Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan debate homemade masks’ 95%+ transmission reduction efficacy, with Rogan prioritizing immune-boosting habits like saunas and vitamin D while Fridman stresses societal protection. They dismiss COVID-19 conspiracy theories (Wuhan lab, 5G) as scientifically unsupported but critique media censorship of fringe ideas. Fridman’s AI podcast and Putin interview plans contrast with Rogan’s UFC fight musings—Gaethje’s delayed interim title bout and Ioana vs. Whaley’s near-draw—while both highlight how fundamentals (in jiu-jitsu, health, or leadership) shape success despite chaos. The episode underscores how crises expose humanity’s resilience, flaws, and the limits of both science and storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
N95 respirator masks, which should be exclusively used as PPE, personal protective equipment, by healthcare workers.
Okay.
There's also a shortage of surgical masks, which are these non-Voen fabric masks that work very well for the thing I'm talking about, but because there's a shortage of them, we should not be buying them.
It should be saving them for healthcare workers.
And then the open question was whether homemade masks like the one I just described Work to stop as a filtration mechanism.
This is the confusing thing for the individual-centric society that we live in.
Masks are the most...
What are they actually effective for?
What they're effective for is to prevent me, if I'm infected, asymptomatic, from spreading the infection to you.
So that's where the movement of Masks for All started, which is your mask protects me, my mask protects you.
And the idea there is not...
I'm not creating a wall from the rest of society.
I am contributing to the bigger aggregate picture of it by not allowing the infection to spread.
So masks...
Is masks allow you to reduce that transmission rate to one to below one.
So allowing you to decrease the transmission rate while also allowing people to be in public.
Yeah, there's a lot of aspects here that are unprecedented.
The scientific community has stepped up in a way that I've never seen.
I couldn't imagine it was possible to do.
Like, everybody, stop what they're doing.
And from whatever walks of life, so artificial intelligence community is really working on a lot of aspects of this, which I can talk about.
The virologists, bioinformatics folks, so everybody's working on this, looking at different angles, and obviously people who are developing vaccines and antiviral drugs are working on this.
To your question, we're all waiting for actual studies, so you can't really answer it.
You can't say something is promising or not.
So what's happening now is there's incredible candidates for vaccines, for antiviral drugs, but in order to say anything at all, there has to be at least a little sign, a little signal that this is something that can work.
So one of the things is If you look at the virology of it, just the protein structure of a corona COVID-19 virus, there's a lot of elements to it that are different from even its other family member of SARS within the coronavirus family.
So it's a totally open question whether Things from masks, what kind of things work for coronavirus versus SARS versus influenza versus rhinovirus, which is behind the common flu, and then what works on the coronavirus.
So that's true for masks, that's true for drugs, that's true for epidemiological study models and so on.
So there's a lot of uncertainty here and you have to actually do the test.
On the mask side, I'm really paying attention.
There's a guy named Jeremy Howard who brought a lot of us together from all kinds of expertise and we're putting together this giant paper showing that masks are effective.
And the same thing is happening in other domains.
The powerful thing about masks is it's something we can do.
Us individuals.
Right now, a lot of us individuals are stuck, trapped in our homes, unable to do anything.
Your only task is to remain, to practice physical distancing, social distancing, to maintain a healthy immune system, to Maintaining a healthy immune system seems to me to be the most important thing because there's so many people that are asymptomatic.
We don't know what is causing some people to have virtually no symptoms whatsoever.
But I would think that maintaining a healthy immune system, eating healthy foods in particular, supplementing with vitamins.
For me particularly, I've ramped up my vitamin C in a big way.
Vitamin D, 4,000 IUs a day.
Exercise.
And sauna.
If you have access to a sauna, and I know most people don't, but if you don't have access to a sauna and you do have a bathtub, take yourself a hot bath.
What you're looking for is heat shock proteins.
One of the things that happens when you have a flu or when you have a fever, when your body has a fever, one of the things it's trying to do is trying to kill that virus.
It's trying to overheat it.
And that production of those heat shock proteins is very important.
There was a study written on flus and viruses and regular sauna use and it showed a significant decrease in infection with regular sauna use.
So it might not help you if you have it now, but it will help you to keep a strong and healthy immune system.
Heat and cold, those two things.
Shocking yourself with cold baths and shocking yourself with hot baths if you don't have access to a sauna.
If you do have access to a sauna, I would recommend ice baths and sauna.
It's very, very important for your immune system.
It's a way that you're giving yourself a drug that your body makes, really.
Yeah, I read a couple of studies actually on the use of, I don't know about sauna, but heat, like you said, hot water and then switching to cold for increasing the efficacy of natural killer, I think they're called NK, the natural killer immune cells that are essential for when...
So there's this moment when you get the disease and you progress, coronavirus, you progress from just having mild symptoms to having to go to the hospital to having to then go into a critical condition.
So that transition, the natural killer cells are essential for that.
And the variation from heat to cold in water helps.
Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be a long time before they sort this out.
And the real problem with that is in the meantime, all these fucking nut jobs that want to blame this on 5G or, you know, or whatever, fill in the blank with whatever crazy conspiracy theory people have.
One that is interesting is that Wuhan apparently Had some sort of bioweapons lab there.
That's interesting to me because if that's the case It's not outside of the realm of possibility that something could be accidentally released or purposefully released.
Like if they do have a weapons lab there, I mean, why do they make weapons labs?
Why is anyone making bioweapons?
You're making bioweapons to...
The idea is you're making a disease you can inflict on the enemy, right?
Well, if you have a disease that can be inflicted on the enemy, that's just human beings.
If that stuff gets out, it would be the biggest shock of all time if it turns out that this was actually a man-made disease that was leaked from a lab.
I'm not saying it was.
Again, I'm a moron.
I'm not the guy to come to when it comes to bioweapons or viruses or any of these things, but I'm just speculating as a human being that if there is a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, Google that.
So, first of all, bioengineering, let's break that apart because it's a fascinating topic.
I mean, one of the things that coronavirus is making us realize is, holy crap, there's things out there that can kill us on a scale that we've never before imagined.
And nothing like that, hopefully, will be happening here, but this is the dress rehearsal, right?
Well, this one's weird in that it's so rare that it affects children.
It's very strange that this virus has a small impact on children.
You know, but goddammit, there was a story that I saw a video about this article that was written that was talking about a one-day-old baby that died from coronavirus.
But when you go into the actual story itself, the doctor who was furious about this, who was reading this paper, was saying that, the article rather, he was saying the baby was 22 weeks premature.
So like that's probably what killed the baby and that is so premature and he was like the idea that someone is using clickbait and fear-mongering at that scale during this crazy time when people are starving for information and terrified and running around trying to find out and especially people with newborns to read that oh my god I killed a newborn and then you go and realize look no it's a complication and we don't know the baby tested positive for coronavirus but it's also 22 weeks early I mean,
if that's the first baby that's dying from this, we're very, very fortunate that it doesn't attack young people.
One, children getting sick, and two, parents getting sick and thereby not being able to take care of their children.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And that can spread.
We're so sensitive now in terms of just on the verge of giving in to the fear on a mass scale.
And that's where information and sort of Inspiring words and the silly old word love is important, like community and compassion and so on to sort of fight that fear.
Because how many businesses are going to close because of this?
How many people don't know that they're unemployed but are?
How many businesses are barely hanging on and they might not make it to the end of the year?
And if the economy takes a downturn because of all these people out of jobs, how many businesses that were barely hanging on before and they're still open now are going to be gone in a couple of weeks?
We really don't know.
I mean, how long do you think it's going to take before businesses are up and running again?
I know Wuhan is back up in business again, but there's a lot of criticism about that, and they're also saying they're seeing new cases.
I think there's so much ignorance going on, though.
I don't think people wear it.
There's a large percentage of people, this is my assumption, that are wearing that mask that are not wearing it because they think they're going to protect other people.
Yeah, and I don't think, I mean, this is what the WHO and the CDC, this is where I hate what they're doing, which is sort of there's truth and that there is ideas of how the truth will be misinterpreted by the public, and so you shouldn't tell people the truth.
So there's a kind of sense, like the WHO and CDC have said that masks don't work, for example, or they said that we shouldn't be wearing masks, we should save them for the healthcare workers.
Well, we have to be honest about what the timeline, the WHO, what they've said, they're wrong about so much of it.
They were initially saying that you couldn't transfer it from person to person.
I mean, this was just in the beginning of the year.
I mean, Dan Crenshaw went over the timeline of all the things that were wrong about what the World Health Organization said on the podcast yesterday.
It's terrifying stuff.
And, you know, and obviously newspapers were going off of that information and they were printing misleading stuff as well.
And the president didn't know.
No one knew.
The whole thing is very weird.
If you're going based on what they were saying, it didn't look like it was going to be nearly as bad as it is.
And then everyone has had to make adjustments.
I'm actually...
The one...
I'm so...
I'm so freaked out about the loss of life and the loss of jobs and how people are getting...
It's really weird.
Everything about it is weird.
It's weird in our lifetime to be a part of something that's just affecting the entire world like this.
But...
I've gotten a lot of messages from friends that are quarantined with their families and like we've never been closer and that we realize that we're in this together because we realize that, you know, during these crazy times, you realize what is important.
Love, that silly little word you were talking about.
Love and community and friendship, like my neighbors.
Everyone's so nice.
Everyone's waving now and everyone's like saying hi and, you know, talking from over the side of the yard and how's everything?
You guys alright?
Need anything?
We're right here.
There's a lot of this like comfort and warmth that, you know, I think I experienced a little bit of that post 9-11 where people get shocked.
They get shook up and then they realize what matters, you know.
Yeah, that's one of the things I don't like about masks, is it feels like you're protecting yourself from, like you're removing yourself from the community.
In a time of coronavirus, you get a cultural appropriation pass, I heard.
To me, I think that's great.
Because...
If it's messaged correctly to show that we are while maintaining sort of social distancing all those kinds of things We're trying to fight to bring our society back.
Okay, let me pause it right there There's no social distancing in a fucking cage fight.
Yeah, okay They're on top of each other sweating each other's mouths There's not gonna be there's gonna be if Tony Ferguson's fighting there's gonna be blood for sure Everybody fights Tony Ferguson looks like they fell off a train So there's gonna be blood The physical distancing you want to avoid is large crowds.
So my main concern is how will the general public interpret it?
Because you want to do everything you do now should be done in a way that, one, is positive, like inspires us towards the community, and two, gets us to do the right thing scientifically.
I don't know if a COVID-infected person fighting would inspire others to say, oh, if they're doing it, it's okay for me.
That's all I'm saying, folks, is you shouldn't have someone who's clearly got something really wrong and just prop him up and weekend at Bernie style and fucking bring him up to the podium.
Well, what they should be able to do is someone should, I don't know, I think they're just hoping and praying that Biden can hang in there long enough and people's hatred for Trump will get it to the finish line.
And that they could win.
And they can keep him from having these conversations where he stumbles a lot.
But it's not fair to him as a human being.
It's not fair to us that this is their only choice they're giving us.
I mean, there are so many people that were involved in those debates Kamala Harris, bring her back.
Bring them all back.
Bring any of them back.
They would be a way better spokesperson for the Democratic Party.
This is just a terrible idea.
That's all I'm saying.
That's all I did say.
But it's like, I just can't believe that someone like me Has any impact at all in people's political choices?
We've never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around 16. We have never, never let our democracy...
Second fiddle way that we can both have a democracy and elections and at the same time correct the public health.
But, you know, you got to think he's probably medicated.
They're probably juicing him up to get him to that state of health anyway.
Like, these people are not stupid.
These people that are involved in running his campaign, they're probably giving him IV vitamin drips and doing everything they can to try to get him as healthy as possible to bring him to that state.
So, back in the, you know, especially in 2016 and so on, just every time, because he's like a, he's kind of like a blue collar.
He has a story with his son, a vet dying.
I mean, there is so much depth to him as a human being, to his story.
He, obviously, as you've mentioned, he's done quite a few shady things like lying and plagiarizing speeches and That was back in 88 when he was running for president.
Yeah.
I mean, but in terms of his long track record of just being as part of the system, whatever you think about the system, he just knows at a time like this, when you need government to work well, no matter who you are, government needs to work well now.
So you have to ask yourself, who is the person who will make government work well?
So to me, the best for president is to inspire the entire population, just to be a sort of talking head that inspires the world and the United States, and two, hires the best people to take care of each of those things.
Yeah, I just think that it's an impossible task for an individual.
And I don't think, I think we should rethink it, but good luck with that.
I mean, the crazy thing about the United States is really, I mean, I had a bit about it, that the United States was founded in 1776. People lived to be 100. That's three people ago.
Yeah, I'm like this is how recently this is and this is a bit about President Trump about him being elected about how crazy and the bit was about we went from Obama I went from this really intelligent very articulate person and it's like we were involved in a relationship with a really and now we're dating a whore Yeah, it was just this crazy bit that I had about it's like we're on the rebound and we're just in a nutty relationship now.
But I just I don't think anybody should be president.
I just I don't think it's a good position for human beings.
I think it was a great idea when we're tribes, when we're a tribe of a few hundred people or a mayor of, you know, a town.
That's great.
Yeah, mayors make sense.
It makes sense that one person, it's a very stressful job, very difficult, but it seems tenable.
It seems like a mayor can be.
You know, a mayor can really control a city and do a good job.
I just think when you get to the scale of the United States of America, it just seems nuts.
It just seems nuts to have one person run the whole show.
And then also, clearly not, because, you know, you have this gigantic organization behind it that requires all the money from the donors and special interest groups and lobbyists and all these moving pieces are involved to make sure that the people that get in place are going to suit your interests and fulfill your needs.
And it's all going on right now while a fucking pandemic virus is sweeping the entire globe.
I mean, some of that is just mass production of testing kits.
So the main tests they're using are molecular-based tests.
There's other ideas.
Like in the artificial intelligence side, there's ideas of how to use CT scans, chest scans, and try to detect the early onset of COVID versus just regular pneumonia.
Because there's a lot of sort of neighboring conditions here, too.
Yeah, that's the thing I was going to say that some enormous percentage, like 85% of people that come in that are sick are not infected with this because this is flu season.
And the flu so far has killed an extraordinary number of people, which is really weird.
Like, while this is going on, and this is not to diminish the deaths of the people that have died from COVID, because it's all horrible, right?
Anyone that loses a loved one, I, you know, my heart reaches, I ache for all of you.
I feel terrible for anybody who loses someone that they care for, whether it's an old person or a young person to a disease.
It's horrible.
But why is it that we're so terrified of COVID, clearly because it's new, but when the flu is killing more people right now than COVID is, and we're not worried about that at all.
I mean, we should clearly be worried about both things.
And this is, again, it's a great advertisement for strengthening your immune system.
This is a great wake-up call for a lot of people that are unhealthy, that are eating unhealthy and living unhealthy.
Please.
Like, if you value life and it's like, it's so easy to just assume you're always gonna be okay if you're okay now.
You know, this is the sort of mentality that a lot of us go through life with, that everything's fine, now it'll be fine.
And this is where preppers go off the rail the other way, right?
They're like, fuck, the sky's falling, it's all gonna fall apart.
And those people, I'm fascinated to see how they're gonna freak out.
Like, now that this is real, and that, like, it's probably a good idea to have stored food, it's probably a good idea to have a small supply of water that's gonna last you a few weeks, this is all a good idea.
Like, how are those motherfuckers gonna react to this?
Well, you're seeing that in some places where people have vacation homes.
And they're leaving the big city and going to the vacation homes and the people that live in these small communities are freaking out because they don't want these infected people coming into their communities and infecting them.
And they're trying to keep them out of their homes, out of their second homes, which is like, look, you can't keep someone out of a fucking house that they own, okay?
You can't just decide that you're gonna throw the Constitution out the window and these people don't own their own property anymore.
But it gets to this weird state where everybody's in a panic.
So this, to me, is where the president is essential, is to, when people are in a panic, there's so much uncertainty, to inspire the world and sort of take us back to reminding Americans, reminding the world what everyone did in World War II. Yeah.
Sort of the huge things we've overcome as a civilization, that this is one of those cases.
And sort of, as opposed to trying to defend your little corner of this land, seeing us as all together, as a community, and sort of inspire that.
And trying to remove, I think, in terms of winning elections, like if Donald Trump wants to win the election, is just do that.
Because in these times, difficult times, presidents are popular.
And if you just forget the stupid red-blue divide and just inspire the whole country, he'll run away with it.
But that lady represents a large percent of the population full of ridiculous ideas such as that.
And he gets a chance to speak to inspire that part of the population and say, let's put this social justice warrior stuff aside for a brief moment as we fight a thing that threatens the economic well-being of our nation.
Well, you hear very little about transgender people using restrooms right now.
You know, there's a lot of things that you don't hear about.
You don't hear about gender pronouns and a lot of stuff that was so supposedly important just a small amount of time ago, and it's not to diminish the rights and the values of transgender people.
It's just to say, I think a lot of what people were complaining about and The reasons why people were up in arms about things is not just because we have real issues with discrimination, but more so that we don't have real problems.
So we look to amplify problems that might not be nearly as big as they are, or as we would like to think they are.
You know, I mean, when we're dealing with something that's a real life-threatening, a real huge issue, no one gives a fuck about your gender pronouns.
You know, no one gives a fuck if you're a they-them person.
Are you they-them?
Okay, congratulations.
I don't know what to tell you, but we're in the middle of something that is a new disease.
It's killing people and some people it's not killing them at all and they're spreading it around and it's weird.
So we don't have time for nonsense and we're in a lot of ways because society is so I want to say this in the best way possible.
This is the greatest time ever to be alive.
Even now.
Even now with all this craziness.
If you compare the world today with the way we're connected to each other, yeah, there's problems.
There's always gonna be problems.
We're a bunch of fucking weird territorial monkeys.
Living on a planet, you know?
There's gonna be problems.
We're sorting through all these different things out, and there's varying levels of economic disparity, physical disparity, mental disparity.
There's so much difference between all of us.
There's no chance.
For complete total harmony.
It's not going to exist with these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons.
It's not going to exist, you know?
What's one of the first things that people did when all this happened?
They went out and hoarded toilet paper and bought guns, okay?
That should let you know.
This is what people are all about.
When the shit hits the fan, they want guns and they want to be able to wipe their ass.
And this is what people panicked about.
This is still...
One of the best times ever to be alive.
And the thing that gives me hope is the way I feel in my community and the way I feel with my friends.
I've had so many friends reach out and just say, are you okay?
How's everything?
If you need anything, I'm here.
That's beautiful.
I love that.
I love this feeling of community that we have.
Real community.
It's this like, especially in the stand-up comedy world, There's an incredible sense of community right now.
People are reaching out to help people.
People are donating to people.
People are sending people money.
They're checking in on each other.
And it's like we're appreciating each other.
We're appreciating each other in a way that I think is beautiful.
It makes me sad that it kind of has to coincide with a tragedy sometimes, but we're humans.
Sometimes we need a wake-up call.
We need a little something that lets us know, hey, you know, this is a temporary situation, this life in general.
Everything about it is temporary.
We are finite life forms on a finite planet that's heated by a finite star.
None of this is going to last.
It's gonna last for a long time, but it's not gonna last.
Enjoy this.
Enjoy this and let's enforce and let's encourage good values, healthy values, community values.
We can get through this and be a better country.
I really believe this.
I really believe this.
I think the survivors of this can get through this as long as we can retain these lessons.
It's so easy.
Once something happens and then that thing normalizes and we get back to Air quotes, regular life.
It's so easy to forget the lessons.
But if we can reinforce those, we can remind ourselves of this, we can have these moments, you know, like so many cultures do where they have these religious ceremonies.
You know, I was talking to Eric Weinstein.
We were talking about Jews and they were talking...
What was the fucking...
Was it Passover?
Yes, it's Passover.
And he was talking about how they tell the story every year.
And the reason why they tell the story every year is to remind everybody, to remind people that you're here because others went through some horrendous shit.
And let's thank them, let's praise them, and let's remind ourselves we're very, very fortunate.
So AK-47 came from World War II. That's a design from there.
And so your job is...
So Germany in the fall of 1941 is marching towards Moscow.
And your job is...
Basically to be a human, just a thing that slows them down long enough to where they don't reach Moscow until winter, which would allow Moscow to defend easier.
So winter is very difficult to fight, even in World War II in Russia.
So your basic job is to slow down the troops.
So you're sitting there with a machine gun, which is exceptionally difficult to carry, and you're just emptying all your bullets.
There's a particular model, I forget, but most machine guns at the start, they were using basically World War I weapons in World War II. And the machine guns that they were using had this giant metal shield that you hide behind as you're shooting.
And that shield would turn out to be exceptionally heavy.
So it's not something you can carry easily.
So I would venture to say it's probably like 200 pounds, that kind of thing.
But you have to look at Soviet Union, where the equipment was not great.
So you're basically throwing human bodies.
And I mean, so I was thinking about how lucky, because I'm alive because the bullets, like he got hurt, his leg, he got hurt in his leg, and I'm alive because he got hurt, because severely where he couldn't continue, because that's the only way out.
And sort of most of his, most of his brothers are dead.
You're talking about 75 million people died in World War II, most of them in Europe, and 50 million of them, 50 million is civilians, so people without a gun.
I highly recommend it to people to try to understand why that tribal connection, why the community connection of people that have gone through war is so strong They actually prefer war in a lot of ways, some of them do at least, to being home.
They prefer that camaraderie.
When you're tuning this up, how are you doing this?
But anyway, in Groundhog Day, which is a Bill Murray movie, different thing, but another old school movie from like 90-something, Bill Murray lives the same life over and over again.
No matter what he does, kills himself, keeps waking up, same guy over and over again.
But he learns how to play the piano because he's like, fuck it, I should just learn a bunch of things.
And so by the end of the movie, spoiler alert, I mean, it's a fucking 30-year-old movie, but he knows how to play the piano.
He knows how to do a million different things.
And I remember thinking, like, that is really almost what it takes To be an adult and learn how to play the piano, you must have an unlimited amount of time because to delve into music, to really learn how to play...
Like if you're a Hendrix fan, I'm a huge Hendrix fan, right?
That's the reason why this podcast is named The Joe Rogan Experience.
I stole the name from Hendrix.
But the idea of me learning how to play guitar, being a Hendrix fan, trying to be as good as Hendrix, or trying to mimic what he...
Yeah, I think fundamentals is a word that doesn't offend people that means the same thing.
In jujitsu, you're a jujitsu black belt, you understand.
That's a thing that for whatever reason is, it's bothered so many people that Vinnie Magalesh was talking about Minotauro.
They were on the Ultimate Fighter together.
Minotaur was one of the coaches and Vinny Magaless was working with someone else and he was saying that Nogueira, who's Minotaur Nogueira, who's a legend.
I mean just a fucking legend.
When he was in his prime, man, he's one of my all-time favorite fighters ever.
His fight with Bob Sapp was probably one of the most legendary fights in all of mixed martial arts and one of the best examples of technique over brawn.
I mean, and he's an unbelievably tough guy.
Minotaur was just an all-time great, but Magalesh, who's a legit world champion, Vinny Magalesh, was talking about Minotaro's jiu-jitsu game, and he said it's very basic.
But Minotaro got offended by that.
It was really upset at him.
But he tried to say, like, I didn't, and I've talked to him about it personally, he's like, I didn't mean it in a bad way.
He took it in a bad way, but I was just saying it's the basics.
It's like, he does arm bars, triangles, rear naked chokes, guillotines, but it's like razor sharp.
Hodger Gracie is a great example of that.
Crone, Crone Gracie is a great example of that.
Fundamentals just sharpen to a fucking razor's edge where they just have the perfect guard pass, but standard guard passes, right?
The perfect rear naked choke, the perfect triangle choke.
They just know those values.
Fundamentals that you get taught when you're a blue belt, but they have them down to just the most refined way possible.
So that's basics in jujitsu.
It gets discussed like that.
And some people, for whatever reason, they get sensitive about it.
One, they have a phenomenally dedicated group of people that have come out of Henzo's because Henzo is an amazing guy and he fostered an incredible sense of community.
I mean, he knows how to teach you how to fuck people up, man.
And he does it in an incredibly scientific, systematic way.
The way he makes his system and how these guys can progress from being a beginner to just a few years later being able to tap really high-level black belts is sensational.
And that's what people, the reason I brought them up is people often don't think of footlocks or the lower half of the body as a part of the basics, quote unquote.
But I think Donahar is one of the people who, with Dean Lister and so on, who helped discover the basics of footlocks.
Yes, but on the point of basics, it's interesting when compared to music, this is what's mysterious to me about watching Jiu Jitsu, watching Haja Gracie, is you watch him do basics and destroy some of the greatest black belts ever.
But I can't see...
I can't see what he's doing, actually.
So when you roll, I rolled with Salo Hibero and Shanji Hibero.
But they're doing the same stuff I do, but it feels different.
And only by feeling it do I discover it.
The cool thing about music is I can actually, it's more, it reveals itself clearer by, you can hear the difference between Hendrix, like Stevie Ray Vaughan playing a bend.
Like I played Comfortably Numb, a cover of Comfortably Numb, and I put up a video.
And a bunch of people were like, your bends are not quite like David Gilmour.
The way you bend this, you know.
Yeah, that sound, that special sound, the Gary Clark Jr. sound, the Stevie Ray Vaughan sound, the Jimi Hendrix sound.
They're playing some basic shit.
I know how to play all of it.
One of the first things I learned is Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
I know how to play it, but there's got to be a soul in there that requires decades of playing the same stupid bends.
And then also dating a few questionable women, having an alcohol problem, drugs, all of that's in there.
There's a thing about music too that it seems that there's a big difference between doing it Figuring you like paint trying to keep track of what the chords are and what the notes are and Someone who knows knows they know know they get their deep in it So there's no wondering whether or not they can play it It's just simply an expression of mood in the midst of playing it that you get from like Some of Stevie Ray Vaughan shit is a good example that he
had a very bluesy moody version of guitar playing you know like some of his stuff like you could you could you could feel like pain in it you know you could feel pain and some of some of his course along with his voice too right he had that live hard voice Yeah, but it was a more of aggressive kind of pain.
Your own sound is discovered only once you get technically just good enough to mimic others and then you can just put all the technical bullshit aside And be good enough to try to hear your own voice.
So when I played the David Gilmour solo for Comfortably Numb, it doesn't feel like me, to me.
And I think the early days, I really want to make clear, because this is embarrassing, I'm not playing guitar enough these days to be impressive, so...
That's one of the things I did, you know, self-isolation now, is for the first time in a long time, this will sound weird, is I actually like laid in bed and listened to music for like, just listen.
Maybe a lot of people do this.
I don't usually do it.
Usually I'm doing something else.
I actually like laid there for the explicit purpose of just listening.
He's got speakers that are worth like a quarter of a million dollars or something preposterous.
He's dumped all of his money in his speakers.
He said, I fucking love him.
He's so unique.
And he just picks out a record and he treats these records and the creation of these records with reverence, right?
And it's really interesting to me because he's a guy who became famous as a musician.
And doesn't even do music anymore.
He basically does spoken word.
He does like his version of like kind of stand up and he's always writing.
He's very inspirational in terms of his work ethic.
He's always writing.
He writes constantly for a bunch of different publications weekly.
And then he also puts together a radio show every week.
So he puts together a playlist and he puts it on the radio and he narrates it and talks through it and guides people through his musical selections.
But he'll just sit there.
And that was like, listening to him talk about that was one of the first times I've ever actually considered like, oh yeah, there's like real value in just sitting down and just listening to music.
He said something to me once when we were both really young, more than 10 years ago, probably when I was training with him, probably 2013, like 15, 16 years ago, maybe even 17 years ago, somewhere around that range.
But we were younger and he was talking about children and having children.
That for him it was there was part of it that was for his own personal edification Like he thought of children as being important for his own like growth as a human and you know raise of deeply spiritual guys a yoga teacher and he's like And I never thought of it that way.
I was like you look at it like for your own and I'm like, okay and I think As a man and in raising these little girls and seeing these daughters grow up and for sure I've learned a lot about human beings.
But also, I learned a lot myself about my perception of humans, of babies to people.
And I've talked about this on stage briefly, but it's too weird to sort of articulate in a joke.
I used to always think of people as being a static thing.
Like I'd see a guy and he's a 55-year-old, you know, truck driver.
And I would think that guy has always been that guy.
Like, if you asked me, hey, was this guy ever a baby?
I would say, well, of course he was a baby.
But I had never intellectualized it.
I never looked at it.
And it instantly gave me so much more compassion and so much more, like...
Acceptance of people, like a relaxed acceptance, like a forgiveness of a lot of stupid shit that people do and have done.
I almost immediately, in raising kids, shifted that and thought, oh, you guys just got fucked over.
You meet an asshole, you're like, oh, your dad was probably a piece of shit.
And you probably grew up in a terrible neighborhood.
And you're probably, you know, ruined by your older brothers who are assholes.
And maybe you lived in a neighborhood where kids were stealing from you and beating you up.
Fuck!
Like, that's how you get to be this guy.
You don't get to be this guy because you just choose to be a piece of shit.
You know, that's not what happens to people.
You become something from your circumstances, your genetics.
There's so much involved in who you are.
And we, I don't think there's any, there's not much value in being mad at someone for who they are.
You know, you could kind of be mad at the impact that it has on your life, their stupidity, and we're all, you know, justified in doing that.
But I think one of the things about having children of your own is you realize when you see someone who's a mess, like, okay, I kind of see, I understand how that can happen now.
It was before I would just be mad that it's there.
And even for us, it's not universally gonna be okay.
There's people that are very young that have had serious complications and even have died.
Guys in their early 30s, dead.
So, you know, everybody's a little weirded out, but when I talk to my mom, I always feel Like I felt when I lived in the house.
I don't know if you ever experienced this, but one of the things that I experienced is when I went back home, when I went back to Newton.
I grew up in Newton, Upper Falls.
When I went back, when I was a grown man with a television show, I was on TV, I felt like a loser.
Still felt like a loser.
I'd go back to that town and I feel like I felt, when I was in high school there, I felt like an outcast and I felt like a weirdo and I felt like a loser.
And so I'd go back there and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I'm a loser.
I gotta get out of here.
There's like a part of you, I mean, I went back again with my family a few years back and I didn't have that feeling anymore.
But then you were the father of That helped too, but it's also a lot of thinking, you know, years and years and years of thinking and years of trying to appreciate all the things you've learned and process them correctly.
Do your best to have the best, most balanced perspective on what this all is.
So then when I was going back, I was just...
Really what I was tripping out more than anything is about the concept of memories, you know, because I have this weird database where I can go to this strange part of the planet Earth, this weird patch of land known as Newton Upper Falls, and I can go.
And it was surprisingly rural.
That was what was really weird.
I kind of remembered it, but then I didn't...
My wife grew up in a terrible neighborhood.
And when we went together, she grew up in a really just crime-ridden when she was really young.
And so when I took her to where I was like, you grew up easy.
This is nothing.
We were laughing about it.
But it was a lot of fields.
The Charles River was right behind my house.
I could go right across the street and hang out in the Charles River.
A lot of woods.
There was a lot of rural shit there that I kind of forgot about.
That was my, you know, 1980s style high school experience.
But going back there as a grown man, you know, and then...
And a grown man who's at least gained some Grasp of perspective, you know, I was in my 40s at the time and Wandering around this town.
It just was very interesting to to This the concept of memory was very stunning to me the concept of Accessing all these different moments where I'm thinking about different times in my life I was in these different areas and different things happen and interacted with people and I can kind of pull those up and then so it's a memory is such a strange thing man It's so strange because we all know it's flawed.
We all know it's filled with holes.
It's it's like a terrible representation of reality like if you bought memory and Like if you said, you know, hey, I'm gonna get a memory.
This guy was, he fucking won the Heisman in college and I'm gonna download his memories.
It should be awesome.
You get that guy's memories like this is nothing.
You barely remember anything.
You have a slideshow and a narrative.
You have a weird blurry slideshow that you can kind of play in the back of your head and then you have a narrative of how it all went down.
In this sort of speculative way that we're doing like now, like how many people are gonna like it's almost like people could think that it's not it doesn't give enough respect to the enormity of the moment because it's so so scary for all of us We're all in the middle of this shit right now, man.
It's fucking crazy.
This is the craziest time I've ever experienced being alive.
Driving down the streets in LA and there's no one on the road.
You know, drive to a grocery store.
There's fucking no one out there.
There's people headed to hardware stores and grocery stores.
It's not like all these bars are like, fuck you, we're open.
It's not like people are just flooding the streets.
I mean, you had a bunch of young people that are having spring break that got in trouble and people were mad at them.
You gotta realize these are 18-year-old people.
Their fucking brains aren't even formed.
Their brains are mush.
You can't fault them.
You would be doing the exact same thing.
We would all be doing the exact same thing.
These are children.
But for the adults, It's kind of incredible.
They shut everything down.
They really did.
It's shut down.
Everybody shut down.
You do a few things, you go home, and everybody settles.
There's not this mass traveling and constant interaction with people, this swarm of interactions that could lead to the spread of a virus.
Instead, there's Pretty fucking incredible levels of compliance.
If you look at the United States overall, you look at this human race that's stuck on this continent together.
Overall, there is a stunning level of compliance that I think is beautiful.
I think it's beautiful.
I think it's people realizing, okay, it's time to realize that some shit has actually happened, and we've got to band together, and we've got to figure this out.
And you got the usual suspects, conspiracy theories and 5G and fucking, they just pulled the David Icke interview.
Let's get to something that's like a universally accepted story.
Well, not universally accepted, but universally recognized story.
The Kennedy assassination.
Universally understood.
What I mean is it's a story that everybody knows.
And the story is questioned.
Almost universal.
Here's a better one.
Epstein.
Epstein's killer.
That's one.
Nobody thinks that that guy hung himself.
No one.
How about that guy?
So if you have various theories or various stories that people come out and talk about with that one, Yeah, and I just actually, yesterday, listened to Eric Weinstein's solo podcast on Jeffrey Epstein.
Look, I mean, if you just look at it from a perspective of the big theory, the big theory, right, is that he's some sort of a intelligence operative, right?
Yeah, and I tried to go back to it and listen to it again.
I'm like, while he was talking, I'm like, okay, I'm so far behind here of what he's, I'm just gonna, like, try to keep up, but recognize that I'm not going to, and then go back.
No, but it's also, I mean, this is the criticism I have, this is what I'm going to nail tomorrow and always tell him, is he almost, he hates explaining the basics of something.
He just skips ahead, right?
Even for the initiated, it's nice to go to the basics to explain, like, what are the ground we're standing on.
He skips right into the depth of things, which is beautiful, but sometimes requires you to listen.
Operative of the intelligence community, but the the pedophile thing is a mess up on the part of the intelligent so they didn't know they didn't know so well it could it could also be That he felt like he get me remember when this is all started out when he started out doing that It was all before social media, right?
So he probably thought that he had this incredible amount of power because of the fact that he was connected by the intelligence community, if he was.
I mean, I don't even want to get into depth about it because I get disgusted.
There's quite a few documentaries about sex crimes in the Catholic Church, and one of the more horrendous crimes involved that guy Ratzinger that they had to kick out as a pope.
You know, that guy was personally responsible for moving a priest who was molesting kids, moved him to a new place where he molested 100 deaf kids.
Just imagine that you could be, that that person can exist inside the structure of the Catholic religion or the Catholic Church.
And that doesn't mean they're all like that.
I mean, I'm sure there's a large amount of beautiful people that are involved in the Catholic Church.
You know, there's probably a large amount of people that really only want to do the work of God and become a better person, and that's why they're in it.
But You also can't deny that this is a thing that exists.
Like the stories of just thinking like learning more about my grandfather what was going through Russia and Europe We take for granted now that we can go to the grocery store.
We still have food We're kind of talking about it, but like imagine there's no food.
that you're starving so millions of people are going to die from start imagine what you're going to do for your family if there's no food especially so world war ii had the nice the horrible but the nice property that there was an enemy but when with the coronavirus the enemy is other people yeah yeah
and that when things get really bad not coronavirus i shouldn't say that because that's not going to get bad but a natural pandemic it's it can do it can wreck i mean it can destroy societies in ways we can't imagine and Bill Gates was basically, in his very polite, nerd way, saying that we should really be worried about it.
We should really be investing in a huge infrastructure for vaccine development, for testing, all those kinds of things.
Do you think they lean into that because they were bullied by people who work out a lot, so they think of those people who work out as like, I don't want to get into their thing.
And you kind of create a narrative where, like, jiu-jitsu or fighting is like a brute thing, just like you talked about with Greek statues having small penises.
You say all those barbarians with their big penises.
You don't want a guy with a bigger dick than you that's smart.
That's like the same thing.
You don't want a guy or a woman or a guy.
You don't want a woman who's hot and smart.
You know, like when people think of really beautiful women, they automatically assume that woman's dumb.
And oftentimes that is not the case.
Sometimes people just have awesome bone structure.
And if they stimulated themselves mentally, if they pursued things, if they had an interest in certain scientific or esoteric ideas and you underestimated them, you'd feel really humiliated if a super smart but super hot girl put you in your place and let you know, not only am I hot, but I'm fucking smarter than you, stupid.
Men don't ever want to think that.
They almost always love to assume that someone who is pretty is dumb.
Of course he was making it seem like it's gonna be easy and let me kind of walk it back like the gratitude thing was the filming was hard and but it's actually a really cool experience so before the run I wrote down 12 things I'm really grateful for like family like Family, friends, my childhood.
And as I ran, I thought about it, like what I'm going to say.
And that thinking, it's weird.
It was all for doing like recording myself, right?
But the result was like pretty profound for myself as an experience.
It's kind of similar with podcasts.
Like you and I wouldn't have this conversation without microphones.
I think just running 48 miles is a better challenge.
Because this was torture.
Okay, if people are thinking of doing it, realize that you're not doing a test of...
It's not a running test.
It's not a marathon test.
It's a test of...
It's a mental test of how much you want to do something really stupid.
I guess it's a marathon test, but you have so much more time to think about how stupid the thing you're doing is that makes it a really big mental challenge.
I did some shows at the Improv and then I was supposed to do some shows at the Comedy Store and we were talking about it and they said the room's too big because they were limiting the crowds down to 200 people.
That was the first thing they did.
So they were going to move the crowd.
They were going to move my show to another date and then open up the original room, which is a small room of 150 people.
And they were asking me if I wanted to go in there or if I wanted to just cancel and reschedule.
We were working all that out.
And then they contacted us.
They were asking me and a bunch of other comics, like, what do you think we should do here?
You know, because there's part of us that thinks we should just shut down.
And they shut down before the order was given to shut down.
They decided this is...
You know the comedy store doesn't want anybody to get sick and they were worried about people losing income But they were also saying like it's probably the right idea to just shut down and then the improv shut down shortly after But they all shut down before they were required to they just shut down because it just seemed like the walls are closing in But did you realize at that time this might be the last time way man because it might be I am I don't want to say anything but it might be a long time before you do stand-up comedy What do you think?
We're all alone with our thoughts and our paranoia and then news media, which in many cases is accelerating our anxiety because there's value in developing stories and writing stories that get people outraged or clickbait.
You know, so there's that.
And we need people just talking.
Just talking.
Just people that are just like you, talking about stuff, various walks of life.
That helps us.
This is a certain e-community that we're all a part of, you know, and...
I feel very connected to that now, you know, because this podcast is it's kind of taken on a different form over the last few years, which is one of the reasons why I actually have to address people talking about politics in me.
I'm like you guys are out of your fucking mind if you're listening to me, but I have to accept that that this is part of the new form this thing is taken and And another form this thing has taken is that it's sort of like an electronic campfire in a lot of ways.
There's a great value to people just sitting around shooting the shit.
And I know there's a lot of people at home that can't You're not chiming in.
You wish you would.
You probably have some things to say.
It's one of the reasons why comments get so aggressive sometimes.
Because people are listening, they have something to say, and they can't.
You just keep talking.
And they're like, fuck!
And they're like, but maybe you should fucking listen to your guests!
But also there's this, I think most people, not most, but there's a big percentage of the population who just enjoy being shitty, but they also enjoy being nice.
Yeah, so as long as you're able to inspire them to be nice, or at least more, because shitposting done well has a humor behind it, and actually a love and respect behind it that's kind of obvious.
Whether it's you or me, or whoever it is that they're shitting on, if they're saying something funny, and one person takes the hit, but a thousand people reading those comments go, bah!
That's so true!
Hey man, I get it.
I'm not trying to stop anybody from commenting.
You know, there was a time where the comments were blocked off because the streaming didn't allow comments because we didn't have a chat in the streaming.
If you have a chat in the streaming, it devolves into racial slurs and ethnic slurs and anti-Semitic slurs.
It's fucking chaos sometimes because people just want to see if you're reading that while you're talking, they want you to react.
So they'll write some horrible shit just so that you react sometimes.
We can't have that.
I'm not going to read that.
So I'm like, just shut off the chat.
We'll stream the show live.
But then we were uploading it.
Comments were shut off because of some sort of a flaw in the way it was processed.
So you had to have the chat on for comments to be on or something like that.
But they fixed that.
But I was...
I really wanted people to know.
If you want to talk about what we're talking about, I want you to be able to.
I can't read it because I don't have the time, and I don't think it's healthy.
There is so little time to just process life that any time that I spend trying to rationalize or trying to accept or trying to process someone's comments, like, There's not enough time for that.
I would love to do...
I try very hard to do my best.
That's what I try to do with everything.
And with this podcast, I try to do my best.
And I know sometimes I talk too much, or I talk too much, or I stumble through my words, or I'm overbearing, or this or that.
Yeah, it's a balancing act.
Sometimes you stumble.
It's weird.
It's all live.
Everything I'm doing is live with no script that millions of people get to see and listen to.
Because I find that rude people are more likely… Like I'm so fortunate to be part of a community who are really nice to me and just in general nice.
I find that they're unable to tell me sort of constructive criticisms in the following… Like if I mumble or if I'm not articulate with my ideas or if I use a certain word too much or if I'm too stuck in a certain kind of perspective, you need the asshole to come along to call you like a liberal douchebag or something like that.
I mean, that's one of the things about comedians that a lot of people had a hard time.
When we started doing podcasts, one of the things that a lot of people had a hard time with was how mean we are to each other.
Like me and Brian Callen and Eddie Bravo and Brennan Schaub when we start goofing on each other or other comics that come in here and goof on each other.
When we goof on each other, we goof on each other hard.
You know, but there's fun in that.
Like, we all enjoy it.
Like, comedians to each other, some of the fucking meanest people ever.
Like, when no one's around, we say, some of the fucking group chats I'm in where people shitting on each other, it is hilarious.
It's so mean, but really fucking funny.
And we also do that as an exercise because it calluses you to other people's insults and to that.
Like, there's...
It's a thing that men do to each other.
They shit on each other.
First of all, to keep each other in check.
And they expect you to do that to them.
But also, to kind of toughen you to people that don't love you.
They're going to talk shit.
You know, you're used to it.
You know, look, if you grow up in a place like, you know, that is filled with people that are always drunk and it's cold out, like Boston.
People talk a lot of shit.
Talk a lot of shit to each other.
That's one of the reasons why so many great comics came out of Boston.
It's because it's fucking cold and people don't have time for your bullshit.
And because of that, because of that lack of attention span or short attention span, you learn how to come out of the gate fast and you learn how to appreciate people's time.
But by the way, he has the thickest skin of any fucking human I've ever met in my life.
Never, in all my years of knowing that guy, and I've known Cal for 25 years, 25 fucking years, never have I seen him get upset at someone mocking him or insulting him, getting legitimately insulted by it.
I've never seen him.
Never.
It just goes like this.
Bounces off like rhino skin.
He literally loses zero enthusiasm.
And it's not that he's not an introspective guy.
It's not that he's not an objective guy.
He has a unique ability to handle insults.
And he'll even rebroadcast those.
Like if his friends are shitting on him, he'll be like, can you believe these guys?
will sink in sadness And the way of them to talk Don't lose yourself to madness The way out is love When the New York towers crumble We were all New Yorkers too For a moment all just human Not the same old red or
blue And the wicked will go on scheming For the power in the pain But the heart that longs for freedom Is a fire they'll never tame Some days will sink in sadness The weight of them to talk Don't lose yourself to madness The way out is love The
virus took our comfort that was never ours to own When the enemies inside us were together but alone This life is so damn fragile,
a leaf caught by the wind But every breath that's tragic Ignites a hope within Some days will sink in sadness The way of them too tough Don't lose yourself to madness The way out is love Lex Friedman, ladies and gentlemen.
Last time I came on, I really wanted to play Hendrix.
And I actually had my guitar, and I chickened out.
So I thought, okay, because it's actually technically really difficult to play in front of a lot of, you know, because you're not going to let me, like, try a few times, right?
Hendrix on acoustic guitar is really tough to play.
It's easier to play voodoo child with distortion because you can mess up.
It's also a nice blues scale so you can let it ring.
You can just jam out.
You can go Gary Clark Jr. mode.
But with acoustic, every mess-up has a, like, it's silence after.
So acoustic doesn't ring for a long time when you play individual notes.
It dies quickly.
So you can hear mess-ups really easily.
So I knew if I mess up, it's going to just sound bad, and I knew I would freak out and so on.
So I just thought to do something where I just strum chords, where I can't screw it up at all.
And then...
The virus thing just made me think.
I was talking to my dad a lot about my grandfather.
It made it so real to me because I studied World War II a lot, especially the Holocaust and all that.
But the fact that just learning about my grandfather just made it so real to me.
It kind of connected everything together.
Plus, there's a book I recommend people read by Albert Camus called The Plague.
That he wrote right after World War II. I don't know if you know who he is, he's like an existentialist philosopher.
Existentialists believe that you have to live, like life is absurd, life is suffering, and there's no meaning to it all.
You just have to live the moment and take each moment as it comes and live it to the fullest kind of idea.
So he described this town that got overtaken by the plague in the book, The Plague.
Kind of similar to Bubonic Plague, basically similar characteristics.
And writes about how everybody reacts in different ways.
The main character is a doctor who basically sees the absurdity of the suffering around him, that there's no meaning to it all.
That's the thing about the virus.
Like with the Nazis and with wars, there's an enemy.
You can kind of trace back and understand what was happening.
But the virus, it just seems like it comes out of nowhere.
And it breaks the spine of the way we think of regular life.
Like some people try to cling on to regular life as if nothing is happening.
Which, by the way, it's kind of like what a lot of our society is doing right now.
We're not yet...
We haven't really felt the pain yet.
And hopefully won't.
But there's this kind of calm before the storm kind of period.
And then some people become more religious.
They start to search for the bigger meaning of life outside of the material possessions.
And then the doctor represents the idea that no matter what, he gives himself fully to his craft of helping other human beings.
And overall there's a story that This idea that suffering is just part of life and the only way...
There's a natural temptation when there's cruelty and suffering all around you to isolate yourself and to withdraw from life because anything you do in life is going to lead to suffering.
Dating, like if you get married, it's going to lead to suffering because eventually you're going to lose the people you love.
So there's a natural desire to withdraw.
But in fact, what he found, the doctrine, what he saw around him, is that love and compassion, like giving yourself fully to the love of other human beings towards community, is the only way to deal with that kind of suffering.
To me, it's a really profound story about About love being the right response in a time of crisis.
And a crisis that hits everybody.
You want to kind of hide from it, but it's actually where more suffering happens.
It's a kind of profound book that I recommend people read.
Most people have read him in high school.
There's a book called The Stranger.
But that one in particular seems so connected to us.
Oh, sorry.
He wrote it as an allegory for World War II. So the plague in that case is the Nazis.
That it just hits out of nowhere.
His book was really popular.
I think in 1947 he wrote it as a kind of allegory of World War II, a way to talk about the virus that first infects the rats and then affects the weaker humans and then affects everybody.
It was a connection and an allegory and analogy to the Nazis.
And so I saw the connection between now and the Nazis.
Of course the scale there with World War II was much more intense.
And finally just how fragile this whole damn thing is.
My grandfather had probably a single digit percentage chance of living.
Most people died.
Most soldiers died, especially in those early years of 1941 when the Nazis...
Basically, Stalin was using Russian soldiers and just human beings as human shields.
Yeah, just threw bodies at the problem.
So the fact that my grandfather survived seems crazy.
And I do all these things.
I'm here talking to you, wearing a stupid tie.
All of that is connected to he somehow survived.
All those ripple effects, me doing research, I hope to impact Billions of people one day.
Those little ripple effects, how fortunate I am to be part of that.
If you stopped and think if you were a cow or a carrot or tomato plant or avocados or chickens or...
Think of the things we fucking consume.
Think of the living things that we pull out of the ground and shove into our bodies and Consume now think of that was something else think of that was you know if there was A population of animals, like tuna, that just got wiped out by something the way we wipe them out.
You go, whoa, like, oh yeah, there's a tuna virus, and it's literally killed 80% of all the tuna in the ocean.
We're down to like 20% capacity in tuna.
Fuck, man, what happened?
Yeah, it's called sushi.
It's called people.
This virus with boats literally goes hundreds of miles out into sea with these giant fucking fiber nets that it's created.
And it sucks these things into the nets and pulls them out with giant cranes and dumped them into a refrigerated hull and then brings them back to shore to get cut up and sold.
But they have perceptions that other people don't agree with, just like everybody else.
Leading scientists tell CNN that it's possible the virus didn't just come from bats in the past months, but it may have existed in humans many months, even years before it grew into a deadly pandemic.
They need to figure out a way to make money off of it, but we need the top of the food chain journalism, right?
And that's what the Times has always represented.
We need them.
So when someone's done something for the Times, it's not so good or flawed, yeah, okay, but it's still not.
That one person, that one article, whatever it is, is not the Times.
The Times stands for something, right?
What the New York Times is supposed to stand for, what it always did when I was a kid, and does now to a lot of people still, it's the cream of the crop.
It's the very best journalism.
It's the very best.
It's the ones that have the deepest insight, the ones that nail it.
And we'd like it free of bias, but it's run by humans.
You know, this is the problem with CNN, it's the problem with any news source, but we still need news sources.
But it's run by humans that need high salaries and there's a huge amount of people involved in making that system that is a CNN. So there's several mechanisms of innovation required.
First, like this podcast here, podcasts in general, require very few people to run.
Now that there's an infrastructure to communicate with a lot of people.
There are some journalists out there that are online, though, that are thriving because of the problems with legacy media.
It's an opportunity.
It represents, for God's sake, Tim Pool, my friend Tim Pool.
Tim Pool's a fantastic journalist.
He's really objective.
You might disagree with him or you might not find his perspective.
To be in the line with yours, but that guy, he holds those journalistic ethics at the highest level.
I mean, to the highest standard with him.
It's everything.
And when you read his take on or see him make a take on things, he is giving you the most honest, objective take on it possible.
And it's really hard to get that from a network.
First of all, it's really hard to get what he does for a network because you're going to get these giant chunks Where he can talk about something for as long as it takes to describe what the issue is.
Whereas CNN has a segment, man.
That segment is fucking seven minutes long.
You better be dumb by seven minutes.
We're going to commercial, and then we're coming back with Don Lemon, and he's got a sassy take on things.
And then Andrew Cooper's got new glasses.
Look at that, handsome bastard.
And then they're all going to talk about shit, and you've got to listen.
And it's Trump is bad, coronavirus deadly, and holy shit, Chris Cuomo's got it.
Let's go to Chris.
He's in his basement.
And then you see Chris in his basement with Sanjay Gupta, and they're holding up chest x-rays.
You know, they...
There's segments, man.
Segments are bullshit.
It's dumb.
You have these standards that you've created a long fucking time ago, and this is the biggest handicap that legacy media has other than their inability to be free, like a guy like Tim Pool is.
He's an independent.
They can't be free like he is.
You have too many working pieces, too many producers, too many people that are telling you what direction.
It's possible, but people can look at things like you have an idea, a subjective idea of what something means when you're looking at it objectively.
So you're looking at a thing objectively.
You're being honest about what it says.
But you also have preconceived notions of what each individual aspect of that certain thing means and what's good and what's bad.
That's where the subjective aspect of objectivity comes in.
When you look at certain things that happen, there's certain ways you can look at something and not have a bias, but look at something and you have a preconceived idea of what aspects of it should or should not be tolerated.
And maybe sometimes it takes someone else to come along and say, okay, well, why do you hold these beliefs?
So, yeah, you're absolutely right, but the problem is that Based on your skill set and your momentum in history, you might look at a very particular aspect objectively and not see the bigger picture.
Tim Pool has revealed and has focused on certain aspects of problems in the system.
And he continues to focus on them, maybe not seeing the bigger picture.
That's impossible for any one person to see the bigger picture, I think.
I tend to see, in a lot of things, the beauty of things.
You can be positive, you can be negative, you can be very cold and fact-based, you can be very flamboyant and very kind of excited, use a lot of visuals, all those kinds of things.
And all of that changes the way the message is carried.
Especially now, I don't know if you've been paying attention, but YouTube, there's so many people, like my brother, has now put the camera on themselves and say their opinions.
While they're on lockdown, people are doing the Lockdown Chronicles.
I think it's a symbol of where we're going.
Right?
You're becoming...
Look, when I do this thing, I'm doing this thing four or five days a week, and I'm becoming more connected with people in some weird way that no one ever thought it was ever going to happen before.
Where there's people that are listening to my voice right now in their ear while they're running.
Right?
A lot.
Not a small amount.
If you could see the actual number of people right now with earbuds in, running, listening to this podcast, you'd be like, whoa!
This kind of connection is a dip into the next dimension.
That's what this is.
And it seemed like it wasn't.
It seemed like it was just a radio show you were doing on the internet.
But then somewhere along the line, it became this weird thing.
And that's what it is now.
Podcasts are a weird thing, especially one that reaches the numbers of people that this one reaches.
And for that to be in my hands is a weird position.
And while it's happening, I'm like, oh, look how fucking strange this is.
Huh.
I didn't anticipate this.
I always anticipated this being some weirdo fringe thing that very few people would connect with, which is why I never tried to censor it at all.
I tried to do a vast majority of it completely high out of my mind and hang out with fun people and just talk shit and have a good time and not have a different perspective.
Some people have a public voice and a private voice.
Well, he was also incorrect about CWD, chronic wasting disease, not being an elk and some other ungulates.
He's wrong about that.
My friend Doug Duren corrected that to me.
He sent a text to me about it that...
He listened to a few of the aspects of that podcast and he was like, he's incorrect about several things.
He was correct in the dangers of CWD, which is chronic wasting disease, which is a disease that they are absolutely terrified is going to make the jump from animals to people.
It's very similar to like a mad cow disease.
But it has its own prions.
He also sent me a text explaining that prions are not actually alive.
They're not a living thing.
It's like a protein or a type of protein.
Is that what it is?
Prions?
Whatever the fuck it is, you can't kill it.
It's almost impossible to kill.
They can sterilize it for three cycles of medical sterilization techniques and for three cycles of insane temperatures.
And there's still trace elements of prions on the medical equipment.
It's a crazy thing.
If that gets into people, we have a real huge problem.
So this is a real dress rehearsal.
Have you seen all these people that are recovering from this?
There's nobody recovering from chronic wasting disease.
No one.
Every deer that gets it dies.
They all die and they die in a horrible way.
Their body rots away.
And they're walking around like a skeleton and they're vomiting all this goo and slime that comes out of them that's infected with CWD and then these animals come along and eat those leaves that they were eating and that they threw up on and then they get it too.
It's crazy.
This stuff even can get apparently into the DNA of some plants.
One of the really interesting things that's amazing on a positive note is that it seems like we haven't seen a virus that's both, or any kind of thing that jumps to humans, that's both deadly and spreads easily.
When would it become something that does tip that scale and become something more catastrophic?
Well, if you were looking at it objectively outside the system, you would say, well, when one part of the system becomes overbearingly powerful— That's us.
So the weight of ants is the same as the weight of all the people.
That's how many ants there are, which is pretty crazy if we stop and think about it.
But they don't have the same impact in terms of their impact on other creatures, like the tuna that we're pulling out of the sea, their impact on the pollution.
Well, not only that, death that was probably left to rot out in the streets and horrendous smells and people didn't understand viruses and diseases back then.
In some places, as many as 90% were killed by European diseases, smallpox and the like.
90%.
I mean, imagine something that just comes to America and wipes out 90% of us, and then you understand what it must have been like for the Native Americans when they encounter the European diseases that the Europeans had already developed antibodies for.
What I'm saying, though, is overall the number of people, the percentage of people that have died from this and then compare that to the impact that smallpox had on Native Americans.
I don't know, but I'm saying if there was a movie or a television show where people behaved with social distancing and everyone was afraid of everyone's viruses, like the reality that we're experiencing right now.
If there was a television show like that, you'd be like, what?
What kind of weird fucking show is this?
You would think it's so strange that there's a virus that makes New York City quiet.
And there's a lot of people that don't even know what it is.
And you get infected and then it gets systemic.
Gets in your blood and you know there's a lot of people that just don't know any better and they're not good at going to the doctor and they Develop some sort of infection by the time they go somewhere and take care of it It's really bad and they're in trouble like they could die, but thank God they have fucking medicine for that at least they can give you a fighting chance So people aren't afraid of jujitsu.
You still do jujitsu even though people get staph.
You know, I know a bunch of people that have gotten staph from training.
A lot.
They could all be dead if it wasn't for remedies, right?
If it wasn't for antibiotics, if it wasn't for, you know, taking the proper care and treating it.
Apparently some people have treated staph organically.
And Rhonda Patrick was actually talking about, I think she had MRSA. At one point and as part of the treatment along with antibiotics, she introduced garlic into the actual wound itself and apparently that had a pretty profound effect.
She's talking about different nutrients that support your immune system, particularly vitamin D. She takes a lot of vitamin D. But she's just talked about all the various forms, whether it's through sauna or cold plunges.
She's the one who turned me on to that, all that stuff, heat shock proteins, cold shock proteins, and the impact of it.
And there's some videos that you could find online of her talking about it.
She's also written some articles about it, and she's just a huge fan of that hormetic response and how important that is to your system, keeps your system healthy.
Dude, I've been doing it seven days a week, which I wasn't doing before.
It's like the top of it is the degrees and the bottom of it is the humidity and you're supposed to calculate those and find out exactly how hot it feels.
But either way, you throw a little bit of water.
I throw three little spoonfuls of water on that bit and just sit there and fucking suffer.
And when you get out of there, everything just feels looser and more relaxed.
As soon as your body comes back to a normal temperature, you just feel so much better.
So this fucking workout goes on and he's shredded.
Look at my boy Keith.
Look at him.
Showing you how to get your fuck muscles going.
But this is him explaining the correct way to do kettlebell swings.
But I... I mean, you can get a lot of his workouts online.
There's a lot of workouts online from people.
If you've got a YouTube account or a computer that gets online, go to YouTube and find these kettlebell workouts that people put online for free because they put a great workout up there for free just so that you subscribe to their page.
They'll give you some value and what you're giving them is a large audience.
There's some fucking great workouts.
Bodyweight workouts as well that are free.
Free videos online.
Follow along and you can do everything from your living room and you can get blasted.
I mean, you can have a crazy workout from a lot of videos.
You can get up to really high numbers and it's a glorious form of torture and it's crazy how much it develops your legs.
Particularly the quads like right above the knee.
You know these little muscles that are on the side?
Like that hurts from Hindu squats more than fucking anything I've done.
Ever.
It targets those so uniquely because when you're at the bottom, when your heel is up and you're on the ball of your foot and you rise up, it's like all that muscle for the whole beginning of the rise.
It's all that part of the quad right by the knee.
It's a really unique way to target that muscle.
And guys who do it a lot, like a lot of those dudes are really into catch wrestling.
They would do like 500 a day, every day.
They all have these like preposterous legs.
And that was, like, a big part of the development of their strength, was just doing ridiculous numbers of Hindu squats.
And you can also do, like, I usually, I used to do them a lot, like, especially when I competed in the jiu-jitsu and wrestling, I would do a lot of them, and I would also, like, jump.
So, like, you explode into the squats, as opposed to sort of slow.
That is a weird choice to wear wrestling shoes if someone can heel hook you.
Unless you're like a heel hook Dean Lister master.
One of those Gary Tonin type dudes that knows how to do it from every angle.
Like for them, actually, I would say like a...
Pride was still around.
Pride let you wear wrestling shoes.
There is a significant advantage from being able to wear wrestling shoes.
Significant.
Not just for your wrestling, but also for your striking.
And Crow Cop wore wrestling shoes for a little bit.
Crow Cop head kicked someone with wrestling shoes on.
I don't remember who it was.
Might have been Mark Hunt.
And I remember thinking, fuck man, he could kick people with shoes on?
That almost seems nuts.
Because the amount of traction that you can get from a rubber sole with texture on the bottom of it versus just your foot, your slippery-ass, bullshit foot that's slipping around on the canvas.
With your wrestling shoes on, you get traction when it's wet.
You get traction everywhere.
Even if there's a puddle on the floor, you get traction with a wrestling shoe where you wouldn't get it with a bare foot.
Well, Ray Longo, who I respect very much, said that fighters shouldn't be fighting because, I don't know if he said they shouldn't be fighting, but he said he definitely felt like it wasn't fair to the fighters because they don't have a full camp.
They're not going to be able to show who they really are.
Like, a normal person out of shape, like you or I would get.
But for Justin Gage, it really depends entirely on how much time he's been spending in the gym.
He's a man with a plan, right?
He's trying to be the UFC lightweight champion.
So he's probably not getting too out of shape.
And he probably knew that in this case there is a potential that one of those guys could drop out because they've already made that fight four fucking times and it fell apart.
So this is the fifth time it's fallen apart, which is nuts.
I think there are some people that they asked to be on standby.
They have definitely done that before and they've asked guys to make weight and there's a lot of guys that have been through a full camp and they're paid for a full camp and they're paid to make weight.
This is something that's happened several times in the UFC's history where guys show up because they're there to fight and step in if something falls apart.
Especially if you have a guy who maybe struggles with weight cutting and you might fall apart and get pulled from a fight.
Or someone who's maybe injured or sick and they're like a little nervous with this fight.
unidentified
We're getting super fights every week, do you think?
I just wanted to talk – not wanted, but I think what they wanted is to talk with the NSF and certain heads of the administrations and just saying this is a really – it's important for us as a country to stay ahead on innovation in terms of artificial intelligence.
So that kind of conversation.
It's a little bit – It's a little bit less about getting into the human story of a human being, which I think Trump is one of the most interesting people that have been in office.
I think he would do it because he will understand who I am.
And the second part is I have a little bit of a Conor McGregor situation going on where everything I've done in my life that I decided I'm going to do always happens.
Father, I said, I'm looking for The meaning I should be living for He put a finger to my lips and said, shh, let the old man speak They call me Brian Callahan.
unidentified
In this cruel world there is a man you should listen to as you journey on through life.
His name is Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan.
Shoulders for days and a really wide bag.
Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan.
Barrel of snakes for a bag.
Then he mounted his horse And he looked to the sky And he rode to the sunset With a tear in his eye And the legend goes The old man rides on Singing the words To this terrible song Joe Rogan You