin moriarty
Sure.
joe rogan
But yeah.
colin moriarty
Like Nazism?
joe rogan
Yeah, like Nazism.
There's a lot of words that have been hijacked.
The word spirituality is really hijacked by morons.
You know, as someone says, I'm really spiritual, I see unfortunate tattoos and wooden beads and nutty talk, you know, Reiki healers.
Was that what they call them?
Reiki?
colin moriarty
I don't know.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know those people that think they could heal you by rubbing their hands above your skin without touching you?
Is that Reiki?
Is that what they call it?
Yeah.
But yeah, there's a completion of the cycle.
In lieu of a better word.
I grow food in my backyard, and I grow plants and vegetables, and when I eat them, it just feels like some sort of a completion, like it feels good.
Whereas it just feels like a good salad if I get it at a store.
colin moriarty
Right.
Well, it's interesting.
You're almost subsistence living in a way because you're hunting your own meat and you're growing some of your own produce.
It's pretty cool.
But I wonder...
joe rogan
I need the grid for electricity.
Someone's got to build the bows and the arrows I buy from a manufacturer.
colin moriarty
You're not whittling the wood yet yourself.
joe rogan
They have very strict tolerances.
It's sort of subsistence, but there's all these companies that are involved behind creating the materials that you use to...
colin moriarty
So it's like capitalism slash subsistence.
But it's interesting because it's the point I made earlier.
You're further along the path of sustainability or further along the path of some sort of righteousness in the way animals are treated and all that kind of stuff than a lot of people are.
So it's a step in the right direction, right?
I just wonder if people, just to play devil's advocate, again, the working class family at the median household income of $40,000 a year, If we got rid of some of these animal practices, which are abhorrent, but if we got rid of them, are they willing to pay $13 or $14 a pound for their beef?
joe rogan
They probably couldn't afford it.
That's a real problem.
I mean, it's absolutely a real problem.
And I think that there's a lot of people that don't even take it into consideration.
I mean, that's probably the biggest problem, that we've made this system, and everybody was born into this system, you know, obviously we didn't create it, but we're born into this system, and it took us until we were probably like, I didn't even know what a factory farm was until I was like 30. I'd never even heard of it.
And then you hear about factory farming, and you go, what is that?
And you go, oh, these animals, they're all stuffed together, and you're like, what?
I thought farms were like animals roamed around.
Like, I don't know what the fuck.
I never even thought about it.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's horrific.
I remember in the late 90s on TV, like on public access or on like...
I think it was just on public access.
You would see these like guerrilla filming sessions that these guys would go to these farms and like break in and like take all these pictures and it was like for some animal rights activist group or whatever.
And I was always familiar with it.
I just never...
I mean, I'm guilty of saying like I never really...
Thought about it too deeply beyond that, sadly, because I thought about the economic realities of it, where I'm like, this is a terrible thing, and we can fix it, but we just have to have a conversation as a society of what that's going to mean for food, because the exact inverse has happened with produce, where we've figured out ways to really dramatically alter seedlings, and I was just reading about Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for what he did to wheat, making wheat.
Golden wheat.
I'm sorry?
joe rogan
Golden wheat, right?
colin moriarty
I think that's what it is, yeah.
joe rogan
Higher protein.
colin moriarty
Yeah, and like a higher yield, but the stock wouldn't collapse and all that.
And he's apparently responsible for, you know, like, there used to be these doomsday prophecies in the 60s and 70s.
People forget that Earth Day.
joe rogan
I'm thinking of golden rice.
colin moriarty
Oh, I'm sorry.
joe rogan
Different things, sorry.
colin moriarty
It's okay.
People look back at the original Earth Day, I think in 1970, and they often talk about some of the prognostications of what's happening to the Earth and all that today.
But a lot of people lost sight of the fact that a lot of what people were talking about then was that we were going to die of famine.
That the Earth's population was growing way too quickly and that they would have these guesses by the late 70s, early 80s.
You can go read it.
It's fascinating.
They would be like, by 1985, like, a billion people are going to die of starvation because we can't feed everyone and all these kinds of things.
That's what they were originally talking about.
about.
So there's been these pioneering heroes in agriculture that have figured it out, that have these high yield crops and all that.
And we're fine with that because obviously crops, flora are different than fauna.
They don't feel, they don't have some sort of connection with them, they don't have a brain.
So I understand the differences are there, but it's funny how these things have totally basically switched sides where now we have these high yield produce, that's great.
We have these high yield ways of getting animal meat, but no good.
And I think that Does it suggest that we have to be more vegan, more vegetarian, all those kinds of things?
I don't know if that's the answer.
I think we have to have a complicated conversation.
And maybe it comes down to this idea of cloning meat or whatever they're doing, like making meat and process these weird chemical processes to make beef that's indistinguishable from real beef.
I mean, that's fine.
If it tastes good, I'm good.
joe rogan
I think that's probably what's going to happen.
I think it's probably going to be like these headless cows that you could just grow in a lab and just slice chunks off of them or something.
I mean, I don't know how they're doing this meat thing.
colin moriarty
I don't really know either, and I'm sure it brings up a whole new slew of bioethical questions, too.
joe rogan
Not just that, also probably health issues.
Who's going to be the first person to live 10 years off of that bio meat before they figure out it causes some inoperable colon cancer?
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
Because your body doesn't know how to process it correctly, and it sticks to the walls of your colon and starts creating abscesses, and they have to remove your colon and make a new one with stem cells and cut you open like a fish and stitch this new shitter inside of you.
unidentified
Yeah, who's going to be?
colin moriarty
Yeah, who's going to be the guinea pig?
Someone will be, as always.
joe rogan
I don't know.
And again, not everybody can go hunt wild animals.
And if you did, there would be no more wild animals.
I mean, that's really what the great market hunting of the early 19th century.
That's in the 18th century as well, I think.
I think when they started that.
I think they started in the 1700s.
They started hunting buffalo and antelope, and by the time, the early 1900s, it was almost completely wiped out.
We had almost no animals left.
And it was market hunting.
It wasn't people hunting for their own personal use.
They didn't have refrigerators back then, remember?
So you had to get meat, and it didn't last very long, and they had to get a new supply of it constantly.
And they would just go out and they would take these guys that were from the war and they didn't have jobs.
And so this was their job now.
They would go out and hunt antelope and elk and deer and then sell that meat at the market.
colin moriarty
What's interesting too about that is that it's the human condition.
It's not only like the more modern human condition.
I'm reading a book or I just read a book called 1491, which is about the condition of North and South America and Central America before 1491. Before Columbus.
Before Columbus.
So there was Viking contact and stuff.
And they were talking about, you know, which is, I think, well known to a lot of people that the Native Americans, the Paleo Indians, wiped out tons of animals before when there was literally only a few hundred thousand of them, you know, because they were over hunting them.
So, this cycle continues regardless.
You even hear about that in Iceland with the Norse that lived there, where they depleted their very precious woodstock there.
There's no animals.
It's not just modern humans that are challenged by this.
The woolly mammoth and all these animals were wiped out by humans.
joe rogan
That's very controversial, by the way.
There's a lot of people that believe that that had to coincide because the dates coincide with the end of the Ice Age.
And there's a guy that I've had on this podcast several times named Randall Carlson, and he has some very compelling evidence that points to the possibility that it was asteroid impact that wiped out these animals in mass.
And that's one of the reasons why in certain parts of the world you could find mass graveyards of animals that were killed almost instantly.
colin moriarty
And this was 10,000 years ago or so?
unidentified
Yeah.
colin moriarty
Interesting.
joe rogan
10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
They think there was two possible large impacts that happened.
colin moriarty
So they weren't bolides.
They actually struck the...
So they weren't like the Tunguska event with an explosion they actually hit?
joe rogan
They think it struck the ice sheet above North America.
colin moriarty
Oh, interesting.
So there would be no evidence.
joe rogan
Right.
Well, North America, well, they think that that was the reason why there's this...
It's a fascinating podcast to go back and listen to.
And I had him on with another guy named Michael Shermer, who's a famous skeptic, and Graham Hancock, who's also a proponent of some of his ideas.
And they showed all these images of these deep fissures that were cut into the land that must have been a massive amount of water over a very short period of time.
And he thinks it was probably a large body that slammed into the polar ice caps or slammed into rather the ice caps that are above, you know, North America somewhere around 10,000 years ago at two miles high of ice over much of the surface of it.
And all of a sudden, boom, gone.
And that's what caused the Great Lakes.
I mean, the Great Lakes are essentially these gigantic glaciers that melted.
And there's all sorts of features.
In these various landscapes that he believes point to massive amounts of water that happened over an incredibly short period of time and the explanation for that and the peaks and the rises and the falls in temperature during that time when they do like core samples of the earth, he thinks that that also points to some sort of an impact.
colin moriarty
That's fascinating.
joe rogan
What's his name?
Randall Carlson.
colin moriarty
Randall Carlson.
I don't remember that.
joe rogan
He's been studying this his whole life.
He had an idea once when he was on acid.
He went and looked at over this gigantic canyon when he was on acid.
And he had this idea that this all happened because of water.
And he was trying to piece it together.
And then became fascinating and started studying it.
And then got really into astroidal impacts.
And he's a wealth of knowledge, man.
A really, really fascinating guy to talk to.
colin moriarty
That's fascinating.
I love that stuff, man.
That's what's so frustrating and why I didn't study in college or really super interested in ancient history or even, you know, paleo history and pre-human history and stuff.
It's also hypothetical you'll never really know.
You have to just kind of trust people much smarter than you, that they have these good ideas that sometimes conflict, but you'll never really know the answer.
It's so frustrating to me.
joe rogan
Well, those ideas definitely do conflict here.
This is the area that he looked over.
unidentified
Here play some of this you get some volume on this Here now right and it probably this would have been a seal or a spillway Free flood club right when the floods hit they ripped through here Lord the valley floor by about 200 feet right right based upon the present depth of the river and the height of the twin system Yeah, yeah.
Now the Twins themselves, I mean, that's a Basalt outcrawl.
But is that being sculpted by the Flood?
joe rogan
Yes.
unidentified
And had the Flood continued for, let's say, another few days, a week, or whatever, they would not exist.
They would have been literally washed away from it.
joe rogan
This is a long, long, detailed thing.
I mean, he's talked about it on the podcast for hours and hours.
I've had him on several times, and there's still a lot of information to cover.
Because this guy's been studying this his whole life.
colin moriarty
I'm going to look into that.
That sounds interesting to me.
joe rogan
It's absolutely positive that humans had an impact on woolly mammoths and a lot of other animals.
But there's a lot of people that are very, very hesitant to blame the entire...
Eradication of these animals on people.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I don't know enough about it.
I do recommend the book, though.
Just an interesting insight into...
1491, it's called.
Just an interesting insight into agriculture, into just some ideas that kind of cobble together some sort of vision of this place before mainstream European contact.
joe rogan
This is one of the few places that I would...
I mean, if you had a time machine...
I've always thought about this.
If you could go in some sort of an invisible bubble and experience the Earth at various stages.
There's two things I would love to see.
I would love to see...
During the Great Pyramids, like when they were in their prime, I would love to see what was Egypt actually like before they burned the Library of Alexandria.
And I would have loved to have seen a native tribe in North America pre-colonization.
colin moriarty
Right.
It would be fascinating.
unidentified
Oh, man.
colin moriarty
And that's the frustrating thing is we'll never really quite know the answer, but it's fun to speculate about.
And I was reading...
I think you'd find interesting.
I was reading about the Easter Islanders and how they...
They have sweet potatoes on the island, which are not indigenous to the island.
And the sweet potato had kind of spread around Polynesia, presumably from South America.
And there's this interesting thing that the word, I don't remember the exact word, but the word that many Polynesians or many Polynesian societies that were separated from each other used for the sweet potato is identical to what they were using on the South American mainland, indicating that the islands might have been populated from the other direction.
They assume that people came down from what is, I guess, Indonesia into Australia and then kind of hopped over to those islands.
But people are suggesting that there must have been contact from Paleo-Americans on those islands because they eat sweet potatoes, which are indigenous to South America, and they call them the same exact thing.
that the societies that were thousands of miles apart had experienced.
And you hear about a lot of this, was there transatlantic contact?
could that and then it gets into crazy like conspiracy theories about the pyramids and stuff but where the Phoenicians come over where there are Egyptian contacts the Chinese come here the Romans I remember that there was this this theory that Romans might have been on the Pacific coast of North America because they found I guess they apparently found some coins Roman coins and they found these jars that I guess were ancient Roman or supposedly ancient Roman anchors for ships Yeah, I've seen that.
joe rogan
These are recent discoveries, right?
colin moriarty
I think so.
Over the last 10 years, maybe.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the human history is, you know, kind of pieced together by what we find.
And every now and then they find something and they go, oh, okay.
You know, I mean, what's really crazy is that with Native Americans, when the settlers got here, when Europeans got here, they didn't have horses.
But horses actually evolved in North America.
Horses evolved in North America and then by crossing the Bering landmass made their way into Asia and All throughout the rest of the world, even zebras.
They originally started in North America.
colin moriarty
It's wild.
joe rogan
But then somehow or another, for some reason, they went extinct in North America.
And, you know, they survived and thrived in Europe, and then they were reintroduced.
Dan Flores, he's a wildlife historian, he maintains that the Native Americans, once they had firearms and the horse, that they would have wiped out the buffalo on their own.
That it had nothing to do with market hunting and all the things that the Europeans did.
colin moriarty
Was terrible and it happened quite rapidly, but he maintains that it was it was gonna happen anyway Just just the nature of what kind of an animal it was and that humans were eventually gonna get to them anyway Yeah, I mean that's what we were talking about with the human condition and how things don't seem to change regardless of who you're talking about and I'm always fascinated by these tangential kind of connections between these different societies that we're learning more and more about that the world is Way smaller than I think we thought it was in antiquity and even before that They were talking about how some
Greenland and I guess Newfoundland and New Brunswick and all these kind of had these Indian tribes that definitely probably had extended contact with the Vikings for a long period of time.
And these words kind of find their way to like the St. Lawrence Valley that describe the same things.
And then when the French fur traders come, they find that they're using words that they shouldn't know.
joe rogan
Yeah.
colin moriarty
It's super fascinating, these brilliant scholars that kind of put these things together for us to read about.
joe rogan
It is amazing.
And just think of how much we don't know.
God, to be able to go back 6,000 years ago and just be a fly on the wall on some...
Ancient civilization and see how they interacted with each other.
colin moriarty
Oh, it would have been awesome.
It would have been awesome.
Because you even read about...
There were these great...
There's outside of St. Louis, I think it's like Cahokia or something like that.
It was this massive Native American metropolis in North America.
We often think about Central and South America as having these...
You know, Aztec, Inca, all these major cities.
But there were major mound cities in North America that were populated by maybe 25,000, 30,000 people.
And they were wiped out before we even got here or before our European ancestors got here.
And it's so...
God, you're right, because it would just be so interesting to see how do they live, how do they farm, what was their commerce like?
What was their languages like?
Did they have written records that didn't survive?
I don't know.
But again, that ties back in that Venn diagram of frustration, because you'll never really know.
joe rogan
There's a ranch up in Central California that I go to sometimes called Tohon Ranch, and there's these stone circles that are carved in rocks.
So they have these massive rocks, and then there's like these concave like dugouts where they would make bread.
So you're looking at places where they would grind grain into these rocks, and these holes are, you know, who knows how long.
They existed.
Who knows how long ago these subsistence farmers or subsistence people lived there and did this.
And so you're stepping over these rocks and staring down.
There's some Getty images of them.
Those holes were carved by the Native Americans and they were done over fucking years and years of grinding stones into the stone.
And now what's interesting is A lot of the ancient Egyptians, I went to see the mummy exhibit at the Natural History Museum, or the Science Museum.
Which one is it in California?
Anyway, they had a museum exhibit on mummies, and they said all their teeth were ground down.
And it's because when they would make their bread and they would grind stone into stone, it would create sand.
And that sand would be in the bread.
colin moriarty
Interesting.
joe rogan
So they'd be eating this gritty, sandy bread.
And that's what they ate.
And it would just chew their fucking teeth away to nothing.
colin moriarty
That's fascinating.
Yeah, it's this marriage of archaeology and anthropology and sociology even that gives...
I'm always disconcerted that more people don't find this fascinating.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Well, you're a real student of history.
I mean, you really love history.
colin moriarty
I do.
I love it.
joe rogan
I mean, I thought that was a really interesting subject when you and I were talking the first time.
And you're a young guy, but you embrace it, you know?
colin moriarty
I think it's fascinating.
Someone has to do it.
It's not practical.
I always tell people, people have gone, you know, over the years, fans of mine have gone to school for history and asked me, should I study history and politics?
And I'm like, you can.
I think you should do what makes you happy.
I think it would be much wiser for you to study pharmacy or chemistry or something.
joe rogan
There's not a lot of money in history.
colin moriarty
Yeah, there's not that.
I mean, I remember when I was about to start grad school when I got my job in the gaming industry and I left.
And I remember professors being like, 50% of all history PhDs will never find a job in the field.
joe rogan
Wow, 50%?
colin moriarty
Yeah, because it's the same thing with archaeology.
I played around with the idea of doing American archaeology, which is a growing movement.
They're digging up Jamestown, all those kinds of things.
And there's just no money in it.
And so I want people to just love history the way I love it and understand it.
And I think a lot of it is because it's not told well.
Yeah.
The stories...
Dates and times are interesting.
I remember them, and I think I have that kind of brain, that kind of right-centered brain where I remember facts and dates, but that's not really what's important about it.
And if people taught...
History more as stories, which I think is what I'm trying to do with my show, then I think that people will enjoy it more.
So I think that's the greatest pleasure of what I do, is people saying, I hate history, or I hated history, or God, I thought it was so boring, but this is so interesting.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
And I was like, well, more power to you, and now we can remember what happened.
And these stories are interesting, and they're important.
joe rogan
They are important, and how many people are taking advantage of that?
How many people are passing these stories around?
I mean, how many Dan Carlins are there in the world?
colin moriarty
Yeah, not many, and pretty much no one of his skill.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Hey, Jamie, can you give me one of them cavemans, please?
And another one of these jammies?
You want a caveman coffee?
You want to get jazzed up?
colin moriarty
I'm okay, thank you.
I don't drink coffee.
joe rogan
You don't drink coffee at all?
colin moriarty
I have no problem with that.
I just don't drink it.
joe rogan
You just don't like the taste?
Or you don't like getting jacked?
colin moriarty
Oh no, I don't mind getting it.
I could use some energy, but no, I'm good.
Thank you.
I always feel like I'm missing out on something.
With coffee?
Yeah, because people really love it.
My girlfriend's the same way.
My dad, super coffee connoisseur.
unidentified
Really?
colin moriarty
Yeah, he loves it.
He loves coffee.
joe rogan
I feel like that with cigarettes sometimes.
I know cigarettes are terrible for you, and I think they smell gross.
But I see people taking a big drag of the cigarette, and they seem so satisfied and excited by it.
I'm like, hmm, maybe I'm missing something.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I always see people outside of work in my neighborhood.
You kind of get to know the characters in your neighborhood, right?
And they're always standing outside, smoking, having a little me time.
joe rogan
I'll tell you what, though.
I smoked one of Tony Hinchcliffe cigarettes before a show once.
I think I've done it twice now.
And it's a real cognitive booster.
I mean, it really does stimulate you in a very strange way.
Thank you, sir.
colin moriarty
Do you think you're better after having it?
unidentified
I don't know.
joe rogan
What's better?
I don't know.
Sometimes you're not better stimulated, especially doing stand-up.
Sometimes you're better balanced and calm.
But mentally, it definitely stimulates you in some sort of weird way.
I was like, ooh, this is a different sort of feeling.
Have you ever smoked a cigar?
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, you get high off cigars.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I can only smoke half of it or I actually start to get almost nauseous in a way.
joe rogan
Yeah, you get high.
The nicotine in a fat stogie definitely gets you high.
There's something to it.
colin moriarty
It makes me think about these old-timers.
People still do it, but my friend growing up, his grandpa would always...
That smell reminds me of him because he'd always just sit on the porch and smoke, but he'd just chain-smoke like cigars.
And I'm like, how are you not...
joe rogan
Animals.
Different people.
colin moriarty
It's incredible.
But yeah, you were doing the sober thing for the Sober October, right?
joe rogan
Yeah, I'm still doing it.
colin moriarty
So today's the last day.
How do you feel?
joe rogan
Today's the last day.
Nervous to smoke pot again.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
I'll tell you that.
colin moriarty
God, I haven't gotten more than like two days without smoking pot in 15 years, so I don't even know.
It's weird.
joe rogan
I'll tell you, the big change is your sleep.
I have radical dreams.
colin moriarty
Really?
joe rogan
Yeah, radical, really realistic dreams.
Confusing dreams where in the middle of the dream you don't realize that it's a dream like I had a dream That I was lying on this couch a couch that actually exists a couch in my house and then I was cold So I grabbed this blanket and I was pulling the blanket over me But the blanket was kind of stuck in the pillows.
So, you know, like, you know Gotta struggle with it to get the blanket over you.
And then I woke up and there's no fucking blanket.
I was like, oh my god Like I dreamt that I was pulling a blanket.
I mean it was so realistic that I would have sworn if I woke up that I had struggled to get that blanket over me while I was taking a nap on the couch.
But there was no fucking blanket.
I was reading and as I was reading I decided I was gonna lie down right here and sleep.
I must have passed out and decided that I was cold and went through this elaborate dream sequence where I pulled a blanket over me.
But I was convinced that I had woken up cold and had to adjust and pulled a blanket over me and went back to sleep.
colin moriarty
It's mainly very vivid.
joe rogan
Fucking super vivid, but there was no blanket anywhere near me.
When I woke up, I mean, there's just fucking couch, pillow, that's it.
No blanket on the ground.
Not like I could have gotten up and put it over there and sleepwalked.
There's no fucking blanket.
But in my mind, if you had asked me, like, did you wake up and pull a blanket over?
Yeah, yeah, I did.
Yeah, I remember.
No, I don't remember shit.
It was fake.
colin moriarty
So are you looking forward to not doing this anymore?
Or do you want to keep...
Keep doing it.
Are the pros outweighing the cons?
joe rogan
I think there are real creative benefits to marijuana.
colin moriarty
I do too.
joe rogan
There's states that I think you achieve when you smoke pot that are unattainable without pot.
I think pot makes me more introspective.
It makes me nicer.
It makes me calmer.
It makes me have a better sense and understanding of the importance and value of community.
It makes me more sensitive to the things that I'm saying.
I don't think Pod's bad.
colin moriarty
No, I don't either.
joe rogan
But I think it's always good to take time away from anything just to get a better baseline.
Sure.
Bring yourself back down to neutral.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I feel like it's something maybe I should challenge myself to do as well, because I remember, I mean, I've smoked marijuana regularly my whole adult life, and it becomes, some people dip in and out of it, like it's something that you do recreationally, or you want to get stoned before a concert or whatever,
but I always found that it was, as sad as it sounds to some people, I think, that it was almost part of my process in a way, where even in college I was writing a paper, or I was working, or whatever the case might be, I feel like, yeah, let's smoke a joint or something like that.
And I agree.
I get most creative to this day, late at night, if I smoke or do something like that.
I'm writing good stuff.
I'm having good ideas.
I'm writing ideas down.
And then sometimes I come back to them later when I'm not stoned and I can flesh them out more or whatever.
But I agree that there's great creative benefit to it.
And I also feel like I'm really happy that in a very short amount of time, American society has come around to the benefits of marijuana, not only medicinally, but just recreationally.
And the numbers, the polling numbers from the early 2000s to today are radically different.
We're talking about shifts of like 30, 35 points and how people feel about them.
And like you're saying, with anything, moderation is probably key.
I often in my life don't, because it can make me lazy too.
It can get me very interested in music or something like that and I get distracted.
unidentified
Right.
colin moriarty
So in my general day-to-day, I don't smoke until I'm done with the administrative shit I need to do.
I'm done.
I've gone to the grocery store.
I've done all these things.
Okay, now it's time for me to relax.
joe rogan
Do your grunt work.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
But do you have a specific joint or something strand ready that you want to smoke to get back into it?
Are you going to ease back into it?
Are you going to...
joe rogan
It just says, Jamie just pulled something.
I said polls find supportive legal weed at an all-time high.
colin moriarty
That's great.
joe rogan
No, I'm just going to smoke some pot.
I'm going to do it tomorrow with Owen Benjamin.
We're doing a podcast together, so I'm going to get high for the first time on air.
colin moriarty
Nice.
Well, that'll be interesting for the audience.
joe rogan
Yeah, it should be interesting for me, too.
Yeah, I'm a little nervous, because I know it's going to hit me like a goddamn freight train.
It will.
I bet my tolerance is down to zero.
colin moriarty
But that's going to be fun for you, because I do feel like there's a plateau, obviously.
joe rogan
Oh, for sure.
Yeah, like heavy-duty, hardcore, daytime stoners, you know, they don't feel anything.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's almost like sustaining some sort of feeling, but you can never reach that feeling again, which is, again, why moderation is important.
And it's the same thing alcoholics, frankly, feel and other people that abuse things, so.
joe rogan
But marijuana, we have a very infantile sort of approach to what marijuana is because of, I think, because of all the prohibition bullshit that people went through.
From the 1930s on, there's this weird propaganda that marijuana is the devil's weed and it's terrible for you.
There's a lot of cultural and societal benefits to achieving those states of mind.
I think they really do make people nicer.
I think it calms you down.
Here's the big one that everybody's worried about, paranoia.
It makes you paranoid.
I don't think that that's a bad thing, necessarily.
I think that paranoia, that feeling of vulnerability, it probably makes you more honestly assess how you interface with the world.
There's a lot of real danger in the world.
And I think that marijuana probably makes you really think about that real danger in a way that you perhaps ignore or put in the back of your head, but it's always there.
It's always there in your subconscious, just sort of grinding away at you, whereas marijuana Brings it to the front, has a light, shines that light on it, goes, hey, maybe you should look at this.
How about the fact that your lungs don't work so good anymore, man?
How many more years you got?
How many more summers do you think you have on this planet?
You know, you got 40, you got 50, you got 60. That's it.
If you're lucky.
unidentified
If you're lucky, you got 60. But you're right.
colin moriarty
It's fascinating because if it opens up these places in our brain that are creative, that let us write better, that make us funnier with your comedy, for instance, or whatever the case might be, then it makes you kinder, which I agree.
It mellows people out.
Then, of course, it would make sense that it opens up these dark recesses in your brain that hide or shield these things that you don't want to think about.
And I agree that confronting those things is normal.
I think...
Paranoia, I think, is a side effect of marijuana, for sure, but it's about how you harness it, and if you think about it within the parameters that you're talking about, which is that these things exist.
So you're just thinking about it.
It's not a manifestation of something that doesn't exist.
joe rogan
No, and it makes you aware of some things that...
Very easy to ignore but are pretty fucking huge like space Like one of my favorite things to do is a smoke a joint and go out and sit in my backyard Just pull up a lawn chair put my feet up and just stare up at space and just think of how fucking insane it is that there is this In immeasurable view of infinity that's above our head and And we sort of take it for granted.
We barely stare at it.
We barely look at it.
We barely take it into consideration.
It's just a thing that we completely take for granted.
But when I'm high, I can really freak out about it.
One of the things that I like to do...
When I smoke a little pot is get to the base of a hill.
There's something about being in the base of a hill and lying down where you're looking up and you see the hill and then you see the clouds moving over the hill in the background, the blue sky and the clouds.
There's something about that that gives me a more accurate understanding of atmosphere.
This thin layer of protective air that keeps us shielded from radiation, the magnetosphere above it, all this stuff that's above us that's just sort of slowly moving around this giant globe.
There's that view where you're laying back and you're looking up at the clouds rolling over the top of the mountain.
It gives you more of an understanding of the spherical nature of the planet and the fact that it is draped in this atmosphere.
There's just a real weird, trippy, reset sort of a feeling that I get from that.
We're on like a convertible spaceship.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it is remarkable.
It brings memories forward of that rare earth hypothesis.
The idea that we might not necessarily be alone, but this is so unique that maybe it's worth...
What was it?
That Harvard professor that did the mathematical equation of if we're alone or not.
joe rogan
Fermi paradox?
colin moriarty
Yeah, where he gives numbers to various things.
And the suggestion there is that we probably...
Life based on the confines of a 13.5 billion year old universe that is expanding at the speed of light is probably that we're not very alone.
But the idea that this planet in just the right place with a moon that protects it from a lot of ancient asteroid and comet collisions with oxygen and water...
It's just so fascinating and I think that we often don't think in a weird way galactically about it or universally about how...
Everything that we experience is based on our experience on this little globe hurtling through space.
joe rogan
Yeah, as temporary life forms.
colin moriarty
Yeah, and I like it because it removes this...
To me, I'm an atheist.
I don't believe in God, and I feel like that's liberating in a sense.
I don't mind if people have faith.
I come from a family of Catholics, and they don't agree with me.
But you almost let go and just be like, we're here.
We have a finite amount of time.
It's probably a mistake that we're here or some sort of just random occurrence.
And it's liberating because you use the time you have to do what you want to do, and then you're gone, ashes to ashes.
And a lot of people look at ashes to ashes as this dark thing, and I'm like, it's kind of nice.
It's kind of interesting.
What's here is gone.
What will be is made from what you were.
joe rogan
Well, people are absolutely terrified of the idea that they're not going to be around to experience something.
It's weird because everybody's afraid to die, but no one's afraid to sleep.
colin moriarty
That's deep, and it's true.
I mean, I hope that I get to see things.
I feel like one of the things that I'm bummed about for the time in which we live, you and I, is that I feel like we're in this middle space where some crazy shit's gonna happen in probably 2100 and beyond when we really start.
joe rogan
Dude, crazy shit's happening right now.
colin moriarty
I think we're at the embryonic state of crazy things happening.
We might think about how far we've come even in the last 15 years, so who knows?
But the idea of traveling to other star systems, the idea of meeting life, oh man.
Imagine how frustrated you would be if a contact-like situation, Jodie Foster, Carl Sagan-like situation happened.
joe rogan
While you're on your deathbed.
colin moriarty
Yeah, or even if you have 20 years left and they don't give you this radical mathematical equation to build a spaceship, but they're just like, hey, we're here.
And we're 150 light years away and you have to literally take 150 years to send that message.
You know, it will take that long to send the message back and then another 150 years to get the message back and so on and so forth.
joe rogan
What if they're all like...
Putin's Russian mob, but in space.
unidentified
You know what I mean?
joe rogan
This idea that they're going to be some sort of altruistic, beautiful alien race that's gotten past war.
What if it's like a race of Harvey Weinsteins out in the universe?
colin moriarty
Just predatory.
joe rogan
They're going to come here and mouthfuck us all.
unidentified
I mean...
joe rogan
Who knows why they would care about us.
And also, there's this assumption that they would treat us better than the way we treat monkeys that we find in the Congo.
Because we don't treat primates very well.
colin moriarty
Well, it is funny how...
That's true.
We don't treat almost anything very well, except for our dogs and our cats.
But it is funny to think about these kind of thought experiments that people do, astronomers and whatever, about what would be the...
Why would they come, and what would be the nature of them, and why are they taking initiative to contact us?
It's interesting that a lot of people do settle on the, if they're going through this trouble, they're not coming here to fuck with you.
joe rogan
That's silly.
colin moriarty
But I think, why not?
I don't know.
Why would you make an assumption, based on human understanding of anything, what they're going to do?
joe rogan
Well, this is a very, in terms of resources, this planet's very rich.
Think about it.
What if they're from a planet that's low in water?
We're three-quarters water.
The surface of our planet is mostly water, right?
We have all sorts of weird minerals and who knows how...
I mean, they're rare in our solar system.
What we find on Earth in terms of the biological life is insane, right?
We haven't even found biological life anywhere else in the solar system.
So it could be that this is just the ultimate fucking sweet spot.
I mean, we are in what we call the Goldilocks zone, right?
But then there's also, my thought is always, why would, it's just like, it's such a limited thing to think that biological life as we know it, carbon-based life on the planet Earth that exists between the temperatures of X and Y, you know, and it has a lifespan of, you know, whatever the fuck it is, like, this is the only way life can be.
Why?
colin moriarty
Yeah, no, I never bought that.
I always was confused by that.
Like, why can't a species breathe ammonia?
And, you know...
Right.
And that's why they use the term, I guess, life as we know it.
Yeah.
But I'm of the same mind as you.
I think...
With just the mathematical permutations, you know, multiplied by the amount of space covered, even the exoplanets we're finding now, I know a lot of them are gas giants and stuff like that, and they're really close to the star system, but they indicate that maybe we're not all so unique.
And I was reading a thing about Jupiter and Saturn, even in relation to exoplanets being found that are similar to them, that they might have been far closer to the sun when they formed and then were pushed out.
So maybe we're seeing solar systems earlier on in there.
I love space too.
I think it's a super fascinating study.
I wish that I was smarter with math, with physics, and all those kinds of things, because I have a very...
Very limited understanding of that stuff.
Maybe I would have explored that instead, but I don't have that.
My brain doesn't work like that.
I can't do calculus.
joe rogan
Are you a fan of science fiction?
colin moriarty
Yes.
joe rogan
Did you like the Battlestar Galactica series?
colin moriarty
Loved it.
joe rogan
Fucking great, right?
colin moriarty
It's awesome.
joe rogan
One of the most underrated series ever.
colin moriarty
It was awesome.
I agree with you.
joe rogan
The new one.
colin moriarty
Yeah, the one from 2004. Yeah.
Yeah, I loved it because I think it married really well.
Sci-fi, believable sci-fi, with the problems we're encountering maybe with AI now with the Cylons.
And then a religious aspect, a monotheistic, polytheistic culture is kind of clashing.
There's a lot of depth to that that I think people don't see because they're turned off by the setting.
joe rogan
But I think a lot of people just missed it because it was a retake of, what was it, 1970s show?
colin moriarty
Yeah, it was like 79, 1980s, something like that, yeah.
joe rogan
It was a retake of that show that seemed to be, at the time, to be a Star Wars ripoff, you know?
It was like, there was like your Luke Skywalker character that was Starbuck, you know?
There was all this stuff to it that people were like, ah, that's a fake Stormtrooper, ah, this show sucks.
And it was a movie.
Or it was a show, rather.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it started as a mini-series, which is about the Cylons turning on the humans, or I guess the end result of them turning on the humans, and then they expanded into four seasons.
I think the show is amazing.
The new show.
joe rogan
Was it only four seasons?
colin moriarty
Yeah.
Damn, it was good.
Yeah, I think it was 2004 to 2009 or something like that.
joe rogan
Bring it back.
Come on, fuckers.
Netflix, get on it.
Come on.
You're cancelling House of Cards.
Give us some Battlestar Galactica.
colin moriarty
Yeah, Battlestar was great.
I thought that they told the arc really well.
Fascinating.
I thought the acting was pretty good.
And I like the idea of the, because we're dealing with it tangentially now, the idea of, not that it's unique to that story, but of AI and robots turning on you.
Very smart people are telling us that that's very possible, and so we should probably start listening to them.
joe rogan
Well, it is possible.
Of course it's possible.
I think we could be a new life form.
I mean, I really do believe that.
I think we're either probably going to be augmented by these creations, and we're going to choose to take on new body parts that function much better than the body parts we have now, or we're essentially laboring to create something that's going to surpass us.
That absolutely could be it.
This idea that it's artificial, too.
It's like, well, it's right there.
It's real.
Like if it's a life form.
Oh, it's artificial life.
No, it's electronic life.
You know, it's something that humans have created, but it's still life.
It doesn't...
Like if you take a plant, right?
You know, I was looking at these plants...
And they splice different plants together, like they splice pistachios into avocados.
They have the base of an avocado tree and pistachios are grown on the outside.
I'm like, what the fuck?
colin moriarty
That's wild.
joe rogan
I didn't know you could do that.
colin moriarty
Yeah, me neither.
joe rogan
Yeah, well, is that artificial?
What is that?
Seems like it's artificial life.
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
I mean, it seems like they've figured out some way to engineer things in a crude sense, you know, by splicing and grafting and doing all these different weird things to plants.
Well, it's still life, though, right?
It's still alive.
It's functional.
And we think of life as everybody has to have bones or blood or scales or fins.
Says who?
Says who?
Says us in our limited sort of vocabulary and our very limited encyclopedia of variables that we allow to consider life?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think you're right because we have to judge maybe life based on consciousness instead of, not that a planet would have consciousness, but I think that's the kind of the ethical question we're going to start coming up with with machines in the next 20 or 30 years is, are you developing something?
There's actually a great, I don't want to ruin it for you, there's an amazing black mirror that kind of touches on this.
It's called, I think it's called White Christmas.
You should check it out if you have time.
And Jon Hamm's actually the main character in it from Mad Men.
The idea that if something is conscious, even if it's not real, or even if it's only in a computer, what does that mean?
And what if it was trapped there?
What if it didn't have agency over its life, but it was still conscious and stuff like that?
We're messing with things that we don't understand in this regard.
Because even the word consciousness doesn't really have a concrete definition.
Because we don't even know what it is.
We are conscious.
My dog's conscious.
But are they self-conscious?
And at what level of consciousness?
And that's what makes us human.
joe rogan
Right.
colin moriarty
So if we're going to implant that into other machines, even if they're just computers, even if they're literally just running on an operating system, then there are definitely going to be ethical questions to ask, I think.
joe rogan
Did you see that Google situation they had where the two computers were communicating each other with a language that they invented themselves?
colin moriarty
I read a little bit about that, but I don't know too much about it.
joe rogan
Yeah, they shut it down.
They're like, what?
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's horrifying, right?
It's happening so much quicker than...
We envision these things as Skynet or the Cylons or something like that, but I think it's going to be much more quaint.
joe rogan
They were very stunned by this.
I saw somebody trying to diminish it.
Trying to diminish it.
And he was like, well, it's just ones and zeros.
It's just like what they're doing.
They're communicating ones and zeros.
Yeah, but they are talking, exchanging information back and forth in a method that we don't understand.
And they do.
How the fuck do they?
And why have they chosen to talk to each other?
And is this like one...
You know how you have like a science fiction movie?
And in the beginning of the movie, you have these engineers sitting around.
And the engineer's going, Mike?
Mike, come here and look at this real quick.
They're talking to each other.
What do you mean they're talking to each other?
There's a language.
See this?
See, this is an exchange.
Here, and here's the answer, and here's a response to the answer, and here they've agreed upon this, and now they've expanded their sentences like, shut it down.
Just shut it down.
What do we do about this?
Let's let it play out.
No.
No, let's shut it down.
Let's talk about this.
And then they shut it down and it phased to black.
Cut to smash cut like you see a new time to 2034 and it's some dystopian Mad Max fucking world and robot people are running down the street chasing after biological people.
Wanting to use them for fuel.
colin moriarty
Well, it's interesting because there are different reasons why a robot or a machine might turn on you, right?
I think the Cylons were interesting because they turned because they were enslaved, right?
So there was vengeance, which is a human quality, by the way.
An animal doesn't really understand vengeance.
Chips do.
Yeah, well, I guess about higher primates or whatever might understand a retaliatory kind of thing.
But generally, this is a human quality, right?
Well, it's a primate quality, for sure.
And so there's that.
So there's like this enslavement, retaliation kind of thing going on.
But then there's the very, like, what I always find fascinating, and I think this is more what Skynet was all about in Terminator, although I don't really remember, is the idea that if you look at the landscape of what's happening and you just remove the most inefficient...
part of it it's the human like in other words them acting as they are machines like this this doesn't make any sense this makes our processing slower this particular component needs to be removed so there's a very logical reason why they would go after you too i think it's it is the stuff of sci-fi but like so many things that start in sci-fi it ends up bleeding into into real life and i think it's uh when i see people like stephen hawking bill gates elon musk all talking about this i'm I'm like, these are some of the smartest people that society has ever given us.
And I think we might want to pay attention and have some...
I think what they want is some sort of Congress.
Not American Congress, but some sort of international coalition that agrees this is what we're going to do and this is how far we'll push the boundaries.
And I just don't know that we'll get there before it's...
I don't want to say before it's too late, but before we have a scary situation.
And even from a mechanical situation, what they're doing at Boston Dynamics is fucking horrifying.
unidentified
Yeah.
colin moriarty
It's so crazy.
I look at the videos and I'm like, what the f...
And it's so funny because some people have said in the past, if you see them, they're using hockey sticks a lot to beat them or knock something out of their hands and stuff.
And I'm like, these are the videos they're going to show.
They're going to show them in their military camps when they're turning on humanity.
joe rogan
Yes.
Yeah.
There's so many different versions of them.
They have them look like cheetahs.
They have them that look like dogs.
I mean, they look like people.
unidentified
It's insanity.
joe rogan
Yeah.
And these guys are just constantly working on these things, too, and constantly improving.
Where is Boston Dynamics?
Is it actually in Boston?
colin moriarty
I think it's in Cambridge.
Because I think a lot of people at MIT might migrate there.
And I think Google owned them, but I think they've divested, if I remember correctly.
joe rogan
That is so wild.
colin moriarty
Yeah, and the ones where they knock them over, and they get up.
Yeah, they kick them.
Yeah, because its gyroscope is going, I guess, and it's...
joe rogan
Yeah, gyroscopes are fascinating.
You know, just something that can sort of self-balance.
colin moriarty
This is the stuff they're going to show them and hype them up in their propaganda.
joe rogan
Yeah.
unidentified
God.
joe rogan
It's fucking amazing.
colin moriarty
It is.
It is amazing.
I mean, these are...
It's so smart these people that do that I managed to do this.
joe rogan
I know, but don't you want to pull them aside and go, hey man, what's the fucking endgame here?
unidentified
You want to make a robot you can't kick over?
joe rogan
Come on, dude.
colin moriarty
It brings up ideas, how will we fight wars in the future?
Will we do them with this?
joe rogan
100%, yeah.
Especially if we fight some war with some sort of a primitive culture.
I like how they have them balanced with all these packs.
colin moriarty
It's incredible.
jamie vernon
Highlight clip of all the times they've abused a robot.
joe rogan
Is that what this is?
Oh my god.
colin moriarty
Yeah, the robot general right now has this playing behind him and as he's talking, he's like, remember what they've done to your ancestors.
joe rogan
Well, they're saying abuse, but they're checking tolerances.
You know, the robots need to relax.
This is how we made you so awesome, you dumb fucks.
You stupid pricks, you can't even walk on ice.
colin moriarty
Now, the interesting thing...
The interesting thing to me about this is, and I don't know if you feel it, but I kind of do, is when they're tripping and falling, I have this feeling of like, yeah, where I'm like, oh, you know what I mean?
Look at this poor guy.
joe rogan
Yeah, you feel bad for him.
Wow, this guy, he can't even kick this one over.
Wow, that thing is stout.
Yeah, I mean, so they have multiple different models.
colin moriarty
The video name is funny, by the way, Jamie.
It's literally named every time Boston Dynamics has abused a robot.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's not abuse, you dummies.
It's fucking testing.
This is how they find out.
But look at that nerd that's kicking it over.
Go back to that guy.
Oh, that thing sucks.
Go back to that one guy that was kicking it.
Look at him.
unidentified
He's like, looks like he's just, I'm gonna get back at everybody.
joe rogan
Go back?
Go back to him?
So you can see him do it?
unidentified
Watch him, you fucking piece of shit.
joe rogan
He's like, looks like he always wanted to kick somebody.
colin moriarty
He's projecting.
joe rogan
Like, even with those little tiny short steps, like he seems awkward before he kicks it.
Like, yeah, I'm gonna kick it now!
Look at this one.
Oh, it's bouncing on one leg and they're hitting it with a 20 pound medicine ball.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Wow.
Yeah, we're in for a weird hundred years.
colin moriarty
Yes, and that's what I'm saying.
I hope that we get to see some, because I think it's going to get fucking crazy.
joe rogan
Yeah, no, there's no doubt it is.
There's no doubt it is.
It's just like how crazy and what's going to be the issues that we're going to have to confront.
Sentient life.
And also the real question is...
Will it have any motivation to advance?
Like the idea is that the real fear is that these things are gonna be so hyper-intelligent that they're going to be able to create a much better version of themselves fairly quickly.
Like as soon as you give them autonomy and as soon as they're sentient, you're gonna say, okay, make a better one.
Make a better one than you.
And they're gonna go, well, you guys fucked up here.
Like why have all these shitty connections and let's do it this way and let's do it that way.
Let's connect to each other.
You guys are using Wi-Fi version 6. This is weak.
What we need is this new form of Wi-Fi that uses the particles in the atmosphere as transistors and sends back and forth to each other through a highly charged signal.
I'm like, what?
How'd you fucks figure that out and then next thing you know, but they're not gonna have ego They're not gonna have this desire for and this is this is you know a real underlying Aspect the motivation of the human race the desire to recreate and to reproduce like this desire for sex and this desire It's one of the reasons why people accomplish things they don't just accomplish things because They have this desire to see what happens when they put these two things together and what's the result.
They want fame, they want status, they want power, they want money, and they want all these things because they want to be more sexually attractive.
That's a big part of the motivation of men.
You know, it's a weird thing.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos doesn't just retire.
Why doesn't Jeff Bezos, when he just became the richest man in the world, how the fuck are you gonna spend 90 billion dollars, Holmes?
Cash out.
Cash out and just chillax forever.
You know, just walk around with a big red wig on so nobody knows who you are and just live like a king.
Like, go wherever you want.
Fuck all this work, man.
You're waking up in the morning, Freaking out about Amazon and making sure everything gets delivered in 30 minutes or less like a fucking pizza.
Instead, just live.
But no, no way.
Jeff Bezos has a fucking supermodel girlfriend now.
He's balling.
He jumps from one gold Lamborghini to the next one.
I mean, you start thinking, I want more.
I want this.
I want that.
Well, what is the motivation to do something like that?
Where is it coming from?
In men, I think a lot of it comes from this need.
I mean, I think if you brought it down to the base level, it's this weird biological need to reproduce or to spread your genes or to stand out as something particularly impressive.
You're peacocking for females in a lot of ways.
colin moriarty
Right.
There he is.
joe rogan
Look at him, stud.
colin moriarty
It is amazing to me where I'm like, I dream every day about how I can retire as quickly as possible.
And these guys that have the means to do it don't.
But there is an internal drive with guys.
I mean, you don't found a company like Amazon unless there's something special about you.
And I don't mean that as a derogatory thing either.
Like, there's something about a person.
joe rogan
Ironic is it was originally founded to sell books.
It was a very simple site.
Have you ever seen the original Amazon site?
colin moriarty
Yeah, you can go to the Wayback Machine and look at all that.
joe rogan
It was just a really simple site to sell books.
And I remember when Amazon started selling other things, I was like, why are they doing that?
They sell books.
Why are you selling fucking kids' toys?
colin moriarty
Right.
Yeah, they moved into music, and then they started expanding from there.
It's funny, though, you brought up the robots making better versions of themselves.
Not to be nerdy about it, but that's exactly what happens in Battlestar.
What comes back to fight the humans is not what left.
Right, right, right.
Because they just were like, we're not good enough.
We can make ourselves better.
joe rogan
They made those killer ones that look like people.
colin moriarty
Right, yeah, the numbers, whatever they call them.
And even the centurions look better, like are more effective, which is their soldiers.
And there's that one episode about the raiders, which is their ships.
They have these autonomous ships that are alive, that are fighter ships.
And how they, one of them is named Scar, and he keeps having these experiences, like he's really a good fighter pilot or whatever, but he's alive.
And it's like, it's really...
joe rogan
Good fucking show, goddammit.
Come on, Netflix!
Bring it Get back!
colin moriarty
If you guys out there, you have such a great audience that would, oh my god, go check it out.
The numbers will spike on Netflix, they'll see it, and then they'll be like, oh, maybe we'll...
joe rogan
Maybe.
Folks, if you haven't seen it, I'm telling you, it is a...
And I think it was sci-fi that made it, right?
colin moriarty
It was like sci-fi is coming to, kind of.
It was a legitimate thing that they did.
joe rogan
And it was very overlooked because people were like, well, it's on sci-fi, well, it's Battlestar Galactica, but it was like a really well-done science fiction drama.
And then, yeah, Edward James Olmos was in it, too.
And that woman that played Starbuck, what is her name?
unidentified
Katie Sackhoff?
colin moriarty
Katie Sackhoff.
joe rogan
Yeah, she was fucking great.
colin moriarty
Yeah, she was great.
There was a lot of great actors, a lot of great, interesting characters in there.
Yeah.
You know, even characters that really made you not like them, like...
Not Gaeta, he's the guy to the right next to her, the professor.
You really hate him.
joe rogan
Yeah, you hate a lot of people.
colin moriarty
Gaius, Gaius Baltar.
joe rogan
Yeah, there was a lot of people that you hated, but Goddamn was a good show.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it was great.
And a lot of these, I don't see many of these people in anything today.
I mean, obviously, James Edward almost is a famous actor, but otherwise, I don't see them sprinkling anywhere.
Not that I watch a lot of things.
joe rogan
Yeah, I know, man.
I always wonder about that.
When you see someone's in some gigantic hit show, and then they kind of vanish.
You know, like, where'd you go?
colin moriarty
Yeah, maybe they wanted to go do something else or maybe they can't get, you know, I would assume that they all could kind of write their own way.
joe rogan
You think that, but I think that also people get pigeonholed into a character.
You know, there's certain characters where you see someone and they're on The Sopranos.
And from then on, they're Christopher Maltasante forever.
Is that his name?
colin moriarty
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, that's who he is.
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
Right?
Forever.
And it's hard to break out of that for a lot of people.
unidentified
Sure.
Sure.
colin moriarty
The one person that managed to get out of there was the wife.
I can't think of her name.
joe rogan
Edie Falco.
colin moriarty
Edie Falco, yeah.
She was obviously big before that, too, in some things.
But she did Nurse Jackie and all those kinds of things.
Some people managed to break out of that.
But you're right.
When you were on news radio and stuff, did you find...
When you went to casting or anything like that...
joe rogan
Well, I never really acted again.
colin moriarty
So, yeah, I guess you found your way into Fear Factor and stuff like that.
But you never even tried to do anything after that?
joe rogan
I was offered some stuff that was terrible.
Like, there were some sitcoms that...
It just came my way and, you know, you read the scripts and they were just...
The real problem was that news radio was so good that the curse of being with that talented cast and amazing writing and amazing production and also nobody knew about us.
Like, when we were on the air, like, people that hear about news radio, most of what people heard about was from news radio's reruns.
When we went into syndication and we started playing, that's when people started really getting into news radio.
News radio really found a big audience after it was cancelled, which is ironic.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
joe rogan
But it was good because the show didn't have anybody fucking with it very much.
It was a weird show in that regard.
It was not a hit.
That show was not a hit show while I was on the air.
My friend Lou Morton, who was one of the writers, he would wear a different t-shirt.
He would come down to the table reads in a different t-shirt with a number on it based on what our rankings was in the ratings.
And he came down once and it said number 88. I go, fuck, dude.
unidentified
We're number 88. And he was like, yeah.
joe rogan
And I was like, oh my god, we're getting cancelled.
And he started thinking, fuck, why did I get that lease in that apartment?
I'm doomed now.
colin moriarty
My sister Dana was a big fan of the show, I remember, when it was on.
Because I'm the youngest, by far, of all my siblings.
So I think it's a little surreal that I'm on the show, actually, for her.
But yeah, I think it's still on syndication.
I feel like I've seen it, or maybe in those deep channels, maybe?
I'm trying to think.
joe rogan
Some things.
What is that one down there?
Oh, the space one.
See that one with me with the white jumpsuit on, Jamie?
See, that's a perfect example of how fucking weird they were.
They did these weird ones where we were on...
Oh, that's not it.
That's not the same one.
That's not the space one.
We did one where we were in space for some reason, but it was the same fucking newsroom, but the newsroom was taking place in space.
They did a lot of weird shit.
They did one where we were completely underwater.
We did a Titanic episode where we literally filmed the show in waist-high water, and we were on a ship, and we wore old-schooly clothes from the Titanic days.
It's just an extremely...
Go to that picture down there.
Go back to that.
Scroll up.
Scroll up with a picture of the cast.
I'm wearing sunglasses over there.
We're at some...
That was when we went to the Emmys after Phil was murdered.
And he's still lost in the Emmys.
And Dave Foley turns to me right after they gave it to the guy from Frasier.
He goes...
What the fuck does he have to do to win?
You know, it was such a morose, hilarious moment where me and Dave were just laughing to each other.
Strange times, man.
It's weird to go back and look at yourself, too, from, you know, whatever it was 20 years ago.
It's just strange.
colin moriarty
Do you have any interest in ever doing something like this again?
joe rogan
No, never.
No.
I have no desire.
It's a lot of work.
This is so easy.
I'm so fucking spoiled.
Come down, sit down with people like you, have a nice conversation, talk, talk about interesting things that are happening right now.
It's fun.
And not that that wasn't fun.
It was really fun.
But it's somebody else's thing, and it's a lot of work.
It took a lot away from my stand-up.
It took a lot away from doing other things.
When I started doing UFC commentary back then, too, in 97, when news radio was on the air, I was actually the interviewer, the post-fight interviewer.
And they would say to me, they would treat me literally like I was going off to do porn.
They were like, why are you doing this?
Like, you're gonna fly to Alabama to work for a cage fighting organization?
You're a fucked up person.
I was like, this is the sport of the future.
colin moriarty
I know you guys are crazy.
You saw something a lot of people didn't, I think, so good for you.
joe rogan
Yeah, I don't know why, man.
Well, honestly, I probably didn't really see something.
I just saw what I liked.
For whatever reason, good or bad, there's me, 1997. For whatever reason, good or bad, I've always 100% trusted my instincts.
When I like something, I go, well, I've got to go do that.
Because it's what I've always done.
It's what's led me through my life.
If I went back...
And I've looked at my decision to get obsessed with martial arts or my decision to quit all that and get obsessed with stand-up comedy.
All the decisions that I've made have all been insanely impulsive, passion-driven.
Derided by everyone around me.
Like, what?
You're gonna do what?
But they ultimately all worked.
colin moriarty
Well, your story's so interesting to me because you have legitimately large pieces of your audience that know you for totally different things.
The guys that watch UFC and see you kind of do, you know, in that sphere.
And then you have the guys that, you know, watch the show or listen to the show.
And you have, obviously, people that love you as a stand-up comic.
And then, obviously, the crossover between all of those.
So you've managed to create, like, three different viable...
Lives that all intermix.
It's pretty cool.
joe rogan
Well, the UFC thing is very strange because whether or not anybody agrees with my opinions on life outside of it, they know that when I'm doing commentary, I am doing my absolute best to honor what's happening inside the Octagon.
And I have a deep knowledge and understanding of what's going on.
Like, this isn't...
Like, do you remember when...
I don't know if you remember this, but Dennis Miller used to do Monday Night Football.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I do remember that, yeah.
joe rogan
People fucking hated him.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I remember.
joe rogan
They were so mad.
They were so mad at him.
And this was before, I think, I was doing FearFact, or before I was doing the UFC. Or maybe I was doing the post-fight interviews, but I hadn't done the commentary yet.
Either one.
But I was like, you can't force funny into something...
Where people want to watch The Thing.
You can't force funny into Alien, the movie Alien.
It's not supposed to be funny.
The Thing is, this is a dramatic, horrifying science fiction movie.
You don't force funny into something like that.
And that's what I felt like.
Dennis Miller was like, this is just like back when...
You know, he's like one-liner, one-liner.
That's his thing.
That's what he did.
But I never did that.
I always just did commentary.
And if you heard me do commentary, unless something happens that's fucked up inside the octagon and I have to go, what the fuck is this?
And then I go on a rant about something, people would have no idea that I was funny at all.
colin moriarty
Right.
And that's kind of nurturing those different audiences, right?
joe rogan
But I never thought about it that way.
It's not like a concerted effort to nurture anything.
It's just...
The UFC in specific, first of all, it's about getting out of my own way and honoring what's happening.
You have to kind of honor...
You've got to think, when a guy...
There's a big fight this weekend, right?
TJ Dillashaw is going to fight Cody Garbrandt.
It's probably the biggest bantamweight fight of all time.
When those two guys get into the octagon, you're dealing with the consequences of the history of an entire division, probably the two best champions in that division going at it, the two of the three best champions, Dominic Cruz being the other one, going at it in this historical matchup.
You have a lot of responsibility, and you have to think about it that way.
It's not about you at all.
colin moriarty
Right.
No, I think it's interesting because I feel like I've actually been challenged in that same way, you know, because I came up as a gaming commentator.
And, you know, Dennis Miller, I think a lot of the reason people were kind of concerned about him, too, was that he would tell political jokes or bring political things in, which was unheard of at the time on Monday Night Football or in the NFL generally, and now it's part and parcel with the NFL. I'm a huge football fan, so I'm bearing witness to it every week.
Yeah.
But I, as a gaming commentator, I've often found some difficulty in keeping out shades of that, shades of politics, and kind of social commentary in what I did as well.
And that certainly alienated some people.
But I also think it engendered, like, wow, this guy's honest and just tells you exactly what he thinks as well.
So I was able to benefit from that, but I also don't have the audience that you have as well.
And I think keeping it structured and separated is wise.
joe rogan
I mean, it is sometimes, but it's also sometimes wise to just be yourself.
And that way you never have to worry if people like you for who you are.
You know, if you pretend to be someone else, like, that's like, okay, I hate to bring him up again, but Cosby is one of the grossest parts about it.
We had it in our head that this guy was this squeaky clean, middle America, perfect example of this ethical, moral guy.
Meanwhile, he was a fucking rapist.
When you're around something like that, You appreciate someone who's just themselves, you know?
I mean, obviously you don't appreciate him if himself is a rapist.
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
It's maybe a bad example.
But what do you define yourself as?
Do you think of yourself as a libertarian?
Are you a Republican?
colin moriarty
No, I was a Republican.
I left the party after Trump won the nomination.
joe rogan
You're like, enough.
colin moriarty
Well, because I can't.
I couldn't stand him.
I consider myself a moderate conservative.
joe rogan
Don't you think it's interesting that Trump was a Democrat his whole life?
colin moriarty
Yes.
I think he's just an opportunist, and I think the Republicans wanted to just win.
But I also think he had 17 people in that field, or 16 other people in that field, and he was winning primaries and caucuses with 35% of the vote.
I have no problem with the Electoral College, but he didn't win the popular vote.
So to me, I was like, I identify as conservative.
I feel like the word libertarian has been totally bastardized.
We were talking about words that don't mean anything anymore.
Where people almost look at libertarianism as like anarchy.
And to me, I'm like, I'm a social libertarian.
I always call myself a social libertarian.
I believe that drugs should be decriminalized.
I think that, you know, obviously this state shouldn't be really involved in litigating who's getting married.
I think if you want to have a polygamous relationship and everyone's...
Cool with that.
That's fine.
All that kind of stuff.
Prostitution should be legal.
I think all that is true.
But from a governmental standpoint, I think that the government has a place.
I think that the government can do positive things that only the government can do.
And so I'm also a protectionist and stuff.
So I also don't believe in a lot of libertarian mantra.
A lot of people call me a libertarian, but I haven't called myself that in a long time.
joe rogan
What makes you lean towards conservatism?
colin moriarty
But conservatism to me is simply the idea that government shouldn't be involved where it doesn't need to be involved if there's no justification for it.
Right.
joe rogan
But if someone looked at you, they wouldn't think conservative.
You've got an earring, you've got tattoos, you're a young guy, you look like, not a hipster, I wouldn't say a hipster, but you're millennial-esque.
colin moriarty
It was funny.
I was listening to some guy talking about me on one of his political shows, and he's like, and he presents as hip.
And I'm like, no one's ever called me.
Yeah, he presents as hip.
And he told me I had a lot of bad ideas, too.
But I was like, no one's ever called me hip before.
joe rogan
Is that even a thing anymore?
Hipster?
colin moriarty
Hipster, yeah.
joe rogan
Is there hip?
colin moriarty
I guess.
I mean, I guess.
I don't even really understand exactly.
You know a hipster when you see one, but I still can't really tell you what it means.
joe rogan
You can see some of them, man, for sure.
You see them coming.
colin moriarty
Yeah, with the big, you know, sometimes the big 80s glasses and the crazy, I don't know, to each his own.
But I consider myself a conservative simply because I believe that the government is too big.
I think that the government doesn't need to be involved in everything it's involved in.
And I think that the idea of conservatism is simply inconsistent.
I think the conservative position on the global women's right to choose is pro-choice.
I don't think it's pro-life.
I think that the conservative, because it means that the government's not telling you what to do.
Just as the government doesn't have the right to have confiscatory taxes, just like the government doesn't have the right to take your guns, the government doesn't have the right to tell you you can't marry a man if you're a man, and the government doesn't have a right to tell you that you can't have an abortion.
joe rogan
So the true classic sense of conservative ideals versus what we see today where it's sort of a mixture of conservative philosophy but the religious influence.
Right.
There's a tremendous amount of religious influence because, well, from the Reagan days, right?
When Reagan sort of courted the religious right.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it actually started with like even Nixon in a way.
Nixon did as well.
Yeah, it's the southern strategy and all those kinds of things and the idea that, that The map has changed.
In American politics until, really, the Civil War, parties were coming and going constantly.
The federalists and anti-federalists, by the time James Madison and James Monroe were president, those were antiquated terms.
Those were only five presidents in between Madison and, you know, or Monroe and Washington.
So, you know, we had this churn, the know nothings, free soil, all these kinds of things.
And suddenly the Democrats come out during antebellum America.
Republicanism begins in 1856.
And you have this idea of these parties that just exist still to this day and simply morph constantly into these different things, making me wonder why we don't just have new parties constantly.
But to your point, the reason that conservatism and liberalism aren't these aren't in these neat buckets anymore is because they're tied to these parties and they have to constantly The Republicans under Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were the original progressives.
They were the ones that wanted land to be set aside for national parks.
They were the ones that freed, obviously, the slaves.
Not so much Teddy Roosevelt as much as Ulysses S. Grant.
And all these kinds of things.
And suddenly everything changes.
And then suddenly everything changes again.
And so on and so forth.
And so none of these words have any definitions anymore.
Which is why I didn't identify with Republicanism.
I consider myself a moderate conservative, but what's conservative about evangelicalism?
What's conservative about even ideas like free trade and stuff like that?
The idea of just having these open markets that destroy your ability to manufacture things, that drive wages down, that do all these kinds of things.
There's nothing conservative about that at all.
To me, I was like, I just have to find my own way forward, so I just consider myself independent.
And I feel like I'm consistent in what I say, because I think you can match them all up.
And I don't think there's any consistency in saying, you can't marry this man, but don't take my gun.
You can't have this polygamous relationship, but we should have prayer in school.
These things don't make sense to me.
You have to be consistent.
joe rogan
Well, the religious things always seem to me to be compromises to get the support of the religious right.
It seems like they move towards those directions because it sort of reinforces the power that they have behind them because they're the only candidates that are willing to do that, right?
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Because the left is not willing to go down that religious road in the sense of a woman's right to choose, in the sense of a lot of things that they get liberals to support them.
It would be antithetical.
They would lose that support.
But do you think that having a guy like Trump in office, that one of the good things about having a guy that's obviously fairly unhinged and ridiculous is that we need to reconsider what it is to be a president.
And this idea that this guy could get into this position by just sort of conning everybody and doing a lot of Make America Great Again speeches and Saying a lot of crazy shit about we're going to build that wall 10 feet higher and all the nutty rhetoric that went on during the camp.
And then seeing him in office and seeing...
Who knows if he's even going to get out of these four years without going to jail, right?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I think you can glean positive and obviously negative things out of Trump's administration so far, right?
joe rogan
What do you glean positive?
colin moriarty
I think what's positive is what we were talking about earlier, that the system works.
That, like, nothing has broken down at all.
In fact, like, we've seen from the circuit courts all the way to the Supreme Court and with Congress that there actually are, these are legitimately viable and independent bodies in the checks and balance system, right?
And this is why I think it's so deeply offensive to, you know, in a way, to be like, well, fascism's alive in America.
And I'm like, it's not.
What fascism would have looked like from a governmental standpoint is Trump's coming in, suspending the Supreme Court, dismissing Congress, and trying all these crazy things that would have happened.
That's what fascism looks like.
What fascism doesn't look like is you passing a travel ban and the Supreme Court saying no, and then you're trying to pass it again, and then the circuits courts say no, you know?
And that's not what fascism looks like.
That's what Republicanism, small r, Republicanism looks like.
And so I think we can glean positive things out of this.
People got mad at me after the election because I was like, the world's not ending.
I actually tweeted it that night.
People were losing their minds.
I'm like...
It's going to be fine.
joe rogan
Well, people are super emotional.
colin moriarty
They were, but understand what we've survived.
Understand when we've had elections, like what has happened, right?
We had an election in 1860, and really even in 1856 and 1852 when things started to really start to fall apart.
And we had one in 1864 during the Civil War.
We had an election in 1932 during the Depression.
We had an election in 1944 when we were fighting the Nazis and the Japanese at the same time.
We can survive this.
No one came in and said, like, we don't need an election now, or untoward things were happening.
We still went through the rigors of our system every four years.
Everything stood up.
Everything was fine.
And the suggestion that Donald Trump is going to be the guy that...
The Confederates didn't do it.
The Nazis didn't do it.
The Japanese didn't do it.
Nothing did it.
Donald Trump's going to be the one that destroys the American Republic.
It's absurd.
And so I take...
I take that as a positive.
But what I take as a negative is we're just wasting time.
It's just time wasted.
It's good theater.
It's entertaining.
But it's not funny because they've not gotten anything done.
And I want tax cuts.
I think that's great.
I want some reasonable things happening that the Congress can pass with Trump to sign.
But I think these are just wasted four years.
And so that's not funny at all.
It's making the problems worse.
joe rogan
A lot of wheels spinning.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
We have deep problems.
$20 trillion in debt.
A massive deficit.
We're spending $600 billion on our military.
$600 billion on our military.
It's nuts.
It's insane.
We have to start asking ourselves questions of geopolitics.
Do we need to be in Japan anymore?
Do we need to have these bases in Poland?
Do we need to, you know, we have a lot, but we can't get past this buffoon that's our president.
In order to start asking ourselves deep questions.
So we just have to punt until a normal person's in there again.
And I think we'll get a normal person.
I think he'll survive his term, but I don't think he'll run again.
I'm of the mind that he won't run again.
Really?
joe rogan
But he's already ran for re-election.
He's already filed.
colin moriarty
Well, yeah, he's filing and he's raising money.
But I think that once Kellyanne Conway and these other people that engineered the election for him to begin with, after the midterms, which I think are going to be interesting, I think the midterms actually benefit in some ways the Republicans because of the map in the Senate.
But I think that when it becomes clear that he cannot win...
joe rogan
You really don't think he'll win again?
colin moriarty
I don't...
So it's interesting because I'm friends with...
I'm good friends.
I went to college with this girl who's a lobbyist in Washington.
She's a Democrat and she's pretty well connected.
And I had dinner with her a couple weeks ago and she was like, not only will Trump run again, he'll win.
And this was when everything was going on and all this, and I'm like, I just don't see him subjecting himself to the possibility of losing.
He won once.
And it reminds me of 2004 when Bush won again, but he also won the popular vote.
He beat Kerry, and it kind of legitimized himself.
I think that Trump is going to risk...
Further illegitimizing himself by subjecting himself to, you know, not only a primary, which is gonna happen, which is the death knell for an incumbent.
I think, ask Gerald Ford, ask Jimmy Carter how that went for them when they were primaried because they were so unpopular.
And then he goes in and there's gonna be, if the Democrats are smart, they put someone up that's really good.
And I also think there's gonna be an independent candidate that's gonna screw everything up as well.
joe rogan
I think he has a very, very high likelihood of running again.
And I think he absolutely could win again.
colin moriarty
Do you think he'll win the primary?
Because I'm not even sure he would get through the primary.
joe rogan
I don't know.
I mean, it all depends on what happens over the next three years.
Obviously, I'm in no way, shape, or form a political expert.
But I think that...
We got a lot of dummies in this country, and all we need is momentum.
All you need is one event, some big thing to happen where Donald Trump solves a problem.
Do you remember how happy people were with George Bush directly after September 11th?
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
Right after September 11th, and he made a bunch of speeches and said a bunch of things, and his approval rating shot up.
colin moriarty
Like 90% or something like that.
joe rogan
It shot up.
And people were very excited and they were like this is this is the reason why we need sort of a good old boy president Because when push comes to shove they know how to get the men in uniform Behind it and just take care of this problem with military might and make America great again and all that kind of horseshit If something like that happens with Trump and Trump you remember how he had that one speech Jamie can you give me another one of these things, please?
We had that one speech Where everybody's like, oh, that was presidential.
He had one presidential speech where he spoke in front of Congress and everyone was clapping and he said a bunch of things.
All you need, all he needs is one event, something that happens, where he steps up and manages it with a reasonable vocabulary.
And does things that people approve of, especially some sort of a catastrophic situation or any sort of a military situation.
If we have to deal with North Korea, if we have to deal with something where there's like real legitimate concerns.
Thanks, buddy.
If that happens and he manages it, people get scared and they don't want change.
I think if that happens, it's entirely likely.
If we have to deal with some sort of a catastrophe, some sort of a tragedy, some sort of an attack or an event, and Donald Trump manages it well, it's entirely likely that he could be president.
colin moriarty
Sure, there could be a moment like that.
I wouldn't throw anything past him specifically because I and many other people were so wrong about his ability to win to begin with.
I kept saying he's going to do better and get more votes than people thought, but I didn't think he had a prayer of winning.
But there are certain things you can look at where it's like, well, it's about 50,000 votes along three states that he even won at all.
The vote was suppressed pretty...
And I'm not saying it was actively suppressed.
People just weren't enthusiastic about this, so people weren't out there to vote.
Now people see the consequences of not voting.
I don't think that...
I don't think that it's like the...
I guess what I'm saying is that the prognostication that this is the end of the world, right?
Like that Donald Trump being president...
We've had terrible presidents.
You know, like we've had really bad presidents.
joe rogan
But he's the worst.
unidentified
Yeah, in some sense, he's...
colin moriarty
I'll say that he's the most incompetent.
We've had some presidents that were just in shitty situations that they couldn't manage.
joe rogan
Long time ago.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I would say Hoover's probably the last one, and James Buchanan obviously was an awful president.
In 1857, the state started to secede when he was president, and he couldn't do anything about it.
So we've had really dire, serious situations under presidents that were in over their heads.
joe rogan
But there also is no footage of them.
There's no film.
You have to really go back and read history to understand the consequences of their actions.
We're seeing all this play out in real time.
We're seeing the poverty of his vocabulary, the way he communicates in the press, the way he pats himself on the back.
Like the other day, he said he has one of the great memories of all time.
He says things that are just preposterous.
colin moriarty
The one about him being in Ivy League.
I went to an Ivy League school.
I'm intelligent.
I'm like, I'm one of the guys that says, I don't think he's dumb at all.
I don't think he's stupid.
I just think he's in over his head.
joe rogan
Did you ever see him in the 90s talk about running for president?
You ever see that video footage?
I think it was on Charlie Rose or something like that.
colin moriarty
Starting in 88, he started talking about it.
Yeah, all the way through.
joe rogan
And when you go back and listen to that, like, first of all, did something happen to his brain?
Like, why is he so clunky now?
Like, why are his sentences so poorly formed, and why is his speech pattern so shitty now?
I mean, that's what you've got to wonder about, like, old dudes.
They get to a certain age, especially guys like him who don't exercise, don't eat well.
colin moriarty
Right.
He has a KFC bucket and all that.
joe rogan
Yeah, he's got a big, fat gut, and he's just...
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Like, how well are his neurons firing, you know?
colin moriarty
Yeah, he's...
joe rogan
See if you can find that video of him back from...
You got it?
Like, watch this.
Listen to this.
donald j trump
I think that if you had to do it again, I'm not sure you could.
I went through a period of two years that was truly tough.
unidentified
Tough in what way?
Well, you know, you have parents, and you have people that adore you, and you have people that, for 15 years, nothing went wrong.
And then all of a sudden, the world seems to be coming to an end.
I mean, it just seems to be coming.
And it's just, it was just sort of an incredible experience for me.
joe rogan
This is him, he humbled, talking about going bankrupt.
I'd like to hear him talk about, like, running for president, though.
donald j trump
My father wouldn't have been in a position to bail me out, but he certainly helped.
unidentified
And, you know, morally and...
jamie vernon
It's the whole interview.
It took an hour long.
joe rogan
Oh, okay.
unidentified
My mother was great.
I have a sister who's a fellow judge.
jamie vernon
You mean to try to find that particular thing?
unidentified
She's very, very...
jamie vernon
You mean to find that particular thing?
joe rogan
No, no, no.
Just listen to his speech pattern here.
unidentified
I never knew as to loyalty whether or not she'd be there or wouldn't be there.
And she was there in spades.
Other people were there.
But, you know, the incredible thing is you can't really tell.
donald j trump
You can't really tell who's going to be there, who's not.
I would have bet my life on certain people.
I would have said, politically speaking, that somebody that you know, Andrew Stein, would have been there.
unidentified
And he wasn't.
He wasn't there for what?
donald j trump
He wasn't there in terms of, for fifteen years I supported Andrew Stein, supported him.
unidentified
I never asked him for a thing.
donald j trump
When I needed a vote on Riverside South, until the very end, when everybody else was on board, Andrew was not there.
unidentified
And I was really surprised at that.
Now, ultimately, he was there.
donald j trump
But it shouldn't have been so difficult.
unidentified
It really shouldn't have been so difficult.
But here comes one of the things they say about you is that there ticks within you a vindictiveness about that.
And you're not going to forget that.
And part of the Trump style is that at some point you're going to try to get Stein back.
Well, I don't think I'm going to try and get Stein back.
I'm just disappointed.
donald j trump
I'm disappointed in other people.
unidentified
And I'm not disappointed in some.
joe rogan
I mean, there have been people there.
My point is, he seems like a much more reasonable person.
colin moriarty
Yeah, cogent.
It could be age.
Maybe he's a little senile.
I have no idea.
joe rogan
Also, I think, and this is something I've been really battling, not battling, but bouncing around in my head a lot lately, is that I think this...
This hate of him, the constant insults, the attacks on him, the constant...
I mean, he blocks people on Twitter all the time, and now people are suing him to say that he can't block them on Twitter anymore.
colin moriarty
People are being very petulant about that.
joe rogan
But all of this, like the Saturday Night Live satires of him, all the shit that they do is...
Ramping up his mania and it's it's actually bad for all of us You know in that you don't get someone to change by going hey fucking change You know you're a piece of shit like that doesn't make people change it makes people aware that you hate them and depending entirely upon their personality whether they're reflective or introspective how they how they react to that he seems to react to it by By,
like, doubling down and by getting more aggressively defensive and more self-aggrandizing and more self-congratulatory.
You know, he seems to get more Trump.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
You know, it's almost like he's the Hulk.
Like, you ever see when they shoot the Hulk, he gets bigger?
unidentified
Right, right.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's...
You know, he definitely...
He doesn't deal with...
He's in a situation where someone needs to lower their rifles, right?
And after he was elected, I thought for sure that smart people in his transition team, and he's not surrounded by dumb people.
He's surrounded by inexperienced political operatives, but he's not surrounded by dumb people.
That someone at some point would have said, like, we can now get down to the act of governing.
And I'm of the mind that if he just started acting more normal...
If he stopped tweeting so much, if he just spoke in a more normal way, did normal things, people would have forgotten a lot of what happened during the campaign.
And he would have been in much better shape to get legislative goals through and stuff like that.
But he can't help himself.
And that's why I think this destructive...
I just don't know that the American people are going to want this again.
I think that he has a base of 30-35% that will be there.
joe rogan
But isn't that what Obama had at his lowest?
Approval ratings?
colin moriarty
Yeah, in his second term, I think he was down to that.
joe rogan
I think his lowest approval ratings were higher than Trump's lowest, but he's in the neighborhood.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I'm not even saying...
Because approval ratings are fickle.
You can do all sorts of shit to manipulate those numbers.
And Trump would, interestingly and rightfully, maybe say, look at the economy.
It's doing great.
Look at the stock market.
It's doing great.
joe rogan
But the economy was on...
It's sort of deceptive, right?
Because the economy was on an upward trend.
colin moriarty
Right, and again, it's all waiting.
joe rogan
And he sort of caught that wave.
But there is a real belief by business people that Donald Trump is going to make things easier for them because of his nature.
The fuck, Jamie?
What happened?
jamie vernon
Newsweek had an autoplay.
joe rogan
Those motherfuckers with their ads.
We have this sense that That business people think that he's going to alleviate restrictions, he's going to make things easier, he's going to open up doors, and he's going to do things that some people think are very unpopular.
Like, one of the things he's done is he made it so you can bring back lion trophies now, again, from Africa.
So if people want to go to Africa and shoot lions, you can bring them over.
colin moriarty
Which is bizarre.
It doesn't make any...
joe rogan
No other president.
What is this?
Trump's approval rating is bad.
Day 197 of his presidency, 530 pegged it at just 37%.
No other president in history of moderate polling had an approval rate so dismal on day 197. According to 538's tracker, former President Gerald Ford came close to matching Trump but could have boasted an approval rate of nearly 2.5% points higher.
colin moriarty
It wouldn't be super surprising to have Obama fall into that high 30s or low 40s in his second term because that's when they don't care anymore.
Yeah.
And that's when they really start to take initiative and do certain things.
jamie vernon
I saw his approval.
I didn't see it below like 47%.
joe rogan
Obama?
jamie vernon
Yeah.
unidentified
Hmm.
colin moriarty
He must have been lower.
Oh, is this...
jamie vernon
Disproval is a little different than approval, so...
joe rogan
Oh, disapproval?
colin moriarty
That's true.
joe rogan
Oh, there's a disapproval rating?
jamie vernon
Yeah.
Do you disapprove or do you approve?
colin moriarty
Well, yeah, because you can be neutral on that.
joe rogan
So if there's a disapproval rating of 50%, that doesn't mean there's an approval rating of 50%.
unidentified
Correct.
jamie vernon
Right.
unidentified
Okay.
colin moriarty
I think, you know, it's funny because I think with...
There are certain things that I think people don't understand that are unpopular that do need to be done specifically for businesses.
I own a business.
I've owned two of them.
You run your own business with all of your ventures as well.
And it's very hard.
And a lot of people look at...
Just from an administrative paperwork standpoint, taxes, all those kinds of things, it's awful.
And I think a lot of people point at business big and small and they look at them as these ways you can get blood out of a stone and extract as much money out of them as possible and all these kinds of things.
And a lot of people are not sympathetic to it because, no offense, they have no idea what they're talking about.
And I've been watching The West Wing again, which I love.
I love that show.
joe rogan
Never watched it.
colin moriarty
Oh, it's fantastic.
You'd probably love it.
You should check it out.
It's just a great show.
And one of the things they say in there is that the major difference...
People call us a democracy, but we're not a democracy.
We're a republic.
And the idea is that you vote for people that go make decisions on your behalf.
And sometimes those decisions are going to be unpopular, but some people do know better than others.
And so there are certain things...
I don't necessarily judge a move based only on popularity, because what does society at large know about running a business?
Nothing.
So you have to ask people that understand what it is to run a business and how you can make that easier.
So you can't judge things based on that only.
My major concern with him, though, is that he's so unpopular, even in his own party, and even specifically with the House, that because they are constantly up for re-election, that they haven't had one legislative win in the entire time he's been president.
joe rogan
Doesn't he not have all the positions fully staffed as well?
colin moriarty
Yeah, there are things, and that's not uncommon either.
Sometimes things go for years without being staffed or whatever.
joe rogan
That seems so crazy.
How the fuck do you take office without all the pieces in place?
colin moriarty
Who knows?
The conspiracy theories run deep on this one, but I don't think he thought he was going to win.
And I'm not even sure he wanted to win.
And I don't think that they had a real transition.
I read Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened, which is an interesting book.
joe rogan
You read the whole thing?
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
You okay?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I'm okay.
joe rogan
Jesus, what happened?
colin moriarty
Well, because I'd be interested...
Were you high?
Part of the time, yeah.
Laying in the bathtub, reading.
It seems like you'd have to be high to read.
But I wanted a perspective, right?
I think it's just interesting.
What was it?
Well, there's a lot of things in there, but one of the things she was talking about was that they were fully prepared for their transition, which is not a surprise.
She was actually talking about in October, she started taking regular meetings, because they assumed that she was going to win, about how she was going to staff things and the decisions they were going to make in the first 100 days.
And I think you just have something that's over-the-top bravado, right?
And on the other end, ironically for someone with so much bravado, you have someone that just was totally not prepared to win.
Because I don't think anyone inside, except for maybe Kellyanne Conway, was telling...
joe rogan
Well, do you think that's the case, or do you think he was just concentrating entirely on winning and then figure it out once he gets in there?
colin moriarty
Maybe, but you should...
I mean, it could be anything.
The definitive book on this has not been written yet, unfortunately.
And actually, Mark Halpern was writing that book, and now he's finished with that.
joe rogan
You realize that he has such a limited understanding of what even his powers are and what even like What was the guy he spoke to?
We said I had a conversation with the president of the US Virgin Islands like hey, you're the president of the US Virgin Islands Yeah, he makes he makes some stupid.
colin moriarty
He makes some stupid mistakes.
He he doesn't I mean, I remember Puerto Rico Yeah, that was there's some moments like that where I'm like you're fun.
You're funny But unfortunately, the situation...
joe rogan
Doesn't call for being funny all the time.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's not humorous.
It's not a humorous situation.
And I feel like specifically with...
In terms of governance, I think he just...
Like, I remember the debates where he didn't know what the nuclear triad was, which is like...
The fuck do you not know what the nuclear triad is?
Where he's speaking around issues that are somewhat basic, that someone that's running for president should know.
And when you multiply that by not being a candidate, but by being the man in the office and then being inundated by the realities of the office, he was just ill-prepared for it.
And part of the reason he won is because he was an outsider.
And part of being an outsider is alienating everyone around you that is an insider.
So he has no one, very few people that are willing to work for him that are capable.
Which is why I think that, you know, there's this idea, I don't know if you've read about it, there's this idea that there's basically a soft coup going on in the American government right now.
Have you talked about, have you heard about this at all?
That General Mattis, who's Secretary of Defense, and then General Kelly, who's the Chief of Staff, are basically running things.
And that...
And it's kind of a scary idea because military coups are, even if they're soft, they're not constitutional, but that people take kind of solace in this because they're like, well, people that are men of honor are kind of making sure nothing crazy happens.
joe rogan
Right.
colin moriarty
And I'm like, but again, this is such a waste of time.
joe rogan
But is that a soft coup or is that just he has given over the reins to the military for the first time ever?
Because most of the time the president is in charge and the military has to come to the president for direction and for guidance and for approval.
Whereas Donald Trump has kind of said, look, you people know what to do better than anybody.
Do what you got to do.
colin moriarty
It could be that.
I mean, yeah, it could be voluntary, but it's still its own sort of coup because that's not what you're supposed to do.
joe rogan
It's not what you're supposed to do.
colin moriarty
Now, I trust the military.
joe rogan
Don't you trust them better than him, though?
colin moriarty
Yes, absolutely.
Well, that's what I was going to say was that typically a military coup in history is a super negative connotation.
Egyptians, Libyans, whatever the case might be, it always turns out bad.
But we have an honor-driven military, I think, in the United States, above all others, that will take care of things and hand it over to If necessary.
But the interesting thing that people have been writing and talking about is what happens if he wants something crazy done and they just don't do it?
We've never had a situation like that.
What's going on on the Korean Peninsula, for instance?
Very dangerous situation.
Very dangerous situation.
What if he goes to escalate and they're like, we're not doing that?
That's actually the first time that we know in recorded history where...
Where the military is not responding to the civilian government.
So it opens all these hypothetical interesting things to think about, but things that haven't come to pass yet.
joe rogan
Yeah, I mean, he hasn't requested anything completely bizarre yet, but he's said some completely bizarre shit.
I mean, he's essentially violated...
The United Nations Code, or how you communicate with other governments, right?
I mean, he's threatened them.
What was it?
Terrible, horrible things?
Fire and fury?
colin moriarty
Yeah, fire and fury, which is funny.
What a lot of people didn't glean out of that was that he was clearly watching Harry Truman videos.
Harry Truman said pretty much the same thing before he dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan.
and there's videos of it where he was like a reign of fury the likes of which the world has never seen or something like that he says and i'm like well you've been someone's been chirping truman quotes in your ear because this sounds awfully familiar to me um but he's been watching tv but uh to me it's like we it's especially precarious because yes a nuclear-armed north korea is not ideal but there's no if you read any foreign policy papers or any any anything out of think tanks there's no good solution out of this
And for him to be so flippant about it, when mutually assured destruction is the one policy that's kept everyone safe for a very long time.
The idea that we will destroy you if you do anything to us and first strike capabilities and all that kind of stuff.
The fact that he's playing with that balance has major geopolitical consequences in Asia, which in turn can bring the Russians in.
Obviously, the Chinese, not a good situation.
joe rogan
It's got a very comic book sensibility to it that, you know, you go and drop some nukes on North Korea and everything's solved.
Problem solved!
No, you just started a gigantic chain of events that could lead to a bomb blowing off in a major American city or more.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I mean, at the very least, you're talking about, even if you disabled North Korea's nuclear capabilities, we don't really understand how their ICBMs work.
I was reading something today where they actually had a major collapse at their nuclear site of 200 people dead, like tunnels collapse and stuff like that.
Like they're actually blowing up so many bombs that they're actually weakening their own structures and stuff like that.
You have this situation where, at the very least, even if you disabled them and they couldn't retaliate, Seoul is 35 miles away from the border.
You're going to talk about tens of thousands of people probably dead in a few minutes.
And then you're getting us involved.
Then there's a refugee crisis on the northwest border of North Korea that's funneling into China.
China gets involved.
Russia also shares borders and has interests in Asia, in East Asia.
This isn't something that a man who doesn't understand things needs to be trifling with.
I would love nothing more than to have North Korea taken down a peg.
joe rogan
How do you think he communicates with the military?
First of all, how does he have the time to do everything he's doing?
Because he doesn't.
I'll answer it before I even ask him.
No human has the time to be the president.
It's one of the problems of being president.
You were talking about earlier how you have businesses and you run things and how complicated and difficult it is.
And those things are nothing!
colin moriarty
No, nothing compared to being the president.
joe rogan
Nothing!
And he's got to deal with the economic situation.
He's got to deal with the military.
He's got to deal with immigration.
He's trying to build a fucking wall to Mexico.
He's trying to bring jobs back to America.
And he's playing golf 150 times.
Oh, he's played golf 72 times.
Cost to taxpayer.
$76,236,013.
At least.
What is this website?
unidentified
I didn't know.
jamie vernon
Trumpgolfcount.com.
joe rogan
Oh, God.
72 visits to golf clubs since inauguration, which confirmed golfing on at least 33 visits.
Goddamn.
See our frequently asked questions for answers to frequently asked questions and our complete data table for the list of Trump's outings.
It's hilarious.
colin moriarty
No, I mean, it's the most complicated and all-encompassing jobs imaginable.
joe rogan
Yeah, and he's out golfing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, you've got to have rest and relaxation.
I don't begrudge you that, but I wonder, again, because of the alienation that went on through the primaries and into the campaign, when you have people that are simply not willing to work for you that are very capable, what do you do?
I don't know.
I think that's why nothing's happening.
That's why when they had the healthcare thing kind of crop up early in the administration, they weren't prepared.
They still have not really released all the details of their tax plan.
It's like, nothing is really...
I'm telling you, Joe, that's the major thing that's a bummer to me is it's just a wasted time.
It's just wasted time.
We do not have time for this.
joe rogan
And again, I don't think anybody has enough time to actually be the president, but I wonder what conversations he's having with the military and how those decisions get made.
I don't really understand the process enough.
To know, like, say, if North Korea does something stupid, what are the decisions?
And who brings those decisions to the president?
Who brings the suggestions?
Who lays out the possibilities?
I mean, how does that go?
colin moriarty
I think, from what I understand, the way it works is that there's a situation room in the White House.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor meet there to discuss things.
The president comes in when they're ready to present him with things.
They present him, based on the branch that's dealing with it, what's happening, and then they give him You know, what are reasonable responses or, you know, wait and see kind of things or whatever.
And I think that's how it goes down.
And then he tells, you know, the Joint Chiefs to to act on his on his, you know, direction.
joe rogan
That's a great name for room to the situation room.
With Wolf Blitzer, Situation Room.
How has he called his own show, The Situation Room?
colin moriarty
I don't know.
He's getting away with it, though.
joe rogan
That's fucking rude.
colin moriarty
I know.
He's getting away with it.
Wolf Blitzer's an interesting character.
A lot of these guys on cable news are interesting people to me, especially now.
joe rogan
How so?
colin moriarty
Well, because there's always been partisans.
We were talking about William F. Buckley and Corbett Al before, right?
But there's no pretenses now.
About anything.
Like, no matter who you're watching, I don't...
I couldn't even tell you, like, a person who doesn't have an open ideological bent anymore and has some sort of...
It's kind of like a means to an end for them to get their information out there the way they want to.
There's no, like, Walter Cronkites anymore.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
No completely objective journalists.
colin moriarty
Yeah, which I would love.
I would love that.
But I don't really...
That's why I don't really trust anything the media says anymore.
It's not only Trump.
It's just, like, there's always an agenda.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's no one who's delivering it all with a straight face.
Everyone has an editorial bent to it.
colin moriarty
And that's fine, but I wish that...
The only places you can really go to get straight up news now are the wires.
It's kind of like a little lonely, you know?
Go to AP and Reuters and then that's pretty much it.
joe rogan
What about the internet?
Is anybody doing a good job of disseminating objective...
I don't think so.
colin moriarty
Not anyone that I've seen.
joe rogan
Seems like there's an opening for that, if someone could figure it out.
colin moriarty
There is, but the thing is that the sad thing is I don't know if there's even an audience for it.
I think that people like you and I that might want a more objective stance to make up your own...
I remember I used to watch BBC World News on PBS in college because it was like this very outsider kind of like...
You know, a 40,000 foot view of what was going on.
And I feel like we don't even really have that anymore.
And I feel like the reason that those people don't exist is because there's no money there.
joe rogan
Yeah.
It seems like the big money's in preaching to the choir.
colin moriarty
Absolutely.
And that's why what I was trying to do is like...
I take a lot of honor that I get fired on from every angle, which means that I'm doing something right.
It's not like only the left-wing people that don't like me.
It's not only the right-wing people that don't like me.
It's like everybody has some problem with me, which makes me feel like maybe I'm somewhere in the middle.
But I don't know if I have an agenda.
I guess I do.
But I have a point of view.
joe rogan
Fox News, to me, is the most fascinating about the news networks.
Because CNN seems almost like...
They're weighted down by rules and restrictions in a certain sense.
Whereas Fox News, you got Hannity, who's just fucking completely unhinged.
You had Bill O'Reilly.
He's trying to fuck everything that moves.
I mean, didn't that guy have like nine different sexual harassment lawsuits that he settled?
One of them for $35 million?
colin moriarty
Yeah, $35 million.
joe rogan
What the fuck did he do?
colin moriarty
I can't imagine how much money he really has from his books and stuff if he can even fork that much money over.
Because that was him, right?
That wasn't even Fox.
I don't even think that was Fox.
joe rogan
Bill O'Reilly files $5 million defamation suit over harassment claims.
He's trying to get some of it back.
colin moriarty
Go back to that.
joe rogan
Let me read the text underneath it, please.
Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Friday filed a defamation suit against former New Jersey state legislator Michael Panter following a Facebook post on Tuesday in which Panter detailed alleged sexual harassment by O'Reilly against an unnamed ex-partner of Panter's.
Huh.
Wow.
Panter's claims, based on the conversations with his ex and incidents he said he witnessed were chilling, Panter says that his then-girlfriend's, in quotes, career was largely dependent on staying on O'Reilly's good graces, and that O'Reilly repeatedly asked her out and made sexually charged late-night phone calls to her.
That's his move.
unidentified
He calls you up and says fucked up shitty on the phone.
joe rogan
What a freak.
colin moriarty
It's crazy, man.
joe rogan
He must have been doing...
This is sort of the Harvey Weinstein sort of thing.
He must have been doing that forever.
That was his thing.
He would call chicks up.
unidentified
Yeah, what are you wearing?
joe rogan
I was about to call Reagan.
Got him on speed dial.
Come over and watch me jerk off.
colin moriarty
It's totally bizarre.
The power, money, it gives you some sort of presumed veil against things.
joe rogan
It does, but it's also the Fox News thing.
It's so sexually charged.
I have a whole bit about the way the men and the women dress on Fox News.
Because those women dress like they're going out on a hot date.
And they're talking about, like, important issues.
colin moriarty
Right, yeah, their little dresses and all.
And they always seem to be sitting at the edges of the table, you know?
joe rogan
So you could see their legs.
colin moriarty
Right, yeah.
It was always very transparent to me.
My thought was always like, well, these are old conservative men that are watching this, and you grab them any way you can, I guess.
joe rogan
Chaka-chaka, boing-boing!
colin moriarty
Newt Gingrich is feeling it.
joe rogan
Just holding on to his 70-year-old wood hood.
unidentified
Oh, I wish I had enough power to stick it at any of these gals.
joe rogan
Do you think Newt Gingrich gets some hot tail?
He's got a young, fairly young wife.
Wasn't he a girl above in the underwear?
colin moriarty
A known philanderer?
joe rogan
Yeah, a little of this, a little of that.
Sexiest ladies of Fox News, as that is.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Well, it's interesting, too, that somebody needed to talk to Megyn Kelly.
Like, what the fuck was she thinking, jumping ship and going over to NBC? Yeah, she's, like, dying over there, apparently.
Well, of course she's dying.
You're the ice queen.
You're supposed to be shouting down the liberals, mocking everybody and telling everybody that Santa Claus is white.
That's your thing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, she's apparently, like, I keep reading about her, about how people won't book on her show.
joe rogan
No.
Well, she's...
colin moriarty
And she's bringing everyone down.
joe rogan
She's not stupid, but she's pressured.
And when people are under pressure, they falter.
Especially if people are not used to that kind of pressure.
She's used to people liking her.
I always thought she was brilliant on Fox.
The way she would communicate with people, she's very sharp.
But she just seems so uncomfortable and under pressure and nervous and awkward.
Did you see the thing with Will and Grace?
colin moriarty
Oh, yeah, where they had that exchange with Laura Messinger.
joe rogan
She asked a guy if he became gay because he liked the character that was like, what?
colin moriarty
Oh, that's right.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
colin moriarty
She had some other awkward...
There was a couple early on where there was pretty awkward exchanges between her.
joe rogan
I heard Jane Fonda.
colin moriarty
Jane Fonda, that's right.
That's what it was.
joe rogan
She asked Jane Fonda about getting plastic surgery, and Jane Fonda just said, are we really going to go there?
And then she went and said, I like to talk about this movie.
This is what I like about this movie.
She basically just steamrolled her.
colin moriarty
I feel, we were talking about typecasting before, right, about how people, and I feel like she's just, she can't get away from what she was.
joe rogan
Well, it's also like, that's a clunky, stupid thing to do, to try to talk about plastic surgery when someone's promoting a movie.
unidentified
Sure.
joe rogan
She's just trying to get soundbites.
She's like, it's calculated effort to get soundbites of the people who put up YouTube clips.
colin moriarty
Do you give a lot of interviews or ever give interviews like a...
Have you ever had bad experiences with that?
joe rogan
Like talking to people?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I'm saying you being the...
joe rogan
I don't do those anymore, man.
I don't do them.
I feel like that's an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.
I feel like you're doing yourself a massive disservice to talk for five minutes to someone that you don't even know.
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
I mean, if I want to talk to someone, I want to talk to them for hours.
And let's do it live so that you can't edit it.
colin moriarty
Right, right.
joe rogan
Fuck it!
We'll do it live!
You know, I think that if you really want to communicate ideas, that's not the way to do it.
It's the way to jump off little sound clips and sound bites and then, we'll be right back!
Then you go to commercial and it's like, what are we living in the 50s?
This is a stupid way to do it.
You guys need to read.
Revamp your whole system.
This system sucks.
This is a shitty way to communicate with people.
Why are we even talking like this?
You're sitting over there, I'm sitting over here, and we're looking at each other sideways?
How come you're at a desk and I'm on a couch?
Why do you have a desk?
What are you writing books?
What the fuck are you doing over there in that desk?
unidentified
The whole thing is just, it's Jack Parr.
joe rogan
You know, it's Johnny Carson.
It's just like this old-school, dumb way of conducting these interviews.
You have a band here!
Well, let's let the band play us out!
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's a capital S show.
joe rogan
It's fucking dumb.
I don't like it.
I think the guy who does it the best is Jimmy Kimmel.
I think Jimmy Fallon does it pretty good, too.
He makes it fun.
He's got a lot of fun things that he does on it.
Seth Meyers does a good job of making it fun, as well.
And he has some really good points on his show.
But I just think, ultimately, I can barely express myself in five minutes, seven minutes.
You know, and especially in front of a crowd.
You're sitting there in front of a crowd and you want to talk about important things or funny things.
Joey, I understand that you don't like the zoo.
Tell us why you don't like the zoo.
Well, it's a fucking animal prison and I think it's fucked up.
unidentified
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
joe rogan
You can't even say all those words, you know?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I feel like there's a...
I think that some people have a short attention span and they don't want long things or whatever, but I think that...
A show like yours, I think, fills a niche.
It's not even a niche, it's a huge show, but fills this need that I think is underrated, that people like long-form things, that they like depth, that they have lots of time to burn when they're driving around or at work and they're bored or they're just cooking food or whatever it is they're doing.
I used to have that argument in my old company where we...
I was like, you guys are just wrong.
Make this show three or four or five minutes long.
I'm like, no, it'll be as long as I want it to be for me to get my word out.
And I was right about that.
And I feel like, so I like the long form stuff.
I like for things to be as long as they need to be.
And to flesh things out and to not corner people, to let them express them and explain themselves and stuff like that.
I think it's good.
That's why your show is so popular.
I'm surprised that people aren't more and more aping the idea of going three, four, five hours if necessary with people.
joe rogan
Some people don't want to do it.
I'm a uniquely blabbermouth type person.
I can just keep talking about things forever.
And also, I'm not connected to something else where I have to worry about what I say.
You know, like I can't get fired if I'm the boss.
I'm my own boss.
You know, so a lot of people don't, they're not in that position, you know, and they really worry about putting their foot in their mouth, which I've definitely done a ton of times, and that that being the end of their career instead of being what it is, just a mistake.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
You know, and I think for people to really get a sense of who you truly are, you know, You get a sense of who someone is over three hours.
You really get a sense of who someone is over three hours, over 1,200 podcasts, whatever the fuck we've done.
What are we on?
1,020 or something like that?
unidentified
1,032.
joe rogan
1,032.
unidentified
Plus fight companions.
joe rogan
A lot of fucking shows.
People get a sense of who you are, you know?
It's just different.
It's a different kind of thing.
You know, a television show is a more polished, edited...
It might be better for your attention span.
I mean, if this was on TV, just regular TV, maybe it would be a bomb.
You know, maybe it, like, uniquely fits into the weirdness that is the internet.
And that's why it's been successful.
And also, I think it's probably been successful because there was never any attempt at it being successful.
It was never like something where I sat out and go, if I just do this a certain way, it will be financially viable, it will be received well, and I'll use this as a vehicle to further my other endeavors.
There's never any thought process like that.
It's like, hey, it'd be cool to just talk to people.
Hey, you think I can get Anthony Bourdain to come over my house?
Yeah, look at him.
He's sitting right there.
Let's give him some beers.
Let's have talks.
And that's where it all came from.
It just came organically.
colin moriarty
Yeah, that's the beauty of it.
I think that shines through with your show and some other people.
You can tell when someone's putting it on.
I mean, I can.
I'm sure you can.
joe rogan
You like to hope you can.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
I'm sure.
Well, Bill Cosby.
colin moriarty
Yeah, he probably would have fooled both of us.
joe rogan
Maybe.
Maybe not, though.
colin moriarty
Yeah, who knows?
joe rogan
Maybe not.
He never had...
That's part of the thing.
He might have fooled both of us if he was on The Tonight Show.
But if he was sitting across the room for us for three hours just talking shit, maybe not.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
You know, you never really got to see that.
colin moriarty
Right.
You must have, I mean, over doing a thousand episodes, many hundreds of guests, you must learn a lot, like you were saying, a lot about a person, but does your opinion of the person change when you have some interesting interviews with bigger people, for instance, that come on your show, better or worse, like after kind of poking and prodding them for a little while?
joe rogan
Yeah, but I think you date a chunk, right, whenever you're talking to people.
And you see some sort of patterns...
And deflection and communication and openness and some people really impress you with their honesty or with their thoughtfulness or objectivity.
Objectivity is a rare one, man.
That's a particularly rare thing where so many people are so married to their ideas and I try very hard not to be.
I'm certainly not perfect at it, but I try very hard To not be married to my ideas.
And if I'm wrong, I really go out of my way to say, wow, I was definitely wrong about that.
Like, I thought that was this, but it's not.
It's that.
And this is how we know.
And here's the proof now.
And here's the studies that have come out.
Wow, fucking that threw me for a loop.
You have to do that.
colin moriarty
Yeah, absolutely.
joe rogan
But there are so many people that do not want to ever admit fault.
And because of that...
Because you don't want to admit fault, because you don't want to admit that you might have communicated an error or you might have been misled by certain information that you thought was true but turned out to not be, it ruins the way people appreciate your words.
Because you could tell me that you believe, you know, something happened in the past because you read it, because you learned it in school, because it's always been taught that way, but then new information comes out that clearly refutes that.
You've got to come in here and say, well, now I know different.
Boy, I thought this.
Because I know that you really did think that.
I know you were really being honest.
And now I know you're being even more honest because you're saying now we know differently.
That now we know differently is fucking giant, man.
It's huge.
And you see it resisted.
You see it resisted in academia.
You see it because people have been teaching certain things for a certain amount of time and then new evidence comes to light and they don't want to consider it.
You see it resisted at all.
Like I had a conversation once on the radio with this lady who called up and she was telling me that she was a paleontologist.
Who studies monkeys?
The biologist?
Would it be a biologist?
colin moriarty
Yeah, like some sort of...
joe rogan
Some sort of a biologist.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
And she said, you know, I have my PhD because I was talking about the Bondo ape, which is a very particularly large species in the Congo.
And I was going over all these different things about this ape, and it was on the Opie and Anthony show, and this lady called up.
And she goes, you are just talking about pseudoscience and cryptozoology.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And I go, no, I'm reciting an article that was in National Geographic.
This is all new information.
And I go, you know, she said she was a professor.
And I go, when did you study?
When did you learn?
I go, how much time do you spend paying attention to the newest, latest information?
Because clearly you're wrong.
They have skulls.
They have videos of these animals.
They have photographs of them.
They have camera trap photos.
They have DNA on them.
They have a crest in their head like a gorilla.
When I get obsessed with things, I have an ability to rattle off information.
I start to rattle off information on this lady.
And she never says, no, you're wrong.
I mean, she never says, you know, well, I guess I was wrong.
I'm going on old information.
She starts laughing and mocking me.
I go, are you better?
Then these scientists that are in National Geographic that are putting out these photographs, that are spending years in the Congo.
Karl Amann, the Swiss wildlife photographer, that spent years in the Congo photographing these creatures.
They nest on the ground like gorillas.
They're a particularly large species of chimpanzee.
So I started rattling off information.
And the lady's like, you know, like, you don't know what you're talking about.
I go, you're not fucking saying anything!
You're not saying anything because you know you don't have the latest information.
That kind of shit drives me nuts.
When someone doesn't really know, but pretends they know, and is presented with information, and isn't willing to accept it.
You've got to be willing to accept information.
This lady called up to try to puff out her chest.
She has the information.
She's a professor.
She knows.
I'm not saying...
I'm not in the woods studying.
I'm reading all these fucking biologists who are...
This is amazing new discovery.
I mean, there's a fucking giant chimp that lives in the Congo.
There's photos of this thing walking around on two legs.
It's six feet tall.
I mean, this is a huge chimpanzee.
It's far bigger than any other chimps.
They have two different types of chimps.
They have a tree...
They call them tree beaters and...
They ground something.
I forget the term they use.
But these larger chimps literally sleep on the ground.
They don't give a fuck.
Nothing comes near them.
What do they call them?
Leopard eaters?
But they have video of them, one of them, literally eating a leopard.
And they don't know if it killed it.
They don't know if it found it dead.
But, like, these motherfuckers can kill leopards.
But if you think about how strong a regular chimpanzee is, you know, a regular 150-pound chimpanzee is supposed to be as strong as a 500-pound man.
Lion killers, that's what they call them.
These are huge chimpanzees.
See if you can pull up a photograph of some of these fuckers.
But they have these two guys shot at an airport.
At a small airport in the Congo.
And there's these two guys standing holding this carcass.
Right hand side, third down.
Far right hand side, third down.
Far right hand side, third down.
Third down.
That's it.
Bam.
That's it.
Go large on that.
Look at the size of that fucking thing.
That's a chimp.
It looks like a goddamn gorilla.
colin moriarty
Yeah, he's a big boy.
joe rogan
Look at the size of his balls!
I mean, that is a fucking huge chimpanzee.
That's one that they found that they'd shot.
They took photographs of him.
But if you go above that photo, Jamie, go above that photo to the upper right-hand corner, That's one that they caught walking around on a camera chap.
They're just much, much bigger than regular chimpanzees.
colin moriarty
That's wild.
joe rogan
No pun intended.
But the point was, it was an incidence of someone just deciding that they had all the information and that they wanted to Just call bullshit on something that they really weren't up to date on it yet.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think pride gets in the way a lot of that.
I try my hardest, and it actually kind of gets to me when my audience or people that watch my stuff say like, oh, Colin didn't admit he was wrong about this, this, or this.
I'm like, I don't know that you're paying very close attention, because I actually take a lot of pride in being wrong about things sometimes and telling you that I'm wrong so you know, so you're not going out into the world...
With misinformation, whether it was about video games back in the day, whether it's about politics or history.
When you're rattling things off, like you were saying, sometimes you get things mixed up and confused.
joe rogan
Oh, for sure.
I fuck things up.
I don't even realize it while I'm saying it that I'm saying the wrong word or someone's name wrong.
colin moriarty
It happens.
And I think it's essential to do those kinds of things.
presents an academic stagnance when you don't want to do that.
I certainly, even though I consider myself, again, a moderate conservative, I certainly have been playing around intentionally with really challenging ideas lately to try to, you know, specifically with the universal basic income and Medicare for all, where I'm like, I'm fundamentally, principally probably against these things.
But if you can show me how they work, if I can read some data, we can get some test cases.
I know they're testing UBI in places like Sweden.
Then I want to see what it's all about, because this is so uncomfortable.
This is so out of whack for me that I want to know how it works.
joe rogan
I'm with you on that one, by the way.
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
And I believe they're testing it in some place in the United States.
colin moriarty
Are they?
joe rogan
Yeah.
I think somewhere in the United States is going to test universal basic income.
See if I can find that.
But this is fairly recent, like over the last few days.
colin moriarty
It's just fascinating to kind of get out of your...
I've been dealing with this idea of rights versus privileges and how we call a lot of things rights, but they're not rights.
There's no right to medical care.
There's no right to that.
But the idea of...
I hate when people are like, it's a right to...
joe rogan
Basic human right.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's not.
You have a right to...
You're inalienable rights of life and liberty and stuff like that.
Those are rights.
joe rogan
You don't have a right to force someone to do something for you.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
joe rogan
Which is essentially what you're forcing a doctor to work on you if you don't have the money to pay for it.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
joe rogan
But I think as a culture, we should probably put that in terms of like, what are we going to do for our citizens?
Well, we're definitely going to provide fire protection.
We're definitely going to provide police.
We should definitely provide medical too.
I just think it should be, there should be a safety net to keep people healthy if they don't have money.
colin moriarty
Sure.
I think that it's a totally valid thing to say.
Oh, what do we have here?
joe rogan
Where is this?
They've randomly selected 3,000 individuals across two U.S. states to participate in the study.
1,000 receive $1,000 per month for up to five years, and 2,000 will receive $50 per month.
Hmm.
What is that?
colin moriarty
It's the control for the experiment.
joe rogan
To serve as a control group for comparison.
With the $50 per month, it's not going to help shit.
But the $1,000 per month, that gets interesting because then you're not giving anybody enough where they can fuck off because $250 is really not even going to pay for rent and food.
But it'll help you, give you a little bit of a boost.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it could be good for the economy.
I think there's a lot of worry about inflation, because you're basically freeing up a ton of money that would otherwise be in banks or not circulating around the market, so it's going to make your dollar less valuable.
I think there's a lot of complicated things economically that people have to deal with with that.
But I feel like, you know, with what you were talking about with healthcare, I think it's an interesting point, because we talk too much about rights.
And we have these rights.
You have a right to not be searched without a warrant.
You have a right to due process.
Free speech.
Those are rights, right?
That are written in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution, but...
But, privileges.
A 21st century, modern, progressive, wealthy society, what can your privileges of being part of that society be?
And I like when people talk about it in that sense and be like, medical care is the privilege of being part of a society like this.
I'm like, okay, so let's frame the arguments differently.
Because I think it's a more compelling way to say, we've achieved so much.
We're not in the dark ages anymore.
We're not even in the 18th or 19th centuries anymore.
Now we have roads, we have police and fire, we have all these things.
What's to stop us from having the privilege Of having this as well.
And I think just frame it that way and you'll have way more people on board.
joe rogan
And it's a very compelling argument for why we shouldn't spend $800 billion on the military.
Like maybe if you had some of that money freed up, you could take care of a lot of things at home.
colin moriarty
You could.
Medicare for all is expensive.
It's extremely expensive.
You could actually, as far as I understand, you could...
I think tax...
I'm sorry, you could remove military spending completely and pay for only like a fourth of it.
So it's a really radically...
Really?
Yeah, I think...
joe rogan
So $800 billion a year would only pay for a fourth?
colin moriarty
I think it's $600 billion a year military spending right now, but I think it's...
Jamie, do you mind...
I hate to ask you to do something, but do you mind looking to see how much the Medicare for All thing costs?
I think it's something like $1.5 trillion a year or something like that, or $2 trillion a year or something like that.
joe rogan
Oh, Holy shit.
colin moriarty
And so, like, these are things...
But you have to have rational conversations.
That's why I have no respect for Bernie Sanders, because you can just throw things out there.
unidentified
Bernie Sanders!
colin moriarty
Yeah, $1.4 trillion.
joe rogan
Sanders' last Medicare-for-all plan cost nearly $1.4 trillion.
colin moriarty
So I'm a little off.
So it's a little less than half.
So you could...
joe rogan
He's a character.
colin moriarty
Well, it's easy to go around promising things to people.
Like, the funny thing is, like, free college, right?
Like, free...
Nothing's free.
But free college, it's like, well...
Your 401k is going to get taxed for that.
If you're a middle class family and you're making Wall Street transactions, broker transactions with your 401k, you're going to pay that tax.
It's easy to say Medicare for all by raising taxes, but everyone's taxes go up 2.2%.
joe rogan
I think there's also a real concern with kids fucking off with that education.
If an education costs...
What is a per year cost of a very good university today?
Not even like an Ivy League university.
colin moriarty
Probably $20,000- $25,000 a year.
joe rogan
That's a lot of money.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
So if you're just giving that to some kid and they half ass their education and they don't get kicked out of school and it's free, like, well, hmm.
Maybe that's not the best use of money.
But if someone can demonstrate a real desire to learn, you know, and a real desire to achieve and to discipline themselves into following through with the courses and doing the work.
You maybe then, maybe give someone a semester for free and prove by their performance in that semester, you know, by their effort, their performance, how much work they've done, that, you know, okay, you...
It's very likely that you can get through four years of this university and get out with a bachelor's degree, maybe even move on and continue your education or become a really valuable member of our society and benefit our economy and benefit our civilization because of what you're learning here.
So making an investment in you.
I mean, I think that's a valuable thing for our country, right?
Have more educated, less ignorant people.
Have less losers, right?
colin moriarty
Yeah, I think, to me, and I say this, I guess, from a place of some privilege, because I went to college.
I went to a great college.
And I'm proud of that.
But at the same time, I feel like it's too...
Why don't we emphasize trade schools anymore?
Why don't we emphasize that you don't have to go to college?
You can be an entrepreneur.
You can start a business.
I feel like it's often too...
It's too much focused on, like, an academic...
I'm like, that's good for some people, but I would argue that there's probably too many people going to college, especially for things that we were talking about earlier on that don't really...
Do anything for you.
If you have a chemistry degree or a physics degree or a math degree, you're going to be great.
If you have a history degree, like I did, you have to be very lucky, like I was, or you might have some hard times, you know?
joe rogan
Or you find something else to do.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
joe rogan
You'll benefit just from the discipline that you learned while you were in school.
colin moriarty
Right, exactly.
It's proof that you can accomplish something.
But I wish that there was more drive to say, like, we need plumbers.
We need electricians.
We need...
And you know what?
Two things.
Some of the stupidest people I've ever met I went to college.
Some of the smartest people I ever met didn't go to college.
And some of the people that I know that are doing the best economically are in trades.
And they don't have a degree.
They're electricians.
They build houses.
They do those kinds of things.
joe rogan
Auto repair.
colin moriarty
Exactly.
These are essential.
And these things aren't going away, either.
Right.
I look at someone like a mechanic.
I look at a plumber or something like that.
I'm like, man, that's really impressive because I don't know what the hell you're doing.
But you know how to wire this house.
You know how to lay the plumbing.
You know how to do all these kinds of things.
That's a vital service.
Sure, carpenters.
Exactly.
So I feel like there's almost this like, got to go to college, got to go to college.
I'm like, no, you don't.
And the other thing that I think is really relevant is that I paid for my college, and I'm paying loans out the ass for my college degree still.
And I have to now pay for someone else's college?
And I did what I had to do, and I don't really feel like it's fair that I had to owe $60,000 or $70,000 in loans that I've paid back.
And then I have to pay extra taxes for someone else to go to college as well.
It kind of frustrates me, and specifically because the only reason college is so expensive is because the government is involved in the loans.
Right.
unidentified
Subsidizing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, they subsidize the loans.
Anyone can get a loan.
If you were in a college and you knew that anyone that came to you could just go get a Stafford loan, right?
You would jack prices up in two seconds.
Of course you would.
Make the loans more rare and even raise interest rates on those loans and watch what happens to the cost of college.
It will plummet because they can't justify the cost anymore.
The government made this problem.
Now the government's trying to...
And this is what I'm talking about.
The government's now trying to solve a problem.
It totally manufactured on its own.
joe rogan
When did that all begin?
colin moriarty
I don't know for sure.
I think in the 70s it began, and then I think it really got out of control in the 90s.
Because I went to Northeastern, and my mom actually worked there, so I didn't even pay tuition.
I only paid room and board.
Tuition at Northeastern is like $45,000 or something a year.
Now, I know people that went to college that had to pay out, have those loans strapped to them.
joe rogan
You have two kids in college?
Holy shit.
colin moriarty
It's incredible.
joe rogan
Holy shit.
colin moriarty
And dude, I don't know what I was...
When you're 17 or 18 years old, I remember my dad.
My dad's a New York City firefighter, a very serious guy.
And I remember him sitting down and being like, I'm taking these loans out for you.
I'm co-signing on them.
And him kind of looking me in the eye and being like, you will not default on these loans.
He's like, I know you don't understand anything.
joe rogan
Ferocious.
colin moriarty
Yeah, because you're 17 or 18 years old, being like, I don't know what the fuck is going on.
I'm going to college.
I'm going to do whatever I'm going to do.
joe rogan
Look at that.
unidentified
Woo-wee!
colin moriarty
Yeah, so it really got out of control.
What is that, 80s?
Yeah, so like in the mid, early to mid-80s is when it got out of control.
joe rogan
Yeah, mid-80s, the spike.
And then look at it now.
Well, it goes to 2009, but in 2009, it's just through the fuck.
colin moriarty
It's just, so the government, the government did this and now they're trying to solve, now Bernie Sanders is running around trying to solve the problem.
joe rogan
It's like, Bernie Sanders!
colin moriarty
And speaking of age and stuff, like the Democrats, he's absolutely going to try to run again.
Is he?
I think so.
joe rogan
But he's so old.
He'll be 80. His neck, his head is leaning forward like someone's got to teach him to stand up straight.
colin moriarty
Yeah, he's just got that bookish kind of, you know...
joe rogan
But he's got this thing going on where his head is like slowly making its way down to his sternum.
Yeah, he's collapsing like in a coin.
Like, Bernie, this is really bad for you.
That's the thing.
That's my look.
He would have won, I think, if he went up against Trump.
I think he would have done much better than Hillary.
colin moriarty
It's a brand of populism that would have been...
So, I think something like 10% of people that voted for him in the primary voted for Trump.
So, that's a compelling number that suggests what you say is right.
But my whole...
The X factor in this is the oppo research.
And you got a little bit of taste of...
The what research?
Oppo opposition research that they never used on Bernie Sanders because they didn't have to.
And the Republicans have all sorts of stuff on him.
And it's not even...
He went, you know, like little things that resonate with older people, right?
So, like, they went...
Him and Jane Sanders went on their honeymoon to the Soviet Union.
It's weird.
That's really weird, right?
joe rogan
Fucking Russians.
colin moriarty
People that are 20 or 25 don't care about that.
People that are 40, 45, 50 care a lot about that, right?
joe rogan
Because he went to a communist country to explore the great benefits of the fucking red flag.
colin moriarty
Yeah, of which there are none.
Just like Lee Harvey Oswald.
joe rogan
Well, they have cool domes in their building.
Very unique buildings in Moscow.
colin moriarty
Good architecture.
I keep asking people, though, because you have these crazy people on Twitter and stuff that have the hammer and sickle and their names and stuff like that.
And I'm like, can anyone tell me one thing that the Soviet Union gave us, like gave the world?
Just one thing that anyone cares about.
That's Russian.
That's not even Soviet, right?
Tetris came from the Soviet Union.
joe rogan
The game?
colin moriarty
Yeah.
That might be the most important thing.
joe rogan
Good goddamn game.
colin moriarty
Communism is so morally and intellectually bankrupt.
It's incredible to me that anyone would even argue it.
It's just as morally and intellectually bankrupt as the far right.
joe rogan
But it seems to be the thing that people go to when they look at some sort of a viable alternative without looking into it deeply.
Marxism, you know?
And that this idea of socialism is going to be a good thing because everybody's going to contribute and capitalism is what's wrong with the world.
And whenever people, they always like to hit up this fucking thing of, you know, the economic inequality, economic inequality, inequality of income, inequality of money.
What people don't seem to get is that when you have true freedom, you're absolutely gonna have inequality.
Because if you have the true freedom to do whatever you want, some people aren't going to do much.
And some people are gonna do a lot.
There's gonna be some Jeff Bezos-type characters out there who just wanna fucking go gangbusters and own half the country.
And then there's going to be people that would really rather just work a little bit and then go play fucking disc golf and smoke pot and listen to records and hang out with their friends and they'd be very happy if they just made an income that was sustainable.
There's a fucking host of different personalities.
There's some people that really enjoy doing art.
And they like to go down to a fucking farmers market and set up shop and sell their artwork.
And that's fine for them.
That's what they want to do.
That's how they want to live their life.
And maybe their dad was a fucking doctor who died at 55 of a heart attack because he was working too hard.
Or, you know, who knows what it is that causes someone to have the ambition or the desires that they have.
But when you have true freedom to pursue whatever you want, that literally breeds inequality.
Because there are going to be people that decide to do more.
And there's going to be people, and whether it's an egalitarian version of this, whether these people are altruistic in their approach, whether they donate an incredible amount to charity, or whether or not they keep it all to themselves.
If you have real freedom, like, that doesn't say you have to donate X amount of your money to this and Y amount of your money to that, if you just give people freedom, You're gonna have inequality.
Because people are in-equal in their efforts.
They're in-equal in their desires.
They're in-equal in their focus.
They're in-equal in their discipline.
And they're in-equal in their capabilities.
colin moriarty
Yep.
That's the major thing.
joe rogan
That's a big one, man.
colin moriarty
That people don't want to talk about anymore.
Yes.
It's kind of a rough thing to say, but I've had conversations with people where I'm like, when did people stop saying like, wow, that kid's just dumb.
It's like, you know what I mean?
I remember even growing up in the 80s and early 90s where it's like, there's some dumb kid.
There's nothing wrong with them.
They don't have a disability or anything like that, but it's just like, this This kid doesn't really have the capability of going.
He's going to do something else with his life.
Now it's like everyone can do anything at any given time.
And I'm like, no, you work.
You have some innate quality to you.
But you work, you study, you toil, you do those kinds of things.
Not everything is delivered on a platter to everyone.
And I almost resent that.
You know, because some people really work very hard, and some people don't work hard at all.
And then, like you're saying, the outcome should be equal?
I don't think so.
joe rogan
There's some people that are tall, there's some people that are short, and there's some people that have brains that are made out of dog shit.
And there's not much you can do about that.
There is absolutely Absolutely a broad spectrum of human intelligence, of awareness.
And how much of that is the environment they grew up in?
How much of that is their education?
How much of that is their raw genetics?
Who knows?
And there's environmental factors that fuck people up, right?
There's real arguments that living around toxic waste is very damaging to your IQ. There's a lot going on with human beings.
And it's not fair.
But here, when you play cards, if you get four aces and I get one, two, and a bunch of fucking random numbers, that's not fair either.
But I have to figure out a way to win with this hand.
Or get by.
And if it truly is a competition and you've got a shitty hand...
You've got to do your best.
Do your best with the hand you've got.
If you are a dwarf and you want to be a basketball player, you're going to have to let that go.
You can't do that.
You know what else you can't do?
You can't fly.
You can't breathe underwater.
You can't see through walls.
You can't run a million miles an hour.
Those are the things you can't do.
So, let's figure out what you can do, and find something that you can be passionate about.
colin moriarty
Right, and I think capitalism, as an economic system, is the only one that accommodates all this, right?
Exactly.
It's such a trite thing, but it's like, it's the least imperfect of all the systems, right?
joe rogan
Right.
colin moriarty
There's nothing positive about something like communism to me.
Whenever I see that hammer and sickle, and I don't mean this to be me, whenever I see that hammer and sickle on this person's name, I'm like, I'm not really dealing with someone with a full deck, I don't think.
I don't know how you can possibly read Marx and do all these kinds of things, jump deep into history, look at the Soviet Union, look at North Korea, look at Cuba, look at all the failure that's happened all around you.
Then look at the fact that everyone is benefiting from capitalism in some way.
joe rogan
They're just doing it wrong.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's not real communism.
It's not real socialism.
That's always the answer.
joe rogan
I mean, real capitalism, the worst aspects of capitalism are the diminishing appreciation for the human being and the fact that money is a power over everything and that people just acquire material goods and all those things are true.
They're true at the farthest end of the spectrum of, you know, good to bad, right?
The furthest end of, like, what is the damage that capitalism can do?
Well, you can devalue human life to the point where money becomes more powerful than anything and people can consolidate this money and build these oligarchical family structures and, you know, there's a lot of issues that can happen, but that can happen with anything.
Where people have leverage and power over other people.
It doesn't necessarily mean they have to happen that way.
There's got to be some evidence and some instances of altruistic capitalism, like Bill Gates, for instance.
That guy does a lot of really good things.
And the Bill Gates Foundation that he has started up, I mean, goddamn, he's donated a shitload of money to schools.
colin moriarty
Half of his money will go to charity.
joe rogan
I mean, that's a good example.
Another good example is Warren Buffet.
Warren Buffet is, I believe, donating almost all of his money to charities.
I mean, and these are guys that are wildly successful.
I mean, you're talking billions and billions of dollars in wealth attained entirely through capitalism.
So you have your bad examples, but you also have good examples.
I mean, what Bill Gates has done, I mean, really incredibly impressive when you stop and think about it.
colin moriarty
Yeah, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whatever they call it, is super influential.
I look at it in the sense of, yes, there are negatives about all of these things, like you were saying, but I also feel like, are you eating today in half the world?
Because that's because of capitalism.
Capitalism, the industrial revolution that got everything going in the last 150 years is all because of the necessity of the chase of the dollar or the pound or whatever the case might be.
The chase for money is not in itself a negative thing.
It's what you're saying, what you do with it.
And the ramifications of what we get because of money is an amazing thing.
I often talk about whether it's good or bad.
When Apple One, the Apple One computer, was being made in the mid-70s, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs used to go to this thing called Homebrew Computer Club in Berkeley.
And people would go there.
There was this real spirit in the 70s amongst tinkerers that they would share their stuff with each other.
That they would be like, this is how I did this.
This is how I programmed this very rudimentary punch card machine.
And they were going with Apple One to this thing.
And Wozniak had really wanted to give it away.
To be like, this revolutionary computer that we are sitting on here, we're just going to give you the tools to make your own.
And Steve Jobs was the one that said like...
We have something here that can become more ubiquitous if we make it into a product that we sell, as opposed to something that stays within the confines of the Berkeley Homebrew Computer Club, where 15 people will enjoy it.
We can market this bad boy.
And so, it takes sometimes a person...
joe rogan
Look at the number.
It costs.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
joe rogan
$666.66.
colin moriarty
4K of RAM. Of RAM, rather.
That's amazing.
joe rogan
4K. That's amazing.
colin moriarty
You know what I'm saying?
Like, it takes sometimes for things to proliferate, sometimes for things to do good.
There has to be a profit motive, and sometimes you need a Steve Jobs who didn't have the intellect that Wozniak had on a programming perspective, but saw products for what they were, went into Xerox, saw the GUI, saw the mouse, saw the Ethernet cable, knew what to do with these different things.
That's the beauty of capitalism to me, you know?
joe rogan
Yeah.
There's an incentive for him to pursue these goals.
colin moriarty
Exactly, and we all benefit.
Look at our smartphones.
Ten years ago, we had no idea what these things were going to become.
And look at the economy they opened up.
joe rogan
Ten years ago, you were psyched if your phone flipped open.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it was all good.
You could do that thing with the wrist where you'd open without you...
joe rogan
Yeah, Kirk out.
Slap it shut.
jamie vernon
Do you remember the Matrix phone when it came out?
It shot open and no one could ever get one.
I feel like a lot of people wanted one.
Do you remember that at all?
colin moriarty
No.
joe rogan
What's the Matrix phone?
jamie vernon
When the Matrix came out, the first one, they all had a cell phone that was made by Sony.
And the bottom of it shot out instead of flipping open.
You hit a little button and you check it out.
unidentified
Come on.
jamie vernon
Really?
It never was released for consumer use.
unidentified
Oh!
joe rogan
Why not?
colin moriarty
Capitalism wasn't ready.
Late capitalism wasn't ready for that phone.
unidentified
Bernie Sanders will have released it for free from everybody.
joe rogan
I think he's a unique character because he's an anti-establishment character.
colin moriarty
He's interesting.
Well, that goes back to the point you were making.
That's why he came up is because you said he could maybe beat Trump.
I think the shared populist message could be a reason why that happened.
jamie vernon
A version of it might have finally came out, I guess.
joe rogan
How does it work?
I'm confused.
jamie vernon
This shot out and it just covered up the thing instead of flipping open.
joe rogan
Oh, like you press a button and it slides down?
jamie vernon
Yeah, I mean that's when they were running and like Trinity was running.
She would just do it.
And they were like, we need an operator.
joe rogan
Oh, that's hilarious.
Isn't it crazy that we thought that was the shit?
colin moriarty
It's not even that long ago.
That's what's so funny about it, you know?
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, I had a black bear.
I thought it was a wizard.
colin moriarty
Those things were super technological, too.
joe rogan
I had a Blackberry.
Is that it?
It slides open.
Oh, it has a screen on the bottom.
Isn't that funny?
They never thought you would ever be able to type on a screen.
Like, that's just ridiculous.
Get the fuck out of here with that.
You need buttons, man.
I had one of them bitches.
I had one of those with the keyboard.
I loved that thing.
It's great.
I didn't send emails.
I never did, but you could.
colin moriarty
But you could.
You could if you wanted to.
joe rogan
I send half my emails on my phone now.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
I love thinking about the iPhone and just the smartphone revolution, and then all of the businesses that are totally based on that thing.
Now, Uber, Lyft, all of these companies that only exist because that product existed, only because someone saw the capital investment necessary to proliferate this thing.
And I think it's amazing.
joe rogan
It is.
It is.
colin moriarty
Communism doesn't give you that.
joe rogan
Exactly.
colin moriarty
Communism gives you famine.
joe rogan
Capitalism is responsible for this intense competition in these smartphones now where there are legitimate contenders to Apple now.
Like Apple just released the iPhone X or the X, whatever the fuck they're going to call it.
But you have legitimate contenders in the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel 2 XL. You have like these three phones that a lot of people compare favorably to the iPhone.
They're going back and forth with this and it's like it's a neck and neck race.
Now it's a matter of whether or not the integration with the operating system is important to you because a lot of people enjoy using a Mac and an Apple computer and you know they want to have the phone.
Seamlessly integrate with the computer, and then a lot of other people use Windows, and they prefer to use an Android phone because of that.
So you're dealing with massive competition now, which is fueling Apple to innovate, fueling Samsung to innovate.
I mean, right now it's just phones, and who knows whether or not it's really important to us, but that could lead to bigger and better things.
No one saw the smartphone coming, and that's really revolutionized the way we exchange information, the way we gather information.
Google's new Pixel XL. You squeeze the side and ask it a question.
Like, that's how quick the assistant comes in.
colin moriarty
Yeah, that's wild.
joe rogan
So you squeeze the side and you say, tell me who Colin Moriarty is.
Bam!
It shows you instantaneously.
colin moriarty
He's a sexist.
joe rogan
He's a pig.
He made a joke and he should die.
What is that, Jamie?
jamie vernon
Foldable screens that are headed out probably in the next couple years.
That's the next thing.
joe rogan
What the fuck, man?
colin moriarty
It's crazy.
This is a beautiful thing.
joe rogan
It's gonna be like that slap wrist thing where you're talking about with the fucking tape measures.
colin moriarty
And as you know, Korean company LG is doing this for altruistic reasons.
They're not doing it to make any money.
They don't see any money in the foldable screen.
joe rogan
They're doing it to support Bernie Sanders!
Yeah, he's gonna support his neck with one of those phones.
Just shove it under and keep his head above.
When I get a phone call, I look down.
I think we're in an incredible time when it comes to this competition, though.
And you're right.
That only exists if people have profit.
colin moriarty
Yep.
joe rogan
It only exists if people have some sort of...
There's competition, and there's an incentive, and there's a battle going on between these.
And I think that's the forefront of it, because with laptops, there's competition, but boy, it's kind of stagnant.
It's like, okay, well, how much processing power do you need if you're not rendering video games, if you're not making things, if you're not making movies?
If you're a person that's making CGI or filmed or something like that, then it makes sense.
You could probably use the faster processors and all the power and stuff like that, but...
Really, the competition is in video games and in video and apps and phones and the images these phones can create.
And all of them now have the ability to do portrait mode where they blur the background and bring you into the foreground.
And then the Google Pixel XL has some incredible AI for altering images and making them look cooler and really amazing stuff, man.
colin moriarty
Yeah, it's awesome.
And I feel like a lot of the cool stuff that we even dwell on from back in the day, everything had a profit motive.
We were talking about the Age of Exploration.
They didn't want to come here.
The Europeans were just looking for a way to shorten their trade route to Asia.
They didn't care about what was in between.
It was actually super inconvenient that we were here.
There was always money at the end of the tunnel for good things.
That's why the space race is so unique, because it had no...
Everything from Mercury and Gemini through the Apollo missions had no real reason to exist other than that we wanted to best the communists.
There was no financial reason to do it, which is why it's so unique.
And I would even argue to this day, there's technology that NASA's created that we find in our everyday lives, but it's one of those unique places where that's not really true.
joe rogan
But there's also an argument, right, that subsistence living probably makes healthier, happier people, and that all this chasing money and chasing innovation and chasing, you know, technological superiority just leaves us with this hollow feeling, or it doesn't do you any good.
Like, you're seeing a lot of these people that...
There was this guy that we were talking about recently, the guy who, he coded Facebook likes And now your computer is trying to hijack your brain, I think is the name of the article.
Your smartphone is trying to hijack your brain.
And what he was essentially saying is that your brain is not designed to deal with the reward system that's involved in checking likes on Facebook or Instagram or stuff like that.
And that these things, this constant...
Yesterday, we were talking about this.
We were talking about...
I had Jamie Kilstein on.
He was talking about checking his phone, constantly checking Twitter on his phone, arguing back and forth with people, seeing who's supporting him and who's not, and that it becomes this massive, addictive thing, and how unhealthy that is.
There's a lot of things about this technological world that we live in that maybe aren't sustainable or aren't compatible with being a biological human being.
colin moriarty
I agree.
I hate to mention it again, but there's an episode of Black Mirror where there's this one person in this cast where they refuse to get this augment that everyone else has.
I won't ruin it for you anymore.
And it makes them this unique thing because they refuse to partake in the new normal of interconnectivity.
And it's...
Again, it goes back to the beauty of the system that there is choice.
Like you were saying, the bohemian painter that just wants to make $15,000 a year selling some art.
joe rogan
That's the beauty of choice.
colin moriarty
Yeah, exactly.
And as long as the system gives you that choice to succeed or fail and no one else is responsible for you, like in base ways, and I'm not saying we're not responsible to bring you to the hospital if you're sick.
I'm not saying any of that.
But we're not responsible to make decisions for you.
We're not responsible to line your pockets with money you did not earn.
Then that's fine with me.
joe rogan
That's also one of the awful things about communism that people very rarely discuss.
You're assigned a job.
You're assigned what you do if you live in Cuba.
I mean, there's very little wiggle room as to what you can and can't do if you were living in the communist Soviet Union.
There's very little, you don't have a whole lot of decision-making capabilities.
And that's just not how human beings operate at their best.
We operate at our best when we're free.
You are uniquely you.
You're not me.
I'm not you.
I don't know how your brain works.
And there's people out there like, I don't know, here's an example, Beck, that are so weird and so different from me.
But he's capable of creating weird fucking funky music because he's so different, because he's so interesting.
colin moriarty
Right.
joe rogan
Like his form of, Marilyn Manson, his form of creativity just doesn't work.
My brain doesn't make that.
You know, like a tomato tree doesn't make mangoes, you know?
And the freedom to express yourself in your own unique way and the freedom to live your life with your own unique direction That's just one of the greatest things about being an American, is that we have more freedom in that regard than anyone that's ever lived.
Because we have more access to things, we have more access to information, and we have more freedom to choose, to express yourself, to speak out.
And anything that gets in the way from that, including the limiting free speech on campuses, is fucking dangerous in that regard.
Because you think you're helping.
But you're limiting freedom.
You're limiting freedom because it doesn't jive with what's going on in your head.
And that's just not the way it's supposed to work.
colin moriarty
Yeah, absolutely.
I agree with you.
I find what's happening on college campuses, I find the stymieing of free speech, this idea, this very primitive notion of almost thought policing as being super unsavory because you have to...
A society needs to be dedicated to protecting its bad elements, as long as those elements aren't illegal.
Right.
So like you don't want to protect the person who is murdering someone, but you might want to protect someone who you want to protect the rights of someone who is espousing really racist shit because you you that's why these protections exist is for their freedom to express those bad ideas.
As long as they don't play out, you don't have to agree with them.
You and I don't agree with those ideas, but you give them oxygen and power when you try to limit them.
I guarantee you that because of the the throwing around of the pejorative Nazism and or as a pejorative Nazism and fascism and kind of giving these people screen time Richard Spencer and all these guys.
I guarantee you that they've gained in her adherence not lost because.
They're gaining more and more oxygen because you're giving it to them.
By trying to stymie them, you're bringing attention to them.
I've said over and over again with Milo Yiannopoulos, going to Berkeley earlier this year and then not being allowed to speak and everyone losing their minds, you just gained Milo Yiannopoulos a bunch of people that had no idea who he was.
The thing that would have hurt him the most is going to a room that was empty.
No one was there to speak, but he has the right to go to that room and speak nonetheless.
joe rogan
Well, what's interesting is what's kind of like silenced him.
Is his own words.
I mean, his own, what fucked him up is his own conversations.
His ability to freely speak about pedophilia.
colin moriarty
Right.
It goes back to the give the person enough rope and they'll do the job for you.
You know, like you don't have to, you know, you don't have to do it.
You don't have to force a square peg into a round hole.
joe rogan
I think in a lot of ways, Milo is a provocateur.
And what he's trying to do is trying to push buttons and get attention and doing all those things.
But in literally doing that and just ranting and raving, he tripped over his own dick.
You know, the publishing company removes the book.
I mean, he leaves Breitbart.
I mean, this is essentially where all this came from.
colin moriarty
I think what people kind of conflate is there's room and necessity for consequences for your actions.
No one's saying that there's no consequences for your actions.
joe rogan
But these consequences seem to be taking place in the marketplace of free ideas.
unidentified
Right.
colin moriarty
I feel like people have tried to force consequences on me, for instance.
They tried to force a consequence that didn't work out the way that they wanted it to, but to try to make a point, to try to illustrate a point.
But you have to let these things, like you said, the marketplace will correct For anything that is untoward, Kevin Spacey is going to be hurting for the rest of his life compared to where he was just five days ago.
Because of the consequences of his actions, right?
So I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences.
I don't think a lot of people are saying that at all.
But I feel like it's thought policing, like there are preemptive consequences.
joe rogan
But these consequences should be like, hey, we don't want to do business with you because you and your values don't align with how we look at the world.
But you're free to do your own thing.
colin moriarty
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's why I'm saying we're giving unsavory far right and far left elements way too much oxygen and way too much power in our society.
They don't represent anyone.
When you walk through your life, how many people do you know that ascribe to Marxism?
How many people do you know that ascribe to white nationalism?
I've never met, in my own 33 years on this planet, And interacting with a ton of different people.
I'm not sure I've ever actually met a white nationalist.
So why are we acting like this is a massive component of American polity when it's not?
joe rogan
It's probably a few thousand people.
colin moriarty
It's ridiculous.
joe rogan
350 million that live here.
colin moriarty
Just lob off the ends of the spectrum, the far ends of the spectrum.
Just lob them off.
They're not welcome in polite society.
They can do whatever they want.
Everyone else, I bet, has 90% agreement on most issues.
joe rogan
And I think that this intense, heated screaming and yelling at each other that you see on Berkeley and Antifa showing up with fucking ninja masks on, throwing Molotov cocktails, this ain't helping anybody.
This just ramps up the other side.
colin moriarty
Antifa, these guys are losers, right?
How dare you?
joe rogan
They're supported by the mayor of Berkeley.
colin moriarty
Yeah.
I'm sure a lot of weird things are supported by the mayor of Berkeley.
But, yeah, it doesn't help any situations.
They look like Cobra officers from G.I. Joe running around, doing their thing, destroying private property.
It doesn't make any sense why you would do this to your own society, to your own community.
It's angst.
It is angst.
It's like, what point are you trying to prove?
And you're seeing this replicate itself a lot.
I know it's an unpopular thing to say, but you can draw a lot of this back to Ferguson, even.
Ferguson seemed...
In some ways, Ferguson is a travesty of justice, right?
But it seemed way worse than it actually was once everything came out.
Once Loretta Lynch, not a very well-known racist, refused to try the person at the federal level, local and state authorities, grand juries refused to try Darren Wilson for what he did to the gentleman there or whatever, and you get the full story, and yet you still have this society or this community in ruins based on some hands up, don't shoot.
Never happened.
joe rogan
Right, it never happened.
colin moriarty
But this is the rallying cry, this destroyed city is the rallying cry.
joe rogan
The problem is it sounds good to people that want to believe a certain narrative.
And so they repeat it, and then everybody's repeating it, and then you have people doing it on television, and then everybody decides that this is the thing that we're going to say over and over again, regardless of whether or not it's true.
colin moriarty
The real travesty of that, too, is that you can literally throw a dart at a map of the United States and find a civil rights infraction that's truly deplorable, that probably deserves the oxygen and the attention, and could be a legitimate rallying cry.
But it goes back to the point you were making before, too.
People don't want to admit they're wrong.
No one wants to admit that a year out from Ferguson, we're much further than that, but even six months out from when it happened, people look back, read through the grand jury stuff, the federal government's take on it, all that kind of stuff, and realize, huh.
Maybe this wasn't the best idea to act like this when we didn't have all the information.
joe rogan
Don't you think that the information is flowing freer and people have more of an understanding than ever before?
I think people are really doubling down on the far right and the far left and the extremism is sort of elevated in that regard.
But I think Overall, I think, you know, people don't like the word centrist, but the people in the center, the people that are more reasonable, are more informed, and there's more communication going on than ever before.
And in that sense, I'm very hopeful.
colin moriarty
I am hopeful, too.
I like how centrism has become this dirty, unspoken word.
But that's only, again, from the far fringes that feel like they're losing, because they are losing.
If your idea is predicated on race...
If your idea of supremacy or superiority is a predicate on that, you're a moron, right?
And no one has to talk to you about that.
You don't deserve to be part of the rational adult conversation.
joe rogan
It's a foolish notion.
colin moriarty
If your idea on the left is that you have to stymie free speech, that free speech is this antiquated thing.
I tweeted out a video last week of a kid at the University of Utah saying that the— I tweeted it.
Oh, thank you.
unidentified
I don't think it's a valid document.
colin moriarty
There's nothing valid about the Bill of Rights, you moron.
If your idea is Marxism and this weird economic engineering and all this kind of stuff, you are also a moron.
And I'm not afraid to tell you that.
You have to be academically limited to look at either of those ideas on those spectrums and think that you have a good idea.
Usually, a collection of ideas, not from the fringes, but a collection of left, right, liberal, conservative, usually is probably what's right.
No one in the mainstream of American politics or mainstream of Western politics has a monopoly on right or a monopoly on good ideas.
There are great things that Republicans believe, and there are great things that Democrats believe.
There are terrible ideas on both sides.
The only thing I see on the extremes is just a complete...
Dearth of good ideas.
It's just all bad ideas.
It's just all terrible ideas.
And so why are we even paying attention to them?
They can scream and shout all they want, but we're giving them too much time on the news.
We're giving them too much time.
Even I do it.
Even I fall prey to that.
joe rogan
Because it's fun.
Watch that little fucker on TV saying that I don't think the Bill of Rights is a valid document.
colin moriarty
Yeah, that's very radical, man.
The reason, by the way, you're allowed to speak at all, right?
I know he probably also thinks this is a fascist country.
I know that when the Nazis took over in early 1933, the first thing they did was let everyone say whatever they want.
So you can see the mirror images of the United States and fascist Germany.
I mean, it's everywhere if you listen to them.
joe rogan
He's 18. You know, he's a little kid.
colin moriarty
Yeah, he has a lot of learning to do.
joe rogan
Maybe he'll look back one day at that video and go, oh my god, I was fucking stupid.
colin moriarty
Yeah, I'm sure he does.
He looks so pompous and proud of himself.
joe rogan
Thank God nobody put a fucking camera on me when I was 18 and asked me how the world should work.
colin moriarty
Absolutely.
We've all said and done stupid things.
And he's too young to maybe realize what's happening.
But colleges are breeding this sort of thing.
And I know that people say it's overdrawn and it's not as bad as it is.
And I'm like, I think it is.
Specifically because when I was in college, I only graduated 10 years ago in May.
This wasn't happening.
joe rogan
Yeah, what you're seeing in Evergreen State, Brett Weinstein.
colin moriarty
I never saw anything like this in my life.
I never heard about this in other colleges in Boston.
A pretty liberal place.
So this is a newer phenomenon, and it's destructive.
It's corrosive.
joe rogan
And it's very damaging to people's confidence in universities.
And, you know, like, look at what's happening to Evergreen State financially.
That college is getting devastated.
People are voting to defund it, and they have real issues with enrollment now.
There was a real interesting article that I just read yesterday where the president was talking about what an impact it's taken on his health and his mental health, and he's unable to think correctly now, and he's unable to...
The guy is literally shell-shocked.
I mean, his decision-making skills are very foggy, he's saying.
colin moriarty
This is what happens when you let petulant, ignorant children think that they run an establishment of higher learning.
When I entered college, I went under the knowledge that I didn't know anything.
joe rogan
How do you turn this around, though?
colin moriarty
I don't know.
I really feel like it comes down...
In a lot of ways, it comes down to the people that pay the bills, in my opinion.
The parents need to not be happy with the product they're getting when they find that their child is now an Antifa member when he comes back for Thanksgiving or for Christmas.
You have to ask yourself, what is happening now?
You know, like, this isn't...
Because people point back to the 60s when there was a very righteous wave of anti-authoritarianism that was born in this very specific climate, you know, and...
I think it's going to take a long time to fix.
I think a lot of it is because of a...
It's a very incestuous...
Academia is very incestuous.
You hire people that agree with you.
You hire people that believe in you.
That's why you find...
What is it?
19 out of 20 people that teach at universities are liberal?
joe rogan
Yeah.
colin moriarty
I'm sorry.
That's insane.
That's not right.
Even if I were a liberal or a Democrat, I'd look at that and be like, that's not...
That's like its own form of social engineering that we've co-opted.
Not only have we co-opted a lot of media, which is why the media hates YouTube and they hate all these things because they can't control that, but now we've co-opted academia.
Your ability to get a degree is going to have to go through these people that you might be diametrically opposed to or at the very least lying to you about a lot of things.
Just 10 years ago, that was certainly not my experience.
So I fear for, you know, which is another reason why I'm like, I don't know if college is the best solution for a lot of even able-minded people.
You know, like where it's like, I don't know what you get from going there now.
If you study a discipline, you probably get out okay.
Again, we were talking about chemistry, physics, math, whatever.
But if you're studying humanity, I don't know, man.
I don't know like what you're getting out of that now.
And I studied the humanity.
I had a lot of liberal professors.
I had a lot of conservative professors.
I wonder what that mix is like now.
And you get different history based on that.
joe rogan
Yeah, I get kids send me tweets all the time of photos of something that their professor is showing in class.
Like someone just sent me something the other day.
It was a photograph of a overhead projection and it said something about science being a social construct.
And he's like, this is the kind of shit I'm learning in school.
colin moriarty
Oh, I think I saw that.
You retweeted that?
Yeah, I saw that pop up on my feed.
joe rogan
And everybody was like, what in the fuck is...
How is this guy a goddamn professor?
colin moriarty
Well, this is the whole thing with, like, you know, even...
I mean, the way this is manifesting itself most is with transgender, you know, the transgender issue.
Yes.
Which, I made a video about this where I'm like, I don't know that the science is really even important.
If a person wants to say that they're a woman and they were born a man, I don't really care.
unidentified
Who cares?
colin moriarty
It doesn't matter.
I don't think you need to scientifically justify it, but I think the scientific justification for this whole gender...
normative kind of thing is actually going to backfire on them pretty badly because they've decided to make something that, you know, if you get a blood test, right, and they can study, study it, you're going to come out as a male, right?
Even if you identify something else, that doesn't mean you can't identify like that.
But if you're going to predicate your whole notion on that, this is science, and it doesn't seem like that might be the case, then you're actually injuring the social movement of people just being accepted for who they are.
And I feel like this is where you start engineering science to fit your narrative.
And I think it's a very, very dangerous thing.
People do the same thing with global warming.
I think global warming is obviously real.
I think the science says that.
I think that it's maybe not as bad, but it's bad.
It's affecting things, making storms worse, sea levels are rising.
But people manipulate that to say, no, everything's fine.
Just hand wave it away.
But it's not true.
And I feel like So I feel like we have to predicate everything on scientific truth when we can, and then give leeway to say like...
The example I used was homosexuality, where there was a theory for a long time that homosexuality wasn't something that was born in you, that it was a choice.
Now we know that that's not true, that it's actually something that's in you.
But even if it was a choice, who cares?
Why predicate it on that if you believe in freedom?
Right.
joe rogan
Exactly.
Exactly.
colin moriarty
So with the transgender thing, it's like...
I don't know that you're even attacking this from the right angle.
You should be attacking it from a social acceptance angle.
Right.
Which, again, goes back to the idea of, like, I think that's actually the conservative stance, you know?
But people would argue with me on that.
joe rogan
Colin, we've got to do this more often.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I really enjoyed this, man.
colin moriarty
Thank you.
I did, too.
Thank you for having me back.
It's a great honor.
joe rogan
We said, like, two hours and 20 minutes, man.
Three hours and 20 minutes, right?
Three hours and 20 minutes.
colin moriarty
Great.
Well, thank you so much.
It was a great honor for you to ask me back.
I appreciate it.
joe rogan
My pleasure, brother.
Thank you so much, man.
colin moriarty
And congratulations on this space.
joe rogan
Thanks, buddy.
Tell people where they can watch your show.
colin moriarty
Oh, youtube.com slash CollinsLastStand and I'm often on Twitter at NoTaxation.
joe rogan
Bam.
See you tomorrow, fuckers.
colin moriarty
Thanks, guys.
Cool, that was fun.
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