Aaron Rodgers details his 2021 NFL season under vaccine mandates, facing fines for attending a party with vaccinated teammates despite contracting COVID himself, and criticizing media pressure like Keith Olbermann’s. He contrasts unvaccinated players’ rigorous testing with vaccinated peers’ lax protocols, questioning suppression of risks like blood clots and anaphylaxis while pharmaceutical fraud—$2.3B—went unchecked. The lab leak theory gains traction, with dissenters like Peter McCullough silenced, as vaccine injuries (heart issues, rashes) were ignored. Rodgers’ dietary shifts (cutting gluten/dairy) resolved knee inflammation, but glyphosate in fake meats and microplastics raise broader health concerns. Ultimately, their discussion reveals systemic failures where profit and authority override science, leaving athletes and the public vulnerable to misinformation and preventable harm. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day So it's good to see you man Good to see you, man.
It was really difficult, for sure, and a lot of different reasons.
I think I knew that this was coming down, that at some point I was going to talk about my status because I'd chosen to not get vaxxed for reasons that you talked about.
Now, I think, typically speaking, because I'm healthy and I take care of myself, getting vaccinated was not on the top of my list.
But, you know, I wanted to look into it because everybody was doing it and talking about it and trying to be safe.
And I wanted to make sure I was, you know, doing my part, if that's what was necessary, to keep myself safe and my loved ones safe and my teammates safe.
And I looked into it.
And at the time, I went on the CDC website and they specifically said, you know, if you're allergic to PEGs, we do not recommend you get vaccinated with the mRNA vaccinations.
So the only other one available was Johnson& Johnson.
And it had just got pulled at the time for blood clots.
So I looked into other options which included an immunization process through a holistic doctor and I researched and talked to probably a dozen different MDs and found a protocol That I felt like was the best available.
I don't know that exactly or want to get into that exactly, I don't think.
But there was hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people that I knew in this circle that were using, that had been doing this to protect ourselves.
Because we were thinking, hey, look, for me, I... I didn't want to risk anaphylactic shock or any type of clotting associated with the vaccine.
So that was my only option.
Either do nothing or do this process.
And I felt like this was the best way to protect myself and my teammates.
And that the NFL would understand and maybe grant me a waiver because one of the most difficult parts about the whole process was that there was clearly two classes of player at the facility.
There was the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.
And the vaxxed had full privileges.
They tested once every two weeks.
They had full privileges on the road.
They could go out to dinner on the road.
They could...
Go to a concert in town.
They could go to a comedy show if it was in town.
They could be at any place they wanted to and live life normally.
Non-vaxxed.
Fully masked.
Zero privileges on the road.
Could not go into establishments with more than 15 people.
You could not be around more than three individuals from the team outside the facility.
All these different, what I think now we all realize were crazy policies.
And that's what actually got me into trouble was that I attended a Halloween party in a 10,000 square foot warehouse with 18 other individuals all fully vaccinated and myself not vaxxed.
And was eventually fined for that.
Ended up getting COVID from a vaccinated teammate of mine who contracted COVID and spread it.
And that's where it gets a little bit crazy.
And I told this story, I think on the McAfee show, but I said...
When I came to camp, they knew I was not vaccinated.
So you had to submit a vaccination card.
That went to the system with the NFL. And obviously I didn't have one, so we were given wristbands too.
So everybody in the facility knew Who was vaxxed and who wasn't vaxxed?
Vaxxed was green, non-vaxxed was yellow.
So already it's weird wearing your colors out there.
And I think, to do an aside here, there was a lot of shaming involved in it.
There was a lot of public shaming that was attempted to coerce people to get vaccinated.
Because not only are you wearing a yellow wristband, you're the only ones wearing masks.
So they knew my vaccination status from the start, as did all my teammates.
There was a lot of talk about I endangered my teammates and I lied to my teammates and my team.
From day one that I returned, which was July 25th, probably, of 2021, they knew where I was at.
Everybody did.
Also on the side, I had an appeal going with the NFL because I said, look, here's my health issues.
Here's the protocol I went through.
Here's the research behind it.
I gave them 500 pages of research from a number of people that put together case-reviewed studies around homeopathy and immunizations and safety in them and also the efficacy of them.
And then I had a conversation with the league, and the league said, in this conversation, this is when I knew that my appeal was definitely not going to happen, was they said, it's not possible for a vaccinated player, a person, sorry, to contract or transmit COVID if they've been vaccinated.
And I said, you gotta be kidding me.
Because I showed up and five people, non-players, five people fully vaxxed are out with COVID. So what are you talking about?
They started rolling out in March and April, because that's when I was going through the process of researching and looking into what I could do to protect myself, having the allergy of that.
I had only known one person at that time, somewhere around April, that had been vaccinated and also got COVID, and I just thought it was an aberration.
I didn't, based on what I saw in the first few weeks at the facility.
And that's why I thought there was an opportunity.
But it was difficult because we were separated.
There was a whole other situation that was going on that You know, also is going on in the rest of society is that my non-vaxxed teammates who were on the bubble, right?
So 53 guys make the active roster, 16 on the practice squad, so 69 guys on the squad, there's 90 in camp, right?
So of the, I said seven, I think it was about 10 guys not vaxxed, only a few of us were guaranteed roster spots, like we were going to be on the team, and there's a lot of bubble guys.
The general managers, and there was talk around the league how general managers were not going to keep bubble non-vax players.
So they were already up against it.
Not only did non-vax players have a harder chance of making the squad, but they also had an almost 0% opportunity to get a workout afterwards.
So if you get cut and the season starts every Tuesday during the football season, Most teams will bring in anywhere from 5 to 15 guys for workouts just to see who's out there.
Is there any players that can add to the roster?
So if you weren't vaxxed, you had a very low percentage, not just of keeping a job, but even getting a job opportunity, like a workout, which is wild.
And so after this conversation with the league, I knew that My appeal was going away and they were doing this, I call it a witch hunt, you know, where they were asking every single player, are you vaccinated?
You know, they're asking a bunch of big quarterbacks and some guys were saying, you know, it's, you know, you know, it's personal or whatever, you know, didn't want to talk about their status.
And it almost guaranteed you weren't vaccinated, right?
So then they were getting ripped and certain guys said, yes, I'm vaccinated.
And, you know, then they tried to get them to say shit about their teammates, you know, who weren't vaccinated, like dogged their teammates out.
So I've been ready the entire time for this question and had thought about how I wanted to answer it.
And I had come to the conclusion, I'm going to say, I've been immunized.
And if there's a follow-up, then talk about my process.
But thought there's a possibility that I say I'm immunized.
Maybe they understand what that means.
Maybe they don't.
Maybe they follow up.
They didn't follow up.
So then I go the season.
Them thinking, some of them...
That I was vaccinated.
The only follow-up they asked was basically asking me to rip on my teammates.
What do you say to your teammates who aren't vaccinated?
What kind of example do you feel like you're setting to your teammates who aren't vaccinated?
I said, it's everybody's own decision with their body.
We're super healthy individuals.
We take care of ourselves.
We understand what goes in our bodies.
I don't have any judgment on any decision that a guy makes with their own body, right?
But I knew at some point, if I contracted COVID, or if word got out, because it's the NFL and there's leaks everywhere, it was possible I'd have to answer the questions.
And then sure enough, I contract COVID in...
Well, the beginning of November, end of October.
And that's when the shitstorm hit because now I'm a liar.
I'm endangering the community, my teammates, all these people, and the attempted takedown of...
Me and, you know, my word and my integrity began.
So that was difficult.
But I will say, and I'm thankful to be on this show, like, I really appreciate you and you helping me out during that time.
I reached out to you I think at the beginning of the season, I feel like, and just said, hey, because you had talked about in your podcast a little bit, you had some, you know, controversial, maybe less controversial now, people on there talking about...
Talking about their, you know, people, experts in the field talking about, you know, their own ideas about COVID and, you know, you helped me with a, you know, a game plan to be ready in case I did get COVID. And I followed it to a T, and when I got COVID, you know, within 36 hours, I was, you know, symptom-free and feeling amazing.
But the protocols was, you're off for 10 days.
So I missed a game.
We lost a football game.
I came back, had to answer a ton of questions about it.
Obviously, I had my, you know, basically, I lost, you know, the majority of allies I thought I had in the media.
The good thing is it drew a real line in the sand, and everybody who wanted to jump on me and trashed me did and showed their true colors.
And very few people, you know, kind of in the media at least, stuck by me.
Well, it was like McCarthyism at a certain point in time.
It was like a red scare.
Everyone was looking for communists.
They were just looking for non-vaxxers.
It was like a fever in the air because people had been convinced that this was the thing that was going to get us out of the pandemic.
And if you didn't follow that thing, that you were the enemy of it.
So I could kind of understand why people had that perspective if they hadn't looked into it, which is a weird term.
Or at least if they hadn't, it's kind of a shallow term, but if they hadn't consulted with real experts, especially in your case, that when you had an actual allergy, it's a particular issue, and the desire to not take the medication that was pulled for clots, that seems pretty fucking reasonable.
But reason was out the window at that point in time.
Yeah, they came after you about horse dewormer and Sanjay was on here and you mopped the floor with him and then he goes back on CNN and basically tries to rip you.
It was ridiculous.
But let me just say this point because I think this is really important.
The two main things against me that they want to say.
One, that I lied.
I didn't.
You didn't ask me a follow-up, but I said I was immunized, and I went through an immunization process.
I don't know how you would classify that other than say I was immunized, but that, to me, was the truth, is the truth.
You didn't ask a follow-up.
You ask a follow-up?
I'll tell you what I mean.
That's one.
Number two that I really don't like.
And didn't like the characterization.
That I put people in danger.
That I endangered my teammates.
I lied to my teammates.
And I already said from day one they knew.
Medical staff, everybody in the organization, everybody knew I'm wearing a yellow wristband.
I'm not vaxxed.
Everybody knew my status.
But number two, what non-vaxxed players had to do is we had to test every single morning.
So vaccinated players, testing once every two weeks, right?
Non-vaxxed every single morning.
Every off day, every day of the bye week, off for a week while everybody else is off traveling and enjoying their life, we stay in Green Bay and we test it every single day.
So every day that you saw me, and I've said it before, I go to about two places in Green Bay.
I go to the grocery store and I go to Barnes and Noble.
I love to read and I gotta get my groceries.
If you saw me at those two places, you can be 100% sure that I tested that morning and that I tested negative.
Before I even could walk into the facility, I had to test, wait in my car, and then wait for 30 minutes for them to text me and say that you're negative, you can enter the building.
So every single day I was at the facility, every single day that any of my teammates saw me, any of my coaches, every single day that you saw me at Barnes& Noble or at the grocery store, I was negative for that day.
I took it seriously because obviously there was a lot going on.
Now, I didn't believe in wearing a mask at a press conference.
You have a room full of reporters who are fully vaxxed, wearing masks, sitting 30 feet away from me.
And again, this goes to the shame.
They wanted me as a non-vaxxed player to wear a mask for an interview.
I don't think during a pandemic there's anything wrong with testing people every day.
I mean, I think if you want to keep people safe and you want to keep that from spreading throughout the team, that's probably the best way to approach it.
But everything else just seems so nuts.
But we're looking at it, you know, hindsight is 20-20, right?
We're looking at it from after it's over.
And so many people, they just bought the narrative that was being promoted by CNN and MSNBC and wherever, that if you get vaccinated, you can't get COVID, you can't spread COVID. That was the narrative.
And no one seems upset that that was a lie, including Birx, who has said that she had always known that it was not going to stop transmission and it was not going to stop people from spreading it, which is wild.
She would say, we knew that you were still going to get it, even if you got vaccinated.
And our league is one of the greatest books every single year that's written.
It's a mystery novel.
You never know what's going to happen.
But in a great epic novel...
You need your protagonist and your antagonist.
You need your heroes and your villains.
And I think they just...
Like, we're going to make this guy the villain.
Because he's been so good for so long.
And he's not vexed.
But I think it ultimately didn't hurt me.
Because at the end of the season...
I was playing really well.
I came back from COVID. We played Seahawks.
We won.
And I didn't have a great game that game.
But the last like six, seven games, I played really, really well.
And then there was a reporter out of Chicago who said that I'm the biggest jerk in the league and he wouldn't vote for me for MVP because of my VAC status.
So it kind of put the rest of the other 49 MVP voters, I think, on notice going, oh, are you going to let your personal political bias enter into a conversation about who the most valuable player of the league is and not vote for this guy because he's not vaxxed?
I think that played into at least some of their minds at some point because they would have to answer, how do you justify not voting for this guy for MVP? Right.
It's just like, there's a thing in sports where there's...
It's way less of it in MMA, but there's a thing in sports where...
Where it's par for the course to be a douchebag to players, to treat them badly and to talk about them badly, because I guess they have this very special role in society where they get to be professional athletes.
So you're allowed to...
If there's a dropped ball or there's a play that doesn't go well, you could say all sorts of personal things about them and disparage their character and call them lazy and call them entitled and all these different things that they love to do.
And it's really like ramped up in sports more than anyone.
And I think it's because of sports fans.
Like sports fans have been doing that forever, you know, when they're at work.
You show up at the job and you're like, see that fucking game last night?
That guy sucks.
And there's this attitude that they, I think, repeated.
You know, I think the interesting thing for me is to see how it changed and how my vaccination status But they couldn't get past that.
They couldn't get past years of friendship and me doing favors for them, doing interviews with them if they needed something, making sure I made time to give them a soundbite or do an interview or come on their show.
And I'm talking about probably a dozen...
That I thought were allies in the media, meaning friendly to me, and that they knew.
Like, if they needed a guest or something, and I had the time, I would always make time for them.
If you don't follow the mainstream narrative, or if you don't agree with me, take out the mainstream narrative, if you don't agree with me, I can't be friends with you because I get to live in an echo chamber.
And that's what society and social media has done, I think, on so many levels.
Like you were saying earlier, 20 years ago, the guy bitching about his favorite player who played bad is bitching to his buddies at work.
And now they're all on social media going nuts and stirring up.
And like we were talking about earlier, it takes just a couple people with an opinion that can...
You know, sway something in a direction and then, you know, start this landslide of negativity around something.
I mean, whether they're using them for military, they're gonna use them for law enforcement, but we're gonna have robots wandering through the streets telling you, show your papers.
Have you ever seen that episode where the robot's chasing after the lady?
That is so possible.
So possible.
All you have to do is be like, yeah, and if it's tracking with satellite, and if you have a fucking RFID chip that they can track, or some sort of a Bluetooth locator, like an AirTag, and they know where you are at all times.
We're about a decade away from a very strange world.
This is a weird time in terms of like control and in terms of the influence of these forces with amazing resources that are trying to lean society into a very specific direction.
You know, the World Economic Forum's article or the rather advertisement where they're like, you will own nothing and you'll be happy.
The CEO of Pfizer was on that and he was talking about a medication that you swallow that has some sort of a chip in there that can tell people whether or not you actually took the medication.
Yeah, I mean the pain management, especially with our sport, is fascinating to see how things are treated, and I use quotations untreated because up until probably a decade ago, you know, it was easily accessible to get Oxy, Percocet, Vicodin, whatever you wanted.
And it's always said, well, there's not enough research yet about, you know, CBD and any, you know, positive, you know, help that it can do for your body.
But we're still giving out painkillers.
Way less, and it's actually monitored now because there were a few teams that were abusing that.
Again, this was over a decade ago, I think, when they really changed the policy.
But no, it's ass backwards, the whole treatment of the professional.
I mean, I can't imagine someone fighting on that stuff.
I mean, the USADA is very strict in terms of what you're allowed to take and what you're not allowed to take, and they test people very frequently.
So much so that, you know, Paulo Costo, who just fought in the last UFC, they actually tested him the day of the weigh-in, which caused a huge outrage because this guy cuts a lot of weight, he was dehydrating himself, and they show up at his house at 6 o'clock in the morning and asked him to test.
Which is egregious, ridiculous.
And they'll never happen again.
They put a stop to it and made sure USADA doesn't step out of line.
But at least they stop people from competing on things.
But like, but some of the pain management, you know, it's been a little bit wild for a while and I just don't understand why there isn't more natural options looked into that are out there that I've researched behind it and we're still pushing the same,
you know, Percocet, Vicodin, Oxy, if you have pain and I saw at one point a teammate of mine who was unable to get treatment on a post-surgical operation without being put under anesthesia because of an addiction to pain medicine.
That was with John Abramson, who is a doctor who's worked to litigate against pharmaceutical companies, and in particular against Vioxx when they were doing that.
They had clear information that Vioxx was going to be damaging to people.
They knew there was problems and they literally said there's going to be some issues but we're going to do very well.
That's literally internal memo saying we're going to do well financially.
But people are going to have like that.
Those kind of issues like cardiovascular issues, blood clotting issues, strokes.
They knew it was going to kill people.
They knew it.
And they got charged.
I believe what happened was they made 12 billion and they were fined five.
Which is good profit margin.
It's just crazy that you could have any profit margin off of killing 60,000 people.
And these are the people we're supposed to trust?
Like, all of a sudden, people put aside all of their thoughts that they had kept...
You talk to anyone about whether or not the pharmaceutical companies were ethical, whether or not they were telling the truth, whether or not they promoted dangerous medications that were unnecessary, and everybody would say yes.
The people that came after me the hardest were fat.
It was hilarious.
And I was like, do you understand that whatever you're doing to your body is way, way worse than what COVID's going to do to you?
What you're doing to your body by being fat like this, if you think you're going to prevent that with some medication that just keeps you from getting COVID and it didn't, you're fucking dying, man.
You're eating yourself to death.
You're eating shitty food and you have a sedentary lifestyle and you're probably taking all sorts of pharmaceutical medication for anxiety and depression and all these other things that are fucking with your head.
It's wild, man.
It's a wild time because people really are conditioned to think that they can take a medication and cure all their ills and cure almost instantaneously something that has become a problem from lifestyle choices that you've built up over years and years and years of body abuse.
So you've abused your body for so long and then you think that all of a sudden a pain pill or this pill or that pill is going to fix all that.
And no one's telling you, hey, you've got to lose weight.
Hey, you've got to drink water.
Hey, you should really exercise on a regular basis.
I think it, let's find out what percentage of the population, it's probably diminished because there has been quite a bit of publicity during the pandemic about vitamin D deficiency because they showed what percentage of people who are in the ICU, I think it was at one point in time was 84% of the people who are in the ICU were insufficient or deficient in vitamin D. I think that's gotta be low there, 42%.
Vitamin, hmm, interesting.
It's only 42. I thought it was a lot higher than that.
The majority of people in this country have a job where you have a boss.
The bosses are a very small minority.
The majority of people work for that boss.
If you work for a corporation, they have very strict rules that they'd like you to follow.
There's behavior rules, there's language rules, there's dress rules, there's, you know, rules about the time you're supposed to be there and the amount of work you're supposed to do and what you're supposed to take home and what's required of you.
People are conditioned to have someone tell them what they can and can't do.
And then they get off on Friday and they can't wait to get drunk.
And that's part of why they want to get drunk, is they want to escape.
They want to escape this grind of a world.
A person who can become autonomous, a person who can have their own job, where it's their business, or it's their product that they're selling, or their art that they're selling, or something where you can be self-sufficient.
That is the biggest freedom that a person can have in this culture.
And most people don't have that freedom.
To have someone lay the rules out for them, tell them when they're supposed to be there, tell them what they get when they work for an hour.
Most people don't have the ability to just think for themselves.
It's been taken away from them because they want to make a living.
It's never pushed like, hey, go learn a technical skill where you can do a year of apprenticeship or college or study and then go make six figures in a job.
One of the biggest times in my life where I felt like a loser was right out of high school, because I took a year off, and I remember just telling people that I was going to take a year off, and they're like, how could you?
So this is Boston, too, which is very hardcore, blue-collar workers and educated people that work hard.
Everybody works hard in Boston.
It's cold as fuck in the winter, and you've got to work.
Everybody works.
And so me taking a year off is like, oh, man, you're ruining your fucking life.
Joe's going to be a loser.
So I really only went to college so that people didn't think I was a loser.
Well, I went to UMass Boston, and it was one of those deals where you didn't have to have your SATs, because it was like a continuing education program.
So I just started taking courses there, and I did it for three years.
That's what I like about friends in Australia or Europe.
Most of those kids, they finish school and then they take a year, right?
They save up their money and then they take a year of traveling, going to different cultures, areas, come to the States, different parts of Europe, Asia, whatever, and...
Yeah, that's one of the great things about social media now is that people are able to make a living off of things that were very difficult to pursue, like art.
Like, if you have, like, really good art, you can, you know, post it on social media and people share it, and the next thing you know, you have orders coming in and you're painting for a living.
The more people can escape a system where someone tells you what to do, I think the better.
I mean, there's some people that want that, and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a good job.
There's great jobs out there.
Nothing wrong with that.
But if you're one of those people like me that just can't fucking sit still, and that seemed impossible to you, you know, back then, you know, you just felt like a loser.
I was on a spring break trip with a buddy of mine, I remember, and yes, we were 15 hours in a 15-passenger van going down to Mexico doing some humanitarian work down there.
That was how I'd spent my sophomore year.
And I remember we, you know, you're talking about who knows what, because back then you might have had a Walkman, but other than that, you didn't have any technology.
And my buddy said, you know, what do you want to do?
And I said, I want to play in the NFL. He's like, yeah, right.
The best part is, so I'm late to my QB meeting, and I have a meeting after practice that day with the liaison.
I don't know what his exact title was, but he was a liaison between the players and the school, basically.
And I said, hey, look...
Here's what happened.
I went in this office.
I told the whole story.
I was trying to get the same treatment as the other 14 kids who had to rewrite the paper.
And she kind of ripped my ass and was a little derogatory.
I didn't think that was fair or appropriate.
They brought some heat down on her, so she had a vendetta against me.
At the end of the semester, she wrote up a three-page paper trying to get me expelled from campus.
I had to go in front of the Judicial Affairs Board at Cal in some kangaroo court.
And ended up having to write...
It was two options.
One, expulsion.
Or two, I could write an apology letter to this teacher.
She made up all this great shit.
I was late to class every day.
I was disruptive.
I literally was on time every day, sat in the middle of the row, and was probably one of the only football players actually taking notes and paying attention.
I was in an HOA years ago, and I was trying to get a fence built behind my house, because there was like a running trail behind it, and I like my privacy.
And I went to this meeting, and the guy in front of me, poor guy, he had to paint five different colors on his garage of the color he wanted to paint his house, and had to have people from the community come by and vote on it.
And he had come by, this was the second month that he had came by, and this 80-year-old woman, who has just an ounce of power in the community, who's running the HOA, goes, I'm sorry, sir, you don't have enough votes.
You gotta come back next month.
This fucking guy's just trying to paint his, you know, his fucking house and he's got like, you know, it's five shades of like between tan and brown, you know, it's all the same goddamn color.
In fact, this community that I lived in, there was a homeowners association dispute and then somebody poisoned the dogs.
Of people that were running the Homeowners Association.
So like two different dogs got poisoned and they never figured out who did it.
They don't know what happened but this person, whoever it was, killed people's dogs because they didn't like the way they were being treated by the Homeowners Association.
Yeah, man, fucking...
Some people need conflict in their life, you know, and that, you know, and being told what to do by someone in the Homeowners Association, it's a fucking...
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a strange thing, man.
Power.
Power is a weird weapon that people wield.
And they really enjoy it.
When you're the boss of an office building or you're the person that gets to tell a student that they can't rewrite their paper.
There's people that get off on that shit.
It's the most intoxicating drug, I think, probably.
There's so many examples that they see, at least they think that this is what's happening, where this mean, shitty person who tells everybody what to do and is a dictator, that person gets ahead.
So they think that they have to be like that.
Yeah.
That has always been the Hollywood way, right?
That's like Ari Gold from Entourage.
You succeed by telling everybody to fuck off and yell at everybody and kick them out.
And I think there's a lot of people that want to get to that place where they can do that to people.
Yeah, there are, but not if you have shitty employees.
Then there's that problem.
There's people that don't want to listen, they're not good, and you have to crack the whip, and then I think over time it becomes easier to be that sort of shitty dictator than it is to have this sort of balanced, nuanced approach to people and communicate with them and try to help them do better.
In this day and age, people decide you singled them out because of their sexual orientation or the way they look or what part of the world they're from.
And it's like...
It's a strange time.
It's a time of a lot of information, a lot of communication, but also a lot of chaos.
Because remember, I was talking years ago, like back 2014, 2015, we were mocking these stories that are coming out of colleges and the way people are behaving.
And just the general, the rules of discourse, the way they were limiting the way people communicate about things.
And I was saying that I think this is a real problem.
People saying, well, why do you care about that?
This has nothing to do with you.
You know, you're a middle-aged comedian.
This is not going to affect your life.
I'm like, that's going to, those guys are going to graduate.
These people that have this attitude are going to graduate and then they're going to infect corporations.
Then it's going to spread.
And that's exactly what happened.
And I wasn't the only one that was thinking this either.
There was a lot of people that were sort of sounding the alarm early on.
Some of the funniest ones were Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckros, and James Lindsay.
They put together these grievance studies, these fake studies, and one was homoerotic behavior and rape culture in dog parks.
So they put together these fake- and they got awards for these studies.
And one of them was fat bodybuilding.
Yeah, they put together a fat bodybuilding study, and these studies were peer-reviewed, and they got applause for these things and praise.
And then, you know, they all got in trouble when it turned out that these were fake studies.
But they were trying to highlight a real problem with nonsense, ridiculous coddling and nonsense of terrible ideas.
And that these ideologies were not objective or that they're not rational.
And they were trying to express that.
And they did it through humor.
And people were very, very upset that they got duped.
And even then, I remember people saying, like, why do you care?
I don't know if you remember this, and maybe Jamie can look it up so it verifies this, but...
I believe a few years ago when there was an ammo shortage, there was conversation around the fact that kind of bizarrely the government and I believe at the time the IRS had bought up something like over a billion or a couple billion rounds of ammunition.
I remember thinking at the time, maybe it's TSA as well.
I remember thinking, I feel like IRS, what do they need ammunition for?
I would imagine there would be a situation where someone was a criminal, and they were hiding their taxes, and the IRS agents were in danger because they were going to target the IRS agent that was investigating their case.
I could imagine that, but I think that would be a rare thing, and you would involve traditional law enforcement.
I mean, are they technically law enforcement?
What's the technical definition of IRS? It's not law enforcement, is it?
Well, I mean, anarchists, their solution is that, I mean, I saw Michael Malice actually talking about this the other day, and he was making some very good points.
And he was saying that there's no accountability when it comes to the police.
In that if they were a private institution, they would have accountability.
Like, if it was a private institution that was hired to take care of things, they would be able to say, hey, you've done a terrible job of enforcing crime.
Look at all this crime.
Like, what justifies your pay?
You've done a terrible job of this.
You've confiscated resources from people and not returned them.
You owe them that.
That was one of the things they were doing in the South.
Well, we're going to freeze that money until we investigate how you acquired $25,000.
I mean, all of these different draconian measures that they use to make their life easier and their life more convenient and certainly enrich the coffers of these states and their budgets.
That all would be eliminated if they were accountable and if there was some sort of a privatized version of the police.
He was making a very interesting argument about it that I'd never really considered before.
And I don't know if that's the solution, but something has to change.
That's incentivizing people to create ways where people are doing something illegal.
And that's what we found when you look into marijuana legalization.
One of the biggest opponents of marijuana legalization was prison guard unions.
Prison guard unions wanted no part of that because that's going to have less people in prison, so there's going to be less jobs for prison guards, which is fucking wild.
So you're basically using people as a battery to generate money.
You're basically using human beings and you're coming up with reasons to lock them up and put them in a cage and that generates revenue for your company.
And you're actively trying to make sure that laws stay in place that are unjust because those laws, as they are now, are profitable for you.
We were reading about this case of this guy who was selling pot to an undercover cop.
On four different occasions, he sold pot to an undercover cop.
And when you add up all of the amount of pot that he sold, it was about an ounce.
And they put him in jail for 15 years.
And this is in Phoenix, where marijuana is now legal.
So this guy is in jail in Phoenix for 15 years for selling something that you can now buy at a store.
No, they denied his clemency because of his past record, which I think is really ridiculous, because if someone gets arrested and they do something and they get out, in my mind, they did their time.
This is a person that was punished for whatever crime.
You can't apply this other crime that they've already been punished for to some new crime that, in my eyes, shouldn't be a crime at all.
That's a large percentage of the people that are in jail in this country.
That's why the hypocrisy about the Brittany Griner situation was so egregious in this country, where Kamala Harris is talking about how horrible it is that Brittany Griner's in jail.
I'll tell you what gets me, and I don't really want to dwell too much on the COVID stuff anymore, but one thing that really sticks with me when you're talking about things that the government could do to make people's lives better is...
You know, I'm 38. People that, you know, around my age I grew up with, went to high school with, college with, a lot of them are in that age group now where people are starting their own business.
They've worked in corporate maybe.
They've figured out exactly what they want to do.
They start their own small business.
And small business is the backbone of America, right?
And how many thousands and thousands and thousands of small businesses closed and never opened again?
Restaurants, bars, establishments like that because of COVID, right?
And safety, you know?
Started as two weeks to flatten the curve and then went to lockdowns in places like Chico, California, where I'm from, where there were multiple stretches of time where there were zero cases.
the entire city of 80,000 or hardly any you know less than a hundred and you got small businesses in a small town college town that could not open their doors and many of these establishments that I went to in high school and college and going back and visiting never opened again yeah some of my favorite restaurants in LA are gone I think at one point in time, L.A. had lost 75% of its restaurants, which is insane.
But, you know, I hope there's lessons learned in this because this is a new thing.
We had never had this before.
No one who was alive today had ever experienced a true pandemic.
And I'm hoping that now that this is over, people are going to, you know, recognize that some serious errors were made and not repeat those.
That's the best you can get out of it.
But as far as compensation for all those people that were forced to close their businesses and keep their doors shuttered and lost everything that they'd worked for decades to build, no, they're just going to be angry.
I mean, more than a million people transferred over to the Republican Party, I think, in 2021 alone.
Find out what that number is.
But you look at guys like Ron DeSantis, who kept Florida open and had some pretty reasonable policies in terms of what to do about COVID. And he mapped it out on television.
He was widely criticized for this.
Where he was saying, like, we need to protect our elders.
We need to, you know, make sure that medical care is available for those people and everyone else.
More than one million voters switched to the GOP raising alarms for Democrats.
The fuck can you think?
A political shift is beginning to hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party's gains in recent years of becoming Republicans.
More than one million voters across 43 states have switched the Republican Party over the last year.
Like, there's all these videos of him lying about his education record, lying about so many different accomplishments that he's achieved in his life.
He was always a bullshit artist.
And not just a bullshit artist, but like a liar.
Like a flat-out liar.
I graduated at the top of my class.
No, you didn't.
How would you not know that?
How do you not know you didn't graduate at the top of your class?
You definitely didn't.
You know, why are you saying that?
Did somebody hit you over the head and tell you that?
Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
And the fact that he was...
Do you know, we used to have Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston because he got caught plagiarizing.
So he got caught plagiarizing when he was running for president in 1988. So in 1988, we had Joe Biden night, where, like, you would do my act and I would do your act.
We would all plagiarize each other.
It was for fun, just for comedians, and people would come by and watch.
I think they counted on people's ability to ignore negative press and also the polarization of this country because people hated Donald Trump so bad that Trump represented an opposition that had to be stopped.
And so this was an established Democrat.
He'd been around for years and We could probably win with him.
Now it swings because you've got Weekend at Bernie's up there trying to read the prompter, and then some Republican steps up and is going to change the country and get us back to America first and whatever the hell slogan it's going to be, and then four years later it's going to swing back the other way.
So in 2010, we played the Washington Redskins at the time, and one of our receivers knew a Secret Service agent and got us a White House tour.
So we went to D.C. and got a tour, and Mr. President came back on that Saturday from actually a round of golf, and they shuttered us into the side where, you know, you can't see the President, you gotta get out of the way.
And he actually came, he heard we were there, and he came and met all of us in 2010, which is so cool.
And then we played golf in 2016, his last year in office, and at the end of the round, he was like...
How you guys getting back?
And I was with Mark Kelly, who's now the senator in Arizona, and we're like, oh, we just Ubered out here.
He's like, yeah, ride back with me in the motorcade.
I was like, fuck yeah, sweet.
So we ride back in the motorcade, which is a wild experience, like nine cars.
One of them's got the codes in it or something, I think.
And then me and Mark Kelly, who flew a space shuttle three times, before his brother spent a year in space, I think he spent the most time in space, walked out of the front door of the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue.
Because no matter who you are, what you represent, someone's going to decide that you're evil.
Even if they don't believe it, there's going to be some pundit, some radio politics personality that's going to talk all kinds of crazy shit about you and make up stories about you.
I feel like the last 10 years, it's really, don't you feel that both sides, the extremes, have gotten farther apart?
Like, I feel like for a while it was maybe the right had kind of been more extreme than the left, but I feel like now both sides, there's a real extreme wing to both sides, and there's even a greater divide between the two parties.
Yeah, I think that's in part due to the reaction of Trump.
You know, to Trump himself, the way he carries himself, I mean, he's a...
He's that guy that got famous from saying you're fired.
He got famous and he got all this press from all these crazy statements that he would make.
And they would give him all this press and that's what helped get him elected.
But it also just made people so angry.
I remember we had an End of the World podcast that we did on 2016 during the election.
So we did this live podcast from the Comedy Store.
And I remember we went into the bar after it was all over and we watched CNN and we were watching like Jake Tapper and all these people like so depressed.
They were so angry and so just it was so visibly obvious that these are not objective journalists that are just talking about this thing that happened but they had a very clear mandate and they had a very clear role that they were playing and that role was that we are the people that oppose this terrible thing that has just happened.
Where we have legally elected, because of people's opinions, this person, who more than half the person, or at least the Electoral College votes, more than half had decided should be the president.
So the people had chosen, and they were like, the people are wrong.
It was wild.
It was wild to see because I was like, this is interesting because it's like, this is one of the clearest examples of, it's just, they're not objective.
These are not journalists.
These are not people that are just reporting on actual facts.
They had to have this opinion, this dour face and everyone was very upset.
Very upset.
Which, I mean, I understand it if you're not a journalist.
I understand if you're just a person, and you were a person who thought Hillary Clinton should be president, and then you saw this guy win, and you're like, what the fuck?
But you're not just a person, you're a fucking journalist.
But what they didn't understand, and I think they recognize now that there's new leadership at CNN, was that that diminishes public trust.
CNN Plus doesn't exist anymore.
It was a great idea, but unfortunately they lost $300 million in 10 days, and so they pulled the plug.
So weird, because I thought it was going to take off.
I mean, who wouldn't want to pay for something that no one watches for free?
Fucking genius idea.
I would have liked to have been in the meeting with those people and just sit down and go, hey guys, look, I know you and I don't see eye to eye on things, but unless you want to lose a lot of fucking money, this is a terrible idea.
Look, these independent people, when you look at like Breaking Points with Krystal and Sagar and Jimmy Dore and all these other people that have these independent political shows that are objective, they give their opinions.
I mean, they certainly editorialize, but they're independent because we know they're independent.
We know at least if I agree or disagree or like or dislike, at least I know that that's coming from this person.
When you would hear these other people talk, you would say, like, you've been given a specific mandate, whether it's from the producers or the executives or whatever.
Your organization has a very specific slant, and you're ignoring reality in order to push this slant.
And then when people find out that they ignored reality, or they find out that this information is biased and that you've excluded stuff that's contrary to your opinion, then people lose trust in it, and then the ratings drop off radically.
They built this fucking entire business, unfortunately, during the 2016 election, talking about what an asshole Trump was.
And they made that asshole president.
I mean, it's a real argument that they made him president.
But I think that, you know, that's part of the problem is that, like, what he just said with all the dummies, like, yeah!
Finally, the dummies have a leader.
Like, he hit a very specific frequency.
I'm not saying that all the people that supported Trump are dummies, but I'm saying that all the dummies supported Trump.
That's not true either, because there's a lot of dummies on the left.
But these dummies on the right, the ones that just want a very fucking clean, specific three-word narrative, and they, you know, keep America great again, you know, like that, those people, boy, he found their fucking vibration, and he's clung to it.
But now that we all realize that that's possible, and they've woken up this group of people that were previously not politically active, it becomes an issue.
If Ron Paul went independent, because Ross Perot did it.
I mean, Ron Paul was a Republican, but I think that if you had a guy like that, that was saying things that resonated with a large swath of people, and he decided to go independent.
But Ross Perot did that.
When I was a kid, Ross Perot was running for president, and he took- He took the election from- From Bush Senior.
And that's how Clinton won.
Because a lot of people that would have voted for Clinton, they were thinking that he made more sense.
Because he took out an entire block of time on network television.
That's how wealthy he was.
He's like, NBC? I'm going to buy you out for an hour.
And he just went on television and explained how the Federal Reserve work and the tax codes work.
He's like, here's how you're getting fucked.
And he did it on television.
And that was terrifying to people.
And they actually changed the standards for debates.
They raise the amount of votes that you had to get to participate in debates.
You couldn't have a guy come in and fuck up their rig game.
They have a rig game.
The rig game is these enormous special interest groups, they put money into both candidates.
Which is wild.
And they fund their campaigns and they figure out who's going to win.
And then when that person wins, then they get in there and then they make sure that they have undue influence on all sorts of things that affect regular people in a negative way.
And the only way you're going to do that is to take money out of politics.
And good fucking luck with that.
That's one of those things.
It's like, once you've got herpes, you've got herpes.
You can take Valtrex, you can do whatever you gotta do, but you've got herpes, kid.
I hate to tell it to you, but this is what our country is.
I mean, our political process has VD, you know, and I don't know how to get it out.
I don't know how...
I mean...
Look, 300 years ago they started another country.
Because they're like, look, where we're at is fucked.
We're getting screwed over.
Let's start this experiment in self-government that became the United States.
And, you know, clearly by people that had an understanding of where human nature can go wrong.
And they put all these checks and balances in place and they separated powers and they did it in a way that they hoped would be, you know, preparing this country for the future in a way that it would be for the people by the people.
And, you know, it was a good idea.
It was a brilliant, amazing idea at the time.
Unprecedented.
Nothing like it.
And it spawned the greatest superpower the world's ever known, the most creative force the world has ever known.
I mean, the influence that United States culture has had on the rest of the world is really like nothing else.
I mean, it's fucking wild.
If you think about the music that's come out of here, the comedy, the films, the sports, the shit that's come out of the United States is bananas.
And it came out in many ways because of the freedom That people were given by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Well, that's unfortunately what a lot of people find out when they decide to go against the United States and then they wind up getting arrested like Brittney Griner did in Russia and you realize, oh, there's places that are fucking way worse.
Isn't it funny that that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but that literally would fix the world.
If more people had psychedelic trips and more people had an experience that dissolved their ego and more people had an understanding that Community isn't just simply a bunch of people that live together.
It's a bunch of people that care about each other and that we could treat the world like a community that could be done.
It could be done in small groups of people and it could be done in large groups of people.
And again, you're not going to resolve all conflict.
I feel the same way about me and then me after Ayahuasca.
But since I talked about it on Aubrey's podcast, it's been really interesting to see the people reaching out across the league.
And there's been a lot of people outside the league and, you know, entertainers, sports people, you know, just friends from the past, people that work at the facility, you know, just the nine-to-five people, all interested in football.
You know, plant medicine.
It's been really interesting.
I think there's a hunger for what I experience, which you talked about with mushrooms, is this death of the ego.
This realization that we're all connected.
This greater sense of what community is.
And I don't know if you've experienced in your DMT journeys and mushrooms, but when you dissolve the ego, The amount of love that you can give back to yourself and then other people, it takes away for me so much judgment of myself and others, so much separation between myself and others.
The greater sense of connection It was overwhelming when I kind of came out of that and got back to reality or whatever.
I was like, oh shit, now here's the integration.
Here's me in a different form.
Here's my reflection that I see of myself and you.
And we're all fucking connected in such a deeper way.
And it's just doing a plant that's been used for generations in the Amazon jungles.
And I got the same feeling on mushrooms as well.
I mean, it was just an incredible connection to nature and life and all sentient beings and all plants and fungi and just the like, you know, of my previous self, I feel like the anger and bitterness and resentment and negativity that I'd kind of like standard walk around with.
It wasn't like a super high level, but I felt like coming out of those experiences, it's like, that shit doesn't even matter.
Like being present with people, having conversations, like putting your fucking technology away and like connecting with somebody and like seeing them.
Because I think on a deep level, we all just want to be seen and understood.
The thing about the social media interactions though is that it happens in isolation like you're alone and you're putting something out there and then the other people alone and they're receiving it and that's why they can be so cruel and shitty is because they're not looking at you and seeing you like most of the things that people say on social media they would never say to someone's face even if they were bigger and stronger than that person they wouldn't say because it feels terrible to say shitty things to people It's an interesting thing that happens when you recognize that a
lot of the way we react with each other is based on insecurity.
We put up these armored walls between us and the rest of the world and you have this thought that, you know, fuck everybody and everybody's fucking me over and fuck them.
And then you do something like DMT or mushrooms or ayahuasca and you recognize...
Oh, that's nonsense.
Not only is that nonsense, that's bad for me.
That's bad for everyone.
It's bad for everyone I come in contact with.
It's unnecessary.
And then you realize the source of it all.
It's just fear.
It's just fear and insecurity.
And that was so profound to me, like this recognition of what the problems that the ego presents and that these problems This ego, first of all, was not designed to live in a society like this.
Our bodies were not designed to live in these neighborhoods of millions and millions of people.
This is not normal.
And we don't know how to deal with that.
And so we come up with more walls and more insecurity and more defensiveness.
And that this is bad for everyone.
And the solution to that is to expose people to these things and allow them to recognize the flaws and the patterns of behavior that they've been following their whole life.
But the more people that get exposed to that, the more that's going to be a normal narrative and that people are going to understand that you're just a person.
You're not a bad person.
You might have made bad choices, but you're just a person.
We're all human beings and people in jail for violent crimes.
They're people that got on terrible paths and they don't realize that we're all connected Yeah, I Wish that there was a way where more people could be exposed to it because I really think it would change perspective on a percent in It's changed radically in my lifetime.
It changed radically over the last couple of decades that I've been exposed to it.
I think the first time I did DMT was early 2000s.
And I remember, well, the first time I did mushrooms was early 2000s as well.
Mushrooms were amazing.
And it was beautiful.
But DMT, I always describe as mushrooms times a million plus aliens.
It was the encounter of entities that was so mind-blowing.
This thing that there might be some sort of...
Some sort of disembodied consciousness that exists in some realm that you can access within 15 seconds.
Just the thought that that's a real thing.
Ayahuasca as opposed to DMT. Ayahuasca is, for people who don't know what we're talking about, is a oral version of DMT. DMT is broken down in the gut by something called monoamine oxidase.
And what ayahuasca is, is...
One plant that contains dimethyltryptamine and another plant that contains an MAO inhibitor, harmine.
And you combine the two of those together and it produces this orally active version of DMT that's a much longer experience, but typically it's not as intense as the smoked DMT. When you smoke it, it's like right into your bloodstream.
They might be both from Brazil, which obviously has a long history of use of psychedelic medicines.
But that these people have these incredible communities that they've based around the entire I'm like, that's really what a church probably started out as.
If you read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which is John Marco Allegro's book.
It's an amazing book that I believe, I'm not sure if this is true, but let's find out.
I believe it was bought out by the Catholic Church.
I have two copies of the original printing of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and it's a fucking phenomenal book.
Because it's written by this guy, John Marco Allegro, who's a biblical scholar and a linguist, and he was also an ordained minister.
But through studying religion, he became agnostic.
And he was like, I think these are all...
They share these stories.
What's the root of these stories?
So he was hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And for 14 years, they painstakingly deciphered this, which I believe was the first version of the Bible that they encountered that was in Aramaic.
And they found these scrolls in Qumran, which is in Israel, where they found these caves.
And inside these caves, they found these ceramic pots that had these scrolls in them.
And it was so painstaking that they had to do DNA samples on the scrolls because these scrolls are made in animal skins.
That's how old they are.
And they took these scrolls and they had to match up the DNA with a specific cow that was on each.
So they knew that these strands were from this one cow.
So let's put all these together and figure out how they piece together.
So they do all this and then they analyze the language and then they decipher it.
His interpretation after 14 years of study was that the entire Christian religion was a giant misunderstanding and the original version of it was all about fertility cults and psychedelic mushrooms and Particularly in his eye it was a lot of it was about the Amanita muscaria which is a very misunderstood and very confusing mushroom because I've done that before, too.
It didn't really do much.
But they think that it might have been seasonal.
They think it might have varied genetically and geographically and that it had different compounds in it in different places.
But this is the mushroom that's connected to Santa Claus.
All of it is connected, because the reindeer eat Amanita muscaria mushrooms, and then they would...
They would actually knock people over trying to get to their piss because they would smell the Amanita Muscaria in their piss.
And these people that did this ritual, they would eat the Amanita Muscaria and then they would drink their own piss because the psychedelic compounds were in the piss, which is...
Could you imagine being one of the first people that discovered psychedelic mushrooms?
And you're eating them.
And then they wanted to hide these stories from the conquering Romans and from all these other empires that were invading them.
And so they hid them in allegories and in myths.
And this was his take on the Bible, is that all these stories were translated over and over again from Aramaic and Ancient Hebrew to Latin and Greek and English.
I mean, Martin Luther was almost killed because he translated the Bible into a phonetic language that people could read and understand, and he wanted people to interpret the Bible themselves.
They wanted to kill him.
It was only because of his political connections that he stayed alive.
That's what I said when I made that video to Neil Young, when Neil Young was getting all his music removed from Spotify because I was promoting misinformation.
I said, what you say is misinformation today Not going to be misinformation in the future you have to understand that and I was saying how they were saying there was misinformation well The things that you were getting kicked off of social media platforms Initially you were saying that masks don't work or saying that The vaccine might...
It's like a large swath of the scientific community is behind that now, and including Newsweek.
It was on the cover of Newsweek, this lab leak theory, which is not...
I mean, it's the most plausible scenario.
There's not an animal host.
They haven't shown that there's an animal host that could give it to people.
That's not propaganda.
That's not fake.
That's not pseudoscience.
This is just what they know.
All those things, we get you kicked off social media, now they're widely understand to be true.
So this is one of the things that I said when I made that video, that these people that you're talking about, one of them, Dr. Robert Malone, he holds nine patents for the creation of mRNA vaccine technology.
He was a part of the creation of mRNA vaccines.
He took the mRNA vaccine and had a horrible reaction and almost died.
And then you have Peter McCullough.
Peter McCullough is the most published physician in history in his field.
This is a guy with rock-solid credentials who initially was telling people to take the vaccine.
And then he was experiencing all of these patients that were coming in with these diseases and these illnesses that they'd acquired, he believed, from the vaccine.
And there was no ability to discuss this and no ability to ascertain if that was the fact.
One of the things that we learned from John Abramson when he came in here and he was talking to us about...
He was a doctor who had worked to litigate against pharmaceutical companies when they had produced He was part of the Vioxx thing and some other medications.
He said that when a pharmaceutical company creates a product and they do studies, when someone peer reviews the data, they don't peer review the raw data.
They peer review the studies that the pharmaceutical companies has given them, which is fucking crazy.
That is so crazy.
That's like, say, if you're guilty of something, and you say, well, let me give you the evidence that I have.
You know, my evidence, that I've reviewed myself, and this is why I feel like I'm innocent, and I'm gonna show you my evidence.
Well, and how about the CDC stopping the distribution of COVID vaccine booster data from people 18 to 49, because they said it would contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
At a bare minimum, it should just make you pause and go, even if you say, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm not any of these things, a rational, to me, and this is an opinion, a rational thinking human would just be like, hmm, hold on a second.
When it comes to pharmaceutical companies, it's like that old story of the scorpion and the frog.
You know, the scorpion hitches a ride with the frog, and the frog's like, hey, man, don't sting me, because if you sting me, we're going to drown.
And the scorpion stings him, and the frog's like, what the fuck?
And the scorpion says, hey, it's my nature.
That's their fucking nature.
I mean, this is what they've always done.
If you expect them to make some moral, right-angle turn...
Towards being just completely selfless and not concerned at all about profits and only looking for the greater good of humanity.
Well, you're looking at the wrong people.
That's not what they do.
What they do is they have a responsibility to their shareholders, they have a responsibility to the corporate management, and that responsibility is to make the most amount of money possible, and they're going to do that.
And they're going to do it by hook or by crook.
They're going to weasel.
They're going to hide data.
They're going to manipulate data.
And they've been accused of that, rightly so, all through this whole thing.
And if you discuss it amongst many people that have like a shallow understanding of this topic, they will immediately roll their eyes and say, oh, look at Aaron.
This crazy fucking hippie asshole football player thinks he's going to educate me.
You know, I've had some people that also were very pro-vaccine, very anti, all these different things, and then got really badly sick and were very conflicted and didn't know what to do.
I know people that got really badly sick from COVID post-vaccinated, and I know some people that got really badly sick from the vaccine itself, and they were very conflicted.
And some of them just kept their mouth shut and stopped talking.
And some of them even publicly said, I would still take it again.
I think overall, the good is good.
I mean, my heart's fucked now, but, you know, it's better for everybody.
And that's one of those things if you say publicly, you're going to get a certain amount of love.
It's like a virtue signal that I was willing to sacrifice.
Yeah, I mean, that's not good either, because it is a real fucking disease, and if you're not healthy and you're not covered, you could get fucked up by it.
But what I was saying, or trying to say, was why is nothing else being talked about as far as ways of combating this disease, like eating better, like exercising, like vitamin D deficiency?
And all of it is a lesson for people in the future that if something else happens again, to be more skeptical and to understand the influences that are behind these decisions that politicians and even, quote-unquote, health experts make.
They're being influenced by things other than just data.
And that's very important for people to understand, that there's an enormous amount of money that's being spread around here, and people have gotten obscenely wealthy because of this pandemic.
And they've done so because they promoted a very specific narrative that they knew was going to be profitable for them, even if it was detrimental for people, even if it removed people's ability to choose.
What to do and not to do.
Even if there was people that would not be adversely affected by that virus statistically because of their health, their age, they didn't give a fuck.
You want to play football?
Take this fucking thing.
And I want you to do it publicly so that I can get more money out of those other people that are thinking about it and they're on the fence.
And if you don't, we're going to send a stooge to your team to show you graphs of your vaccination percentage of your team compared to the rest of the league, which actually happened.
See, again, that's why people are like, no one knew your vaccination status, you lied to your teammates.
No, no, no.
Day three of training camp, they sent this stooge in, and he showed these slides about what your vaccination percentage was on your team, where you compare to the rest of the league.
And I started asking him questions about liability.
Oh, I'm not a lawyer.
Okay, cool.
But you're in here talking about all these different things, and you don't talk about anybody's personal health issues.
There's zero exemptions.
You took out religious exemptions.
You took out PEG exemptions.
You took out anybody's ability to have...
An opinion.
I don't want to do this.
Well, it's not only going to affect your day-to-day status on the team, but your ability to get a job, your ability to keep a job, your ability to get a tryout if you get cut from this team.
Because you want to put a percentage above 90% of your team where you guys can have some sort of special virtue.
Look how amazing we are.
We're above the 90% threshold here.
And then they scared teams and said, if you had an outbreak caused by a non-vaccinated player, you'd not only forfeit that game if you had enough players out, but you wouldn't get paid for that week.
And here I am showing up to training camp, Joe, the first day, and we got five people who work for the organization out with COVID all fully vaxxed.
And I got COVID from a fully vaxxed individual who only got vaxxed to keep his potential of being a part of the NFL. How many people do you know that had vaccine injuries?
I mean, I had my own assumptions that he was obviously trying to slam me because that was the flavor of the week and I was an easy target.
But I said, "Have you ever watched me on the Pat McAfee show?" I said, "Do you understand my relationship with Pat and AJ, who's my best friend on the show and the jokes that we have and the lightheartedness?" I said, did you watch the episode at all?
Because if you did, you would know that they were making a joke about how I hurt my toe when I had COVID. I said, and also, sidebar...
Every, probably an assumption, but I'm assuming this is probably true, just about every beat writer that works for the, that covers the Packers, right?
And national media that watch that show each week because they write stories about it.
Not one writer wrote anything about COVID toe.
No one fucking, you know, was like, oh, let me look into what Covito is and maybe I can, you know, scoop this first and write an article about it.
I said, no one wrote about it.
I said, do you think you were like writing some, you know, groundbreaking, you know, breaking news story by saying Covito?
No, you're trying to slam me.
I said, I just want you to admit that.
You didn't watch the show.
I said, and you were doing it?
No, no, no, no.
I watched the whole episode.
I said, have you seen any other episodes?
I said, do you understand the rapport I have with these guys?
With this particular medication, this particular vaccine, it was very specific that they were going to exempt them from any liability because of this emergency use authorization.
It depends on what kind of medications they get him between now and then.
Whatever the fuck they gave him during that second debate, that's a good mixture.
I don't know if he can maintain that mixture, because I have a feeling that every cell in his body is like, like re-entering orbit in the space shuttle, like, fucking keep it together.
I would have him on testosterone, period, anyway, because he's that old.
I mean, I would have him on peptides, human growth hormones from Orleans, whose body produces more growth hormone.
I would have him on all sorts of nootropics.
I would have him on AlphaBrain.
I would have him on every fucking thing that's available, NeuroGum.
I would give everything that you can to enhance this memory, acetylcholine, all these different things that we know through peer-reviewed data that actually do help your memory.
And then I would give him some sort of stimulant.
I would give him something that's maintainable, something where he's not like out of his skin going crazy and you'd probably practice.
Practice with low doses and I know they had practice debates and so he had his talking points dialed in and I would even give him an earpiece.
I'd give him something where we could give him data and tell him this and tell him that and don't say this and here's how I respond to that.
But I don't even know if that would be good, because sometimes when people have things in their ear, it confuses them.
It's hard to get used to, like having people talk.
Have you ever had someone talk in your ear while you're talking?
Well, Colby Covington should have gotten credit for a takedown in the second fight.
He did take Usman down.
Usman's knees went to the ground and Daniel Cormier was angry that it wasn't registered as a takedown.
He goes, that's two!
And you're talking to Daniel Cormier who's an Olympic wrestler.
That's the expert.
That's who you should be going to when you decide whether or not something's a takedown.
So I think they erroneously credited that with the first time that Kamaru Usman's ever been taken down in the UFC. It was the second time, but it was the most significant.
Because not only did he take him down, he took him down, he mounted him, and then he took his back.
And he was threatening with a rear naked choke.
It's big.
But then Kamaru, who's the champion he is, took over, and he won most of the remaining rounds, and it looked like it was three rounds to one.
And to land that head kick in a fight like that was fucking wild.
Especially when you consider Leon hadn't fought in so long.
There had been so many problems.
He was scheduled to fight Tyron Woodley in England.
That fight got canceled because of the pandemic, and there was all these setbacks, but we had always known that he was one of the very best in the division, and he was this dark horse, this guy that people maybe in the general public weren't really aware of.
Everybody's aware of the big stars, and he was this super talented guy that had only lost one time in the UFC, and that was to Usman early in his career.
And that was when he didn't know how to wrestle.
So one of the big victors was him taking Usman down the first round and showing him, hey, motherfucker.
I mean, how do you not react that way when that happened?
I mean, everyone behind us had the same reaction.
There's a video of Tony Hinchcliffe, who was right behind me, and when the head kick lands, he stands up and puts his arms in the air and he goes, Oh my god!
That's what everybody's reaction was.
Like, oh my god.
Because when you think, that's one of the beautiful things about MMA that is different than any other sport, or boxing too, is that you could come from behind with one move, one thing, and it changes everything and shuts it all off.
That's what I love about the Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder fights, is because you just knew at any point, it didn't matter who was ahead, one punch from either of these guys, and it'd be fucking over.
But in the UFC, you just don't see that a whole lot, where a guy's getting his ass whooped, and then comes back and...
Well, it's a credit to Leon that he was able to do that, but also a credit to Leon that he really didn't absorb a lot of punishment in that fight.
He wasn't busted up.
He didn't have his eyes swollen.
He hadn't been concussed and rocked.
He was losing, but he wasn't getting beat up.
He wasn't getting tortured.
He was still very fresh in the fifth round, which is also a credit to his conditioning, that he was able to fight that kind of a grueling fight and still be fast enough.
As well, because some of the other fights, multiple fighters were really, I mean, poor Luke, you know, wasn't conditioning-wise, but there were other, in the prelims, where people were really tiring out in the second and third rounds of three-round fights.
Well, Usman lives and trains at least in Colorado.
So he's training at altitude, which is great.
But there's arguments about that, too.
One of the arguments is that the best method to do is actually to sleep at altitude, but to train at sea level.
Yeah, because it's about how much output you can put out.
And that if you're training at sea level, you are able to put in more work.
So you have more output.
So you're able to condition your body better, and then you recover at altitude.
So in your sleep time, your rest time, then your body acclimates and produces more red blood cells, which enhances your endurance, but you're still getting in more work.
And I know BJ Penn used those when he was fighting, and some other folks have used those, but Leon used that throughout his camp.
So even when Leon was training in England, before he came over to America to prepare for the final leg of his training, he was sleeping in an altitude tent.
I don't know, because a head kick like that takes a long time to recover from, and that's something that really needs to be discussed, because his ability to absorb punishment may be Because of that kind of a knockout when you get knocked unconscious, like Freddie Roach wouldn't let Manny Pacquiao do anything for like a year.
He wouldn't let him fight, he wouldn't let him train, he wouldn't let him spar.
He was like, you need to take a long time off after Juan Manuel Marquez knocked him out with that one punch.
That kind of KO when you're flatlined, when you're flatlined by a massive blow like a fucking head kick, which is the most powerful blow that you could throw in MMA. That can affect you.
And it affects different people in different ways.
There's all sorts of different variables that have to be taken into consideration.
Was it just a flash knockout?
Is he going to be fined in a couple of months?
Or is it something that we don't know what kind of repercussions health-wise that's going to have on him?
Some guys, they lose their chin, like, overnight.
One knockout like that, and they're never the same again.
Because right now there's only eight weight classes.
So there's some big jumps.
And one of the big jumps is 85 to 265. 205, rather, and then 205 to 265. Those are the big jumps.
So 85 to 205, that's 20 fucking pounds.
That's so much weight.
There's nothing like that in boxing.
In boxing, you have guys that are fighting at 147, and then you have guys that are fighting at 154, and then you have guys that are fighting at 160. That's so reasonable.
Six-pound weight class differences are very reasonable, and then it goes to 68. That's reasonable.
Then it goes 68 to 75, also reasonable.
These make sense.
Seven pound gaps, six pound gaps.
The 20 pound gaps that they have in MMA are nuts.
And then how about the fucking 60 pound gap from 205 to heavyweight?
That's crazy!
It's too big.
It's too much.
And the way these guys are depleting their body and destroying their body to make weight, you can only do that so many times.
Guys start getting kidney damage.
They start getting kidney stones and develop all sorts of issues with their organs.
It's just not good.
And it's avoidable.
It's totally avoidable.
If you just structured the weight classes and ran hydration tests to make sure that guys are competing in a weight class that is actually their frame, that actually fits them.
There's a lot of things that I bring up that they go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, we can't.
But they could.
And unfortunately, I think it's going to take a tragedy.
And we've had people die overseas.
I've seen people on death's door.
I remember when Travis Luder fought Anderson Silva.
He missed weight.
But I was there while he was trying to make weight.
So he missed weight and then they gave him a certain allotted amount of time to try to make weight again afterwards to see if the fight can still go on.
I watched him shuffle because he couldn't walk.
So he was shuffling to the scale.
His lips were cracked.
Like you could see like blood in his lips because he was so dehydrated.
There was no water.
He had dried himself out to death's door.
Like if he had to fight that right then at that moment, he would not have been able to go one round.
He was so exhausted.
And then the next day he lost and he looked exhausted when he lost.
He wound up losing by submission.
He got caught in a triangle and got hit with elbows and tapped out.
But it was more the weight class or the weight cut than it was anything else.
You know, you could say that's on him because he didn't do it correctly.
Look, you know, Usman is big for the weight class too.
So is Leon Edwards.
They both made the weight fined and then they rehydrated.
It can be done.
But it's unavoidable.
It's an avoidable part of MMA that I think should really be addressed.
And I think it's also cheating.
I think it's sanctioned cheating.
You know, you're not 180. You're not.
You're pretending.
You're pretending you're fighting at 185 pounds.
You're fighting at 220. That's what you are.
You're 220. You just dry yourself out to 185 for the briefest amount of time possible.
You hop on a scale early, and then they scientifically rehydrate you up to a healthy level.
To dehydrate yourself to the point of literally on death's door 24 hours before a fucking cage fight is crazy.
You wouldn't go out and party 24 hours before a cage fight.
You wouldn't do any of the things that could deplete your body the same way dehydration does.
But yet we allow it.
And not only do we allow it, we expect it.
It's dumb.
It's dumb and it's avoidable.
And it's one of the biggest dangers in the sport.
There's a company called One FC that apparently have some sort of hydration policy.
People that were competing at lower weight classes are now competing at higher weight classes.
They move stuff around, but they've addressed it.
And they've addressed it in a way that seems to work for their organization.
And I'm sure there's some fuckery involved and some shenanigans involved, but way less than we have in the UFC. We'd like to see them be preemptive instead of...
And there was some maybe genetic issues going on, but at the root, there was not the right nutrition and hydration policies or education involved to allow these guys to recover.
And what was going on Only got changed when there was a tragedy.
Do you think that's because they are trying to instill mental toughness and just condition them to just some extreme level by doing this and that this was like this old school thought?
He went through two camps in a row because one fight got canceled, and they went right into another camp, and then he went out fighting Kelvin Gastelum, and he was gassed out, like, almost immediately.
Which, that fucking guy has a gas tank as big as the ocean.
He's never out of gas.
It's like one of his biggest strengths is his fucking relentless pace.
But his body was just failing him because it had never gotten the adequate rest and recovery.
There's, I think in any business, I'm not just going to single out the NFL, but there is an aversion to a new way of doing things, always.
And I think until they see other people doing it and having success maybe, it's always going to be met with, no, this is how we do things.
We've always done it a certain way.
This is how we're going to do things.
Now, there's education that comes up and conversations, and we further...
But it's not like, hey, you got a concussion?
Okay, you're going to hyperbaric for, you know, days one through three and do light therapy in this day and do, you know, and take, you know, this on this, whatever it might be.
And I know Jim, and I'm definitely friendly with Jim.
I enjoy being around him.
He plays in the same golf tournament I do in Tahoe.
He's played every year it's ever been on, and I've talked to him about his issues and heard him talk about it as well, and it definitely gives me pause.
That's why I'm always doing research on my own about stuff that people have done.
Joe Namath has talked a lot about his use of hyperbaric chambers, actually, and healing some of the gray matter that has been associated with traumatic brain injuries.
But, you know, CTE has been linked to a number of suicides that we've had from former players, and it's a real thing.
I really do think it's an issue.
The NFL, I think, is doing a lot to combat it now, thankfully.
With the standardization of the helmets that we use is way different than it used to be.
I mean, there is a very high standard and testing process that goes into that.
They've tried to police the helmet-to-helmet hits that we've had.
There's way more protection for players that carry the ball.
There's protection of all sorts for any type of helmet-to-helmet contact.
You can't erase any of it, and some of it, honestly, is the draw to the sport, is the violent nature of it.
But I think all of us realize the risks that we're taking.
I mean, you should.
You're playing a contact sport, and there's things to look into and to think about when you're playing and when you're done playing to make sure you're Cognitive function is still there, and you're, you know, lesser at risk to some of the effects of CTE. Well, you're a very proactive guy, so I'm sure you have kept abreast of all your own impacts.
Yeah, I've had three concussions where I've come out of games in my playing time and obviously taken a number of other hits to the head that didn't classify as concussions.
But the last one I had was in 2018 and I got kind of clotheslined.
And I went over and sat on the bench and I was like, oh man, I kind of dinged up a little bit but felt like I wasn't, I was okay and then just came on and my vision just went like, you know, and took myself out of the game and that one kind of scared me to be honest because it, It didn't feel like I was concussed.
It felt like kind of a normal shot almost.
And then it just came on and I basically was losing my vision.
And that's when it gets scary.
So that's when I really started looking into some of the things that people were writing about and researching on traumatic brain injuries and And ended up getting a hyperbaric chamber and felt like those dives have really helped me.
And then, you know, taking out for brain is awesome too.
But you learn how to take care of your body and avoid.
I mean, Tom has avoided, I think, big shots most of his career.
He had one knee injury, another than that.
He's been fairly healthy most of his career and not really had any concussive issues.
And I've been able to stay relatively healthy as well in my career.
But But yeah, it's a young man's game and that's the fun part is the battle against time and the battle against age and the battle against the young guys trying to take your spot.
I've had multiple cartilage issues, two clean outs, had an ACL reconstruction in college, and then just a lot of issues around that, nerve issues, arthritic issues, bursa, inflammation.
And then in 2015, after that season, I got cleaned up and I said, it's time to get serious about my diet.
And I cut out a lot of shit from my diet.
You know, hurtful to many Wisconsinites, but I really cut out dairy.
That's really amazing that diet had that much of an impact, especially when you consider the amount of abuse that your knees would take playing football.
And people are saying, oh, it's a tiny amount of parts per million.
No big deal.
Like, what are you talking about?
Where's the fucking long-term data on tiny parts per million of a fucking toxic chemical being ingested by people not being problematic?
Show me that before you're...
Because there's so many people that are co-opted by these companies, and then they'll immediately be the expert that comes on to calm people down after this, oh, you need to look at the actual data.
Well, it's just the worst of it is what's happening to people in development.
Like people, when a woman's pregnant, her body's exposed to a large amount of phthalates.
I think she's from Harvard.
But she wrote this breakdown of the introduction of phthalates.
And phthalates are these chemicals that exist in plastics.
And they use mammal studies to show what happens in mammals.
And one of the things it shows is that their taints shrink.
Because the taints of male mammals are between 50 and 100 percent larger than female mammals.
But with the introduction while they're in the womb to phthalates in the female's bloodstream, the male taints shrink.
And they've shown a radical decrease in the size of taints, the radical decrease, and this is in humans.
Decreasing the size of penises and testicles and then a big uptick in miscarriages for females.
And they believe that all of these are about these chemicals that are now in our diets.
It's destroying the reproductive systems of people.
It's lowering sperm counts in a radical way.
It's very, very scary stuff.
And it's like it's almost unavoidable at this point because I don't believe that these studies were released.
I think they figured this out somewhere in like the 2010s.
And so we have like 10 years of this data and maybe even less where they're just sort of working out like what are the implications and what's actually happening to people.
The Roundup shit scares me almost more than anything.
Because so much of that...
What do we got here?
Plant-based impossible burger.
Okay.
Tests conducted by moms across America found the impossible burger tested positive for residues of glyphosate.
The levels of glyphosate detected in the impossible burger by Health Research Institute laboratories were 11 times higher than the non-GMO Project Verified Beyond Burger.