Christopher Ryan reveals his "Vanthropology" lifestyle—sleeping in a legally recognized Sprinter van domicile—while questioning law enforcement’s role in maintaining prison quotas, linking it to Edward Snowden’s data revelations and Google’s abandoned ethical motto. His theory on language shaping brain identities, like Peggy’s multilingual personality shifts, parallels MPD research, including Stanley Krippner’s studies and Sybil, challenging rigid views of consciousness. Ryan’s shift from bow hunting (ethically declined) to rifle hunting elk in Colorado contrasts with Rogan’s reflections on fame’s pressures, like closeted gay actors or superficial self-help gurus. Mocking corporate greenwashing at the 2019 Motherfucker Awards—funded by Nell Newman Foundation—he ties societal collapse to evolutionary trends: birth control, sustainable energy, and nature reconnection. Yet, Rogan counters with parenthood’s biological depth, while Ryan clarifies his focus on compassionate love. Their dialogue underscores how context reshapes behavior, from sleep apnea tools ignored due to shame to invasive species like Everglades pythons rewriting ecosystems. [Automatically generated summary]
It's like, you know, you and I have probably spoken about in my 20s, I backpacked all over the world and hitchhiked to Alaska a couple times and did all these adventures.
A sprinter van that you have a bed in and a cooler and a freezer, that's kind of like a backpack for an older, slightly richer dude.
That's how I look at it.
Because you have everything you need with you, which is a feeling I love.
I love just being able to say, you know what?
I'm tired.
I'm going to pull over and sleep right here.
And before I do, I'm going to have a couple of beers and listen to some music.
Yeah, I believe if you have a bed, it's considered a domicile.
That's what I've been told.
I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is that the front two seats are considered the vehicle, but beyond that, in the back where you have the bed and all the stuff, that's considered your house.
So a warrant to search is the same as someone coming into your house.
Because I know a dude who got in trouble because he was drunk in the backseat of his car because he knew he was drunk and so he's like, I'm not fucking driving.
I'm just going to sleep it off.
And he laid down the backseat of his car and the cops knocked on the door and he opened up the door and he said, yeah, I'm drunk and I'm sleeping off and they arrested him.
Well, you'd have to have a lawyer go over every piece of it and then a lot of it is open to interpretation and they can change it at a moment's notice.
One of the things that you see in terms and conditions is they have the ability to change it without notice.
Sam Harris had a great podcast with this guy who was an expert in data collection.
He was talking about what's actually happening now is that there's a commodity.
That commodity is data.
And we didn't know it was a commodity.
And then all of a sudden these companies like Facebook and Google made billions and billions of dollars off of this commodity that we didn't even know we were giving up.
Well, humans are strange creatures, you know, and we vary so widely that, you know, trying to make any sense of putting 300 million of us together on an island, essentially.
She was raised in Spain and then lived in Miami when she was 13 to 15 or something.
So she spoke English really well, Spanish, French, and Catalan perfectly, right?
And we were living in San Francisco.
And I was high.
I was smoking a joint.
She was across the room talking to her mom on the phone in French.
And then her mom put her dad on the phone, so she switched to Catalan.
And I was just high enough that I noticed, like, wow, that's not – Peggy talking two different languages and then three because she would like put her hand on the phone and say, my mom said no, no, no.
So English, French, Catalan.
It's not Peggy speaking three languages.
Those are three different Peggies.
She's different.
Her facial tics and her movements and her body position changed depending on the language she was speaking, right?
And at the time I was in grad school and I thought this is like multiple personality disorder.
So I started researching multiple personality and I sort of came up with this idea that language, in her case, because she learned them all when she was very young, She reconfigures the brain in such a way that she actually has different identities in those languages.
And next time we were fucking, I started talking to her in Spanish, and she freaked out.
People have, with multiple personality disorder, the research is bizarre.
It seems to indicate that people have different physiological states in the different personalities.
So you could have a different baseline heart rate, blood pressure, Different baseline heart rate.
I don't know how reliable this is, but I even read that some people have different ocular pressure, so that one personality needs reading glasses and another doesn't.
When I brought it up, he – I think he's – We had a weird conversation, and I think part of the weird conversation was the first conversation that he's had publicly since he's been accused of, you know...
We know that hypnosis, people can have open heart surgery under hypnosis or have limbs amputated or all sorts of amazing things with no anesthesia whatsoever.
And Stanley actually has a really interesting theory along those lines, which is that in prehistoric populations, would be adaptive because a lot of the healing rituals were keying into placebo response.
So if we have a certain ritual, if you're susceptible to – you believe in that, like voodoo – There's a voodoo death.
People die when a spell is cast or a curse because they believe it.
If you don't believe it, it doesn't happen.
So it happens the opposite direction as well with healing.
So his idea is that that would have been a very adaptive characteristic in prehistoric societies, whereas in contemporary societies it's maladaptive because you're more susceptible to advertising or you're easier to manipulate.
So I – yeah, I've – when I was in grad school, I had some professors who worked with hypnosis and I studied it a bit along the same – around the same time I was looking at multiple personality disorder.
Because I was real interested in this question of how the brain and the body interact.
There's all this research showing that people with the same condition in hospitals, exactly the same age, same prognosis and all that.
They heal significantly faster if their hospital window looks out on trees as opposed to looks out at another building.
Something like that.
Just looking at something like nature keys the body into some sort of energy that helps it to heal.
She was hit by a car when she was 15 and she was put in a mental institute for nine months afterwards She had severe brain damage and she lost her ability to do mathematics and like really scrambled her brain and that is probably the birth of the Roseanne that we know the comedian and That's also the case of Sam Kinison Sam Kinison was also like a pretty normal kid and then he was hit by a car and you know pretty severe brain damage as well and Brain damage,
especially has an impact on your ability to be rational and impulsive behavior.
People with brain damage a lot of times get very impulsive.
It varies so widely.
It's what happens to you dependent upon what kind of trauma, where the trauma is, what part of your brain.
But when they said it about Herschel Walker, I was always confused.
I wonder if it was from football, like football trauma, or was it personal trauma, like, you know, abuse?
So there's a species of grasshopper in North Africa.
That, you know, they hang out.
They're grasshoppers.
They're dispersed.
They eat grass.
They chill, right?
Rains come.
The grasslands expand.
Grasshopper population increases.
Then the rains stop.
Grasslands contract to the point where the density of the grasshoppers triggers dormant genes.
So there's an epigenetic event in these grasshoppers, and they start to transform, and not over generations, individuals.
Front legs get shorter, back legs get longer, thorax changes, shape of the head changes, coloring changes, and behavior changes from being these chilled out, solitary, relaxed grasshoppers.
Have you ever read the accounts of the settlers in the pioneer days making their way across the country and dealing with these swarms of locusts and really not having any idea what to do with them and how to handle it?
And it's interesting to think about the state of consciousness and how that affects allergies because apparently – and again, I'm always cautious about saying shit on the show because there's so many people listening.
So caveat, it's been a long time since I read the research.
But if I remember correctly, under hypnosis, a lot of people with allergies no longer – in fact, I remember the research – Yeah, it was a setup where the person could see.
So like you and I are talking across the table and there's a mirror behind me.
And in the mirror, in your peripheral vision, you see roses.
And I mean, I've got this idea for a book, if I keep writing books, which is sort of a self-help book, but it's a parody of self-help books.
And so it'll be calling attention to the way so much of what we do to try to be healthy is actually counterproductive because we stress, especially Americans.
Everything's work.
Everything turns into work.
And Americans are very suspicious of pleasure.
We're taught that pleasure is evil and dangerous and all this.
I've never bought that line of reasoning.
I've always felt like what feels good generally is good.
Now that can get corrupted by advertising and false messaging from a sick society that tells you, you know, sit on the sofa and drink beer and eat bags of chips all day.
But if you get beyond that and you can actually hear the voice of your body, I think if your body is telling you to, you know, stay in bed because it's a rainy cold day, Now, I know this is totally against your perspective on life, where you're like, you've got to tame the inner bitch, you've got to get out of bed, you've got to work out, it doesn't matter.
I'm like, no, man, I'm staying in bed.
You go do what you need to do.
I used to climb mountains with this friend of mine in Spain, and he was like you.
He was a fucking billy goat.
And I'd go with him until I got to a nice spot with a nice view.
I'd be like, dude, I'll be here when you come down.
But when it was over, I was like, okay, obviously, I'm in good shape, but not in good running shape at all, so I should probably get in shape for this.
So then I started running.
And then when I got into running, and particularly running hills, then I started feeling it once I kind of got in that kind of shape.
And then when the workouts are over, I run all the time now.
I got my dad a golden retriever years ago when my dad was like, you know, maybe it's genetic because he was pretty lazy.
He'd come home from work and he'd sit in front of the TV and drink vodka.
And my mother didn't like dogs, but my sister and I convinced her that dad needs a dog because dad will get this dog and he'll go for walks because the dog needs to walk.
He was like, he said, yeah, you know, I've had the experience a few times of, you know, standing on this toes over the cliff 3,000 feet up or whatever and fist bump with your buddy and he goes and says, see you, you know, see you down there.
He goes and then you hear it.
Yeah, he's gone.
Like, I've carried dudes' bodies out of the woods, you know.
I've done that too many times.
He was talking about, you know, these different approaches and how the young guys tend to be more, fuck it, man.
They think they're indestructible.
And at his age, he's seen enough, he's carried enough bodies, he's lost enough friends that he's not thinking that way anymore, you know.
And he doesn't want to be around guys who are.
unidentified
Because he doesn't want to deal with the trauma, you know, well, it's all there's a competitive aspect to it, too Come on.
Yeah, you know like that stuff can get you killed too because then it's just like sort of Hijacks your own Way of interacting with whatever the fuck this danger is.
Mob mentality like, you know, if there's like a riot, like physical violence, in a way that you would never, like, a lot of people who would never think about hitting someone When people are hitting people all over the place, you'll just dive in.
People will dive in and kick people and punch people.
It was after the Ohio State-Michigan game in 2002. The Ohio State-Michigan game, I know you don't really understand the football thing of it, but there, it's a huge day, big event.
We won in a very close game, undefeated season for Ohio State, so they're headed to the national championship.
This then meant sofas on fire in the street for like the next couple hours.
And then shortly as the night exploded, there was a couple bonfires in the middle of the street.
We saw that on the news, so we went close to see it because we were a couple blocks away.
As we got close, we heard the knee-knocker bullets getting fired out, so everybody scattered.
What's really crazy about those chaotic moments of violence is that when something's in the air and you see a big brawl going on, it's like everything seems...
It seems like civilization's flimsy, like for that brief moment.
I think there's a natural thing that kicks in with people that sort of allows them to act in war and allows them to act like when the tribe is invaded.
Like when, you know, when a neighboring army invades your village, there's some thing that kicks in where you, like, recognize this is violence and you just look to swing on anybody that's around you.
And you see it in these brawls when you see some sort of a riot.
Like, you see these people and you're like, I guarantee you that guy's never punched anybody before in his life.
And he's running over trying to punch people.
And everybody's punching everybody.
And people are swinging.
You see it in these fucking...
Whenever you see, like...
Like an Antifa versus Proud Boys type thing.
You know what I mean?
Like these left versus right Trump supporters versus Bernie bros.
I've often wondered about what that is, because I've been around it a bunch of times.
Well, I was around it once, big time in high school.
When I was in high school, there was a kid who lived in this really nice house, and he'd moved into the neighborhood for the first time, and he decided he was going to have a party to meet a bunch of people, make friends.
And people started robbing his house, and a brawl broke out.
I'll never forget it.
I was there at the event horizon of the brawl.
I was there the moment it happened.
A girl did something to a guy.
I can't remember what she did.
I can't remember if she threw a drink in his face or if she hit him.
I don't remember.
But I remember him hitting her.
Because I remember him pulling his hand back.
I'm like, oh my god, he's going to punch her in the face.
And boom!
He punched her right...
I mean, like, he knew how to punch, too.
It was like a real punch to the face.
The girl goes unconscious.
And then, you know, she falls back.
And then chaos.
I mean, people diving on top of people, piles of people out in the yard.
Yeah, I mean, you think about these dudes who, you know, come back from war with PTSD. You know, again, it's this consciousness context dependent behavior where, you know, they do things in that situation and then they come back to the normal world.
It's like coming out of a dream.
And it's hard to believe you did that.
It's hard to believe that was you.
And how do you integrate that into your life with your wife and your kids and mom and dad and the neighbors?
I mean, those poor guys, they're dealing with some real heavy shit there.
Like, once they get there, you know, get you to go do what they want to do, then, you know, it's hard to even get, you know, is what, a two-year wait for any sort of psychological counseling?
Actually, the one Jamie showed, it was right before the wingsuit dude, was a dude who'd been in Iraq, and then he came back and worked as a SWAT team commander.
So he was doing all sorts of really heavy stuff, and then he just got out.
And now he's living off-grid in Idaho, raising three little boys with his wife.
And he's a former Mormon, so he sort of talked about how Mormonism taught him to respect authority and do what he was told.
And that just fed right into his experience in the Army and with the police.
But man, I have so much compassion for those guys.
Who get out and like look back and say, what did I do, you know?
Yeah, the incremental progress that we achieve as a civilization is, it's amazing, but also so frustratingly slow that no one, I mean, no one I've ever talked to thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no war.
No one.
No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no murder.
No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no rape, where we just figure it out.
Like, I'm pretty confident if it was just the three of us forever, no one would rape anybody, no one would murder anybody.
Like, what number of people, how many people do they have to be before one of those things becomes a possibility?
If you have a group of close friends, a group of close friends who are good communicators and good, honest, healthy, friendly people can live together.
And, you know, whatever issues you might have with someone not doing the dishes or someone forgetting to put back your lawnmower or whatever the fuck it is, you could work that out.
Well, that's where hunter-gatherer groups always splinter.
They never get beyond that.
And I think that's why, because, you know, a hunter-gatherer group, which is egalitarian and sharing and cooperative and all that, by necessity, right, because that's how our ancestors survived, is by taking care of each other, mitigating risk, you need reputational damage.
And if everyone doesn't know everyone, reputational damage is no longer effective.
So if you, let's say you go and you're a good hunter and you kill an antelope and then you don't share it and you just keep it for yourself, that's not going to go over real well with a hunter-gatherer group.
You're going to be ridiculed, chastised, maybe expelled from the group, maybe have a hunting accident and die.
Because that hoarding, selfish behavior is extremely taboo in a hunter-gatherer society.
Whereas, you know, you look at our society where reputational damage is no longer functional outside of your group of friends.
As long as you're good to your friends, your golfing buddies, you can screw the rest of the world.
You can not pay your contractors for years and become president.
You know, Dunbar was looking at the brain anatomy of different primates, and by looking at the proportion of a neocortex to the rest of the brain, he predicted the maximum social size of those primates, of each of the species.
And that's how he came to the estimate of 150 for humans.
And I think I'm going to, I don't know if Steve did this or not, but I think I'm going to, as I said, a director's cut.
So I'll, you know, when I read a paragraph that reminds me of something, or, you know, what I thought when I wrote that, or, you know, my dad really wanted me to include that phrase or, you know, whatever little asides.
I would have loved to talk to him about what it was like to show the Kennedy assassination footage on Geraldo Rivera like 10 plus years after the fact.
It's one of the best unintentional comedies ever, but I don't think it's particularly unintentional.
There's a fucking moment in that film where the sheriff, when the sheriff's talking about the body and carrying the body off in bags, he's like, what did you think?
Well, first time I heard about it, I thought he was retarded.
And then the kid just has a smash cut to the sheriff's face, and I'm fucking howling.
I'm howling laughing.
And I'm like, this guy did this on purpose.
There's so many cuts in this movie that are so humorous.
I gotta think that, and Werner Herzog, have you ever heard him on Eric Weinstein's podcast?
A gay woman, like Jodie Foster, could easily play a straight woman in a movie and no one would care.
It would be fine.
That is the fucking glass ceiling in Hollywood.
It's one of them.
When a gay man comes out of the closet, those roles, John Travolta, whoever it would be, I don't know if he's gay either, but if he was, that's where the buck stops.
You cannot be the leading man who's the married guy with kids or the hot man who's in a sexual relationship with a woman if we know that you're having sex with men.
Because you're dealing with barbless hooks, for the most part.
So it just goes into this cartilage in their mouth they don't really feel, and then allegedly don't really feel.
I don't know if they feel it.
And then, you know, they pull it out and they're fine.
But there's some catch and release, especially with like three-pronged barbed hooks where the animals definitely die.
You know, they get caught in their gills and they start bleeding from their gills and then you have to release them anyway.
Because, you know, in some places the regulation is catch and release.
But people love doing it.
They find like peace, like drifting a fly past this area where the fish is lying dormant.
And then you pull the fly and then the fish grabs it and then you got him.
Oh boy.
But you're tapping into this sort of primal reward system that you have in your DNA that makes you want to catch these fish, but then you're letting it go.
He spends a lot of time in Hawaii and he knows a lot of people there.
Jeff Healy, I think.
Big surfer dude.
Anyway, so he knew all these people and I guess...
And Aubrey and some other, those guys sort of asked him to hook them up with a trip.
And so he put it all together.
And then at the last minute, I think Aubrey couldn't go, I think because you were coming down to Austin and he wanted to coordinate with you or something.
So they said, yo, Chris, if you want to go, it's all paid for.
I was already shooting because Kyle Tierman and I had already planned a trip for like three weeks after that.
So I was already practicing for that, which was going to be a pig hunting trip on the Big Island.
But then I went on this deer thing, but mainly I went on the deer thing just because it was an opportunity to fly around in helicopters and see Molokai, which is amazing.
And it's probably, I don't know, is it hard for you to maintain that kind of humility when you're getting all this pressure and opportunities and all this stuff coming at you?
Yeah, you'd just be pretending you're cooler than you are.
I think part of being a human being is making mistakes.
It's a messy thing to be a person, you know?
And I mean, I'm also big on forgiveness.
And I think you have to be because human beings are fallible and like we're saying, we vary from moment to the next.
And to try to hold someone to who they were six months ago or a year ago or five years ago or what they said or what they did and not accept it and hold a grudge To me, that's crazy.
Do you want people to do that to you?
What kind of life is that?
What kind of civilization are we creating where people hold grudges and don't forgive people for things of the past?
But you also have to be able to forgive yourself.
I struggle with that way more, believe it or not, than I struggle with forgiving other people.
I can forgive other people pretty easy, for whatever reason.
I'm super self-critical, and I have definitely some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder that allows me to get really good at things because I obsess.
You know, it's probably unhealthy, but I manage it.
But, like, the mania that goes on in my mind, I just figured out a way to put it to use.
It's like, okay, I got this fucking engine.
Like, what do I stick it on?
Let me stick a thing in there, and I could drill a hole with that instead of just having it going, blah!
Which a lot of people do.
A lot of people don't find a focus for whatever mania they have going on in their mind.
So I've found various things.
That's one of the reasons why I don't ever see myself not doing anything.
I don't have enough time.
That's my issue.
There's a lot of things that I love to do that I just don't have the time for.
It's like, I'm finally figuring this shit out, and I'm almost 60. Well, I remember when I was, like, 26, 25, and when I first came out here, I remember thinking, boy, by the time I'm 52, oh, fucking everything's solved.
There's arbitrary numbers that we have in our head of who you should be at 50 or 60 or whatever the number is.
You're just alive, man.
You're just alive.
And while you're alive, you better forget about all those numbers.
The times that I get outside, like when I elk hunt every year, and I spend time, particularly in Utah, in the mountains, the place that we go, it's just, it's cleansing in a way that is so hard to describe.
It's so hard to describe what it's like just to be out there in the woods and be in the forest and be with the wild animals.
And if we don't, I'm going to work hard to make it not uncomfortable.
The thing about people liking people and not liking people, a lot of it is this severely limited way of communicating, especially when it's one way.
If you're putting out a podcast or you're putting out books and they're reading your shit but they don't get to interact at all, that builds resentment.
There's a lot of weird resentment that people develop when they listen to you and they don't get to interact.
Especially if someone like me Who's always talking shit, right?
I talk shit for a living, basically, and I'm always giving my opinions, and some people have maybe even a strong point that I probably even agree with them.
And they don't get to say anything.
So they're sitting at home listening like, fuck this guy, I'm tired of this bull.
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking my buddy Simon and I were in a restaurant in Venice and the woman recognized me and like, oh, I love your podcast and gave me your number and I was like, yeah, I'll give her a call sometime.
And Simon's like, dude, I would never do that.
You never, never, you know, interact with your fans.
And then I was like, no, but Simon, you don't get it.
She actually knows me.
Like, in Simon's case, like, he was in Scary Movie 3, 4, 5. He was, you know, he plays these characters.
So when people are like, yo, Simon, like, they don't know him.
Between 50 and 100. Like, you know, when you and Duncan were on, when we were doing the shrimp parade thing, it would, you know, peak because it's you guys.
Yeah, I think the subscription model, like when people are paying, like a paywall, the problem is the growth is so limited.
So then you could either just do it for free and put it out there and maybe just sell books or sell T-shirts or, you know, in my case, tickets to shows.
When you get back in shape and you're 70, guess what?
You're never going to be who you were when you were 20. It's never going to be what it was.
I mean, it was the richest city in America at one point in time.
During the peak of automobile production, I believe it was one of the richest cities in America.
And it's a far cry from that now.
And it's strange when you drive through the town and you see these boarded up buildings and factories with all their broken windows.
And you could buy a house for like $100.
It's weird.
It's weird.
But then there's also a lot of craft restaurants and these businesses that are building up and these hippies that have kind of moved in.
And they're kind of...
you know making stuff there and there's a lot of cool shit cheap enough to get in and do stuff yeah yeah which is you know if you're a young person growing up there you know like you can make something happen and with the internet the your ability to establish a business and your ability to you know to actually get something off the ground it's so much different than it ever has been before yeah and and people love a good comeback story so detroit like a bunch of detroit made
things could be exciting for people like yeah look at that detroit i'll buy that yeah detroit made you know there's a company called shinola if you ever heard yeah the watches really nice watches american-made watches they make a bunch of other stuff too like bags leather goods things along those lines but One of the things they proudly say is made in Detroit.
And they make cool shit, you know?
So there's something to that, you know?
But the place I'm working at is the Fox Theater.
And it's just like really fucking cool old theater.
And what's interesting, there's columns.
And it was back when people used to be able to smoke.
They smoked in there so much that all the columns are like...
They have that orangey nicotine sort of tint to them.
But one of the columns was replaced by...
So this one column is clear and smooth and clean, and the other ones are fucking orangey.
It seems like you could go up to them with a butter knife and just scrape the nicotine off of them.
But it's a beautiful old building that was made...
Way, way, way back in the day, and they said that when it was first made, it was one of the only buildings in Detroit that had air conditioning, so people would go to see movies there, and they would pay to see movies just so they could fall asleep.
They'd go in there in just the cool air, and they'd fall asleep during the summer, because people would just be sweltering in the heat of the summer.
Because the sort of confluence of convenience and safety and ease, and it's still exotic and really interesting and very foreign...
You know, I wouldn't recommend India to everyone or Indonesia, but Thailand is like, whatever your tolerance is, you'll find something there that works for you.
Yeah, I know a lot of fighters who've gone there for camps, for training camps, and wound up either moving there or starting camps there or starting gyms there.
There's some really beautiful places, but I found, I was traveling with Casilda, my wife, who's dark-skinned, and there's a lot of racism in She got harassed a lot because everyone assumed that she was a local.
So the first time I came on the show, I didn't know you, right?
And I didn't know anything about you because I was living in Spain.
And Duncan, I had done Duncan Show.
It was the first time I'd done a podcast.
I didn't know what a podcast was.
I came to LA to visit my parents.
I had this email from Duncan.
I'm a comedian.
You want to do a podcast?
I'm like, sure.
Never met a comedian.
Don't know what a podcast is.
So I did it.
We had a good time.
And after, he's like, you know, I'd love to introduce you to my friend Joe Rogan.
I think you guys would get along and you could do his podcast.
I'd never heard of Joe Rogan.
Right?
No insult intended.
I lived in Spain.
I never watched Fear Factor.
Your whole thing was happening over here.
I didn't know about it.
And then I went back to Spain.
I was like, okay, Duncan's friend Joe...
Does this podcast in his living room the way Duncan does, I assumed, right?
And I went back to Spain, and I was talking to my buddy Voodoo, who's a tattoo artist.
And he's like, so how was LA? I was like, yeah, cool.
I did a podcast with this comedian.
It was really fun and interesting.
And he's like, oh, you should do Joe Rogan's podcast.
I'm like, dude, how do you know Duncan's friend Joe, right?
It was this whole weird thing.
He's like, no, dude, Joe Rogan.
So I tried to tell you that story the first time I came.
And the point of the story is I'm an idiot, I don't know what's going on, right?
I'm oblivious.
But we got to the point where I said I didn't know you, and you were like, so what did you do, Google me?
And I was like, well, not really.
And then we had to do a sound check, or you had to do an ad or something, and the story got interrupted, and I felt like you thought I was trying to diss you or something.
I'm holding, literally, I remember, I'm holding the bottom of my chair, trying not to fall out of the chair.
And we start talking, and I'm telling this story about a dude that I had met on an airplane, and he was super into Sex at Dawn, and then we were going to do a movie together and whatever.
And then you would say, oh, no, no, no, it's not that.
You would screw things up.
You'd get scrambled in your head.
When there's no pot at all, that never happens.
I mean, you might make mistakes, but you know what you're talking about while you're talking about it.
When you're really, really high like that, there's a lot of times where you're talking about stuff where you literally don't know exactly what you're talking about.
And kids are there, and it's just, you know, it's not set aside.
Right.
And the Spanish guy said to me, you know, in Spain, we have many alcoholics but no drunks.
And it's true.
Like, you don't see people puking in the street, you know, raging, drunken lunatics, like, you know, in the US. What about, like, sports events, like soccer games?
They sell beer, full-strength beer.
I don't remember if they sell wine.
And, yeah, I mean, Barcelona is a special place.
I don't know what it's like in Madrid.
I never went to a soccer game in Madrid.
But Barcelona, the Catalans are sort of dry, very self-contained people.
So, you know, there's no raging.
And right now there's rioting going on, but that's a political thing.
So the hero with a thousand faces, his observation that societies all over the world have basically the same origin myth, which is the odyssey, right?
It's the person goes out and has all these challenges and faces their fears and learns all the stuff and then returns home with the knowledge that they've gained and they realize that what they were looking for all the time is actually...
I feel like, as a species, we're at the point in that journey where we're turning toward home.
That's sort of the overriding narrative of this book, that where we are now is we've learned enough that we can go back to or go toward a way of living that replicates in important ways where we came from.
So you're doing it.
You're hunting.
You're spending time in nature.
We're looking at different ways of raising kids.
We're looking at paleo diet, fasting, controlling the frequency of the light that comes into our eyes at night.
There's this awareness that the way forward requires an understanding of where we came from.
So I kind of feel when I'm having a good day, I feel like we're at this point now, this crisis point where these institutions, central institutions of Western civilization are collapsing around us.
They're just government, Wall Street, religion.
It's all just like being exposed as incompetent and useless in many cases.
But we've learned these really interesting things like birth control and passive energy and different ways of living on the earth without destroying it.
And so the sort of metaphor I use in the book is that we're going to live in zoos, right?
But do we want to live in the Calcutta Zoo or the San Diego Zoo?
And I feel like, you know, what we're seeing now is we're clearly in a moment of massive global change.
And I hope that what the opportunity will...
That's being presented is to redesign human existence in a way that's more in accordance with our nature.
There's a feeling that not all women, but many women have, where they have that biological clock.
It's telling them to have a baby.
When they have a baby...
I mean, you've seen women that have children.
It's the most intense bonding, the most intense release of oxytocin, the most intense love and feeling of connection with another living creature that...
I've ever experienced that I could ever explain to someone.
And it's a natural part of being a human being.
It also changes who you are as a person when you are responsible for these little people and then you have love for these little people.
Like Dave Chappelle said to me once something that really resonated.
He said, not only has it changed how much I love, it changed my capacity for love.
And that resonated.
I was like, that's what it is.
It changes how I feel about other people.
And the experience for a man is entirely different than it is for a woman because the woman literally creates the being in her body.
A baby is growing inside a woman's body and then she gives birth to it.
With a man, you do what you always do.
You fuck her.
But now you have a baby.
And it's undeniable that you love the baby, you love your child, but you did not have the experience of having it grow inside your body, which I think is a connection that no man is ever going to understand.
I don't think it's possible to understand what a woman experiences when she has a baby grow inside of her body.
But then...
What had changed for me, which was a big one, was it made me look at people Instead of looking at them like static beings.
I feel like I've gained, you know, this is part of what I was referring to earlier where I said, like, you know, we're learning to dance and the party's almost over.
I don't have kids.
I've been around kids.
But I feel like when I was in my 20s, let's say, I sort of worked this out recently in relationships that I think there are three things.
There's attraction.
There's compatibility.
And there's love.
And I look at a lot of my relationships with women, they had two of those.
Always love.
Sometimes the sex was great, and sometimes the compatibility was great, and very rarely all three of those.
But I used to think love was a really limited, scarce experience in life.
And the older I get, the more I feel like, no, I could love anybody.
If I spent enough time with them and got to know them, I'd feel love for them.
That's not hard to find.
It seems it's everywhere.
When I was young, I thought it was really hard to find.
Some people it's hard to find someone who loves them and some people are burdened down.
You're very free in the sense that because you have this unusual way of making money and you don't have a lot of needs, you don't need a lot of material things.
Some people are very burdened by these needs and they're not free and they're confined to a job and it's very difficult for them to meet anybody.
Right?
And then you're also stressed out all the time because of bills and horseshit and then work politics and work dynamics and dealing with the fucking environment of the office.
And you got a boss that's an asshole who's like, you know, you have board meetings and shit and everybody's got to sit there and get cancer while this asshole talks.
You know, are you imagine sitting at a board table and some guys, what we got to do with this company?
You know, like one of the things that I love doing in my podcast is meeting somebody who's never told their story before and never even thought of their life in terms of a narrative, and in the course of the podcast, having them realize how fucking interesting they are and having them realize how fucking interesting they are and how interesting their life is.
I've had people break into tears and stuff, you know, because they've never thought, like no one's ever asked.
Everybody's interesting.
Everybody's got some kind of bizarre story to tell.
Like, anybody who's got, like, I was not breathing for 20 seconds at a time.
And, yeah, this woman I was sleeping with, like, actually counted, you know?
And she's like, dude, like, you're choking, you're suffocating.
So I went and got a test.
It's super easy.
You take it home and hook this thing in your finger and all that.
And they told me, I think it was like 25 episodes per hour is considered severe.
I had 74. Every minute I was suffocating to the point where I sort of woke up and like my throat tissue, you know, the muscles contract so you can breathe again.
I didn't, I mean, I feel kind of evangelical about it, because, you know, I know a lot of people have this, men and women, And there's this weird kind of shame around it, and I'm just trying to be like, hey.
Anyway, we're talking about how hard it is to get people to pay attention to environmental issues because it's such a downer, you know?
And I was like, man, I know all these comedians.
It would be cool if we could find a way to get comedy into the environmental thing.
And we came up with this idea where we flip everything upside down and we say, we have an awards ceremony to honor the companies that are doing the most to fuck Mother Earth.
And the awards are accepted on behalf of the companies by comedians.
So we did it last year and it was fucking wild.
It was so great.
So the presenters were people like Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and the guy who was the founder of Greenpeace and environmental people and sort of political people.
And accepting on behalf of these people, like Leo Flowers, if you know him, Jake Johansson, Moshe Kasher, and Natasha Leggero did this incredible bit where they were incestuous brother-sister couple.
It's like, there's people that are real self-help people that are doing real work, and they really are committed to it, and they love it, and they really love helping people.
And then there's other people that find that as like a niche.
The world of constant motivation, where you're constantly motivating people and trying to find some new way to say things you've already said a thousand times.
But sometimes they can say something that resonates.
Some people can say something that resonates.
But those people have to...
There has to be something unique about them, like their life experiences.
They have to have accomplished something.
There has to be some actual meat behind their words.
Mm-hmm.
And there's a lot of people that are doing it that are just doing it.
They're not really doing anything else.
They just do that.
That's very strange.
It's very strange because they've tapped into this need and this feeling that people have where they need to be motivated and they need someone to say positive spiritual things that resonate with them.
So these people have sort of found that as a way to become popular or famous or insta-famous or whatever, you know?
I guess if that's all you've ever known, if all you've ever known was living in an incredibly primitive way and hunting and gathering, you'd be fine with it.
I don't remember where I was, but we were sitting around a fire talking about, like, bizarre experiences we'd had traveling, whatever.
He was from, I think, New Hampshire, and he had a thing, like you and Marshall go running every morning, he had a thing where he and his dog would go down to the lake and take a swim every day at dusk.
When he got home from work, he'd take the dog for a swim.
It was a black lab, I think.
And he went to visit his brother in Florida.
And he drove down there.
And his brother was out when he arrived.
And it was around dusk.
And he's like, ah, let's go for a swim.
There's a lake.
And he jumps in the water with his dog.
And they're swimming across the lake.
And it's quiet, right?
And he hears this...
And he's like, what was that?
That's a weird sound.
And then he realizes, I'm in fucking Florida.
I'm not in New Hampshire.
There are alligators here.
What the fuck am I doing?
So he turns around and starts swimming back.
And he's swimming along, trying not to panic.
And the fucking dog goes, dog's gone.
Fucking alligator came, or croc came up and took his dog.
When I lived in Florida, when I was a kid, we lived in Gainesville, and there was alligators everywhere, and I remember one of them snatched some lady's dog, and I was like, Jesus Christ, I didn't know they killed people's dogs, because you would see them floating around, and they seemed so innocuous, because they were almost always still.
They very rarely moved.
There were signs, they didn't want you to feed them marshmallows.
People would throw marshmallows, and the alligators would eat marshmallows.
Yeah, he tried to chase it off and he stumbled upon, there was a smell, he's a rancher, he stumbled upon this smell and the smell was a dead cow and this black bear had been eating this dead cow and he tried to chase the black bear off and the black bear decided to try to go after him and had to wind up shooting it.
He's trying to say, hey, get the fuck out of here!
Waving his arms, and it woofed at him, and then it turned around and came at him from another direction, and then it literally ran up within like 20 feet of him.
I actually told this story at the beginning of Sex at Dawn.
I was with my girlfriend at the time, and like your situation in Costa Rica, she wanted to give some peanuts to these monkeys.
These guys at the entrance were selling little bags of peanuts.
And so she – there was this baby monkey hanging by his tail over the trail where we were and she pulled out this bag of peanuts and like opened it and that attracted all this attention from other monkeys.
And while she was handing a peanut to the baby, this other monkey jumped out from the bushes, leapt on her, took the bag of peanuts, and was gone, like in a flash.
It happened so fast.
She's screaming.
I'm like, what the fuck?
It was just like, holy shit.
We're surrounded by these monkeys.
They're everywhere.
And that's when we realized all the local people had these big sticks.
And we thought they were walking sticks or something.
So we, you know, 20 minutes later, we're in this sort of field, and there's a tree in the middle of the field, and there are more baby monkeys.
And by now, she's totally forgotten about it.
She's just like, oh, they're cute.
So I have the peanuts now, and she wants to give more peanuts.
So I pull out a bag to give to her, and this monkey comes out of the woods, sort of a big one, and he's, like, looking at me.
And I'm just like, fuck you, dude.
Like, I'm three times your size.
Fuck you.
And he sort of, like, moves, you know, sort of does this thing, and he's looking at me, and there's a branch, and I picked up the branch and threw it at him, right?
Kind of like what your buddy was trying to do with his bear.
Like, hey, get the fuck out of here, you know?
And this monkey just looked at the branch land in front of him and looked up at me, and he was like, you fucked up.
And he leapt over it and came charging at me with these fangs, just coming straight at me.
I went nuts.
I turned into a monkey.
I just started going...
And I was like jumping up and down and spraying spit everywhere.
And he stopped and we're like, ah!
And my girlfriend's screaming and we're like 10 feet away.