Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan debate anarchism, with Lex admiring Michael Miles’ "loving troll" approach while Rogan warns lenient policies worsen urban decay. They critique WWII narratives—Rogan on Stalin’s atrocities, Lex on Hitler’s charisma—and compare modern polarization to historical extremism, citing Epstein’s evil as systemic but QAnon as baseless. Rogan praises Chappelle’s raw talent despite personal struggles and defends carnivore diets over vegan dogma. Fridman highlights psychedelics’ therapeutic potential while Rogan cautions against exploitation. The episode ends with Rogan gifting Fridman an Omega watch, symbolizing timeless engineering over fleeting luxury, amid musings on Putin’s judo black belt and America’s enduring contradictions. [Automatically generated summary]
But the problem is my fucking shirt was at the cleaners.
So then I tried to use, um, I have some other white shirts that are like these really stretchy shirts that you can wear them if they're open, but if I'm trying to put a tie on, they literally don't fit around my neck.
So I'm doing this and I'm killing myself.
And then I'm like, well, maybe I'll leave it open.
But he says things like, yeah, like police is the enemy.
It's like, wait a minute.
And you live in New York.
So he plays with ideas.
It feels like he's just somebody who's juggling with different ideas and having fun with it, not taking anything seriously.
And that's really refreshing, because in the best light, that's a fearless way to see the world.
And also, he's working on this concept of, I think he calls it the white pill, you know, like red pill and blue pill.
The white pill is basically, you know, I think he's highlighting that for red-pilled folks that there's sometimes a cynicism about the future of the world, and the white pill is seeing the truth of the world but being optimistic about it and thinking like we can actually make things better.
So not becoming cynical.
Not saying like, you know, globalists, the government is ultimately like power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's always going to be a bureaucracy.
It's always going to be greedy people who take power and take control.
So that's like the cynical, the negative view.
But the positive, the white pill view is that You know, we can actually build a better world.
I mean, he has ideas about how to build that better world that I don't agree with.
I'm not sure I've quite understood them, but because ultimately he's a counterpuncher, which is, you know, government, all government is bad.
So that's the idea of anarchism, is that you're supposed to, in this emergent way, You know, form groups and agree together how those groups should operate.
I mean, if rebelling against that form of government, draconian measures they've put in with the lockdowns and then allowing people to camp everywhere...
Yeah, but he also says, I think, that we're in a state of anarchy between different nations, because you can choose to immigrate to a different nation, and then they operate, there's no, I think there's, you know, the UN and so on, there's agreements between nations, but they operate as independent entities.
I don't know.
And his idea is like, remove as much as possible.
It's like libertarian plus plus.
Like, remove as much control from the government as possible.
The step back from the anarchist view is, you know, we should get government out of most things, but the violence thing, we should let government protect us from.
So, the military, the police, you know, and things like firefighters and all those kinds of things.
I mean, that forms the fabric of society that can be stable and operate well, and we could do all of the amazing things in terms of...
Building new businesses, doing science, doing all the kinds of entrepreneurship, just everything that makes this capitalist United States of America possible, like all the freedoms we enjoy.
At least to me, it feels like the violence thing has to be removed off the table.
He was driving up Highland Avenue in Hollywood and was just saying, like, he wasn't showing the whole video during it, but he was, like, at a stoplight and, like, there was tents the whole way up here.
And he was extremely, like, this is also a really nice tent.
You know, you didn't get to see the real homeless situation, but Bridget Phetasy sent me a video when she was driving by Venice, and it's a minute and a half long of just straight tents as she's driving down the road.
And the concern is that when you are too lenient on the homeless folks and just allow them to camp wherever they want, shit wherever they want, they just do it.
And if you don't put up rules, if you try to be progressive and open-minded, it's like they have new words for them, like the unhoused and shit like that.
And when you do that, you open up the door for more of them to migrate there because there's – like there was a video that somebody put up of them interviewing these homeless guys and like, why do you like San Francisco?
And they said, first of all, they give us food.
They give us money.
They let us – they're really loose.
They let us camp wherever we want.
And these guys had moved to San Francisco to be homeless, which is a problem.
But see, just like you said, that problem is tied up with the fact that a lot of people are struggling financially because of COVID. It feels like trying to solve the homelessness problem is in direct tension with trying to take care of people who are struggling.
Well, I think it shows that there's a problem with people losing a place to live and that the solution is not necessarily let them camp out anywhere they want.
I think there should be some sort of a step that the government takes, whether it's to develop housing or to build something for them, but when you let them just camp and shit everywhere, then you ruin all the other spaces.
Like, the best way to keep the city intact And to try to help these people is to implement some sort of a program where you provide housing for them.
Letting them just camp on the street, that's chaos.
So this particular state government just seems incompetent at solving this particular problem, but it also seems to be not very good at solving some other problems, right, in terms of encouraging businesses to stay there?
The other way is now that there is a Democrat in office that they could see there's a path to pass further regulations and push this closed economy, go into lockdown further.
But the Michael Malice devil argument is that, you know, that's one way for the government to gain more control or the populace is to fear mongers say that there's a big problem and that magnify the...
The sort of the narrative around how big that problem is.
And unfortunately, from my perspective, as a scientist, to use scientists to say, look, scientists are saying there's a huge problem, sort of use science as a tool of fear mongering, and then gain further and further control of the populace.
Why would they want that kind of control while also devastating the economy?
They need the economy because they need tax revenue.
If they're not getting tax revenue, how are they going to feed the military industrial complex?
How are they going to feed all their businesses?
How are they going to feed the pharmaceutical industry?
All these people that finance their campaigns and all these banks that pay for them to speak after they get out of office, where's the money coming from now if there's no economy?
I don't think that...
I think that's like one of them doom and gloom QAnon type deals where people are thinking, like, they want to kill half the population and, you know...
Everything you said incentive-wise, it makes sense.
I was really confused why we haven't done, for example, mass-scale testing of everybody, which seemed like, you know, the antigen tests, which can be under a dollar to manufacture, manufacture hundreds of millions of them, At home testing of everybody.
So you can start April or May of last year, start mass manufacture.
There's no reason we can't do that.
And then everybody starts getting tested.
At the individual level, you know, the accuracy is not perfect.
But at the societal level, that's one way.
If you get a positive test, you definitely have COVID. And so, based on that, trusting the individuals, not tracking them, but trusting the individuals when they get a positive test, that they will stay home.
And through that process, we would have been able to open up the economy in the summer.
Like, Michael Minna, I think, from Harvard, people should go follow him on Twitter or wherever.
He's been screaming about this.
Like, why the hell...
Is FDA getting in the way of this?
So the FDA doesn't like crappy at-home tests.
They want expensive, nice tests.
But the problem with expensive, nice tests, it's hard to manufacture them on my scale.
Everybody inside Silicon Valley, all my friends that work there, all the great entrepreneurs, all the people that work at big companies, Google, and so on, say, do not move here.
You know, here's childlike, naive me, like, texting, oh, what are the cool places to live?
Well, the question is, if you want to build, in the tech space, if you want to build a company to do something cool, I don't care if with that little app or change the world, it's some large-scale thing, where do you go?
So he's been, he's kind of the reason that's making me think, like, it's very possible that this becomes, in the good sense, where the crazy, the wild entrepreneurs move.
There's a lot of those tech guys that review things are Android guys because you're constantly taking your SIM card out of one phone and putting it in another.
I got an iPhone 12 and I tried to get it registered at Verizon.
It took an hour and a half.
It didn't work.
I bought it online at the Apple Store.
I got it delivered.
Took an hour and a half to get it.
They go, like, we can't figure out how to do this.
We might have to change your plan.
I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ.
Finally, they got it.
They got it up and running.
I'm like, oh, it's great.
It's different.
It's more square.
Same fucking phone.
It's not much different, right?
For what I do, I mean, I'm not playing games.
I'm just making phone calls and taking pictures.
The camera on the 11 was awesome.
The camera on the 12 was awesome.
The next morning, on my way to the fucking airport, and it just stops working.
Just completely stopped working.
Wouldn't make phone calls.
I couldn't call Verizon on it.
Couldn't do anything.
It said, please contact Verizon.
And I'm like, oh, you sons of bitches.
So then I had to call them and I just reactivated my 11. I have this fucking brick of a 12 just sitting in my dresser.
Well, but the point is, it's a symbol of all my failures in life because I've gotten, it's been sitting in a box just looking at me, just like that brick of a phone, just saying, this is why you're a failure because you can't take three or four hours to read a fucking manual or tutorial or learn how to actually use this.
It gets you in a way it's both exciting, inspiring, and depressing because they're so good and they make it look so easy.
Like, look, you can just tap a beat and you can start But when you actually start to learn how to use it, like Ableton Live the software, you realize there's all these buttons.
There's all these things you have to learn.
How do I even record just the basic, just even our conversation, how do I record that?
And then you have to realize there's shortcuts you have to learn.
You basically have to sit down.
Embrace the suck.
Embrace the learning curve of saying, okay, on Monday, I'm going to read this tutorial and I'm going to get it done and learn something new.
And doing that alone is really difficult when nobody's really pushing you.
I don't know.
That's probably a metaphor for a lot of things we fail to do in life.
It's like always putting it off and putting it off and putting it off.
Something that actually will probably bring, like me in this case, a lot of joy.
Okay, so this is why, you've told me before not to read comments, but I do write comments on Instagram, and he put a story out, I think yesterday, saying that he's doing the 48 mile challenge again, 4x4x48, where you run 4 miles every 4 hours, and like a fucking idiot.
I commented.
I thought nobody would know.
I said, I'm in.
I wrote I'm in.
I thought I would get positive and then people would be like, oh cool, talk to me about it.
And I could do it peacefully at home.
So it's March 5th, I think, is when he's doing it.
There's going to be times at night when you're running at 4 o'clock, you know, in the morning, midnight, different times, you know, the fucking boogeyman comes out at nighttime.
unidentified
So make sure that you have, you know, safety parameters in place.
Run with somebody.
Do whatever the fuck you have to do to keep yourself safe, just like last year.
All right, that said, this year I want to give away some items, and I've been talking about them a lot more.
But I have some, you know, new shorts in stock.
So this year I'm doing tons of giveaways for those of you who go above and beyond.
And what that means is some people last year raised thousands of dollars.
This is all for charity.
Tons of people got tons of people involved in the 4x4x48.
Did several things they did.
Outside the box thinking to raise awareness for their causes, their charities.
I think it was because of the wrestling background, I've always approached everything in training with the following thought.
Like, how can I train really hard, like, twice a day?
How can I put in a three-hour, four-hour session of training with killers without getting injured?
So don't, you know, make sure there's a strong frames, like just working on all the stabilizers, making sure to not want to, the ego, it's like silence in the ego.
Just, you know, if somebody is being rough in a way, or somebody is much better than me in a way that puts me in compromising positions, Not in terms of being submitted, but in terms of just putting pressure on some body parts that's going to break me.
I can tell.
It'll lead to injuries.
I'll not have my ego and try to beat them.
I'll flow with it more.
And just making sure I put in the miles versus the wins, the individual wins along the way.
So maximizing that allowed me to just be lucky, honestly, because you can be just unlucky.
Like Richie Martinez, a boogeyman, has this crazy guard game.
And if you're not accustomed to someone who's got that level of flexibility...
I've talked about Richie before too because he comes from a weird background.
He's a breakdancer.
And because of that breakdancing, he has incredible body control.
You know, breakdancers, people that think of breakdancers, they don't necessarily equate it with these incredibly athletic people, but my god, the breakdancers of today.
What's that style called where you're doing like a robot style like pop lock type situation where you're it's not it's not breakdancing it's like I think it's called pop locking no no like where you're deforming your body in different ways that it's kind of like a robot dance but on steroids you know what I'm talking about yes it's like you're making your body flow in all different kinds of I don't want to miss I'd say it's hyphy, but I think it's called hyphy and Stylebender does...
Yeah, but you gotta admire the man who's, so Khabib is talking about what, like agriculture?
Like farming?
Matt, I don't know if you were paying attention to this.
He's talking like a businessman, but a businessman not like talking about like tequila or like new clothing line or maybe doing a podcast or something like that.
I don't know.
He's talking about actually building farms and honoring the culture of his people in the kind of way, the businesses that they build, honoring the dreams that his father had and his mom has.
Well, his English is so, like, developed around, like, talking a little bit of trash in MMA. I don't know how good his English is developed in terms of being, like, philosophical for three hours in a podcast or, like, thoughtful about life.
His mindset, he's basically David Goggins before David Goggins, which is just this mindset.
I remember he said that I've always wanted to train so hard that they would have to carry me off, you know, like be near death.
They would have to carry me off the mat and he's never succeeded.
And he was proud of his daughter because she's a swimmer and she passed out during a swim meet in the pool and he was proud of her that she succeeded where her father failed.
A bunch of the Iowa folks non-stop messaging me like, where the fuck is the video?
Stop being a little bitch.
And he was really nice to me.
There's both a love in that family atmosphere and a love within the focus that they've had.
For so many years, this is one of the magical things I experienced that made me even further believe that family can be beneficial for success is that they're all in on this effort that Dan had to win the Olympic gold, to just succeed as a wrestling coach.
Just his whole life.
They get it.
And they love him for it.
And they kind of embrace it.
And there's, like, this family atmosphere.
Like, what they did at Tom Brands is the same Olympic gold medalist, too.
Coach of Iowa.
Another guy who's just insane.
We sat down on the couch and just watched these, like, documentaries about people being badasses, like mountain climbing, just overcoming shit.
Because here's a narrative that I don't like, and it's the Trump supporters are all racist.
I don't like that narrative.
I don't think it's true, and I think it's too simplistic, and I think it's...
There's a lot of people that don't like a lot of what Democrats are pushing, whether it is, you know, whatever the variables are, whatever the things are that they don't like about the Democrats.
It doesn't mean they're racist.
This thing keeps coming up over and over again, like you can just say it.
You can just say it.
And that Trump equals you're supporting racism, you support Biden, it means you're the future, you're progressive.
It's a weird narrative that is very polarizing to all the people that voted for Trump that aren't racist.
They don't like a lot of the things that Joe Biden stands for in terms of his politics and the way he was with the Obama administration, the way the Democrats have been throughout the election.
There's a lot of...
They're allowed to have their opinions, and I think we run a real dangerous risk in this country of separating people, like good versus evil, and not just respecting people's differences and differences of opinions.
It's a different kind of discrimination.
It's an intellectual discrimination.
It's a cultural discrimination.
It's a weird way of chastising people that don't share your ideas.
I mean, one of the things that I do does bother me about sort of the, I don't know, is it the left or something, is not loving this country unapologetically.
I mean, criticizing, but just like loving the incredible experiment that this is.
And I think what I felt in terms of Dan Gable and so on, the nature of their support for Trump was, they were not like rah-rah Trump.
I mean, there's beautiful things about Russia, too.
Like, culturally speaking, in terms of just, like, in the struggle of the...
I would say it came from the wars.
The music, the art, the poetry, the writing, the science that came from the World War that impacted Russia way more than it did the United States.
The World War II. I mean, tens of millions of people died.
China, Russia, Europe, obviously, just...
They had to for a century struggle with the biggest existential questions of good and evil, of losing most of your family to unjust slaughter or starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s.
Like I mentioned before, my grandmother survived the Something that people don't talk about.
They say that Hitler is evil and so on.
They don't often highlight the evil of Stalin.
There's not enough talk about just the fact that he imposed just things on the people without any consideration of the suffering that that causes.
And you, he's been, he's like, I don't know, I don't know what's a good metaphor, but he released an episode now like once every year, and it's always like an exciting, it's like Christmas or whatever, as a duo.
But he has two, and I recommend people listen to it, he has two podcasts.
One is Hardcore History and one is Common Sense.
He shut down Common Sense for a while because he felt Too polarized by the political climate, right?
But he released an episode, People Should Listen.
One, he got a lot of shit for.
That was a little bit, I think, critical of Trump, but not between the lines, not directly, but he got shit for that before the election, was like steering into the iceberg.
Basically worried.
He's the opposite of me in his level of optimism.
But he was worried about where this country's headed.
And he released a new episode, I think Garbage In, Garbage Out, about the...
You know, basically making a case for centrism, you know, for center-left, center-right in this country as opposed to extremes.
It's poetic.
It's beautiful.
People should listen to it.
But it's done with the same kind of care that he does with the Hardcore History.
But he did release one extra Hardcore History.
He inspired me to...
You mentioned what we do.
He inspired me to try to do a solo thing, like an episode on Hitler, on the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
I read a book called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It's this huge volume.
I recommend people read it.
It tells the story of how Hitler came to power, and it tells the story from the perspective of the person who was there.
So it was written in the, I want to say, 60s and 70s by a person who was a journalist that lived through it.
And it's one of the best books on the entirety of the whole Third Reich project, how evil came to be.
And so I've been trying to, for the last two months, to do an episode.
And I think it's going to take another, like, year.
I struggle with that one because I think it's the most useful to understand because it's so modern.
It's useful for...
I feel like Hitler is a really interesting person to study, in the context of Stalin as well, of communism, fascism, the economic systems, how depression in the United States leads eventually to conflict and violence, how a charismatic leader can take control of a populace.
There's so much about human nature that you can learn from there that feels more directly relevant to us now than maybe even like Alexander the Great.
The Trump episode, so Steering Into the Iceberg, I think the episode is called, I think the nature of the criticism was that Trump Magnify the division, which ultimately shut down the ability of people of having nuanced conversations and to be able to reason.
And whenever you destroy reason, you're not able to do what...
You're not able to make the decisions that kind of keep this country great.
You're not able to think clearly, like grounded in...
In a deep, real, humble understanding of reality, you're more focused on the division.
So you construct sort of narratives about the other side, that they're evil somehow, and you go into this battle.
This isn't just Twitter.
This is everywhere.
And so his argument was that this kind of process, once it gets going, you're going to have a charismatic leader that takes over, like Trump or somebody else, that then is going to make it worse and worse and worse.
There's too much incentive to make it worse.
And that's going to ultimately lead us to destroy this nation.
It's a different kind of mania than what grabbed Germany when Hitler took over.
It's a different kind of mania because of social media and because there's too much information and there's too many competing ideas for it to be the same sort of situation.
But I think people were really worried because that...
What happened with Hitler in World War II is...
We would like to think that's outside of what's possible today.
But I don't think we really believe that.
I think deep down in our hearts we know that a charismatic leader with all of the wrong intentions, with all of the right things lining up in terms of the economy falling apart...
In terms of the lack of patriotism in general or a feeling of insecurity by the nation and then all of a sudden they get exhumed.
They get risen from the dead by some charismatic person who...
Can talk people into doing wild shit.
And I think we saw a little bit of that with the storm in the Capitol.
When he said you have to be strong, it's a show of force.
So when I saw that, I was like, oh, Jesus Christ.
Like those words, and there's a real question of whether or not those words were inciting and whether or not what he did was illegal.
I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer, obviously.
But the rhetoric, that kind of rhetoric, like you have to show strength.
What exactly did Trump say?
Because he said something along the lines of, you can't be weak, you have to be strong, you have to show, they need to show a force or something like that.
There's a really good book on the drugs that fueled the Nazi regime.
I feel like, damn it, I wish I remembered the title, but it's a book entirely about all the drugs that they loved that fueled that entire war, the entire regime.
And it's probably, you know, we don't talk about it often, you could probably attribute most of the Nazi regime to just really good drugs.
Like one of the thoughts, there was apparently, there was, God I wish I remember who told me this, but there was a moment where Hitler was supposed to meet Mussolini and he was apparently just like broken down.
He was completely exhausted.
I can't remember.
Jamie, do you remember who brought this up on the podcast?
So there's a really interesting relationship with Mussolini, but Mussolini was always on board.
He was like, but can we just not do this whole thing you're doing?
Do we need to go to war?
But there were kind of buds, and he was able to convince him.
So that's an interesting set of conversations that people should look at.
The really interesting set of conversations is between Hitler, Chamberlain, so between Hitler, Britain, and France.
And my favorite part is when it was France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia, so in the very early days.
And Hitler was just, it's clear to me, there's an element of like Jeffrey Epstein style smoothness and charisma, that in the room he was able to convince people that he ultimately wants peace.
And at the same time, there's this moment that really is so dark.
A lot of these scientists, that is their kryptonite.
It's not a coincidence that this guy allegedly involved a huge part of the scientific community.
In this crazy thing where he's got a fucking island and he ships off these brilliant minds over there, allegedly, and introduces them to a lot of these ladies.
He's saying that he's a part of the intelligence community.
And that's actually been reported on.
Do you know that when he was arrested, the initial arrest and when he was given a very lenient sentence, one of the guys who was involved in that case said it was above my pay grade and that I was told he was a part of the intelligence community.
Now, the word had always been that he was either a Mossad agent or someone along those lines.
Now, if you have some of the most brilliant minds in the world and you want to compromise them and you want to somehow or another get them entangled in your world, there's two great steps.
There's two ways you would compromise the scientific community, one of them being money, right?
So he gives them money, funding, helps them, millions of dollars, right?
Donated millions of dollars to various projects, various things they're working on, to women.
Bring all these scientists together, bring these brilliant guys together with the promise of money for all their projects they're working on, and then you bring them to an island.
And they say, hey, everything's fine here.
Don't worry about it.
You know, I got a fucking temple that's painted like the Jewish flag, the Israeli flag.
If they don't know what he's doing, and they're innocent, right, then they haven't done anything wrong, and he's giving them money and taking pictures with them, just simply by taking pictures with them.
Okay, I thought you meant like, say there's a beautiful young lady here and then she was tasked with escorting me around to show how wonderful Texas is.
If Epstein is that, like why, so there was, I guess actually Eric makes this argument, is like the whole thing that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile was actually a negative in that sense for the, if he is a part of like the intelligent community.
But do you think that the argument for that would be, if autonomous vehicle driving is ultimately one day far safer, and most people believe it will be, don't you believe it will be far safer than just manual human operations of vehicles?
The reason I bring it up, people in the scientific community, and I can see that argument, and I felt that argument, and I partially agree to it, which is this is the safe way to proceed.
They're mastering Phoenix, Arizona currently.
They're like mastering it and slowly growing.
Tesla Autopilot is like, we're going to deploy this Autopilot technology to the entire world.
But the point is, there's a lot of open questions from a human psychology perspective.
And that's where the scientific community speaks up.
Elon seems to be going full steam ahead.
And he's doing one of the really cool things.
I don't know if you're paying attention to this, but they're really deploying the full self-driving beta.
Technology.
For the people in the beta program, the FSD beta program, it's able to take left turns, right turns, stop at the light, actually take you from point A to point B fully autonomously.
And he said that when Elon was telling people to use Signal, something happened, and Signal literally gained the amount of users of a small country in a couple of days.
They had an outage a few days ago.
Signal did, and I talked to Moxie about it.
Because I sent him a message about something where there was these...
There was an article that was demonizing signal.
It was really disturbing to me because they were demonizing signal and demonizing...
I'm going to find it.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
They were demonizing signal and they were demonizing encryption.
And they were saying that it's a tool of the people that stormed the Capitol and this kind of shit.
I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
So it was this weird, like, plea to Big Brother to look in on everybody and to make sure that everything's okay.
I'd love to hear your opinions actually on Parler.
There are a lot of people that move to Signal as a place to try to communicate with each other when all the platforms are banning just a bunch of different accounts.
It's really unfortunate, man, because I see both sides.
I really do.
And I know some people don't.
I'm going to send this to you, Jamie.
Some people don't see both sides.
I really do see both sides.
I don't think that most people are doing this because they want to support some sort of gigantic government overreach a la NSA, Edward Snowden exposed stuff.
I think most people do worry that these kind of things will escalate.
Now what we saw, the attack of Capitol Hill, we keep going.
Millions flock to Telegram.
So this is something that Glenn Greenwald posted.
Millions flock to...
That's okay.
Millions flock to Telegram and Signal as fears grow over big tech.
But go back to what Glenn said, because Glenn had a really good point.
He said, three journalistic units most devoted to demanding online censorship are CNN's media reporters, NBC's disinformation team, and New York Times tech reporters.
Here's the letter laying the groundwork for making encrypted apps Signal and Telegram the next targets.
And scroll down to his next tweet, please.
He said, when the internet and encryption proliferated in the 1990s, the Clinton administration seized the Oklahoma City bombing to demand backdoor access to all encryption.
Bush and Obama used 9-11 to radically expand internet surveillance.
Now it's CNN, NBC, New York Times journalists who take the lead.
And there's a whole stream of...
It's from January 15th from Glenn Greenwald, who's an amazing follow on Twitter and just a fantastic journalist.
But his take on it is accurate.
You've got to be really careful when people are calling for denouncing encryption, privacy.
You should be able to say things privately between each other.
There's no fucking reason why anybody should know what you're saying to me.
And the way you text most of the time, SMS, with your wacky fucking Android device, that is the least private way.
I... I wasn't, I don't know what to think you're right.
I'm personally torn about the whole banning of all these different accounts of social media.
The one that really hit me was Amazon, I don't know if you're paying attention to this, but Amazon removing Parler from AWS. Yeah.
It feels like that created a worse world, a more dangerous world.
Because there's a difference to me than banning accounts on Twitter, which is also very complicated.
But it's like the difference between banning the ability to make a phone call, the ability of banning your number, blocking your number, versus banning your ability to make a phone call at all.
When the actual infrastructure based on which your apps operate is now putting its finger on the scale of who succeed and not, now that starts affecting capitalism.
That means Twitter can't have a competitor that has the conspiracy theorists, that has the people that are allowed to say crazy shit about Jeffrey Epstein not killing himself or something.
Fucking everybody who does something like that now is a QAnon follower.
It's the greatest way to dismiss people ever.
Because you were talking, Jamie and I were talking before the podcast about these hilarious threads of these QAnon followers realizing they've been had and saying, you know, I can't believe Biden's the president.
And then there's some really dumb ones who think Biden is in on the QAnon conspiracy and he's helping.
So when a guy like him is saying that this interstellar object that travels faster by far, by more than twice of any comet or any asteroid that we've ever observed, that is coming away from the sun, not affected by the sun's gravity,
that is ten times more reflective than any other object that is ten times more reflective than any other object we've ever observed, that one of the things that Jeremy Corbell sent me is that it appears that it's commonly depicted that that object, a muamua, is a cigar-shaped object.
This thing that people have where they want to believe in Q, or they want to believe in aliens, or they want to believe in Bigfoot, they want to find these secrets.
I think this is ultimately the reaching for the branch.
This is a call to psychic powers.
And I think, ultimately, that's what we're trying to develop as human beings.
And I think it's taking many, many, many generations.
And I think the evolution of human communication through grunts and gestures, all the way up to sounds, all the way up to complicated computer code and various languages, I think that what we are doing is trying to evolve human communication, whether it's through biology or whether it's through technology, to the point where there are no secrets.
And I think that's coming.
And I don't think it's going to be as far off in the future as many people think.
And I think Elon and this Neuralink shit, these are the...
The first warning shots of this symbiotic relationship that we're going to have with technology that allows us to read each other's minds.
And this is what I've been saying for a while, that I think this is the future of human beings.
I think the future of human beings is...
The thing that's gonna save us.
We're gonna realize that we're in this massive conflict between lies and truth and encryption and disinformation and propaganda and these fucking...
Crazy conspiracy theorists and all these people that are alt-right and white supremacists.
Are the Proud Boys evil or was it all just a joke?
What's the truth?
I want to know the truth!
Because the fucking mainstream media does not have a vested interest in telling you the truth.
They have a vested interest in telling you whatever the fuck they should tell you that's going to make the most people around them happy and sell the most clicks and get them the most views.
And so we've got a conflict.
We've got a massive conflict.
Two polarized sides, right and left, red and blue.
No one knows how to get out of this okay.
No one knows.
The way to get out of this okay, the way we get out of this, is we can clearly see everyone's intentions.
And maybe some people that you thought were bad are not bad.
Maybe they're really good.
And maybe some people you thought were good were really bad.
They're just playing on the heartstrings of what's the common consensus of what you're supposed to say.
What pronouns are you supposed to use?
What are the words you're supposed to utter?
What are the things that you're supposed to repeat?
There's a lot of really bad actors out there that are playing upon these cultural narratives.
They might be sociopaths.
But they're saying the things that you can say publicly.
Well, I think I love the picture you paint of reaching for branches and everyone's reaching for different branches.
I think on the path to reading each other's minds, there's going to be a lot of technologies that allow you to read each other's minds in more subtle ways before it's like full-on waterfall, Neuralink, just...
I think that's what social media does.
We can read each other's minds.
There's a...
I mean, we're all struggling with this.
And I think despite the media and all that, everybody is just like the alien folks are reaching for the different branches and underlying that is ultimately like a curiosity and an optimism.
And that's how we got to where we are today.
It's just like chimps being, you know, the sons of apes, but it starts with bacteria.
It's just like reaching, always reaching for the next branch, like hopeful.
And you're always trying to reach out and make a better life.
And it's gotten better and better and better and better because of that kind of reaching.
That's what Elon does with his crazy thoughts about, first of all, landing on Mars and then colonizing Mars and colonizing other planets.
It seemed crazy at the time.
But because of that kind of reaching, a hundred years from now, several hundred years from now, it'll be ridiculous to think that obviously we would not be colonizing this solar system and even other solar systems.
And that kind of thinking, then that moves to robots.
Bridges, the problem with bridges is you're putting all this weight on those discs.
The thing about the iron neck is when you have this halo on and this bungee cord, Mike Jolly, the guy who invented it, was a fucking gigantic NFL player.
It was so intimidating meeting him.
I'm like, hi!
He's so much bigger than me.
You pull the cord.
The cord is a 50-pound bungee.
And then you have this halo around your head that you can change the resistance.
And so you go...
But you're never doing this.
So this is how people fuck their necks up.
They fuck their necks up by putting an unnatural load on those discs.
The bowhunting community doesn't know what to do with him.
There's people in the bowhunting community that don't like what he does because he works out so hard.
Here's the thing.
When you see Cam Haynes, you see a guy who's like this fitness endurance athlete, but that's deceiving.
Because although he is those things, he is those things to be the best bowhunter on earth.
And there's a real argument that he's the greatest bowhunter of all time.
Like, if you ask me, I love him to death, but if I wasn't his friend, and I was on the outside looking at him, and I'm like, who's the greatest bowhunter of all time?
I'm like, It might be Cam Haynes.
Like, there's a real argument.
Like, there's a couple of guys in the running.
John Dudley's in the running.
Fred Bear is the legend.
There's a few of these guys.
These, like, legendary bow hunters, but...
This guy is so successful.
Like insanely successful every year.
Every year in the most difficult pursuit.
It's really hard to be successful bow hunting elk in the mountains.
It's hard.
He's successful every year.
And he pulls a 90 pound bow.
Now you can't even buy a 90 pound bow from most bow companies.
They won't make you one.
But he fucking strong arms them into making him a 90 pound bow.
So all these other bow companies, or all these other bow hunters rather, a few of them that are kind of butthurt and jealous, are mad that he is telling people he has a 90 pound bow.
My question is, do you think you are as strong as him?
And if you don't, what do you give a fuck if he's pulling 90 pounds and you're pulling 70 pounds?
Are we trying to pretend that we're all the same strength?
Because that seems silly to me, because I know a lot of really fucking strong people that are way stronger than me.
I don't want to pretend that I'm the same strength as them.
And if I found out there was a guy out there that pulls a 150-pound bow, but he's built like The Undertaker, and he weighs 300 pounds, I'd go, oh, okay, that makes sense.
That's like me pulling a 90-pound bow or a 100-pound bow.
That would be easy for me.
But for him, a 150 pound bow would probably be just as easy.
Because he's fucking giant!
Cam Haynes is working out every day.
You've got a problem with him pulling a 90 pound bow.
You don't really have a problem with that.
Your problem is with yourself.
Your problem is that you know you can't really do that.
And it bothers people.
So there's this weird ego thing in the bow hunting world where they get upset at him because he's a legitimate psycho.
Because he literally does get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, run in the rain in the dark, puts in a half a marathon before work, goes to work, puts in another 10 miles during lunchtime.
That is the most just like there's a romantic element of just like this is what I have to live with but I also love this man from her perspective and also there's this picture of like Goggins who's like I don't give a fuck I'm getting these push-ups in um and he's he didn't really plan it he's just he's just there in the corner he's like almost like why are you filming me right now just let me deal with this guy right here I'm surprised he has a bed He's
unidentified
shaking his arms out while he's doing these fucking push-ups.
But just that admission that this is not, he's not a robot, but he gets everything a robot does done.
He can do it.
He pushes his mind to do things that the body does not want to do.
So he almost, in some ways, behaves like a robot, but one of the values in Dave, multiple values in Dave, one of the values is that he lets you know that he's not a robot.
He lets you know that he's got that little bitch inside of him talking to him.
If you like to work out and you want to get fired up, that scene at the Russian bathhouse at the Red Circle bar where he kills everybody, that fucking movie is so good.
But the problem is with carnivore, at least for me, is it makes me feel so good and lean and focused and just energetic that when I go off the path, it hits me way harder.
And that almost enforces you to be almost too stoic to where you can't have fun.
I mean, not fun.
I'm not saying pigging out is fun, but there's something social about even just drinking beers or Just picking out...
The real criticism is coming from people who are either, you know, there's some people that are very educated about nutrition and they have a problem with the carnivore diet.
They don't like, you know, there's some evidence that points to the idea that it's unhealthy.
The anecdotal evidence, though, from individuals that find great benefit in it is very compelling.
And unfortunately, I'm one of those.
Then there's also, there's a lot of people that make these arguments that are not well-founded about it being bad for the environment.
And I don't necessarily think monocrop agriculture is good for the environment.
I think the problem with the environment is massive amounts of human beings consuming food.
And I don't believe the argument that...
There's no way to eat meat that's healthy for the environment because they've shown that you can do regenerative agriculture.
The question is, you can get it.
You can definitely buy grass-fed beef from like Joel Salatin or some Polyface Farms or there's a company Piedmontese Farms.
Butcher Box, they use all grass-fed, grass-finished beef, all from ethically responsible farmers.
They have like a real relationship with farmers and ranchers where they treat their animals ethically and fairly and inhumanely.
And a lot of people are like, well, how can you do that if you kill them?
I understand your perspective.
But the way they kill these animals is instantaneous.
There's a bolt to the brain.
They die instantly.
And I see the argument that you should never kill a thing.
But I think you need to understand that that death for an animal that is essentially a prey animal.
Like if you look at this weird mandala, this weird, if you look at just the range of animals on the planet, there are animals that eat other animals.
And a cow is one of those animals that gets eaten usually by large predators.
The way they get eaten is horrific.
The best way for them to die is from human hands, if that human does it correctly.
Whether it's a hunter or whether it's a farmer.
There's no animals that are wild animals that live to be an animal that dies of old age.
The numbers are so low, it's like people that live to be 120. There's not a lot of them.
Most animals die by starvation, by disease, or by predators.
The vast majority.
If someone comes along, whether it's me shooting it with an arrow or whether it's an ethical, humane farmer, like one of the ones that ButcherBox employs or some of these other ranchers, you can get it.
The real question is not that.
I mean, there's an ethical question.
It's a debate and it should be handled.
You can have a respectful conversation about this.
But the real question is, can that sustain 7 point whatever billion people?
And I don't know if it can.
I don't know if that's true.
I think our problem might be the massive amount of human beings and the fact that very few natural ways will sustain this population.
Monocrop agriculture is terrible.
It's terrible for the soil.
It's terrible for the environment.
It displaces wildlife when they...
When they harvest those crops, it's devastating to the wildlife, it's devastating to small mammals, and devastating to insects, devastating to birds.
Life for life is not one for one.
We don't look at a mouse the same way we look at an elk.
An elk is a large, what my friend Steve Rinella calls charismatic megafauna.
This isn't me like being a social justice warrior or signaling or something.
It feels like this would be one of those things that in a hundred years we'll look back and say this was a really fucked up thing that we did as a society.
Because what are we going to do to control the population of these animals?
Once we've established herds of cows and sheep and chickens and all these different animals that we consider livestock, how are we going to stop them from breeding?
Are we going to separate them from each other?
Are we going to play God?
Are we going to bring in predators?
What are we going to do?
If we stop eating them, what are we going to do?
And are we acknowledging There's a lot of people that are vegan zealots, and they do not believe that it can be healthy to eat meat.
The problem with that is, of course, that almost all elite professional athletes eat meat.
There's very few exceptions.
There's a few that do well, and there's also a few that try vegan diets and their bodies wind up falling apart.
And vegans hate that.
They hate when you talk about it, they get angry, because it's an ideology.
You could say it's almost cult-like.
But they also have some good points.
Like, they're not killing sentient beings.
And they don't think of plants as being a sentient being.
No, he's a young guy, which is like, you know, part of my excitement that this is like, this is a legit...
This is somebody that we'll be following for decades to come, I think.
He's just in the early steps of a journey.
He's running huge studies.
One of the things that really excite me about what he's doing is he went from...
Sort of using psychedelics or psilocybin or any of the other psychedelic drugs to explore how you can treat different mental disorders, diseases, addictions, and so on, to now pushing it towards how can it help?
A person who, what he calls a creative, somebody like you, a comedian, or somebody like Elon, an engineer like me, engineer, scientist, all that kind of stuff.
How can it help the mind when you're not trying to treat some kind of...
Explicit disorder, but actually trying to expand your thinking about the world.
And actually doing that as a study.
That's what I'm excited about.
Kind of waiting with just like bated breath that he runs a study that I can participate in.
It was a little tedious in the beginning because we were talking about politics and it was post-Capital Hill and it was like, you know, he was very frustrated.
It's funny enough, like, so you talk to Avi Loeb, who's, you know, the Amu Amua, somebody who's really open-minded about that, but he's less open-minded about psychedelics and all those kinds of drugs.
It's fascinating.
We're, as a species, you talk about reaching for branches, are exploring, like, what's Yeah.
What's interesting?
And I think psychedelics is a legitimate, like I haven't actually tried much at all, but it feels like every time I've tried mushrooms, it makes you realize that the mind is capable of so much more than you were cognizant of.
It makes me think that there's more to reality than we can grasp and that we need to help.
We need something.
We need a little doorway that lets us walk through to some other side, whether it's psilocybin or dimethyltryptamine or whatever the method you use.
There's a lot more out there.
We're very crude in our perceptions, our ability to perceive, and I think Our ideas of drugs, our negative ideas of drugs, are a lot of times, they're flavored with the limitations of human personality and human beings interfacing with the world,
looking for escape rather than looking to explore and looking to give in to Mother Gaia and give in to these magical compounds.
Also, there's a lot of fucking charlatans, man.
There's a lot of people that espouse the use of psychedelics because it makes them appear to be spiritual and it boosts their ego.
I've had more than one conversation with people where they say, you don't seem like a psychedelic guy because you use a lot of...
Fucked up words and you say a lot of shit you probably shouldn't say.
I'm like, well, I'm also a comic.
At the end of the day, my goal is to...
Look, I'm also accustomed to being around people that do what I do.
Sometimes people get taken aback by my crude language or the way I think about things or discuss things, but my culture, my community is...
Comics.
At the end of the day, they're comics.
And fighters.
Both of those groups of people in the community are used to saying some fucked up shit.
It's fun for us.
When you're a person who...
People are accustomed to things...
One of my favorite videos...
It has nothing to do with psychedelics.
Of a fighter.
It shows you the sense of humor of a fighter.
My friend John Wayne Parr, after a fight, he's got this giant gash in his head.
And they're stitching him up, and as they're stitching him up, they're opening up his thing like a mouth and talking.
A lot of people would be freaked out, and they have this cut in his head.
He's laughing, it's post-fight.
You know, there's a sense of humor that fighters have, and there's a sense of humor that comedians have, and I'm sure first responders, firefighters, a lot of soldiers that I'm friends with, they have a different sense of humor too because they've seen a lot of wild shit and a lot of violence.
They use...
There's a style of communication that for a lot of people to just live a more...
And the real ones like Ron White and Dave Chappelle, they'll be raging stronger than ever.
Because people are going to appreciate it and they're going to realize, oh my god, this is the way out.
We need to stop...
Getting angry about everything, and we need to start embracing humor.
It's important.
There's a broad spectrum of human thought, and we can't just live in the fucking range of outrage.
That range is a shitty range, that range that so many people exist in.
And one of the reasons why they exist in that range, the outrage range, is because they're doing it online.
It's not a real way of communicating.
Because of the fact that everyone's been separated from just normal regular interactions with folks You know, I remember like I would feel like when I was when I first moved to LA I Didn't have any friends and I would feel real weird.
You know, I would be I had a furnished apartment So it wasn't really it didn't ever felt like mine.
It felt like a hotel said that they're this place called Oakwood's these Oakwood's apartments in Burbank and I think it was in Burbank.
But wherever it was.
I was staying in these apartments.
It was weird, man.
I felt weird.
Like, what am I doing here?
And then I would go to the comedy store.
And I'd be around people.
And I'd be around like-minded misfits.
And we'd all be laughing.
And I would be like...
It was almost like somebody took a weighted vest off of me.
Like...
I'm going to be okay.
It's going to be okay.
And then, you know, it felt weird again the next day and then I had to go to the comedy store again.
We need each other.
We need each other, but we need each other person to person.
And there was no social media back then, which if there was, I'd probably be just like a lot of these fucking idiots that are online raging about the world and looking for acceptance and looking for social justice brownie points and virtue signaling at any turn, hoping that it gets me some love and likes.
Because that's what people are doing.
They think they're doing it because they're trying to correct the world, but they really don't understand that they're contributing to the polarizing aspect of today's culture and climate.
I was surprised how much they contributed to just pushing back.
There's a lot to discuss there, but they helped stall the Nazis in the fact that it took them much longer to then, after conquering Crete, they had to go to Russia and they succeeded.
The Greeks successfully Stalled the Nazis to where most of the war was in the winter pushing towards Stalingrad.
There's a fascinating history there.
I always love the kind of 300 where you stand back and like just a few people are able to fight back the storm of evil.
Well, I think sometimes I mourn for the death of L.A. I really do.
And I think when I'm around comics sometimes, particularly comics like Yana, who I met at the Comedy Store, there is a part of me that gets to this part where I'm like, God damn it.
I know, but hilariously enough, he was talking about something about him becoming famous and trying to plan ahead that if he's going to continue being married...
It's weird, because when sex is involved with human beings, we have these cultural norms.
But these cultural standards about relationships are based about...
There's two things going on.
One, there's like if a woman commits to a man and she's enhancing his career...
And she abandons her own to try to help him, and then she doesn't have a career, and then he gets rid of her and cashes her out for a new model, and then she's fucked, and she needs alimony.
Or, vice versa, like the Tom Arnold situation, where Tom Arnold, that's our guy.
We've all talked about that.
That's our fucking Michael Jordan when it comes to male alimony.
He married an incredibly successful woman, Roseanne Barr, and then when he got divorced from her, he got paid, and he got rich and famous from that.
There's that, and then there's when there's children involved.
And I think as a guy who grew up without a father, without my real father, I don't know my real father.
I have a stepfather.
I'm very fortunate that my stepfather was in my life, and he's a great guy.
And my mom has been in my life my whole life.
I'm very fortunate, because there's some people that don't have neither of those things, right?
It means a lot to me to be there for my kids.
It means a lot to me.
And it doesn't mean that I love my wife any less, but whatever the marriage thing, I was like, okay.
We had a kid.
I'll abandon all of my preconceived notions about the silliness of legal contracts with the state.
It doesn't mean I don't love anyone any less or it cheapens it at all.
And I remember being terrified because I was a little kid and thinking like, God, I don't ever want to be trapped with some fucking person where they don't like each other anymore.
Or even if they love each other, they've developed these patterns of communication that are so negative and corrosive.
They just scream at each other all the time.
And when I was a young man, that's how I thought about relationships.
And also, I had a bunch of bad ones growing up, especially when I was broke.
When you're broke, and your future looks pretty fucking sketchy, boy, you learn a lot.
And those girls were right.
They were right to look at me skeptically.
Like, this motherfucker thinks he's funny?
Like, where are you going with this?
Where's his career going?
And, you know, there was like, when girls would cheat on me, like if I found out about it, there was a relief.
I was like, oh, great.
I'm going to have to wait for this to happen.
Like, it already happened.
Like, I knew it was coming.
Like, this is my concept of relationships.
They were always tortured and struggling.
And for, what is the percentage of people that get divorced in this country?
There's a community of people that are focused around the Kardashians and the athletes and the musicians and the this and the that and their whole ideas.
You know, this obviously sounds hypocritical.
It's coming from someone who happens to be famous, but I think that it's an empty pursuit.
It's, you know...
You can get famous doing a thing that you love, or you can try to be famous.
And they're two very different things.
And I think there's been many times in my life where I was trying to get famous.
Because it seemed like it was impossible.
Like when I was young and first getting on television, first doing comedy...
Like, are you able to be cognizant of ways in which the fact that this podcast is the biggest podcast in the world and just all of that, how that's changing your mind?
I mean, I think about that with power, that you might not be cognizant of the way that power is changing you.
You would hope that some president gets to a position of power not because they crave it, but because they have solutions to problems and they genuinely think that they can help the world.
I'm not saying that...
I'm not equating my...
I'm not favorably comparing myself to a president or something like that, but I think...
I got a slow drip of fame.
And that's one of the things that helped me.
You know, I started...
I got on television for the first time in, like, the early 90s with doing stand-up comedy.
And then it led to a sitcom.
It led to Fear Factor and the UFC and all these different things.
And then, ultimately, it accidentally led to the biggest thing that I ever did, which was this.
For some reason, your Bernie Sanders conversation popped into mind, because that's my favorite part about the inauguration that happened, is Bernie Sanders sitting there in comfy clothes with mittens.
I think he's recognizing that it's never going to happen.
You know, he had this idea that he was going to sort of help the work class.
I really do believe that guy was legitimate.
I think he stood for what he really truly believed.
I think there's a lot of people that felt disappointed that there was, you know, some votes that he wasn't there for that he could have helped and some stands that he could have taken that he didn't and then ultimately that he kind of like gave in to the powers that be and the status quo.
But I think meeting him and talking to him and I don't know.
Maybe I'm a romantic, but I really do believe that he had in mind only good intentions.
And I think he really did want to help working families.
And I really do think that he wanted to.
It was one of the reasons why I supported him.
I think he really did want to alleviate student loan debt.
He really wanted to make universities free.
He really did want to make it so that healthcare was accessible to everybody.
He really did want to make it so that a living wage was something that people can expect if they work a job.
And the economists be damned.
I don't know if they're right.
I don't know who's right when it comes to that, whether or not like 15 bucks an hour is going to cripple our culture and crush businesses.
Yeah, it's a story that resonates with anyone that has had a difficult upbringing and recognizes the need that children have for the love of their parents.
There's a thing that happens to children when they're raised incorrectly.
So the problem with this book is that she had the opportunity to write a deep psychological study of Donald Trump that's apolitical, and she kept inserting politics into it.
She kept inserting her obviously liberal point of view, as opposed to studying a fascinating, complicated human being who's obviously achieved a lot of things in this world.
I bet that's probably what the editors want, and I bet that's probably what a lot of other people wanted, but I agree with you Is that I want to be able to make up my own political ideas and my own political decisions.
I want to know what you know about this human.
You know, if Donald Trump might sit down and write a book about her, let me tell you something about this bitch.
This is what I mentioned with the charisma of Hitler, not equating anybody in this conversation.
But Putin is actually two things.
He's very charismatic and witty, intelligent, thoughtful.
So he's a very different style than Donald Trump, who's more chaotic, comedian-like, just off-the-cuff kind of way.
And the other thing that Putin is, which a lot of dictators have been throughout history, is that he's really good at his job, actually, of being a manager, of being president.
He loves his job.
He loves his job more than he loves power, which is fascinating to watch.
You can have critical perspectives on it, you can have positive perspectives on it, but the truth is he's really good at having the meetings with the different people that are responsible for energy, for agriculture, for the way the country runs, actually listening to them.
Obama was really good at this and listening to the different experts and understanding what they're saying, even though he himself is not an expert in it, asking the right questions, thinking through it.
Calling you out on your bullshit if you're corrupt.
He's actually really good at fighting corruption.
A lot of people argue that he's actually, while he's good at fighting corruption, he's creating an extra, like, another level of corruption by the way, the kind of cronies he gets into government.
But the fact is, he calls people out on their bullshit.
When he gives a lot of money to different kinds of region to perform a certain task, he expects that task to be performed.
Like if a certain kind of infrastructure has to be built, he calls you out on your bullshit if you didn't build that set of roads or whatever the infrastructure is.
So he's good at his job.
The stuff that's underneath it, the potential hypocrisy or the deeply unethical things for which there's very little proof, but almost like common sense, like Epstein didn't kill himself level of logic, it bothers a lot of people, especially in the West.
But in Russia, I think he still has...
Majority support.
I'm pretty sure he has significant support in Russia.
Young people who love the West, who love the idea of freedom.
They don't like the idea of what Putin is doing, which is essentially an authoritarian government.
He's essentially a dictator.
And if you love the idea of freedom, even if Putin is good for Russia, it feels like this is the wrong man to bring freedom to Russia.
And that's ultimately where the battle is, the battle for freedom.
They look at America, yeah, it's a giant mess of just division and all that kind of stuff.
But I think what permeates everything that's going on in America is a love of freedom.
We have a different definition of what that means, but ultimately we want to be free to pursue the thing that we love doing.
Whatever that is.
This country, the United States of America, allows people for whatever weird thing they're into, or amazing thing they're into, to be able to pursue that.
And build, if it's like engineering, to build that thing.
Or if it's art, to create that thing.
Stopped by kind of institutional breaks that slow you down.
And so like the left defines that as saying, you know, if you're a minority, then there's all these institutions that slow you down in terms of your ability to be free in expressing yourself to your fullest potential.
And then people on the right are saying, well, there's all these, like, how do you put it nicely?
But, you know, government overreach in controlling, stifling businesses, stifling conversations, stifling thought, stifling the truth, you know, by sort of saying that this is what, by using terms like white supremacy, by using all these kinds of terminology, being with Stifling freedom of speech.
People on the right are saying that about the left.
But ultimately the struggle is for freedom of speech.
And really effectively in Putin's Russia, all of those freedoms are kind of absent, if we're honest.
Because you can make an argument that the main flaw of our democracy is that every four years we change leadership.
And there's a battle as soon as the person takes office to establish who's going to be the next person in line four years from now.
So oftentimes, this is one of the things that...
To quote Chris Rock again, he was talking about Obama.
A lot of people were disappointed with Obama's first term.
And he was saying, you've got to wait until the second term.
That's when he can do some really gangster shit.
Because he knows he can't go anywhere.
But isn't that a strange thing?
That if you had any other job...
Imagine if I only had four years to do this podcast.
Go back and listen to the first four years.
They were fucking terrible.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I wasn't good at it yet.
I needed to figure out how to communicate with people.
And I think I'm better today than I was yesterday.
And I think I'll be better tomorrow than I am today.
And I think you get better if you care, if you work at it.
Is that the same thing with someone who runs a government?
I would imagine there's some similarities and parallels.
Now, the problem with that is, of course, The best case scenario is you have a benevolent dictator.
You have a dictator that cares but realizes, like, you fucking idiots, I need to take care of you, but I really do love taking care of you, and I'm going to do it within your best interests, and I'm going to try to do my very best to run this country the right way.
I don't think anybody thinks that of any of our presidents.
I think everybody thinks that our presidents are beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists and all the people that got them into positions of power in the first place.
And it was like very generic positive unity kind of But if you want to do a unity speech, you better bring your best Martin Luther King Jr. You better bring your best Obama.
That sucked.
But I'm fascinated by these complicated people that come to power.
Obama is one of them.
I think he's way more fascinating than people give him credit for.
But when I came to this country, what I fell in love with is the freedom.
That a silly fucking guy like me can do anything I want with my life.
And so this one is from Maya Angelou called Caged Bird.
She has really good...
One of the literary geniuses that America's ever produced.
But she mostly talks about the freedom in the context of racism.
But...
This is bigger than that.
This is about freedom in general.
Freedom of the human spirit.
It's called Caged Bird by Maya Angelou.
The free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream to the current ends and dips his wings in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free-birth things of another breeze, and trade wings soft through the sighing trees, and the fat worms waiting on the dawn-bright lawn, and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the graves of dreams.
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream.
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied.
So he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still.
And his tune is heard on a distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.