Lex Fridman critiques Boston Dynamics’ PR-driven robotics, contrasting it with Tesla’s vision-only AI advancements under Elon Musk’s leadership, while questioning China’s censorship and QAnon’s manipulative, single-author origins. Rogan defends legalizing cocaine to curb contaminated markets, praises nonviolent trafficker Roger Reeves, and debates Jordan Peterson’s intellectual legacy amid "woke" backlash. They pivot to sports betting hypocrisy, wrestling’s MMA foundation (Khabib, Snyder), and Jimi Hendrix’s LSD-fueled live performances, linking artistic peaks to discipline and suffering—like Goggins’ ice baths or Bukowski’s vulnerability—before ending with Wolfe’s tequila philosophy and a playful gun-training joke. [Automatically generated summary]
So, very specifically, I'm interested in the problem of human-robot interaction, where there's this beautiful dance between a human and a robot.
The same way you have a dog that you love playing with.
There's a magic there.
I don't know.
There's an excitement when Marshall looks at you and looks away and then looks at you again.
And just that excitement, I want to understand how we can engineer that into our AI systems.
So that's called human-robot interaction.
From a perspective of Boston Dynamics, they want a machine that doesn't have anything to do with humans.
They want a machine that patrols a factory looking for anything dangerous, or does surveillance on a factory floor, or helps in dangerous environments where it's too dangerous for humans, so you want a robot to do the work.
You want always there to be a distance between a human and a robot.
For me, I'm interested in exploring When human and robot close together.
And I think that's actually really important to understand for safety as well.
Robots should be able to detect and predict the movement of humans really well in order to avoid hurting them accidentally.
Like that's a robotics AI problem.
You know, it's predicting the movement of pedestrians, predicting the movement of humans, whether it's the human body or the human hand on the factory floor.
You have to understand the mind of humans.
They don't move like billiard balls.
They move in unpredictable, complicated ways.
Or rather, predictable but complicated ways.
And that's the problem of human-robot interaction that I think is beautiful.
Not very many people are really studying it carefully.
And I wanted to study it carefully.
One of the things I did, and you always learn this mistake the hard way, is I asked for permission on everything.
The right way to do it is just to do it and apologize later.
I want to show off some awesome stuff with probably one of the greatest engineering feats in the space of robotics ever, which is both Atlas, the bipedal robot, and the Spot, the legged robots.
But you have to allow people like that to rise to the top in all spaces of leadership.
I see in politics, I don't know, Andrew Yang, somebody like that.
Somebody who doesn't look like the past.
And Elon Musk certainly doesn't look like the past in terms of CEOs.
By the way, I know you're not a huge fan of Autopilot, or don't use it very often, but they have, because I want to squeeze in AI a little bit, they have Autonomy Day in a few days, Tesla does, and they're going to, they've been doing, I don't know if you've been paying attention, but they've been doing a lot of interesting stuff on the semi-autonomous, autonomous driving side.
So one of the crazy things they're doing that I never thought would be possible is to use vision only for their FSD, for their autopilot, meaning cameras only.
Talking about breaking with the ways of the past.
So in the past, you always have radar.
You have more, quote unquote, reliable sensors for emergency situations.
For emergency braking.
So here, Tesla is using only cameras, so only vision.
The logic there is our roads are all designed for human eyes, therefore you should be able to drive with only visual information.
The problem is with rain, with fog, with all those conditions, with night, how are you going to be able to do it?
The fact that they're doing so much more successful than I would expect is quite incredible from an NAI perspective.
And they're just going full steam ahead there with something called Dojo, which is...
I don't know if you know how this whole process works, but...
They're basically deploying a version of autopilot software to a fleet of vehicles.
Those cars are driving, sometimes by humans, sometimes by AI. And then whenever AI runs into trouble, that's a little data point that they send back to the mothership.
And then it retrains the system, and the system gets smarter and smarter, and then redeploys a smarter version.
So there's this loop.
They call it the data engine.
This loop, it sounds maybe trivial, but it's one of the first large-scale implementation of an AI system in the world that does this kind of loop.
So it's not...
oftentimes when you deploy these kinds of systems, you deploy them, and the time between versions is like years.
You have to basically buy a new smartphone or something like that.
Here, the time between new versions is every week.
I think every Friday they're releasing a new version, something like that, which is a, you know, it's a revolutionary idea.
It sounds ridiculously simple, but it's revolutionary in that as opposed to deploying a perfect system, you deploy a system that's not perfect, and then it improves over time and converges towards something that's safer than human drivers.
That's fascinating.
And then the Dojo computer is they're building their own huge system that's doing the training.
So to train neural networks or AI systems, you have to have specialized hardware.
So, Elon, this is another really interesting lesson for companies, especially car companies.
As opposed to outsourcing the work to other companies, you do it all in-house.
So if you look at the history of Tesla, at first it was distributed across other suppliers and so on, but they're doing more and more and more in-house.
I think that the dream is you have a single factory, like here, Giga in Austin, Texas, where the input is raw materials and the output is a finished car.
And they're doing the same thing with the AI. They don't want to use GPUs and computers from somebody else.
They want to have that in-house.
So the whole thing is like this organism that takes in raw materials and produces intelligent vehicles.
Andrew Huberman is coming to town and he's doing this thing that like, I don't know, it's like Stephen King style thing where he's just locking himself in a room and writing.
He has to finish his, he's working on a book, some like science related book.
I mean, the same as with Book of Five Rings and Underwar, right?
It's been forever.
I mean, a lot of these books I've already read.
I'm sort of rereading them.
The way I think about books is to kind of travel.
So you're like traveling to a place.
Like Man's Search for Meaning with Viktor Frankl is the Holocaust and is the story of a man in a concentration camp finding meaning and beauty in a moment of suffering.
And so you're...
Like, that, you're traveling with him to that concentration camp, and you're there.
And then if you, you know, if you only read for like 30 minutes, you don't get a chance to fully immerse.
If you just stay there and you travel there, it can, I don't know, it can really change you.
Or at least in the past, this has really kind of transformed your mind.
Just put it in perspective, like what's going on over there now.
And it's, you know, I mean, books are amazing for putting things into perspective, but there's something about a documentary, especially a boots-on-the-ground documentary by a journalist like Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan while Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban.
So it feels so...
It's so intense when you're watching it and you see, you know, guys in the beginning of the film that wind up dying.
And it's...
First of all, I forgot, like I think you have a sense of what they mean when they talk about these mountainous areas, this mountainous terrain that's impossible really to control because it's very difficult to traverse, very difficult to get around.
I don't think you really understand it until you watch that film, until you really see the mountains and you're like, oh god, like how is anybody ever going to control this area?
No wonder why the Soviets failed.
No wonder why we failed.
No wonder why the people that live there, they're living in an incredibly difficult environment in terms of just getting around.
Could they have designed a better withdrawal plan that scaled over time, where they gave particularly the people that helped the American military over there, that they're very vulnerable right now.
They're in a lot of trouble.
Could they have protected them better?
Could they have done something?
Could they have designed a plan?
That's what most people who are criticizing this believe.
The people that actually understand what's going on over there, they think this idea of pulling out immediately Yeah.
The Afghanistan situation is so crazy because, you know, Biden was on television just a little while ago talking about how there's 300,000 armed Afghanistan soldiers that were trained by the United States and there's only 75,000 Taliban.
And so you start questioning the whole operation, the whole process of making decisions about foreign policy and the military conflicts.
What lesson do you draw from that when there's places like North Korea, when there's many people in Africa suffering?
There's many regimes that are abusing its people there.
Then there's people that criticize Russia.
For certain things in terms of from an authoritarian regime perspective.
And then the big one is China.
And then what do you do about that?
I mean, I do find the libertarian argument here the most sophisticated and convincing is we should stay out of other people's business until we have a really clear good plan.
The majority of Americans, given a transparent communication of what is going on and what we're going to do, the majority of Americans are behind this plan.
Otherwise, stay out of it.
When you have something like Nazi Germany, where there's obvious atrocities happening, where there's an obvious war on the horizon, then that's different.
It's so fucked because I'm trying to be kind here.
Misfits need love too and and misfits need a purpose and That is what I got on that documentary at least the first two episodes I mean free speech also, you know the family that runs 8chan in the Philippines Like their commitment to free speech and to let people just do whatever the fuck they want to do like In many ways,
I agree and see their point but the not even but What I'm seeing in the documentary though, these people that are into QAnon, the people that were following the drops, the people that were deeply invested in believing that this was some person who, I don't know, maybe they'd resolve this later on in the series, I don't know, after two.
Yeah, he was interesting because he said, I think it was in the first episode, he says something like, you know, he is disabled and, you know, like people were generally in public nice to him.
But then when he went in anonymous forums, people were basically just cruel to him.
The cool thing about that documentary to me, I always had a hunch, but that documentary makes it clear to me that one person can be Q. So the documentary from the very beginning, I don't think they'll resolve it.
First time I saw him, I was like, that guy, that's Q. Really?
Yeah, it's obvious.
So to me, technically speaking, because not the people on the forums, but him, I know that person in the following sense.
Like, I know programmers.
These are hackers, these are programmers.
I know these people.
I knew from the very beginning that Q... If it's controlled by a government agency, like in Russia or something like that, it's because they acquired a single person who was good at this.
It's pretty easy for a single person to control anonymous forums in this way.
With some combination of bots and just individuals.
It's weaving narratives.
Human beings love narratives.
And if you come up with crazy shit and you start, there's a mystery, like a Hitchcock-style mystery.
You're basically telling stories.
It's how Scientology got started.
You're telling beautiful stories, like some mystery, some painting a picture of evil that you get to fight, painting a picture of a better world if you defeat the evil.
All those things you can do pretty effectively through technology by a single person.
That could have been done for the movie, too, because I'm looking at other pictures of him and there are no pictures of taped up glasses, but I had to find that one.
No, I thought it was probably some wackadoo who works with Trump who is enjoying the fact that he has access and he's playing games with people.
That's what I felt like.
He's playing games and manipulating people.
It's just the way...
They're communicating.
The way they're communicating with like puzzles and then all these QAnon dorks, all these people that are like these misfits that they follow in this documentary that are really obsessed with it.
They have to like try to piece the puzzle together.
Tell them what the fuck is going on.
Why is this a puzzle?
Why is this a puzzle that's open to interpretation?
That's dumb.
That's a dumb way to leak information.
Did Edward Snowden release information in puzzles?
Did Julian Assange release information in puzzles?
No.
This is a stupid way to release information.
You don't have to reveal your identity, but reveal the information very clearly.
The way he speaks in these broken sentences, and the fact that it's coded, this is someone who's fucking with people.
But the thing is, what I got out of this documentary so far, is that, look, if you get a hundred people in the room, You're gonna have a misfit.
One person in that room is gonna be an outcast, they're not gonna fit in, and they're gonna be searching for meaning and longing, and this is just, they don't have like a very clear place where they fit into the puzzle.
So if you get a hundred people and one of them is like that, well you have 330 million people in this country.
So you have fucking millions and millions of misfits.
Yeah, there's a depth of loneliness in all of us and we're searching for meaning.
I really honestly think that if you look at the spread of the people in the world, I'm not saying 100%, but I'm saying there's a population of 60-70% that, I mean, they're not radicalized, but they're searching.
And we're searching for stories to unite over.
This is the scary thing.
It's both exciting and scary.
It's exciting because you can use technology for the people to rise up against power centers.
They're abusing them.
That's what QAnon is doing.
They're doing it with false narratives and they're rising up against, I would say, the wrong kind of power centers.
But the fact that people can do that, I think, starting from a single person is exciting to me and is promising to me because I ultimately believe in the positive aspects of human nature.
But I also do believe people are searching and we're hungry.
So what we're calling misfits, you're a misfit.
You're just like, you're a busy misfit that runs on a treadmill.
I see what they're doing, this longing for community.
And I get my community in different ways.
But if I didn't have stand-up comedy, if I didn't have jiu-jitsu, if I didn't have podcasting, I would try to find community in some way.
And I think when I say misfits, a lot of these folks...
They're just social outcasts, right, in a lot of ways.
And it's not just that they're misfits.
They're kind of disconnected to, you know, like the lady who's missing her front tooth and the husband telling the kid, build that wall, build that wall.
These are misfits, right?
These are goofy people that they don't have, like, I don't think they have many conversations with objective, intelligent people that are well-informed.
So when they're having these conversations, I think they lack the experience of critical thinking skills, and so they'll believe all kinds of stupid shit.
You know, like the guy who got super excited that he thinks that Trump was pointing at him.
I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency.
I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 70s to become involved in protecting agency drug operations in this country.
I have been trying to get this out for 18 years and I have the evidence.
My question for you is very specific, sir.
If in the course of the IG's investigations, and Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity, and it's classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity, or will you tell the American people the truth?
I think we missed the beginning of it where he said that he personally witnessed the CIA selling drugs, but...
This is 1996 allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking.
It all turned out to be 100% true.
I mean, this is how Freeway Ricky Ross, the original real Rick Ross, made millions and millions and millions of dollars.
He thought he was just an awesome drug dealer.
Well, he was an awesome drug dealer that was working with the CIA, unbeknownst to him.
Like, they were allowing him to sell drugs so they could profit off of it, so they could funnel the money into the war with the Contras and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
By the way, there's not often, I'm a big fan of JRE, there's not often when I do a podcast interview, I was talking to Roger Reeves, and I'm thinking, I wish I wasn't doing this interview, and I wish I was listening to this on your show.
Well, it also touches my heart because it's like, go to see about a girl.
He's been with his wife through that whole thing.
She was with him through all the crazy times, and when he was in prison for many, many years, she stayed with him, and now they're back together, and there's I got to hang out with them, and they're in love.
It's crazy.
Just to look at a couple through all of that, through all the crazy life they've been through together.
If they got a hold of pure cocaine and made supposedly educated decisions, you could educate people.
Like, we've educated people somewhat about alcohol, right?
We know not to drink and drive.
We know alcohol can cause liver damage and it could fuck you up and, you know, drink moderately.
These narratives are all constantly distributed, right?
We should have done the same thing with cocaine.
Like, I'm not interested in cocaine, but...
I think cocaine should be legal.
I really do.
I mean, so many fucking people do it, and they're getting it from these weird sources where you really have no idea what's actually in it.
You're not testing it.
You know, and it's infuriating for adults, for grown adults.
They should be able to make informed decisions.
And if they just had pure cocaine, which they would be able to get if it was legal, instead of the stepped-on bullshit that people are getting, it'd probably be a lot better for you.
When you talk to Dr. Karl Hart, have you ever had him on your show?
You should have him on your show.
You know who he is?
The guy from Columbia?
He's brilliant.
And his perspective is incredible.
It's very refreshing.
Because here you got a guy who's a professor at Columbia who talks openly about responsible drug use.
That he uses drugs and he enjoys them.
And he's a brilliant man.
And it's not wasted his life at all.
It's not ruined him at all.
And he was a clinical researcher, and before he was a researcher, he was of the opinion that drugs are bad.
And he bought into all the propaganda about drugs, and he's like, there's no way to use them right.
They're going to get addicted.
It's going to fuck you up.
But along the way, doing actual research, he came to understand what they actually do to you and how they could be used responsibly.
So that might not be right for everyone, but we should at least do really good science on who is it right for, what are the protocols, how to do it in a healthy way, all that kind of stuff.
Do you know how many people are on OxyContin right now?
How many people are on Oxycodone and how many people have back pains and their doctors prescribe some opiates and they take them on a regular basis?
I would like to know.
Let's find out.
How many people in the United States regularly take prescribed opiates?
Because there's very little difference between opiates prescribed in pill form and heroin.
The difference is, again, with heroin, you're getting it from some fucking crazy sources and you don't know what's in it.
If you get oxycodone and oxycontin and the various pills that you get opiates in, you're getting it, at least you're getting a pharmaceutical grade version of it.
Okay, let's just go to 2019 because it drops quite a bit.
But still, because they tightened down the regulations and there's a lot of documentaries about the abuse of it, but In 2019, it's quite a bit less, but it's still 153,260,450 prescriptions.
Well, they were aware that billions and billions of dollars were being made.
And so rogue elements of government agencies participated in the trafficking of this and they funneled that money into black operations, you know, like they did with the Sandinistas and the Contras versus the Contras.
But they've been doing that forever.
They've been doing that forever.
And if you thought about drug use and drug illegality, you scaled it down.
I always like to scale things down to a preposterous number.
So if there was just the three of us on the world, why would we make anything illegal?
It was just the three of us.
There's three guys in this room, you, me, and Jamie.
We're all grown adults.
Imagine if Jamie decided that he's the police officer, and if he catches you with heroin, he's going to lock you in a cage.
It would be preposterous.
We'd have to pull Jamie aside.
We'd have to go, Jamie, you can't lock Lex up in jail because he wants to use heroin.
Do we really need laws for substances that could potentially cause you to commit crimes?
Because if you get drunk and you are friendly drunk like you are in real life and you just laugh and we have a good time, then that's fine.
But if you get drunk and you go out there and you want to fight the security guards and you want to go across the street to 7-Eleven and kick somebody's ass, the problem is the actions.
The problem is not the substance itself.
The problem is what are you doing when you're on these substances?
Well, we already have laws to stop you from doing those things.
Are we saying that if you drink alcohol that it's impossible for you to control your violent urges?
He's also just like one of the most well-read, one of the most brilliant people I've ever talked to, which is hilarious because he has all of these, sometimes literally, masks that he can put on and take off.
It's like the most masterful troll I've ever encountered in my life.
I always wonder, like Elon Musk, I wonder in each industry there's like a rare moment when there's like this weird shooting star, this glimmering weird thing that happens.
I've been obsessed watching soccer lately, football.
He's made millions and millions of dollars, and he's also been given millions and millions of dollars by all sorts of very, very rich Muslim people who love him, and they gifted him money.
Now, I'm biased a little bit, but I think Russian is a language that is more effective at communicating, feeling, Emotion, suffering.
The way the language has evolved, because it went through the 20th century, through the wars, through the atrocities, through all of that, I think there's something to that, where the language carries the burden of the people, the suffering of the people with it.
The American experiment has a different trajectory that results in a different language, and I would say American language is much more simplistic.
So you can't fuck with the words as much.
The way the Russian language works, you can adjust the words to completely change the meaning.
Plus, swearing is an art form in Russia.
Russians swear a lot more.
Obviously not Khabib, but generally speaking, Russians swear a lot more than Americans.
So what you find when people suffer, when you go through the war, when you go through poverty, more people become comedians because humor is a way to escape pain.
You get some vodka, you get a guitar, and you're just shooting the shit.
There's much more of that energy because there's nothing else to do.
And then the laughter is one of the only ways to deal with the absurdity of the government taking everything away from you, all those kinds of things.
And so there's a natural humor to the language, there's a natural ability to like between the lines to communicate pain.
That's why you have all the poets, there's Dostoevsky, even shooting way farther back Tolstoy.
So there's a history of literature being used to communicate that pain.
I think Russian language is better at doing that.
But there's also kind of a, culturally speaking, there's an inclination to romanticize things, like to be kind of philosophical.
I think that has to do with the early education system in Russia, under the Soviet Union especially, was such that everybody was forced to read really heavy literature early on, like way early on, and also do some Like math.
The level of education in Russia in the first five years, the first eight years, leading up to ten, is just an order of magnitude more intense than it is in America.
Where America catches up is the college.
America dominates the world in university education.
But in terms of high school, middle school, elementary school, American education is very soft.
It doesn't really challenge people.
It doesn't really push them.
Russian education system.
You read all that stuff.
You read Tolstoy.
You read Dostoevsky.
Not only that, you have to memorize hundreds of poems.
There's a strictness to it where you have to learn, at least when I was coming up, handwriting and you can't make a single mistake.
So there's an emphasis on perfection.
I think China has a similar kind of thing.
Like you're afraid.
The way I'm afraid when I go to a hard training session for Jiu Jitsu, like beforehand, like fear, I was afraid going to school.
Because there's an expectation of excellence, there's an expectation of perfection.
If you suck, You're not going to, like, everybody looks down on you.
And if you are excellent, everybody celebrates you.
And that creates a huge amount of pressure.
But when a lot of the population does that, there's just an intellectual nature to everybody.
The athletes, just everybody.
The plumber, everybody in the population is all of a sudden philosophical.
And that, like, the Satya brothers that are sort of made Dagestan and Russian wrestling famous...
They're poetic.
There's just a poetry.
There's a romanticism.
There's philosophy in the way people spoke.
And I think that's connected to the language, but I'm not sure it's like the chicken or the egg.
I don't know if just the language is being used in this way or the language enables that kind of communication.
That does make me wonder, because I know English and Russian, how much I'm losing that I can't speak Chinese or Japanese or Portuguese.
Like, how much of the culture am I missing that I'll never get a chance to truly deeply experience?
Yeah, I would imagine that if you could understand Mandarin, if you could speak Mandarin and Get an understanding of how the government communicates with the people, how the government controls people in China, what they allow, what kind of conversations they allow.
I'm sure you saw the John Cena video where he was apologizing to China.
I would love to hear these billionaires that are apologizing to China, like Jack Ma.
They disappeared him for four months and then he came back and he was happy to be alive.
They took billions of dollars from his company, devalued it, did a lot of weird shit, right?
See, the problem with electronic censorship is it's all entailing.
You can't hide in a pub somewhere.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you can't go into a basement and...
I mean, you can, but the reality is most communication is done digitally.
It's done online.
And when they have their tentacles into all these servers and into everyone's phone and into everyone's computer, The consequences of communicating openly are very real.
Basically, it takes a person who says, I don't care.
I'm willing to die for the things that are in my heart.
I'm going to put them on paper.
And I'm going to write some of the greatest literature, some of the greatest poetry ever written.
I mean, that...
That's kind of what I'm saying is I wish I was able to connect to that literature being written right now in China.
That probably is circulating and a lot of people know, but we just don't have a connection because China is a good example, at least from the way I understand, of there being a very big gap culturally and language-wise between America and China.
Even bigger than I would say between America and Russia.
So it really is a leap of language, a leap of culture required to truly understand the people.
And it's sad that we can't.
Or at least I feel like that's a huge learning curve, a huge burden to connect.
Because these are like power centers.
China's getting stronger and stronger.
And I believe the way forward isn't through war.
It's through love, through connecting, through mixing the cultures and all that.
But because of the language gap, that might be difficult.
I mean, the overwhelming censorship that they have and the overwhelming control that they have over the population is very different than what we tolerate currently.
My concern over here is that we're moving towards some sort of social credit score.
And I think that's one of the big concerns that people have with vaccine passports and things along those lines.
It's a slippery slope.
And to inviting this kind of control over the population and to make it to normalize it.
And to make it, you go from that to this and make it so that they have access to your whereabouts.
And because, you know, they need to track you for COVID-19 or COVID-23 or whatever the fuck it is.
When they ramp things up and make them even more intrusive than we have, we can get closer to what they have in China.
Yeah, it's terrifying because people, for the most part, are losing trust in our institutions and governments and being able to use something like vaccine passport data to help us as opposed to limit our freedoms.
And that's really disappointing because things like vaccine passports might be effective if it was done by competent institutions.
But right now, I would definitely be against something like that.
But as far as I understand, I mean the data on vaccines, it's like you have a set of solutions and the question is which one has the best ratio of benefits to risks.
It seems to me that the vaccine has the best benefit to risk ratio.
It's very confusing to me that we're not opening schools and still behaving in certain parts of the United States like we're on lockdown.
Even though there's vaccines.
So that's really confusing to me because from my understanding, taking the vaccine significantly lowers your risk of death or ending up in a hospital.
So if anyone who wants to take the vaccine or is at risk or wants to lower their risk of dying will take the vaccine.
Everyone else accepts the risk of dying.
Great.
Open up the society.
I don't understand why it's not completely open now.
So you have full freedom.
There's more than enough vaccines to take the vaccine.
There are vaccines available to be vaccinated.
And from that point, it's on you to decide what are the risks you're willing to accept.
Certain companies want to force people to be vaccinated and then there's the issues of side effects of vaccines and whether or not they're fully understood and particularly long term and whether or not they've been fully reported.
And then also there's a lack of responsibility.
The vaccine manufacturers don't have any responsibility in terms of what does or does not happen to someone once they can't be sued.
So the problem is the source of information for the effectiveness of vaccines and the risks are coming from centralized institutions that have completely lost trust of the public.
You don't have just the fact that people don't trust him.
You have the mainstream media ignoring all the things that he's done that would lead people to distrust him, particularly financing EcoHealth Alliance, which was responsible for gain-of-function research in Wuhan, which is responsible, perhaps, for the leak of this fucking virus in the first place.
But the problem to me with Fauci isn't the actions he did, it's the lack of transparency and just basic human, authentic communication.
It's the same problem as with Bill Gates.
I think Bill Gates is a brilliant person, I like him, but there's something shady about the way he communicates about stuff.
Whenever he buys a lot of land, he's not very clear about communicating why he bought that land.
And so immediately, conspiracy theories spring up that spread effectively through our Q friend, And others like him.
And the final result that hurts my heart deeply is the mistrust in science.
So like mistrust in scientific institutions lead to mistrust in science.
And then there's like this kind of sense that science sucks.
No, science and technology enables the high quality of life that you currently have.
It gives you the freedom to be able to tweet and the freedom period to choose the path in life for most of the people in the United States.
That's science and technology.
Also to get medical help on an infinite number of conditions you might have.
That's science.
The best aspect of life that you can think of are presented by science today.
So there's a lot of great stuff being done by science.
Don't let shady, greedy assholes at the very kind of top that are communicating science as part of our government be somehow connected to what is the essence of science.
So that to me hurts me in this conversation about vaccines is that somehow it's somehow leading to a mistrust in all the amazing things that science has brought us.
There's also a problem with people like him where they say things, they say these statements, these statements that you're led to believe that they have an understanding of the situation, and they clearly can tell you where it's going and what's possible and where we're at with the virus.
But then it turns out they're 100% wrong.
But then they come up with a new statement, and you're supposed to believe that.
Remember, like, in the beginning, he was saying that masks are ineffective.
He was saying there's no asymptomatic transmission of the virus.
There's all these different statements.
They were saying that it's just...
When they don't know, they never say, we don't know.
They don't say, this is very confusing and we're trying to figure it out as we go along.
Well, he's used to communicating for most of his career without the internet.
You gotta think, he was the guy who was the head of the United States response to the AIDS crisis.
And he was the guy who was responsible, I don't know what his exact role was, in prescribing AZT for people who had AIDS, which turned out to be disastrous.
Okay, so, you know, I don't know the actual decisions.
I'm sure he might have, there have been a lot of things we're not saying that made him a great scientist.
The point is, he's not a great communicator of science, or certainly a great leader.
And what we need now is a great leader to communicate the current data available in the vaccines, as far as I understand.
Objectively.
Like, from everything I see, and that's why, like, Brett Weinstein stands on his own with, like, an army of mainstream media against them, sort of communicating what are the different options out there, like Ivermectin, one of them.
He may very well be wrong.
I tend to think the effectiveness of ivermectin will not be as high as he predicts.
I think the effectiveness of ivermectin has only been really proven in terms of prophylactic.
As a prophylactic, I think it has a high level of effectiveness according to some of the studies that they've done like out of Argentina and a few other places where they did it with frontline workers.
And then on the vaccine side, I mean, it all comes down to effectiveness.
Which is more effective, the vaccine or ivermectin?
That should be studied really well.
There's really good data on the vaccine now.
The point...
There's the ability to collect really good data on the vaccine, but the way it's being collected is very shady in terms of breakthrough cases and not being measured well.
And on the flip side, the reporting of when the use of the vaccine leads to side effects is not done well.
If someone decided to misinform people purposely and then talk about, you know, the under-reporting of side effects and what's really going on and how, you know, the long-term effects have been demonstrated but they're holding that information from you and then people start leaking that.
And the final result is nobody trusts anything, so you don't know what to do.
And then how are you supposed to proceed forward?
And then government kind of continues wanting to gain more and more power by sort of doing actions like lockdowns and enforcing vaccinations and all those kinds of things because that allows you to grow government.
And the whole thing is just...
It feels like it's not heading towards a solution.
To me, there's a few obvious solutions from the very beginning.
There should have been the world's largest infrastructure project for testing.
There should be at-home testing every single day from May of 2020. It's super cheap, less than a dollar to manufacture tests taken every single day.
That data is not being collected.
It gives you complete knowledge and freedom to make your own decisions whether to go out or not.
Well, there's the other problem, is that as soon as there's a crisis, then the government changes its position from working for the people, people that are elected to work for you, to try to make life better and more organized, to someone who controls people and tells them what to do because of the safety of the masses.
And this is not a debatable issue.
They get to decide.
Look what's going on in Australia right now.
Australia is fucking madness.
They have very, very few deaths, very few cases, and they've got everything locked down.
They have places in supermarkets and stores...
Roped off where you can't go into them because they're non-essential areas of a store.
Like someone sent me some photos of these areas of stores with like party supplies and things like that.
They literally have like a rope around it and a sign that says these are non-essential goods.
You are forbidden for going into this area.
This store is only for essential items.
And the number of deaths over there and the number of cases is very low.
But they're trying in a very draconian way to eliminate any possible future.
They want to keep people in their houses.
The military is circling over houses and yelling out at people at bullhorns, get back in your house.
And it's also, it's one of those things where people have a position and then they get very emotional and very angry supporting their position, defending their position, and attacking the other position.
The Iceman Wim Hof is long viewed as scientifically impossible.
It wasn't until the first, how do you say that?
Radboud?
Radboud University study in 2011?
That things really kicked off.
Studies show that by using his method, Wim was able to voluntarily influence his autonomic nervous system, something which until then was thought impossible.
This groundbreaking finding published in PNAS and Nature established credibility, quite literally rewrote biology textbooks, and piqued scientist's curiosity.
What does it say though that they did though?
There's actually some papers that showed Yeah, there it is.
Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system attenuation of the innate immune response in humans.
So this is the study, this is the very same study?
This endotoxin was obtained from the Pharmaceutical Development Section of the National Institutes of Health, supplied as a lyophilized...
Lyophilized powder and was reconstituted in five milliliters of saline at 0.9% for the injection and vortex mixed for at least 20 minutes after reconstitution.
The LPS solution was administered as an IV bolus injection at a dose of two nanograms per kilogram body weight in one...
Placed in an anticubital vein to permit infusion of 0.9 NACI solution.
The subjects received...
Boy, there's a lot of fucking scientific terminology here.
Yeah, continuous monitoring of blood pressure and blood sampling, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation data were recorded from a Philips MP50 patient monitor every 30 seconds by a custom in-house developed data recording system starting at one hour before administration of LPS until discharge from the intensive care unit eight hours after LPS administration.
You know, and all this stuff is with breathwork and his ability to control his mind and his emotions and...
To be completely in tune with his body.
He was a yoga instructor, so he's been a yogi before that.
His whole life study has been about his body and about balance and being able to control all of his systems.
And he's such an intense human.
When you're around Wim Hof and he's talking to you about breathing, you get a sense that there's this energy that this guy has, this power that this guy has.
And so when you think about that in terms of what he's able to do with this study, you go, okay, well, how much of this is applicable to a regular person?
And how long does it take to get...
Is this like a black belt in jujitsu?
Like, I can show you an arm bar, but can you do it to me?
You know what I mean?
Like, if you show a white belt an arm bar, I take some guy and go, hey, I'm going to show you how to do an arm bar, and then you're going to put me in your guard, and then you're going to try to do an arm bar.
See, I tend to believe, I'm with Donahar on this, I tend to believe basically almost anybody can become that.
I mean, there's a few ingredients, but with the right coaching, with the right sort of focus, I think maybe not the greatest ever, but you can become pretty damn good.
So he's the first person that made me kind of think twice about the vaccine because he's obviously one of the best, a person who is in one of the greatest shapes possible, right?
There's no question he is the best moving heavyweight I've ever seen.
No question.
The best moving.
It doesn't mean that, like, this is the way he fights.
Like, look at how he, like, every time Derek Lewis goes to set up to move towards him, Cyril Ghosn is nowhere to be found.
He lit Derek Lewis up, man.
And every time Derek Lewis comes to him, like, look at that jab.
I mean, his movement in terms of closing the distance is spectacular.
Look at that front-leg front kick to the body.
And I was severely impressed.
I mean, he had beaten a lot of really good guys.
Like, he beat Jairzinho Rosenstreich.
He beat Junior Dos Santos, whose best days are behind him.
But, you know, he's beaten some very, very good fighters.
But to watch the way he beat...
Derek Lewis, who's a legit one-punch knockout threat, and the technical acumen that he showed, the skill, the technique, the footwork, the movement, the understanding of distance, the ability to control everything that happened inside the octagon was spectacular.
It's just like the UFC and Ngannou were at some sort of a weird impasse, so they decided to make an interim title, which brings up all sorts of ethical discussions about what is an interim title, when is it If the organization could just decide, oh, the negotiations aren't going so well, we're just going to have an interim title.
You know, like, how much time do you give a guy before, you know, he defends his title?
The difference in boxing is so different.
Like, boxers go the long stretch, and boxers enter into negotiations and negotiate.
Like, Caleb Plant and Canelo Alvarez, they've been Dancing back and forth as to whether or not they're supposed to fight and the negotiations fall apart and they come back together again and now they're supposedly in negotiations again for November.
You know, boxing is so different.
Like, the boxers have more control over what happens because it's basically just boxing.
The UFC is...
A star in and of itself, like the organization is a star and to be the UFC heavyweight champion is a huge thing, but ultimately you're a champion in the UFC, which is huge.
It's not the same as like a boxer.
Like Terrence Crawford is a great example, right?
He's a world champion boxer and people want to see Terrence Crawford fight.
They don't give a fuck if he's fighting for Bob Arum or if he's fighting for Golden Boy or that doesn't mean jack shit.
Talking about things that divide the populace with the vaccines, it's probably Messi versus Cristiano Ronaldo, who's the greatest player of all time or currently playing.
Yeah, I think the Brazilian Ronaldo is better than Cristiano.
So Cristiano is much better looking.
He's much harder working.
He's an incredible soccer player.
One of the greatest ever, just not in the top five for me.
Messi moves like nothing I have ever seen.
And this is, I think a lot of people agree with this.
This is moments of genius unlike anybody else.
This everybody agrees on.
And the question is, how much do you value moments of genius in terms of movement?
Just like how many things you're able to create, they're like, what the fuck did I just watch?
Right, right.
I value that above all else.
Now, one of the...
The reasons why until like a month ago, people still said Messi might not be the greatest ever is because he's never taken his national team, Argentina, to a major, like a World Cup win or the Copa America, like the major international win.
He's always, he's taken him to the final a bunch of times, but never won.
And so that has to, that's like LeBron questions.
How many times, if ever, did you take your team, especially when the team is not great, did you make them step up to win the championship?
And until, so he won the South American Championship, which is a huge championship for the first time with Argentina last month, which solidified him as the greatest.
Anyway, I'm making some enemies now.
But the main point is the movement.
I think I want to agree.
When you watch him, it's art.
And I was thinking in the same way, who is that?
Like if you didn't see the face or the uniform, if you just saw the silhouette, you can tell it's messy.
And I was thinking, who is that for MMA? Mighty Mouse.
Nah, well Anderson Silva was fantastic in his prime, no doubt about it.
But Mighty Mouse, the only problem with Mighty Mouse is that he's in a weight class that's very small.
There's not a lot of guys that weigh 125 pounds, so there's not the same talent pool that Anderson Silva dealt with.
Anderson Silva dealt with much more danger in terms of one-punch strikers.
But, you know, the argument could be made that Anderson Silva, when he was at the top, is the greatest of all time.
And then the argument could be made that Mighty Mouse is the greatest of all time.
Mighty Mouse just destroyed people and destroyed people in a way like they looked overwhelmed and confused, like they couldn't touch him.
His movement and his ability to mix the wrestling and the striking and the submissions together flawlessly and seamlessly was incredible.
I feel like fighters have these bursts of time that may last three years, five years, seven years, whatever it is, when they're able to maintain the championship-level RPMs.
And you got to judge them inside that time.
And it's very subjective, obviously, whether it's Anderson or whether it's Jon Jones or whether it's Khabib Nurmagomedov is a very, very good candidate because, in my opinion, Khabib is probably the best candidate because Khabib, not only did he not lose a fight, He barely lost a round.
He lost maybe one round to Conor and it seemed like he was just taking the round off to kind of preserve his energy so he could finish Conor afterwards.
And he did.
And he wound up finishing him.
Khabib has never been in trouble in a fight.
Michael Johnson tagged him once.
Michael Johnson is a guy that doesn't get nearly enough respect.
Yeah, he's had some rough losses, but Michael Johnson knocked out Dustin Poirier with one Michael Johnson was a fucking dangerous, dangerous man, and still is.
And he tagged Khabib.
It probably had Khabib in the most trouble ever in a fight.
He had him wobbled.
But Khabib ultimately won that fight and destroyed him.
I mean, was pounding on him, was telling him, quit now, quit now, you know I deserve title shot, beating the shit out of him, and then put him in a Kimura and tapped him.
But it's arguable that Khabib's the greatest of all time.
You know, and the question with Conor after that fight, there's so much that leads...
There's so much that has to...
It has to be in motion for you to be a Conor McGregor and for you to be a Conor McGregor that has the kind of balls to tear up Jose Aldo's picture and steal his belt and go on this press conference tour with him where you're going all over the world and you're talking crazy shit and climbing inside of Aldo's head to the point where the one moment where they close the octagon door and like, oh my god, it's real.
Conor was elevated by that moment and Aldo seemed like he was dwarfed by the moment.
Did you see that thing with Ronaldo where they put a Coca-Cola in front of him and he pushed it aside and he picked up a bottle of water and said, Agua.
And like he only drinks water?
Because apparently he's like meticulous about his diet and what goes into his body.
And Coca-Cola's sales tanked.
Their stock market price tanked.
It cost them like, I'm sure they bounce back, but it cost their market share something like a billion dollars.
When I type it in, it says the sports betting legal in New York.
The only way to legally place a sports wager in New York is to go to one of the four full-service commercial upstate casinos operated by an upstate Indian nation and place an in-person bet.
He's still got, oh sorry, which I should mention, so he has two years of NCAA, so Gable has a choice now, because I think he's interested in W, like he's interested into that.
WWE? WWE. Yeah, he's also interested in the UFC. In the UFC, but then he can also go back to college and wait for the Olympics again, which is in only three years.
So he can go back to school, dominate NCAA, get a couple titles if he can.
If you want to be pure, let's be pure all the way.
No advertisement, let's keep the whole thing pure, and make it so that NBC and whoever the fuck airs the Olympics, they're only doing it for the purity of the experience of competition.
We will not make any money off the proceeds of any of this.
And whatever money is generated at all, we'll donate to charity.
Scoring points, this is a discussion that I've had with people before.
That style of karate, it's a very useful tool to know.
There's guys like Raymond Daniels who've used that really effectively in kickboxing.
There's guys like Michael Venom Page who uses it really effectively in MMA. There's an ability To leap in and catch you with things that most guys do not have.
When you've got a guy who's elite at that, but then learns the other things, that's a giant bridge to cross that a lot of folks can't...
They don't know what to do with a person like that.
I mean, you're part of people that are creating an incredible place in Austin, but also the fact that Elon really believes that this will be the Silicon Valley.
All the sort of pursuit of excellence without the...
And part of it is also, like we said, the weirdos.
The not cool people don't want to follow Elon Musk.
So they don't get it.
The wild people, the crazies, the dreamers, the people that really want to...
Pursue excellence and in the full diversity of what that means, real diversity, the full spectrum of diversity, and chase big ideas, big dreams, change the world.
Those are the people that are moving here, so it's super exciting.
Well, the thing about Austin as opposed to New York City or Los Angeles is that an individual like Elon Musk can move there and then moving there after he does will be considered like following him.
Because it's not a big place.
It'll be considered copying, or it's a beta move.
Whereas if someone moves to New York City, and then you move to New York City, it's like, God, there's billions of fucking people there.
Or millions of people there, rather.
Who cares?
Or in Los Angeles, same thing.
Not one person defines a city, but if you're in tech, and when Elon decides to make a move from California to Austin, It's a big deal.
And that big deal sort of defines the area.
And if you move afterwards, it's kind of like you're copying.
And people that have...
Maybe they have a little bit of jealousy towards a guy like Elon, or maybe they have some weird animosity towards him, or they don't like...
I mean, he's an easy guy.
Like, if you were in tech, he's an easy guy to be jealous of.
He's running four different businesses simultaneously.
He's...
Has radical influence on innovation.
Radical.
In terms of electric cars, in terms of the Boring Company, in terms of SpaceX, the solar division.
He's got a lot.
And that's not even count Neuralink.
He's got a lot of wild shit that he's doing simultaneously.
So if you're a person who has a big ego and you fancy yourself as like a tech innovator of the highest order and a real wonder kind, and then you see Elon and he moved to Austin, you're like, well, fuck that, I'm staying here.
And I'm not going to, just because the internet, like, it's the jealousy thing.
People criticize you for being a fan, and there's a pressure to sort of be, like, not celebrate others, because that seems like a beta thing or something.
But them little barrel saunas, there's a reason why they make it that.
Like, that fucking contains the heat.
That's nice.
And when you throw the water on the rocks, the fucking steam and the heat in there, it's much more uncomfortable.
It's like physically, like tangibly hotter in this little barrel sauna, which makes sense because my other sauna is big and it takes a long time to heat up.
This motherfucker heats up like full blast, gets to 185 degrees in 20 minutes.
Actually, somebody who was talking about wrestling, somebody texted me, because I mentioned going on the show, and they said, make sure you push back and talk shit to Joe.
I really enjoy that.
And as the example, he mentioned a time where I mentioned that John Wick sucks to you.
The thing is, it's not just that he's coming out of the closet, I celebrate the fact that he's able to be his authentic self, but it's also the music is fun.
I don't want to speak out of turn too much, but as far as I think, isn't there a bit of a problem with homophobia in the rap slash African American community that he's also fighting against?
But I always wonder whether you'd be disappointed if you actually sit down with some of the great actors and talk to them for two hours, three hours, like if they were in the Joe Rogan experience.
Not a lot of scientific thing, but just there's someone offering this and even says here that you have to keep taking the benzo through your Ibogaine treatment.
He's one of the most misrepresented people I've ever seen.
When I see people represent him in a way that is completely inaccurate and caricature of who he really is, I've been stunned at people's representations of who he is.
Especially when he was less known that takes a lot like most people are not willing to not brave enough to do that yeah major props to him no I'm a big fan of him as a human being you know not just as a public person a public intellectual a public person espousing ideas that are controversial but just him as a person like my time spent with him with no cameras on I like him a lot he's a really nice guy Yeah.
But the point is they'll be like, it's the carnivore diet or something.
No, it's not.
It's just the way I am.
The carnivore diet has nothing to do with it.
I feel good on carnivore.
I still, one of the questions I have, because I'm scaling up training, like, I want to, in September, scale up the training like hard with Craig Jones, with Donahard Gordon, like five, six times a week, and if you're doing a little experiment, and then compete a lot in like October.
No, I don't have any insider information about Donahar.
But they were in New York and then Puerto Rico.
When you have that singular obsession when you're in New York, there's still a release valve in the city.
When you're all just alone together, there's a few camps in Jiu Jitsu and martial arts that have been like that where you're just in the middle of nowhere.
You're together.
That can be too much.
So maybe there has to be a difference between stepping on the mat and the time off the mat.
When you're on the mat, there's that grind, there's that ritual of every single day or twice a day, whatever it is.
But when you step off, it's a little bit of an escape to an outside world.
There's something to that.
I'm a huge believer of training.
I'm with Dona on this.
Training every day, if not twice a day.
You have to listen to your body and you still step on the mat, but then maybe you're doing drilling as opposed to hard training.
Yeah, if you're listening to your body, if you're doing it correctly.
If you don't, the thing about Jiu-Jitsu is your body will let you know if you don't, and you'll fall apart.
One of the things that's heartbreaking about communicating with Hickson, because of course Hickson, if you don't know, you know, Hickson was on my podcast a week ago.
And Hickson Gracie is widely considered the greatest Gracie of all time, one of the greatest jiu-jitsu practitioners who has ever lived, if not the greatest, and most certainly the champion of the most important family in the history of martial arts.
That's Hickson.
And such a fascinating person, but...
His body's fucked.
His back is fucked.
He's suffering from disc degeneration, the spaces in between his back.
All the gelatinous discs are deteriorated to almost nothing.
So he's basically bone on bone for all of his back.
So he's in real pain.
It's, you know, I have some disc degeneration.
I have quite a bit of it, actually.
But I have it to a point where I'm still functional, and I work very hard to maintain it.
I've had a lot of treatments, Regenikine and stem cells, and I have a lot of mitigation techniques I use for spinal decompression.
Back strengthening, but it's made me a little bit shorter, like my body's shrinking because the discs are smaller and smaller.
And I know that if I train hard with jiu-jitsu too much, it'll eventually get to where it's bone on bone and then I'm fucked.
I'm not fucked right now.
Like right now, I got good motion.
I can do most of the things I want to do.
I can train pretty hard, but I'm also 54. And there's a reality of the body.
It's like there's only so much you can do.
When I see Hickson, I see the future of most jiu-jitsu practitioners, you know?
Not like the hard sparring that you do when you're in your 20s and 30s where you just fucking...
You know, it's all like...
But that's how you get hurt.
Jean-Jacques Machado is one of the things that I brought up in my conversation with Hickson.
It's really amazing that Jean-Jacques, who is one of the greatest jiu-jitsu practitioners of all time, still rolls to this day because he's so smart.
And Jean-Jacques is probably close to 50, if not 50. But he's very fit, very healthy, very flexible and loose.
But he doesn't explode.
Everything's controlled and perfect technique.
His precision and his technique are so excellent that there's no need to ever rush something or muscle something.
And I think that...
When you're in competition a lot, and you're in competition to tap younger guys and to dominate real explosive individuals, you run the risk of these injuries.
And the big injuries are the spinal injuries, because all the other injuries you can fix.
If you've got a joint injury, those can be fixed.
Meniscus is bad, but the real bad shit is discs.
That's the real bad one.
And everybody that I know that develops real spinal problems, tingling of the nerves, that's the shit that really doesn't go away.
You know, and Craig locks up his leg and he's forced to tap.
There's a lot of guys Craig could do that to.
A lot of guys.
What John has done and what Gordon and Nicky and Gary Tonin and Nicky Rod have done, they've created an amazing level where they're all feeding off each other, which is really weird that they're separating right now.
But they have put him on a protocol, and there's some ways to deal with his particular stomach ailment, to deal with biologics, BBC 157 and stem cells.
There's some treatments that are effective, and he has had a big reaction to it.
He's not 100%, but he's quite a bit better.
He can keep more food down.
That was the thing.
Gordon was the best grappler in the world, the best grappler of all time, and he was dealing with a stomach issue that kept him from eating food, which is just fucking crazy.
So, right now, I kind of decided, like, I'm not a professional musician, obviously, but, so, like, I have in my repertoire, I'm able to play a lot of Hendrix.
So I've always wanted to play Hendrix here, but it always felt difficult.
Yeah, drug use and violence, but it's always worked for me.
There's something to Hendrick's looseness and the freedom of his expression that's just...
I don't know if you get there any other way.
I don't know.
I don't mean...
There's certain liberties that he would take with notes.
To me, Voodoo Child, to me, is like, if I'm tired and I play that song, like if I'm on a stair mill or something like that and I play that song, it's like fuel for the body.
It's like a drug.
All of a sudden I'm like, whoa, let's go!
Your body just fucking feeds off of it.
There's something about his interpretation of those notes.
It's like you're always going to, everyone's going to know that even if you take it further, you took it further because the other guy had the baton first and he handed it to you.
Yeah, artists, particularly musical artists in general, they get to a certain point in time and they lose whatever, like rock and roll people, they lose whatever it means to be this creative force.
In general, and it's not universal, but in general, musicians stop really creating great music as they get older.
They might be able to recreate the great music of the past.
If you go see the Beach Boys, they're not busting out new songs.
But you have a good sense of humility and the significance of humility.
Humility is very, very important because it's the only thing that will save you when your ego gets overwhelmed.
It's the saddest thing in the world when you see someone overwhelmed by their ego to the point where they want and expect a certain type of treatment of other people.
I've tried as I've gotten more and more famous to be more appreciative and more humble.
I've tried.
It's something I work at.
I'm not perfect at it.
No human being is perfect at it.
But the problem with the world of podcasting in general is that there's no blueprint for it.
It hasn't been established.
It's not like, you know, if you want to be a rock star, you can pay attention to Hendrix.
Rogan's telling you there's no fucking guidelines.
And you're not going to do it the way I do it because you're not me anyway.
It's going to be a while before we figure out how to do this right.
But I think humility is significant.
And you do it very, very, very well.
You're one of my favorite people to listen to and your podcast is excellent.
You're one of the very best at removing yourself from a situation and interviewing people and trying to extract the most out of them and it's not easy.
I don't want to do it, but I don't think I can perform at my best.
Here's the problem.
Even discussing self-imposed suffering and the fact that I do it is a little bit of an ego boost, because I'll let you know that I torture myself in a way, like physically torture myself.
You know, like, oh, what are you, working out hard?
Like, there's part of that.
But that's the reality of what it is.
I just don't think there's any other way.
I think you need challenges.
And I think if you live a life without challenges, you're going to become a tyrant.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I really admire David Goggins is there's an element to his suffering that the fact that the camera is sometimes turned on is an accident.
Well, I see it because he's one of my best friends.
But, you know, I wrote the foreword to his book, and one of the things that I wrote is that he's doing an art form.
And it's an art form that very few people can participate in, and very few people are going to appreciate unless you participate in it.
And it's the art form of the maximized life.
It's the art form of the grind for the grind's sake.
And if you can gaze into it and just...
Separate yourself from your – that's one of the things that people want to do when they see a person like a Goggins or a Jocko or a Cam Haynes.
They want to compare themselves and oftentimes they come up short.
They're unfavorably comparing their life to this person and they realize that this person is more disciplined than me.
This person is—they're doing things that I just—I'll fall short some days, and they don't fall short.
They just keep fucking grinding.
They keep fucking grinding.
And I think it's a performance.
I think it's like a—it's a wild— Form of art because it's the it's a conquest over the mind the conquest over laziness and procrastination and and That little that little voice in your head.
It's like you don't have to get up today You don't have to do it today Not one of my favorite things that Goggins says you sometimes I stare at my shoes for a half hour before I put on those motherfuckers But I always do I think you've recently been posting about that.