Jon Stewart and Joe Rogan critique modern political commentary as performative, comparing it to pro wrestling, while Stewart rejects comedy’s role in driving systemic change. They expose veterans’ healthcare neglect—burn pit victims denied care despite clear toxic exposure links—and COVID-19 bailouts favoring corporations over essential workers. Stewart’s veganism stems from farm animals’ emotional capacity, contrasting Rogan’s defense of ethical hunting and natural cycles. Both agree factory farming demands reform to prevent societal collapse, echoing JFK’s warnings, yet Rogan remains hopeful about progress. Stewart’s shift to advocacy, paired with Rogan’s pragmatic optimism, highlights the urgent need for structural accountability over symbolic gestures. [Automatically generated summary]
The economic system that's been set up around politics is the very same that Vince McMahon set up around wrestling.
You create...
I mean, it is a kind of, you know, kayfabe.
It's a sort of like...
There are characters.
You know what it's like.
When you're trying to produce something every day, you're going to go with kind of a boilerplate structure.
So you're going to say, all right, our show revolves around...
You're from the right.
You're from the left.
Whatever comes in, we're going to filter it through that.
We're going to keep it producible.
But it starts to, like you say, it becomes inauthentic.
But the same thing would happen to me sometimes with, like I'd be doing shows and you would know you weren't necessarily feeling the Outrage of something or that the commentary was going to be as spicy or as deep as you might want it, but you might kick it up a notch anyway because it was performative.
I always had to fight that instinct to not give in to the gravity of what was expected of me.
Well, it's such a tightrope to walk because you're commenting, you're doing comedy on something that's actually serious.
And it's great to mock the ridiculous aspects of it, but really, if you're doing The Daily Show right now, we really are in a legitimately troubled time.
It's not like a troubled time of ten years ago or eight years ago.
No, and I think as that builds up, it becomes harder and harder.
But I can recall, you know, people will say sometimes, and look, I think there's a certain nostalgia that people...
View my time on the show has.
And I'm not being self-deprecated.
I just mean, you know, when you walk away from something, I think a kind of nostalgia about how, you know, I took a fair amount of shit while I was there.
But the point is, like, Charleston happened when I was hosting that show.
And what would happen is you started to feel like you were expected to say something profound about it.
And you knew that you didn't really have that in you at times or just that's a bar that was beyond, you know, you really did just want to help your staff get through it more than anything else.
And so these events would come up and the weight of Feeling like you had to say something meaningful in that moment for people because that's the role that either they had, you know, let you know that you had in their lives or that the show kind of took on, you know, became kind of difficult to navigate.
Because the shit is so cyclical.
Man, I could go back and do you my 10 War on Christmas bits when that shit would flare up.
But at a certain point when things like Charleston happened or Eric Garner, I had nothing in the tank comedically.
All I could do was stare into the camera and just express sadness and help us.
You know what it is?
It's impotent rage at a certain point.
You rage against it, but over a period of 16 years, if you feel the thing you're raging against grow stronger and kind of collapse on top of you and you not make headway, nobody likes to piss in the ocean.
You like it, but at a certain point, if that's your job, I think people began to look at the show like it was supposed to change things.
Look, people are begging for The Rock to run for president.
This is how desperate we are.
People have asked me to do it.
Look, I'm a fucking bona fide moron.
You don't want me running anything.
You certainly don't want me running the country.
And if enough people have actually asked for that, you just know there's a feeling of desperation in the air.
And...
When you were running that show and you were doing great comedy about real shit, and as this real shit compounds and piles up and it doesn't seem to have any effect on this real shit, all this great comedy, after a while I can understand why it would start to feel like...
What am I doing here?
How long?
Do you know who, what is that guy's name who was doing the resistance, the guy who was in the basement of GQ? Ken Olbermann?
You know, it seems like trying to enact change is so difficult that when actual change happens, it's one of the reasons why it happens in such a big way.
It's like there were so many people bounding at the wall and pounding at this wall that when, boom, when the George Floyd protests broke through, then all of a sudden it's, we've got real change.
Let's take down these fucking statues and light everything on fire, and there's this feeling Of change and of chaos that is also representative of the fact that it takes so long to turn our cultural battleship.
It's like to actually get a real turn is so hard.
Everything stays the same no matter how mad people get.
Like, this shit's not going to get fixed by HBO Max pulling Gone with the Wind.
Like, it's fine.
When you pull a movie, nobody was planning on watching on a streaming service nobody can find.
We're still at the symbolic stage.
We're still doing the shit that is symbolic.
This is where leadership becomes such a crucial component.
You have this great Awakening of energy, it has to be channeled into something lasting and meaningful, and we have to diagnose the real problem underlying this moment so that we don't make a mistake in just changing the window dressing and the gilding on the buildings.
It seems like the shift is big enough that something is going to happen in that regard.
It just seems like this shift is nothing like anything we've ever seen in our lifetime.
And it's worldwide.
Which is really crazy.
Like the George Floyd death sparked all these protests worldwide.
Which has really never happened before with anything that really has taken place in America.
And it just seems like...
There was also a lot of frustration during the bailout period of the COVID crisis that all these corporations were getting so much money that people got one $1,200 check and then there was no more talk.
So that's what I'm talking about by structural change.
I feel like in this moment, this horrible...
A crime and murder sparked something.
But what's underlying that is not just the racial inequality and the inequities, but this whole idea of we build our society economically from the top down.
Well, like, when you're in a pandemic, right, and tens of thousands of people are dying, and then we say to ourselves, all right, Well, who are the essential workers?
Who are the ones that are the fabric of our society and culture that keep the wheels turning and the trains running?
Who are those people?
Well, it turns out they're the most poorly compensated people in our society.
I don't think we can have the structural change until we flip that.
Like, fuck, man.
When people talk about freedom...
And liberty?
What's more for freedom and liberty than not having your health insurance tied to your job?
What kind of freedom do you have to make decisions in your life when you fear that if I take a chance, if I go for something, if I try and change my lot in life, my kids will no longer be covered by...
All the things that we built up to accept, I think we have to...
Turn it over.
And it has to lean more.
People should be able to have, like, a dignity...
You should be able to work a job and not be poor.
You should be able to work a job and not need food stamps.
You know, it's funny, I was talking, a friend of mine named DT, who is, you know, he was really, like, grievously wounded in war, right?
And I was talking, we were talking about, like, coronavirus, and I was like, I feel like I'm in fucking danger when I go out.
And he was like, yeah, welcome to being downrange.
You know what I mean?
It's just not, it's not something that we as Americans would ever consider We're really sheltered in a lot of ways to what a great vast majority of the world faces, but also what a vast majority of our own citizens face in terms of having lives that they feel are built on sand as opposed to granite.
And so his point was like, yeah, you know, that's what it feels like when you're in a war, but I signed up for that.
But like bus drivers and grocery store workers, like, They had to fucking decide, like, I need this money more than I need to protect my life and maybe the health of my family.
It really did highlight what's essential, though, which is, back to your point about this idea of income equality.
People will balk at that, like, hey, this is a game.
If you want to figure it out, figure out how to make more money.
Invest and do this and become a banker, and you fucked up and you wanted to be an artist, or you fucked up and you wanted to be a carpenter, you should have been a, you know, whatever.
And Oh, my God.
If you don't have healthcare.
All that stuff is not...
None of that money means anything if the fabric of society deteriorates to a point where literally everybody has to stay in their home and you can't work.
And that's what happened.
And it really flipped the whole thing on its head because we had to consider survival.
We had to really consider survival instead of just existence.
We were saying, oh my god, we have to protect ourselves from this viral attack.
Right, to get a job when you get out where you're not going to make a fraction of that every year, so you're going to be behind the eight ball for the rest of your life.
Now think about, you know, black people not being able to build equity and wealth through generations of, you know, government policy that excluded them from, you know, from whether it's the Homestead Act or the Federal Housing Administration or the GI Bill.
You know, all these government interventions...
Socialism, if you will, entitlements, if you will, were made to help white families build equity, right?
Over generations.
Black people were explicitly excluded from that.
So add that on top of the amount of money that you're going and you start to see the hole that we've dug for people.
And if we don't address that hole, I don't care how many fucking...
Because I still think to this day, and I don't know how your experience with this is, but like, I still think there's a large swath of, you know, white people in society who feel like they blame black people for not being able to get out of this hole that we put them in or that white people in society who feel like they blame black people for not being able But they think it's a problem of culture and virtue.
Like, hey man, if they would just pull their pants up and talk different, you know, they wouldn't have such a hard time.
Yeah, it's a dangerous narrative whenever you blame people for their circumstances, if their circumstances are grossly out of their control and really severely limit their progress.
And that exists also for, if you want to talk about coal mining populations in Kentucky.
No plus.
We don't all start out at the same starting block.
So all you pull yourself up by your own bootstrap, motherfuckers, you're lucky you have arms.
There's people out there born with no arms.
We should all be thinking of ourselves in this country as a community, not as a bunch of people in competition with each other.
We're all piling our money together every year.
We throw our taxes into the mix to try to take care of the infrastructure and the government and the housing and all the different things that get paid for by our taxes.
We're a community, man, and we're not thinking like a community.
We're thinking like a bunch of people that don't want other people to have the same shot in life.
I think you struck on something, though, that's very important in all this, and that is a theory of limited resources.
A lot of the conflict between what you would consider the more nativist wing of American politics and The more progressive side is this idea of resource guarding.
I work my fucking ass off.
I play by the rules and they're going to take all my labor and they're going to pour it into these people.
And I do think we have to address that idea that we're here to build equity.
Let's all get together and the project of this next generation is to build a stronger foundation, a granite bearing for everyone to stand on so that there's a few people standing on Mount Everest.
and everybody else is in sand and quicksand isn't the way that we run the society.
And think of these programs not as entitlements, but investments.
If we invest in dignity of work shit and start building that up, well, food stamps and welfare start to go away.
Because we're building something more substantial.
unidentified
We built a great middle class in the 50s for white people.
that nobody is saying and your lives are fucking cake it's not like it's going to change your life that much either man this this mentality that oh bernie sand like when i was a supporter of bernie sanders when he was running i got pushback from people that were like uh so you want to give your hard-earned money more of it away to the government and you think the government's going My perspective was, if you just looked at it this way, if you could give...
Let's just get crazy.
If you could give 25% more money to taxes, but the world would be 50% better, wouldn't you want to invest in that?
I understand that people are check to check.
I understand.
But if people like me, people that earn a good amount of money are the ones who are going to be hit the hardest.
If you wanted a better world...
Wouldn't you be willing to invest some of your money into that better world?
And if that money goes to making sure that no one has to do this in the future and that we develop this It's a question of, you know, when you look at the greatest anti-poverty program we've ever put in place, it's Social Security.
Now, the flip side of that is what they'll say is that the problem with some of this is they don't trust the mechanism by which that money is going to be invested.
Because they've been sold, to some extent, a little bit of a lie that this trickle-down theory.
So every administration that comes in is going to stimulate the economy.
They all do it.
We don't have a free market.
The Fed right now is driving so much money into stocks.
You're talking about zero interest rates, negative interest rates.
They're driving everything away from bonds and savings so that the stock market, which for some reason we've come to look at like a pulse oximeter, Of the nation, which it's not.
It's, you know, oh my God, we lost 300 DAOs today.
Like, we've come to look at it like it's our temperature.
So, in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, I mean, this will go back generations, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of the...
They would build these sometimes 10-acre, 20-acre pits.
Everything would go into them from mess waste to hazardous materials to computers to everything.
They light it with jet fuel and they burn it.
So now you've got guys that are downrange that are also down...
I mean, they're living...
They're basically camping out in a toxic waste dump, right?
Oh, Jesus.
So they come home...
And you're starting to see pulmonary issues, cancer issues.
These guys are dying.
And they're not being...
They have to advocate against the government.
So we're trying to put together, working with this team coalition, wounded warrior groups and people, VSOs and groups like that, to address this legislatively similar to what was done for the 9-11 community, right?
So I thought...
Because it's always about money.
You know, we always have money for war, but we almost never have money to pay for what are the absolutely could have seen coming a mile away consequences of what our veterans face when they come back, right?
We don't take care of them.
When they're out of sight, they're out of mind.
And so my idea was you have all these profiteers, Raytheon, Halliburton, all these groups, make them kick in 10% big.
A contingency in war so that when these guys go home and the government backs away, there is money there to take care of what is the natural damage that's done to these people in the name of fighting for our country.
So that they don't, and their families, I mean these people have to become their own lawyers.
They have to go in front of medical boards and they have no support.
Their families are oftentimes caring for them, whether they have health issues or traumatic brain injury or, you know, other kinds of invisible wounds.
You know, the UFC had a program back in the day where we were working with the Intrepid Center for Excellence to work with traumatic brain injury patients and to raise money for them.
And we were doing this UFC fight for the troops to raise money for it.
And what got me sick was, how is it that we have to do this?
Like, how is it that this isn't something that's taken care of in the budget?
Clearly, in advance, you're right.
You're blowing people up and you're not preparing for people to come back injured.
You're sending young, brave women and men to die for their country or risk severe brain damage and you don't have enough money set aside to treat them when they return.
You've got a five-year window, but if you get something that they deem was not service-related, so you could have been There's a guy in Texas, we work with his wife Rosie and Leroy Torres, who's literally like, his case wouldn't be, they denied his case in front of the Texas Supreme Court.
Yeah, the jet fuel burn at the Trade Center is another excellent example of first responders, right, that were terribly sick, and many, many of them died because of the fumes, and people in the surrounding areas.
In fact, Donna Summers died of lung cancer, and she lived near there.
Jimmy Zendroga, he was a cop, and he got really sick.
I mean, Those guys developed the pile cough like a day into the search and rescue, but Jimmy's and Joey, he gets sick, and they kept trying to tell him that, A, first it was in his head, and then it was, it had nothing to do with where you were and working on the pile in 9-11, and then they tried to say, like, it's from snorting drugs.
They fucking, you know, ruin this man's reputation as he's dying.
He dies, they do an autopsy, in his lungs.
Everything you could possibly imagine from a pulverized building.
I think along the same lines we're talking about reform of the police department, there has to be some reform of the healthcare system that deals with veterans because it seems to be just this long history of doing it a certain way to save the most money possible and the idea that these guys are sacrificial anyway.
They're sending them off to potentially die if they come back alive.
They do their very best to not treat them and to not spend any more money on them.
It's sick.
It's amazing we have so many guys that are still patriotic, that still want to go and do this, considering the fact that they're treated so poorly when they return.
And they lose, you know, listen, being in the military is isolating in the first place.
It's just not that, you know, it's only less than 1%, I think, of the population.
Put on top of that, when you get out, you know, you're used to being with a unit, you're used to that camaraderie, you're used to all pulling for the same, you know, working as a team.
Well, now you're removed from your unit, and if you're hurt, that's even further isolating.
You know, and in that moment, to have to then, you're worried about your future, your family's future, and in that moment, when you, when that's when the government should step in and go, hey man, You fulfilled your service to us.
Well, I think, again, this speaks to what's going on in this country in terms of revolt.
That we realize, like, all this stuff, whether you're talking about the healthcare system, whether you're talking about police reform, whether you're talking about impoverished communities that are stricken with crime and drugs, it's not changing...
Under the normal conditions.
Something has to happen, and something has to happen in a big way to change it.
And all these things need to be addressed, right?
Healthcare of soldiers needs to be addressed, reform of the police, reform of these communities.
It has to be addressed.
If you're going to spend trillions of dollars to bail out these large corporations, you've got to work on these other problems too.
You can't just ignore them because they're not the ones who are funding your campaign.
And I remember asking the Treasury Secretary at the time, you know, this is a mortgage question, right?
Because the derivatives made it like a geometric problem.
So if they're bundling mortgages and 8% of those mortgages go underwater, it sinks the derivatives market, which is trillions of dollars as opposed to billions of dollars.
So I said, you know, with all that money, what if you just made those mortgages that were underwater hold?
Because the moment you do that, doesn't that fix your derivative problem?
Haven't you just made, and plus then people get to keep their houses?
What he said to me was, you can't do that because of moral hazard. - Huh? - So moral hazard is a theory that you can't incentivize bad behavior.
So what he's saying is the people that took out mortgages on their homes that went underwater, that's their fault.
So you can't bail them out because that would be sending a hazardous message morally about the economy.
So I said, what's the moral hazard?
Of then making the people that actually blew up the economy whole again.
What's that?
How is that not moral hazard?
And he said, the plane was on fire and we had to land it.
I've heard the argument that nothing's too big to fail, let it fail, and then I've heard the argument that if it did fail, it would be so catastrophic.
But if you made the mortgages at the base of that, okay?
So let's say 10% of the mortgages were underwater.
So let's say you had a $200,000 mortgage and now the house is only worth $150,000.
So instead of giving a million dollars to AIG at the top, give $50,000 to that mortgage, bring it into line with its value, suddenly that thing's not underwater anymore.
It's like putting ballast into a ship that's sinking.
Put the ballast in, the ship comes up, rather than just saying, alright, we'll buy you another fucking ship.
Incentivizing bad behavior doesn't count when you're the ones who tank the economy.
It's like what you're talking about today.
If someone tried to say that these small businesses that are going under because of the COVID sanctions, because everybody's been locked down, if those people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, it's a great example why that analogy sucks.
Because there's nothing to do, man.
You can't work.
There's nothing.
What do you want them to do?
There's no opportunity.
Everything's shut down.
If you go under at this time, it's not your fault.
There's got to be more emphasis on testing, and there's got to be more emphasis on showing people how to keep their immune system healthy, and then recognizing people that can't do that, and doing what we can to protect them.
Well, you're also bombarded by the people that spend the most time doing it.
Because there's a lot of mentally unwell people that spend their entire day camped out on Twitter having arguments.
And if you want to venture into that world and risk your consciousness and your health, your literal mental health, by communicating in this really crude manner with text messages and, you know, arguing over semantics with people that you don't even know.
Yeah, sometimes you can't do it, but yeah, there's value in criticism.
It's very important, but not too much.
It's like anything else.
There's value in a little bit of snake venom.
You develop a tolerance, but if you get a big fat dose, you're dead.
In many ways, it's the same with interacting with people that are upset with you.
There's going to be people that are upset with everybody for no reason.
No matter what the story is in the news, even if it's clear-cut to you and I, there's going to be someone who has a violent opposition to that idea.
It doesn't mean they're right, and it doesn't mean you're right.
It just means people have a lot of different fucking ways of looking at the world, and if you want to exist in conflict, in perpetuity, stay on Twitter, and stay on Twitter all day long, and just argue with people.
I don't want to do that.
And again, it's not that I... I don't have any room for improvement.
It's not that I don't appreciate or accept or recognize the value of criticism because I definitely do.
It's that it's not healthy.
It's not healthy for me.
It could directly affect the kind of content I put out.
Do you feel like one of the hardest things to do is to maintain your kind of creative barometer so that you don't let those kinds of things When you feel like they're not constructive, pulling you too far to the outrage world or some other things, like to maintain that.
And that's why I think it's good, like what you do in terms of conversation, like you basically say, you know, I'm going to do long form because that, you know, feels like, at least from my perspective, The healthiest form is conversation.
But even in that case, people will take long form, edit things out of context, and then it becomes the same problem that we have with Twitter and with everything else.
You get these little sound bites, these little video clips, and you don't understand the full context of the conversation or what was actually said.
And then people get outraged at that.
You know, we are living in a very strange time, and I believe it's an adolescent stage of communication.
And I think it's going to give...
Our frustrations for this are going to give birth to a better form.
And I think one of the things that podcasts, what it's in response to, the popularity of the long form, is in response to people being upset with like these...
Traditional late night talk show things where there's a window here with one guy on the right and a window here with a guy on the left and there's a person in the center and they're yelling at each other and then you cut to commercial.
And you don't really feel like things got resolved.
So the response to that where people are gravitating...
Was it hard for you, you know, when we came up as comics, it was also at that point, like, it was sort of a gladiatorial environment, you know, and I remember, you know, the Boston scene, you know, was always like, that's a tough scene.
Well, in the beginning, there wasn't a very good switch.
You know, it's like one of the reasons why the early episodes sucked.
It's like I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't think anybody was listening.
It was just for fun.
And there was a lot of just hanging out with comics and just doing what comics do.
If we were at a diner somewhere, just talking shit and making each other laugh, but we were doing it and videotaping it.
And then along the way, I started interviewing actual interesting people and talking to them and having conversations and not...
There's a place for comedy, and then I make a really big point in never trying to force comedy into places where it doesn't belong.
I do that also with the UFC. When I do commentary, I'm never funny.
There's no reason to be.
It's not what my job is.
And then when I'm doing a conversation with someone, I just try to talk.
I don't try to be a comic.
I'm a human.
I want to know what they're talking about, and I want to get them to expand upon their ideas as best as they can.
And I want to be engaged.
That's all I'm trying to do.
So it wasn't that was a big transition.
It was that I had to learn how to do this thing that I didn't think was a skill.
I thought that being on the radio or podcasting was just talking.
That's what I thought.
You're just talking.
And then I realized, no, no, no.
You're talking in a way that people want to listen.
You're making it entertaining.
You're keeping your ego in check.
You're moving the conversation along while not being overbearing.
You're not letting people ramble too much where it's boring you.
You've got to figure out how to juice things up and push them and massage them and move them around.
It's a skill, and I didn't think it was a skill.
And like I said, that's one of the reasons why my early episodes sucked so bad.
There wasn't even any consideration to the fact that people were listening.
It was just fun.
We were just doing it for ourselves.
And then along the way, and this also speaks to the value of criticism, I read a bunch of criticism about what was wrong with the podcast.
You know, that we talk over each other, I talk too much, whatever it was.
And I took it to heart.
And I would think about it.
I'd go, okay, I've got to consider that people are listening to this.
This isn't just what I want to say.
It's what I want people to hear.
Just like stand-up, you want the joke to easily enter into a person's mind.
So it's so well-written and so perfectly timed that the audience goes, Jon Stewart's got this.
I'm just going to sit back and let him take my thoughts on a ride.
And that's what really good stand-up is.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why Dave was able to do that 846 special that way, where he has this long, drawn-out story with so many important points, and a few laughs thrown in there, but so engaged.
And he's so...
You just go with him.
You just let him take you.
Just let him take you.
And that's...
Everything, whether it's someone giving a speech or, you know, I mean, even like just almost every conversation that we have.
There's a skill to it that we're not taught.
I mean, you know what it's like to talk to someone where they're not even really talking to you.
They're just kind of waiting for them to talk.
They're waiting for you to finish so they can talk about themselves.
That's a real problem with people and communicating.
And I had to learn how to be a better communicator, really.
Because there is now, like, I think the best measure sometimes of art or of stand-up or those things is when you hear things or see things that are uniquely that person.
Your voice that you develop authentically, uniquely.
And that's a hard thing to develop.
It's funny because I feel like That's what stand-up helped do for me.
Because when you do that in front of an audience, even I'll give like Boston as an example, you know, when we'd be working Knicks, you'd do that, that run of Knicks is like the Framingham and the other ones, you know, but you go to the one in central Boston first.
And I can remember, I hadn't played The Room before and I was a young comic and I'd just done Letterman, I think.
I'd gotten like a big break.
And so the guys at Knicks booked me on that run to be a headline of my first run on those Knicks properties.
So I came into Knicks and they were just going to throw me up on stage.
And what they did was such a learning experience because you kind of think like, I'm on Letterman.
I'm just going to walk into this place.
I'm coming up from New York, hotbed of comedy.
I'm going to fucking strut my stuff at Knicks.
And they threw up before me I think it was Lenny Clark, Kenny Rogerson, and Sweeney.
And I walked down the room and it was like Dresden.
They had so blown that room out with brilliance.
And then it was like, from New York, a Letterman guy, John Stewart.
And if you don't stay on top of it, the energy of that room, it is a bear that will get up and walk out of the room if you're not careful.
But it's interesting also that now, so you're known now, Stand-up when you're known versus stand-up when you're not is also a different experience because you walk into a room when they know you and there is, you know, you don't have to be as sharp if you don't want to because of that.
And that's a discipline as well to kind of make sure that you're not coasting on things.
Maybe some goodwill that they had for you based on something else.
I mean, I think it's really critical to strengthen your immune system, and I do a lot of things to do that, and I think that that's something that people need to really concentrate on, and I really wish that our elected officials were talking more about that and having speeches with doctors and...
I mean, just the science on vitamin supplementation and how critical it is for your immune system, particularly vitamin D, that could literally save lives.
You did those episodes on the Game Changers with James Woods.
And it was fascinating to watch because I watched that movie.
And, you know, nutrition is also like diet is such an important part of What we do to ourselves that we don't think and especially in a time of COVID where so many people like you say like when you see what this does to people with type 1 diabetes or with other kinds of you know conditions that might be caused from either poor diet or lack of access to you know healthier options and things like that you realize like shit we've put ourselves in a very
He said this pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities both in our economic system and in our health system, like the way we are as human beings.
Who's vulnerable?
The obese people, people with diabetes, older folks?
I mean, it highlights all these issues where...
We really need to concentrate on for the future.
If you want more people to survive this, there are strategies that can be implemented and we really need to talk to people about just being normal stuff, being well hydrated, making sure you're not dehydrated, well rested.
Teach people meditation techniques.
It's not hard to learn some breathing exercises that have been actually proven to increase your immune function.
It's not hard to teach people about vitamin D and supplementing it if you can't go outside.
When you're talking about what we talked about earlier, like economic inequality, it's hard to go into an area And be like, so here's what we're going to do.
We're just going to sit and breathe quietly for five minutes.
It's a really difficult, it's like hierarchy of needs.
How do you work into the idea that those types of theories are actually important to the betterment of like Yeah, that's an interesting point, and I think what you have to do is it has to be, first of all, told by people who are doing it successfully.
So people that are doing it, that maybe were struggling with their immune system, If you see someone who is in the situation that you're in currently, and they turned it around...
Well, not me, but listen, I've been working out my whole life.
I've never stopped.
But if someone is fat, I'm talking from their perspective, and they see some guy who's really thin and chiseled, then it's not going to make sense to them that they could ever be like that.
But if they see someone, there's a lot of...
Really fantastic photos and Instagram and Facebook pages online where you can get inspiration from someone who actually stuck to a diet, actually stuck to an exercise routine, and then speaks really well about how much it improved the way they feel, their emotions, their depression.
All the aspects of their life.
And that's, I think, one of the more, like David Goggins is a great example of that.
I use him all the time because he's this incredibly inspirational guy who is a Navy SEAL. And at one point in time, he was 300 pounds.
He was drinking milkshakes.
And he puts those pictures of himself on Instagram all the time just to let people know, hey, I'm not some alien.
I'm a person who is weak just like you.
I was lazy.
I got fat.
And then I figured out how to train my mind to be disciplined.
And I We've figured out how to be happier.
And I think that that's really important for people to see that we're not in a static state.
We're all in a constant state of improvement and growth, hopefully, or deterioration if you're not careful.
So the story, what I don't want people to do is suffer and I want people to feel better while they're alive.
And I think that's something that's missed in the message of health improvement.
You will actually have a better experience on earth and it'll help you mitigate stress.
It'll help you have better relationships because you won't be burdened down with a lot of anxiety and stress that literally comes from a physical release of energy.
I look at the body like a battery.
I think that some people's batteries are just overflowing with corrosive material because they never exert it.
They never blow it out.
A battery is a bad analogy, but there's a certain amount of physical requirement I think your body has.
And if you don't give that Let me ask you a question because now this is I'm
because i know the reality of the life of a deer if you don't kill that deer it's going to die a horrible death from a wolf or a coyote or a mountain lion or whatever the fuck gets a hold of it it's going to freeze to death it's going you can either die quickly by the hand of a person you respect that life and it'll nurture your body and the bodies of your family our problem is a disconnection more than anything and let me tell you something when the covid lockdown happened i got more requests from friends and more requests for information about hunting and gun ownership
how do i protect myself and how do i feed myself and how do i grow food those were three really big questions that i kept getting from people it's funny i have such a different perspective on it in terms of just the um The relationship between myself and I didn't.
Well, once you get into a custom, and once your gut biome changes, you know, you really get accustomed to whatever you're eating, good or bad, unfortunately.
And that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time quitting sugar and bread and pasta and things along those lines.
So your body just craves it.
That's what it wants.
When you start eating healthier food, your body does crave that.
And it's a tougher road, and the world is certainly not built for that, and it certainly feels a little bit...
Of a narrower lane that you have to do.
And I also think it's an incredibly emotional topic.
Like, very little that's as emotional and personal as what people put in their bodies and how they eat and what they do.
And I'm always very respectful because I also, I got no leg to stand on, man.
I, like, this is what I'm doing.
It feels better for me, but I, I always say, like, but It's such a personal and individual choice, and everybody's got to do for themselves.
The only thing I would say is, I do think it's important for people to get educated on it, to read up on, like you say, factory farming, or what might be the nutritional cost of it, or what are some of the things that are in it, or what maybe is it going to do to our immunity when we use so many antibiotics.
The meat production.
That's the only thing I say.
Try and educate yourself to how your meal gets to your table.
That's why I'm a huge advocate for local farming and agriculture because those are the people that are just growing their food and they're bringing it to your table.
I find that incredible.
But I also try not to take a position of judgment on people because I feel like that's unfair.
Well, I think that's very wise of you, and I think that there's a lot of people that share your position on animal death, and I think that's one of the more promising aspects of laboratory-created meat, as long as it can be done in a way that's actually going to be healthy for us.
It seems like there's some real science behind that, and they're very, very close to releasing that on a large scale, so it would be actual meat that doesn't come with death, which is really fascinating.
Growing your own food in your backyard is very satisfying, too.
And I would say to people, that's a microcosm.
It's a very micro form of what it feels like to hunt an animal and then eat it and feed your family.
If I shoot an elk, I eat it literally for a year.
So one animal death equals a year of my meals.
You know, there's also the moral high ground position.
You know, I think a lot of people love to look at the moral high ground of eating vegetables and only eating vegetables as being a superior way to live their life.
And that's a good decision.
I understand where you're coming from.
I understand that there's people that look at life very differently than me.
They maybe don't have this sort of fatalistic perspective, even though it's respectful.
I have a very fatalistic perspective when it comes to just all organic organisms competing for resources and for life.
These animals, I mean, I've run into them when they've killed each other.
I've seen animals that have been taken out by other animals.
I've come across their bodies torn apart by wolves in the woods.
It's a wild, wild thing out there, man.
man.
And I think we're so insulated by it in the, in our culture of today, that it's one of the reasons why veganism and all these things are becoming so attractive.
I would hope that along with that, we're going to be nicer to each other, that we're going to be, we're going to grow to be a kinder human race.
You know, for me, I think it was, there was a certain part of consciousness that I never ascribed to animals to some extent.
I mean, it's funny because I always thought of myself as, oh, you know, I love animals.
I, you know, always had dogs and cats and, you know, you find a bird with a broken wing and you stick him in a box and two weeks later he flies away and you're a hero.
But I never really ascribed, like, individuality to them and I think that was the change for me was interacting with In an individual way.
And it just changed my relationship to what I wanted it to be with animals.
And it just made it untenable in that moment for me.
But I truly understand, like, That that is a really individualized, personalized experience that I made.
And like I said, I would love it for people to make that connection because I think it's profound.
There is something about that connection for people that when they do see it, you know, it's funny, I'll talk about the pigs and they'll be like, you know, Where they just eat everything.
If you're eating an animal that's a wild animal, you're eating an athlete.
I mean, they're sinewy and thick and they're strong and they've survived.
And they're so much more nutrient dense.
When you're talking about factory-farmed animals, you're talking about, I mean, factory-farmed animals is the worst version of what human beings are capable of.
They were capable of ignoring suffering to the point where we lock them all in warehouses, their piss goes down in a tunnel and fills a small lake up, and they've flown over these places with drones.
It's horrific, right?
The pig farms in particular, they're horrific.
But when you're talking about what you're doing on your farm, of course you can't eat those things.
They're your pets.
That would be...
I mean, you're naming them and feeding them and touching them.
I feel like because of my wife, and she's a much kinder, smarter version of me, so because of her kind of showing me that relationship and experiencing myself, it's just changed the way that I view it.
And it kind of takes us back around to the earlier part of the conversation, because when you think about animal agriculture and you talk about those hog farms, where are they located?
They're located in the poorest neighborhoods.
They locate, and the environmental damage that they do is also damage that's done to poor rural communities that live around them.
Now, I'm not suggesting that there's not economic, there's an economic incentive and an industry around it, and certainly not, you know, you don't just end industries, but reform, again, like, it's sort of like, uh, George P. Bush said this.
He was talking about Donald Trump.
He goes, I'm going to support Donald Trump because Donald Trump is the only thing standing between America and socialism.
And I was like, the only thing standing between America and socialism is an inability to meaningfully reform capitalism and its more damaging effects.
And if we can't do that, then the people take to the streets.
I think reform, like Bernie was talking about and those other guys, that will save capitalism.
That will save democracy by showing that we recognize that there is collateral damage to the systems that we use to gain wealth and to gain power.
And if we can reform those systems meaningfully for the people who suffer most terribly under them, we save it.
But if we can't, The Bastille gets stormed.
That's just what Kennedy said.
If you make peaceful evolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable.
So I think at some point, we have to demonstrate the will and the stamina to be able to attack these problems.
And we're in an adolescent stage of our evolution as a civilization.
It's growing and changing.
There's never been a civilization like us today, and we're growing and changing to try to suit our real sensibilities and to try to get better at this fucking thing and not just accept this old, crazy, corrupt structure that's existed forever.