Peter Attia joins Joe Rogan to dissect Outlive’s six-year, three-revision process, scrapping a 200-page appendix on supplements like rapamycin due to publisher demands. They debate boxing’s greatest middleweights—Ali’s 1966 Cleveland Williams fight vs. later controversies over thyroid doping and brain damage—while comparing Hagler’s mob-linked 1980 Leonard bout to career shifts like joint replacements in athletes (Flea, Tyler). Rogan criticizes trans athlete policies and media bias, contrasting France/Israel protests with U.S. coverage, before Attia reframes priorities with a "life in weeks" calendar. Overdose deaths surged 50% annually, hitting 100K+ in 2020, while Rogan cites Peterson’s 90% regret statistic for childless women. They blame systemic failures—$6K ER bills, student loans, and ignored healthcare gaps—while Attia laments medical education’s neglect of nutrition and supplements, despite their proven impact. Credible voices like Huberman Lab and Derek (More Plates) cut through noise, but frauds persist, underscoring the need for rigorous self-criticism and performance-based worth over fleeting legacies. [Automatically generated summary]
And there was a whole appendix that never made it in.
So one of the things I wanted to do was pick like the 20 most important drugs, hormones, supplements that I think are relevant and write just quote unquote 10 pages on each.
And I didn't go into it thinking it would be 10 pages.
I thought I'm just going to write the essentials on these 10 things.
You know, kind of rapamycin, metformin, you know, nicotinamide, riboside, you know, those sorts of things.
But then it turned out it was taking me like 8 to 10 pages per and the publisher's like, yeah, there's no way you can have a 200-page appendix on a 450-page book.
You know, I was watching this clip of you and Huberman.
It was really fascinating, because you were talking about self-talk, the way you talk to yourself, and about how you adjusted that.
I thought that was very, very interesting.
would you get so you know the one of the problems with people like yourself I guess myself to people that get like really into things is you get obsessed and then you get very hard on yourself if you're if things aren't going well or if it's not going exactly the way you want it to go the way you know if you're not using proper technique if you're not doing and then for you you had a real problem where you like very hypercritical of yourself yeah
I mean— I know it had to do with sort of, you know, various defects in my, you know, my life as a child.
And I think there was just...
I think everybody responds kind of differently to...
The word trauma is a bit loaded, so I want to be kind of careful using it.
But I think we all experience trauma.
We're highly adaptable, right?
So everybody adapts to trauma very well, I think, for the most part.
But there are maladaptations.
And I think one of my...
You know, issues, I think, growing up was just a total inferiority complex, right?
This feeling like not good enough, you know, look down upon constantly, you know, all that sort of stuff.
Like, a lot of this is very typical immigrant stuff, by the way, like when you're kind of the only non-white person in your middle class neighborhood, you're different than everybody else.
Look, I think that's what drew me into sports like boxing and martial arts at such a young age, right?
It was kind of like the, I'll be different, I'll be better, I'll be tougher, all those things.
Somehow I just think that that narrative got harsher and harsher as I got older and older.
And it didn't matter what sort of accolades came with it because it does produce good results sometimes.
You do get better.
But I think where I got to was just the benefits were no longer close to compensating for the costs.
And I think the biggest costs were the costs not just on me, which were there all along, but it's how it kind of spreads into your relationships with other people, most importantly, your family.
Yeah, I realized at an early age that there's zero benefit in being hard on yourself because I am, no matter what, I'm a perfectionist and I get very angry at myself.
There's zero benefit to self-talk that's negative.
Well, I mean, from, you know, age 15 on, I was very, very active in martial arts competition, right?
So my whole focus was on that.
And my whole focus was on getting better.
And anything that would somehow or another get in the way of me getting better, I cut it out.
Whether it was partying, drinking, spending too much time with girls, whatever it was, I'm like, that's got to go, because that's getting in the way.
And I found that negative self-talk gets in the way.
Because the reason why I had negative self-talk was because I was insecure, And I was very ambitious and I really wanted to be really good and I wanted to be really good immediately.
I didn't want to wait.
But I realized somewhere along the way that the negative, in any way shape or form, I didn't need it because I was so driven.
Like, that the negative was just getting in the way.
It was like, I thought that it was helping me because I was like, come on, you fucking idiot.
Like, get going.
But then I realized, like, no, no, no, no, no.
Like, that's not...
That isn't...
There's no benefit to that.
Because all the...
You already have, like, this crazy desire to get better.
So just don't ever be shitty to yourself.
And instead...
Concentrate all your energy on what you're doing wrong and technique.
And that's why my technique got so good so quickly.
It's because I didn't spend any time after losses, loathing myself.
All I wanted to do was get back to the gym.
But I just figured it out on my own.
And I don't know how.
There's been some moments in my life in comedy and in martial arts where I realized I had an error in thinking and I made adjustments.
And that was an adjustment that I made as a young teenager.
Yeah, it's hard, man, because if you're ambitious, if you have goals, if you're very into what you're doing, you're very focused on whatever the endeavor is, whenever you have a setback, it's really frustrating and it's infuriating and you can get very angry at yourself.
Yeah.
Whether it's with archery or whether it's anything that you do that you're really interested in if you you know that it was a lapse of concentration or you're tired or you just weren't focused on it entirely and you fuck something up it's like god damn it you fucking dumbass piece of shit.
Like, it's so easy to do that.
But you can't let that happen.
Because it's a bad use of fuel.
It really is.
It's a bad use of fuel.
I mean, I'll still occasionally yell if I fuck someone, like, FUCKING FUCK! But I'm not mad at myself.
It's just energy.
I just have to fucking get it out.
You know, I'm just...
I just gotta fucking let it out.
But I think thinking of yourself as a fucking loser is never good.
Like zero time.
There's no benefit in it ever.
You're always gonna have frustration.
You're always gonna...
But you have to also understand the process.
While things are going poorly, it's very difficult to recognize that it's part of the process.
It's so hard.
It's so hard when things are going poorly, whether it's with stand-up comedy or martial arts or anything.
When things suck, when things aren't going well, it's so difficult to see past that moment.
But you just have to.
And over time, with many, many different instances of this taking place, you recognize, like, it's okay.
I know you feel like shit.
I know you feel like the world is ending.
But it's not.
Not only is it not ending, this is, like, totally inconsequential, and this is actually good for you.
Because this frustration will add to your motivation, it will add to your inspiration, and you'll eventually get better.
Do you think it got so much worse because you accomplished so many things and your drive just increased with the amount of success that you had and the different things you'd accomplished in your life, whereas when you were younger it was almost like...
You experience fuck-ups and success, whereas as you've gotten older, when a fuck-up does happen, it's just so infuriating because you should be past it?
My thinking is a little bit different, which is there's an addiction at play here, right?
So if you shift the thinking of this to that addiction mindset...
And it's hard to sometimes think of perfectionism as an addiction because it doesn't produce immediately the same negative consequences as the addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling and sort of the less socially acceptable addictions.
But I think what happens with most people who are addicted to something is their appetite for that addiction gets higher and higher.
And so, you know, if you're addicted to alcohol, like an alcoholic habituates to a certain amount of alcohol.
They have to drink more and more and more.
And similarly, the need for achievement grew more and more and more.
And one of my therapists explained this to me so well, and I was like, that is the most frightening, brilliant analogy I've ever heard.
She said, you know, your entire self-esteem is based on performance, and anytime you turn to one of your performance, you know, addictions, and you don't get performance back, you lose your mind, right?
Everything you have to do feeds your sense of self-worth.
So if you go out and shoot the bow, it's got to be great.
If you go out and drive the car or get in the simulator, it's got to be great.
If you're trying to prepare for a podcast, it's got to be great.
Like all of these things, you have to be great.
And when you don't, it's sort of like an alcoholic who walks into a bar, asks for vodka and gets water.
They're asking for vodka.
They need the thing that feeds their addiction.
But they're being given water instead.
So I'm demanding great performance because that's how I validate my existence and instead I get no performance.
I get lousy performance.
But because my appetite has grown, it gets hard.
That's why I think over time it just got worse and worse.
There's the underlying belief system has to be completely shattered, right?
So that's, you know, I spent total of five weeks in residential care, two weeks in 2017, and three weeks in 2020. So that's, you know, that's as bad as it gets, right?
That's, you're doing 12 to 13 hours a day of therapy, seven days a week.
And that's where you're kind of going back to the root of the problems.
Like what is it that is creating or has created this belief system in you?
So you have to go back and look at that.
You then have to figure out what are the strategies and tools to break these habits and behaviors.
And so to the latter, there was a very tangible tool put forth by one of the therapists, which was every time you do something that creates this ire and rage in you, instead of defaulting into your normal state, which is yelling at yourself or breaking an arrow over your thigh or whatever it is you would do, Pull out your phone and audibly speak as though it's your friend that made that mistake.
Right?
So if I'm shooting horribly, And I really feel like I'm gonna lose my mind, I pull up my phone and I pretend it's you that's shooting horribly.
What would I say to you?
I wouldn't yell at you if you were shooting poorly.
I'd be like, Joe, look man, it's a little windy today.
Let's be honest, we're not making excuses, but when it's 20 mile an hour wind, it's hard to shoot well.
Maybe you're tired, you know, you probably just lifted right before you came out here.
That always makes it harder for you to stabilize the bow.
And look, maybe it's just a bad day.
Like, let's come out and do it again tomorrow.
And so I would record that, and I would send that to my therapist every single time.
And this would happen like multiple times a day.
And just doing that four or five times a day, after four, five, six months, what I called my inner Bobby Knight, which was the name I had for that guy that would scream at me, like, I just couldn't hear him anymore.
Well, I think it's just that I realize, like, outside of my kids...
I'll tell you an interesting story.
It's sort of a sad story, but it's so profound, right?
So I had a friend who his wife was pregnant with their first kid, and he's a successful guy.
So prior to his wife having kids, I think he goes through the same sort of thoughts everyone is going to go through, which is like, how is this going to change my life?
The day his wife has the baby, it's like the next day, I guess, she's still in the hospital.
He steps out to go buy some food.
And he still remembers this to this day.
He's like, he bought a banana.
And he's walking back to the hospital with the banana that he just bought.
And he thinks to himself, I wonder if I'm going to be the kind of guy who now thinks the most important thing in his life is his family, or is it still going to be being a venture capitalist?
And he's thinking about it.
He's thinking about it.
And he goes, you know what?
I actually think it's just going to be my family.
I think all this other stuff is going to be bullshit, and life is going to be my family.
The problem is that getting acceptance and getting appreciation for success is a drug.
It really is a drug, right?
And it becomes a thing that you aspire to and it seems like the only thing in life.
The goal to life really is harmony.
That's the real goal.
Like the goal to life is not never being uncomfortable or always being uncomfortable.
The goal to life is not never being upset versus always being upset.
The goal to life is like this balance.
It's like enjoyment In the things that you do, but also in your occupation.
Having hobbies, but also having a family.
Having love and friendship, but also having enough people in your life that you've encountered that suck to understand why you appreciate the people that you care for so much.
I think all those are important.
Even the people that I know that suck...
I value those experiences because they've taught me how really cool my other friends are.
You know, when someone is a fucking psycho narcissist and they fucking ruin everything they touch and like, it's good to see that person.
It's really good to see this one person that doesn't give a shit about anybody but themselves.
And go, wow, what a weird way to live.
And then it'll make you appreciate this other friend that's super generous and helps everybody.
He's always smiling like, God, I love you so much now.
I appreciate you.
I appreciate that you have this energy because we could all be that guy.
We could all be this fucking psycho who thinks about nothing other than themselves or this psycho who thinks about nothing other than success.
Which I've been in my life before.
I almost wish I could go back and meet myself when I was 21. Because I'm so different from that person then.
I almost have a distorted understanding of who I was.
On her case, she didn't marry some fucking dumb asshole.
It's like, you get lucky, but you also...
I've dated some monsters.
You know?
And I got out of it, luckily.
But just, Jesus Christ.
There's monsters out there.
There's people, and these people are just human beings.
And you're catching them at whatever stage of their existence where they've had, like, terrible upbringings and bad family members and just a fucking alcoholic dad, abusive mother who's constantly criticizing them.
There is no single stroke of luck that has impacted my life.
And by the way, if we had been born in Egypt, if I had been born in Egypt, because we're not Muslim, I mean, it's not a great place to be if you're not a Muslim in a country that's obviously majority Muslim.
So I would have been discriminated against.
I mean, I wouldn't have had the same educational opportunities.
I wish I wouldn't have had any of the opportunities that I had growing up in Canada.
So, you know, something that's completely out of my control, but probably had a greater impact on the arc of my life than anything else.
Typewriters existed forever and then all of a sudden there's a word processor and it like says, didn't you mean this word?
And you're like, oh my god, yeah, I did mean that word.
Thank you.
It's like you barely even, like when I write in Microsoft Word, I am stunned at how often it just like corrects for me or that I can just hit tab and like I'm halfway into the word and offers a suggestion.
Yep, that's it.
Yep, that's it.
Like I get four letters in and it's like suggestion?
Yeah, his Signal app because he was about to have a conversation with Putin.
They were trying to set up a conversation with Putin and the government called him up and they're like, hey, we know you're setting up a conversation with Putin.
We saw it through your Signal app and he was like, what?
Like, I didn't even fucking know they could do that.
That's what he was saying.
I assumed they could do that because I had a conversation with Gavin DeBecker and he essentially said that through Pegasus software, it's Pegasus 2.0.
He said, Pegasus 1, you needed to click a link.
And that's how they got Bezos.
That's how, what's the guy's name from Saudi Arabia got Bezos.
Because I was not impressed with chat GPT on questions that required...
Like, I'll give you an example.
Like, I asked it...
Between Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, and Roberto Duran, explain who you think is the best boxer of that era.
I can't remember, but it was so dumb, Joe, that I was like, this is not a helpful answer.
It basically said, well, Tommy Hearns beat Roberto Duran.
It just basically recited a bunch of facts, but it couldn't come up with anything.
I then asked it.
This was actually really odd.
I said, what was so special about the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix?
That's the one where going into the final race, Verstappen and Hamilton were tied even, winner take all, for the championship that year.
And it was a very controversial ending because of the safety cars.
So basically...
Lewis is leading, Max is in second, and then with a few laps to go, who spun out?
I think Nikos Latifi hit the wall, which needed a safety car.
And in the process, there's a rule that says every lapped car should be able to unlap itself for the restart, but they only let the cars between Hamilton and Verstappen unlap themselves.
So by the end of a race, usually the leaders have actually lapped the back markers of the field.
So unlap means they get to go ahead of the leader to unlap themselves and catch the tail again because the cars are all going so slow under a safety car.
I see.
And anyway, the point is, it was super controversial.
If not for the way the stewards had interpreted the rule, Hamilton probably would have won the race.
But instead, Verstappen won.
Because he was on better tires.
So even though he was behind, it was like he smoked Hamilton in the last lap.
I mean, he attacked with such ferocity, such fucking technique, and just roughed Leonard up and battered him and did to Leonard what nobody anticipated, you know?
And Leonard, for whatever reason, decided to try to stand with him, which is crazy.
So Leonard had a far better approach in the second fight, but he also was facing a Duran that just really fucked up.
And those are the days where you had to weigh in the day of the fight, too, which is crazy.
Because Hagler knew like, you know, do you know Hagler had extraordinary musculature on the side of his head that was so thick It was almost like he was built with headgear on.
I just did everything to emulate Hagler when I was a kid.
It was just...
And when he, quote-unquote, lost to Sugar Ray Leonard, I was in eighth grade, and all the girls in my class, to tease me, put bags of sugar on my desk the next day.
I mean, if a guy fights with a Thai style, with a very light front leg of the wrestler, he's just going to fucking power double him into the corner, and that's a wrap.
Yeah, it's so interesting to me, like, watching MMA, like, how people are trying to incorporate all these different techniques, and there's all these adjustments that have to be made while new techniques come into play, like the calf kick.
The calf kick has kind of changed most of MMA because it's so devastating.
It's like one of those techniques where you get a couple of those and all of a sudden your leg is screwed up.
Like you can't really move good anymore.
Even if it looks like you can move good, you're really kind of hobbling on that one leg.
You're masking it with switching of stances and moving, but you're in agony.
Yeah, I used to do this dumb thing where I was a middleweight, so I would fight, I would spar two rounds with a welterweight, two rounds with a middleweight, two rounds with a light heavyweight.
So I wanted to kind of, so each, the opponent would be fresh for two rounds, so I was getting more and more tired as the opponent is getting stronger but slower.
No, I had stopped competing by this point, so there was literally no reason for me to be doing this.
This was so dumb.
Like, I was in college at this point, right?
So, I'm a college student who would still train really, really hard, and on the fifth round, so the first round with that guy who's a light heavyweight, I still remember his name was Mike, and this was a, even by the standards of a light heavyweight, he hit like a mule.
He just was, he was such a hard shot.
And I just, on that particular day, I was just not feeling good.
But I just didn't listen to myself, right?
I was like, you're going to finish these six rounds no matter what, even though I felt horrible.
And he got me with straight right after straight right after straight right.
And at the end of those six rounds, I went down to cool off on the speed bag.
And just, you know, for people watching who don't know what that's like, like hitting a speed bag, you shouldn't feel anything.
Like there's no weight to the dumb thing, right?
But just the impact of the side of my hand on the speed bag made it feel like I was getting kicked in the head.
Yeah, I know quite a few students who were in college who were also actively sparring in MMA and I'd watch them get after it and I knew that, you know, they relied on their brain and this was just for fun.
I was like, God, it's such a risky endeavor.
It's so dangerous because you're going to get hit.
It's not like anything, like even in skiing, like falling down and hitting your head like that is kind of rare.
Like it only happened to me once or all the years that I was skiing.
But getting hit in the head happens every time you spar.
Unless you're like so exceptional.
Willy Pep, you're fucking Pernell Whitaker out there.
Did you ever see the video when Jack Johnson fought for the title where they converted, I think it was Reno, they converted the town just to have that event there and all the guys with their hats on?
Those three years where he protested the Vietnam War, in many ways that cemented Ali's legacy because he was such a cultural icon that he was like, you know what?
Fuck you.
I'm not going to Vietnam.
You guys are out of your fucking minds.
No Viet Cong ever said anything bad to me.
I'm not going to Vietnam and killing people.
Fuck you.
And they just removed him from boxing.
They wouldn't let him box for years.
And by the time he boxed again, people were so happy to see him again.
I used to have in my old office in San Diego a big art print on the wall of that fight, of the knockout punch.
So, one day, it was a Friday afternoon, one of my analysts was in my office, and we were, you know, he's, at the time, he's probably like 25 years old, right?
And we're doing something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I don't know what made me think this, but I looked up at the picture, and I was like, hey, do you know who that is?
Who, you know?
And he's like...
Is that Muhammad Ali?
And I was like, yeah, that's Muhammad Ali.
Isn't it interesting that you wouldn't immediately recognize that?
And I explained the significance.
And I said, that's him knocking out this guy named Cleveland Williams.
And this is the whole story of Cleveland Williams.
And I said, let's pull up the fight.
And we watched the fight.
It's a three-round fight.
The next day, Ali died.
So I emailed him the next morning because I found out that morning.
I was like, hey Dan, just so you know, Muhammad Ali died last night.
Because the amount of punishment that he endured late in his life and to see him with Parkinson's I remember having this argument with someone who said, no, no, no, he's got Parkinson's disease.
It has nothing to do with boxing.
I was like, shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
What are you, examining him?
You just don't want it to have anything to do with him.
You watch his fight with Larry Holmes.
Tell me.
Tell me you don't think that he endured brain damage in that fight.
Why did they do that with T4? They just had this belief that, oh, he needs more thyroid hormone to, yeah, speed up his metabolism, and of course he's always going into camp overweight at this point and needs more energy, right?
So the thinking is, well, more thyroid hormone will make him have more energy.
But, I mean, I remember reading one of the biographies of Ali.
I think it was...
It might have been Thomas Hauser's biography where he goes into pretty good detail on the state of his medical care at the end of his career and just how horrible it was.
The odds of them knowing someone in the mob are quite high, okay?
And then you have this fight with Leonard where, man, even to me watching it, because I watched it, that was back when they had Closed Circuit.
Closed Circuit.
So for people that don't know what that means, you would go to the movie theater, or you would go to any kind of a theater that would have a large screen, and you would pay money to go watch the fight in an audience.
And so I actually watched quite a few fights like that.
I was shocked at the decision after it was over, but I remember going home thinking, God, it just seemed like he didn't have any pop on his punches, which for Hagler is crazy because Hagler was a fucking murderous puncher.
It just seemed like he didn't try to hurt him.
It seems crazy.
But then the decision comes, and then Hagler just disappeared and went to Italy and became a movie star.
And I was like, oh, well, what a great deal.
I mean, how else does he become a fucking movie star in Italy?
He goes into Italy, does the worst movies you've ever seen in your life.
Well, that's pretty obvious what's going on there.
You know, that's the amount of people that have had issues with the vaccine versus the amount of people reported.
Like, I don't know what the real numbers are.
I don't think anybody does.
Because there's a lot of reluctance to talk about it.
It's very interesting.
You know, I've had friends that had vaccine injuries that went to the doctor and the doctors didn't want to report them in the VAERS. The whole thing is very weird.
But Tommy Hearns wrote on his Instagram, I believe it was his Instagram, to pray for Marvin because they're still friends even after that Marvin was in the hospital because of a side effect of the vax.
Again, I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if Tommy was wrong.
I don't know if he was incorrect.
But something happened and he died.
Yeah.
I would have loved to have met him.
But what a great way to end a career.
Just go, that's it.
Done.
See ya.
So many guys just hang out too long.
You know, there's so many guys that just get battered.
Did you watch the Benavidez plant fight this weekend?
Five years ago when my daughter was into her, I was like, eh, whatever.
Not to get too down the rabbit hole, but if you look at the progression of her music and how it's grown up with her, you think about what she was doing in circa 2008, 2007 versus what she's doing today and the lyrics.
I'm super impressed.
And also just her commitment to her fans is pretty amazing.
So it was always the same story, which is started out with nothing, became really famous, too much drugs, you know, everything went to hell in a handbasket trying to make it back.
Like, it was the same story.
You just plugged in a different musician every time.
But I remember my roommate and I, in college or whatever, we'd watch some of this and we'd be like, like, imagine, this was like a Metallica concert.
I mean, it's like, it's just a spectacle of it all.
It's like, you know, when they have ACL here, and you go to some of the bigger shows here, it's like, part of what you're going to is the spectacle of it all.
Yeah, look at that.
1994!
Look how crazy that is!
I mean, that is...
When you see them on stage and you see a shot from behind them, so you get to see them facing the crowd, it is so big.
Like, so many of those guys, you don't think of them as athletes, but as they get older, like, all those years of repetitive stress, like Maynard from Tool, he had to get a hip replacement.
He obviously exercises, but his knee is pretty fucked up.
So I had a conversation with him about stem cells and all the different things that I've done to sort of mitigate some of the knee problems that I've had.
But his knees look pretty bad.
It looks pretty bad.
But the dudes out there just fucking jumping around and dancing around.
So many people wind up getting fucked up.
Steven Tyler had to get knee replacements.
You know, Ted Nugent got knee replacements.
He told me he was jumping off amplifiers and destroyed his meniscus.
Yeah, I mean, you don't think of those guys as athletes, but they're doing so many shows, and they're on the road so many days a year, stomping on the ground, jumping around, and all that energy.
It's like your body doesn't like it.
So many guys I know from jiu-jitsu.
I just was having a conversation with a friend of mine last night about it who needs two shoulder replacements.
I'm like, Jesus Christ.
It's like these hidden epidemic of injuries that you don't realize.
It's just like a way to actually fix the bone externally.
So you put like screws into the femoral neck right away out of the gate as opposed to kind of letting it bleed off and lose its blood supply.
I talked to an orthopedic surgeon about this like a little while ago who's a hip guy and I said like if Bo Jackson had that injury today how likely is it that he would have had a hip replacement?
He goes like If they had scanned him right away, they probably could have salvaged that hip.
Well, you know, it's just what they've done to those other girls that are competing against her is just a fucking crime.
It's horrible.
Imagine if you're a biological woman, you are working your ass off.
You are fully dedicated to being the best of the best.
You're dotting all your I's and crossing all your T's.
You are watching your diet.
You're watching your recovery.
You are fucking trying.
And this person who just decides they're a woman With testosterone flowing through their body for their entire life just dominates you.
It's fucking maddening, and it's fucking maddening that we have gotten into this ideological battle, this cultural end-of-the-road ideological battle where we're allowing that and where people will step up and virtue signal and defend this.
Like, as if it has anything to do with being compassionate and considerate and trans rights or LBGTQ plus AI, whatever the fuck it is, rights.
It's nonsense.
We are a society that needs a real problem, and we are fixating on these fucking very strange issues and deciding that we're going to correct all the inequities and inequality in the world by allowing these people to Express their truth and you're encouraging mental illness,
you're encouraging virtue signaling, you're encouraging mass ideology, this ideological capture of an entire culture where people know things aren't true.
You know it's not right, you know it's not accurate, you know it's not scientifically true, and yet people have to espouse these certain things.
Because if they don't, they'll be labeled transphobic.
It's fucking wild.
And I never thought it was gonna happen like this.
California, like, there's more than 40 of them that have made their way into prisons.
And there's hundreds of them that are under review right now.
It's crazy.
They go to prison and get women pregnant.
So that not only are they saying that they're females, but they don't have to do anything other than say they're females.
They don't have to take estrogen.
They don't have to get their balls cut off.
They don't have to do anything.
They don't have to do anything.
I'm a female.
Oh, well, we don't want to fuck with you.
We definitely want you to go to the place where you're allowed to live your truth, Peter.
I mean, Patricia.
Get in there.
Get in there and start fucking.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
And one of them was a guy who is a fucking murderer.
You know, the thing about these people that identify as females, like they did this study on inmates that identify as female and want to be moved over to female prisons.
There was a large number of them that were sex offenders.
And even if a person says, look, I'm going to do my best to remember this if it really makes you feel better, but you can't override your entire lifetime of regular pronouns and remember that you're a they, not a she.
I remember when Fallon Fox first started fighting women in MMA, and then it turned out that for the first two fights, She wasn't telling them that she was biologically male.
She just said that that wasn't important.
Or you shouldn't have access to her medical information.
This is a medical issue.
No one's business but hers.
And I was like, that is just straight bullshit.
Like, that is so crazy.
And the pushback I got on that, I was like, whoa!
What is going on?
unidentified
And this was like 2015, 2016, something like that.
I never would have imagined we would get to the point where this is like a public issue throughout the entire world.
And that you're dealing with trans athletes wanting to compete and then dominating female sports, breaking records.
I mean, someone quoted the, like, there's these two trans athletes that were competing as females in Connecticut.
And they were saying that if you looked at their times, like, their times, like, if you take, like, an elite female runner, like, who's that woman's name?
Well, there should be lawsuits that they're getting denied their ability to compete in a fair field, a level playing field.
It's not fair.
It's not fair.
And people make this stupid argument like, oh, well, you know, there are differences in the spectrum of athletic ability in females.
Yeah, there is.
But the difference between the highest end of the spectrum of athletic ability in females and the lowest end of the spectrum of professional athletes in males is fucking enormous.
It's a fucking Grand Canyon size gap.
It's like these dorks that have never competed in anything before.
Those are the ones that are proponents of this.
Because they think of it as like social justice and social change.
You don't even know what the fuck you're asking for.
You're literally asking for people to cheat.
Because that's what they're doing.
They're cheating.
They're sandbagging.
They're sandbagging.
Like, we'd get sandbagging all the time in martial arts.
You'd get someone who entered into the white belt division and you're like, that guy is not a fucking white belt.
Like, because people like to win.
They just want to win.
It's all the time.
You know, in pool, you know what people would do in pool?
Not only would they because there's like these rating systems So there's certain people that are such pieces of shit They will enter into tournaments and lose over and over and over and over again on purpose and Play like shit on purpose so that their rating is really low and then they can enter into a tournament And then they get a handicap against someone who's a player of their caliber So in certain leagues like say if you and I were playing in a league There's a bunch of different ones now.
I'm not sure how the Fargo rating goes, but there's other leagues that, like I used to play in a league back in the day, and say if I was better than you because my number is higher than you, I would have to either give you games on the wire, or say if we were both going to race to seven, I would have to go to seven, but you would have to go to five.
Or, you know, something along those lines.
In some places you actually have to give a spot.
So people would lose on purpose just so they can get that and so they can maybe win a tournament.
Just because they want to win.
People are gross.
They like to cheat.
And the idea that that isn't factored into this at all, the possibility that people just want to win and want a sandbag, and then also that no one's factoring the psychological reality of people getting extraordinary attention for doing this.
For transitioning and then for competing and being so brave.
And yeah, they get hate.
But people love to concentrate only on the hate.
They get a lot of love.
They got a lot of love from a lot of fucking insane liberals out there who are literally out of their mind and don't understand sports and don't understand competition and are just saying things because Twitter said it.
Sam Brinton was in charge of, was it nuclear waste disposal?
Something for the Department of Energy.
And this person who has a shaved head and a fucking goatee and a beard also wears makeup and women's dresses and was stealing women's luggage multiple times from airports.
So would go to the airport and then would grab somebody else's bag, take it and take their clothes out and just start wearing it.
And got caught doing this and said, oh, I didn't know.
But meanwhile, I'd taken the clothes out of the luggage and left it in the hotel room.
And then they got him on camera stealing luggage from another airport.
And then they're like, we think there's a fucking pattern here.
And then there was a woman who was a designer from Houston that saw him wearing her dresses at an event.
And she's a designer who's very specific, one-of-a-kind clothes.
And there's photos of him wearing those dresses and her wearing those dresses.
Like...
It's like they're just playing this weird diversity and oppression game.
Can you imagine going back to our earlier discussion about like 100 years ago if – I mean what the problems were then, right?
And again, one of the things I think about is – It's easy to say, because I don't have any other reference for it, that we're living in the weirdest time.
But I don't know if that's true, right?
I don't know if political discourse is as bad today or as worse today than it was in the past.
I actually have reached out to Lawrence Wright, who also lives here, to see if he can introduce me to him.
But it's a fascinating book.
He's Hungarian, I believe, but has lived in the U.S. for many years.
And What is the name of the book again?
The Storm Before the Calm.
And I read it like about six months ago and was beyond blown away.
And he writes about these macro cycles that lead to enormous transition in US history.
Because again, we're such a young country, right?
250 years old or barely that, right?
And basically there were two cycles, and I believe one cycle, so there's like a political cycle and a social cycle, and one of them occurs roughly every 50 years, one of them occurs roughly every 80 years, and he goes through each cycle, so what's the, what creates the tension, the pressure, the break point, the rebuild, but what he writes about in this book is,
look, this is the first time we're coming up to both cycles happening around the same time, like roughly 2030. And so what he's saying, like, everything that we're going through right now, politically and socially, And economically is actually pretty predictable.
And here's what's interesting.
He wrote the book, I believe, pre-2020.
So a lot of what he said was kind of going to happen is already happening.
It's super interesting.
And the implications for 2024, 2028 in terms of, you know, kind of presidential stuff is interesting because obviously a lot of it has to do with different administrations and things like that.
So he thinks we're coming to the end of a cycle where basically the current political and social structure has exceeded its utility, right?
So politics as we – I don't think anybody would disagree that politics has basically lost its service, right?
Like the people aren't benefiting from their politicians anymore.
So why is that?
Well, so let's go back to the last cycle.
So he said the last cycle was Jimmy Carter into Ronald Reagan.
And so Carter was the last of that cycle, which was kind of super big government.
And then Reagan ushered in, you know, obviously small government, but also lots of military spending.
And, you know, what he says is...
Actually, I'm trying to think.
I don't think he actually predicts exactly what's going to happen in the next cycle.
But what he says is all of the kind of discourse that we're seeing now where basically there's nothing that's really bipartisan anymore, that's going to lead to kind of a breakdown of the system where...
I'm trying to think how he describes it much more eloquently than I can.
The gist of it is...
He says that the next president to be elected will be kind of the last of the cycle.
So whoever's elected in 2024, he thinks is kind of the last of the current system we have.
And we will, again, it's hard for me to imagine this is true, but what he's basically saying is it will no longer be kind of the elite class running the country.
Because that's obviously what we do right now, right?
We have a pretty elite class that runs the country.
How would it be possible that they would relinquish their grasp on power and control?
Because it seems like everything they're doing is indicating that they're moving towards greater and greater control and more and more.
They're taking advantage more and more of the situation to reap financial benefits.
When you look at just the fucking insider trading that they're allowed to do and no one's stopping, just that.
It's just unbelievable that there's not more pushback against that.
There's jokes about, you know, Nancy Pelosi and what a great stock trader she is.
But if you just look at the entire list of Republicans and Democrats that are involved in stock trading that do way better than some of the very best traders in the world, like it's really clear that this is a fucking money grab.
That it's dirty.
No one's stopping it.
No one's voting to stop.
There's no one who's speaking out.
And the problem is the people that would be involved in putting forth legislation to make this illegal are benefiting from it being legal.
It's also, you know, we're in a very weird place right now with the media.
Because the media has lost its hold over the narrative.
It used to be that the media was the primary place that people would go to find out what's going on in the world.
But now the media conveniently leaves out anything that it doesn't want to be front and center in terms of like things that people concentrate on and talk about.
Like one of the greatest examples that's happening right now is this massive protest in France.
Macron in France takes his fucking $80,000 watch off under the table while he's talking to people about tightening up and about how this has to be done.
The guy's wearing a fucking...
Find out what watch he was wearing.
Because you're a watchhead.
You would like this.
But the fact that this dork thought it was a good move to take his fucking watch off under the table.
Yeah, people don't understand that a watch like what I'm wearing, an Omega Seamaster, it's very accurate, but it's more accurate in certain positions in terms of how the mechanical winding of the watch works.
And a tourbillon, it doesn't matter where you're at.
It's perfect.
I saw a Grand Seiko tourbillon that was like a quarter of a million dollars.
But meanwhile, go to CNN. Are they talking about that?
Go to CNN and see if CNN is showing...
Go to the front page of CNN and see if they're showing front and center the massive protests in Paris or the massive protests that are in Israel right now.
Because at the end of it, I always learn something.
I always learn, like, oh, I didn't even know that was bothering me.
Or I didn't know that I was really freaking out about this.
Or I didn't, like...
I think what marijuana does that a lot of people say makes me paranoid, what it does is makes you hyper aware of perhaps some things that you weren't really thinking about or avoiding or things that are maybe in the back of your head that should probably be in the forefront, some issues you need to deal with.
Or just some realities that you need to confront about the world, about life, about mortality, about your loved ones, about, you know, just the world we live in is very temporary, and you are very temporary.
You know, I mean, a year's not that long.
I mean, we're just in the Elkwoods in September, and September's just a few months away now.
Here we are, it's basically April, you know, I mean, May, June, July, August, September, it's there again.
And then there'll be another year, and then you're dead.
That's really how the world works.
And meanwhile, so many people – it goes back to what we're talking about at the beginning of this conversation.
The focus and concentration on things that are completely important like your legacy.
Completely not important.
Unimportant.
Like your legacy.
Like it's foolish.
It's nonsense.
Like no one is going to remember you unless you're fucking Socrates.
It's depressing if you only concentrate on, oh my God, one day it's going to be over.
But if you just look at the reality of the amount of time that you have available to you, the amount of time in life, That's just what it is, and it'll help you prioritize, and maybe it'll help you have a more balanced perspective, which is, I think, especially towards people that are high-performing, ambitious people that are successful, it's very difficult to get off that horse.
Like, I got offered something pretty recently that I'm not interested in, and this pitch was They were talking to me about money and they just kept talking to me about the amount of money and this and that and this.
I'm like, listen, listen, listen.
This is not what I'm – that's not my motivation.
You're not going to get me with this.
I have zero interest in this product.
I have zero interest in this thing that you're trying to promote.
I'm not.
I'm doing it.
No way.
And they didn't seem to be able to understand that.
I'm like, there's not enough time in this life.
And I have too many things that I enjoy doing.
You're asking me to do something I don't enjoy doing for something that I don't really need, which is money.
Like, I don't really need money.
Like, what I need is, I need things that I enjoy.
That's what I like.
And I have all these things that I've already cultivated in my life that I do enjoy.
Like, I'm having fun.
I have great friends.
I have great hobbies.
I have great family.
I have great things that I like to do.
That's all I'm doing.
Like, I'm not doing this other thing.
And it was the most bizarre conversation.
It was almost like I wanted to say, and you should probably not do it too.
You should probably think about your life too.
Like, you guys are kind of my age, and you're talking to me about this stupid idea.
But it's just life – you can get caught up in the momentum of whatever thing you're pursuing.
And if you're pursuing money, it's one of the slipperiest slopes because you can justify all sorts of things.
Like, well, it's not that bad.
Oh, a few people are going to – but I'm going to make a lot of money.
And essentially that's how pharmaceutical drug companies push out drugs that wind up having horrible – I mean, there's no greater example of that than the opioids, though.
The fact that no one went to jail for the rest of their life for what they did It's really horrifying.
If you think about the things that people go to jail for and the fact that that family, the Sackler family, what they did and the lies that those people who made those drugs told in terms of their addictive properties, in terms of what they're going to do to people, it's fucking insane.
Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for the New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
When we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad, and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
When we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad.
When in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad.
unidentified
There are dozens of examples that I could share with you and with your viewers.
People that work at networks, frankly, like the one I'm speaking on right now, who try and claim that, you know, it was racist to investigate the lab leak theory.
But you and I both know, and it would be delusional to claim otherwise, that touching your finger to an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third rail by the mainstream institutions and increasingly by some of the tech companies will lead to reputational damage, perhaps you losing your job, Your children sometimes being demonized as well.
And so what happens is a kind of internal self-censorship.
unidentified
This is something that I saw over and over again when I was at the New York Times.
And he talks about how basically – look, we kind of spent most of our evolutionary lives with real risk.
And he argues that paradoxically that made us happier.
Like being in war, even though war itself is bad, the sense of camaraderie and the dependence that you have on another person, right?
Like, you know, again, I've never been in war, so I can't speak to it.
But just listening to the way others have spoken about it, it's like, if you and I are in war together, I trust you with my life and vice versa.
And he argues that that is so absent today that A, you're seeing a lot more thrill-seeking behavior that is just basically engineered risk.
And there's just a lower sense of purpose.
And I think he argues that women are less susceptible to this in large part because at least historically, one of the most dangerous things a woman can do I mean, the historical mortality of childbirth is enormous.
And therefore, they're probably, again, these are broad generalizations, but certainly the statistics don't lie, which is that men are disproportionately subjected to these types of deaths.
It's interesting what causes people to experience despair because Jordan Peterson sent me a statistic yesterday.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It's really kind of disturbing.
It's essentially saying that women that hit the age of 30...
That 50% of them now have no children, and 50% of them will never have children, and that 90% of them are going to regret it, which is really horrible.
Like, if you really stop and think about that, 90% of them regretting it.
Okay, I'll send this to you.
The epidemic, unfortunately it's a video.
I'm not going to watch it.
It's like an hour and 18 minutes.
But that statistic alone, that 90% of them are going to regret not having children.
There's a series of biological switches that go off in a person's life.
Becoming an adult, being on your own, becoming self-sufficient, finding an occupation.
Finding groups of friends and community and having a family.
There's a thing that people, they do and they become a different thing because of that.
You become a different person when you become a mother or a father.
You do.
Something happens.
You reach like another stage of life.
It's a different chapter.
And for people that never reach that stage, for men, and I've talked about this many times, it's like very depressing.
It's very depressing when you see a lot of men that do not have children that are in their 60s and 70s and they've never had kids and they're not married and they're just adrift.
It's really sad because these same guys that really valued freedom when they were 30 and 40, they find themselves in this purposeless existence as their body starts to fade and fail.
And they realize like, oh my god, I've missed a whole thing in life because I didn't want to take that chance.
Because I didn't want to, you know, either contribute to overpopulation or I didn't want to lose my freedom or whatever the rationale was.
And all of a sudden you find yourself in your late 60s alone.
No children, no wife.
And you can't have children anymore.
It's over.
What do you do?
I mean, maybe a man can.
Some old men have kids.
Maybe.
You know, you can do it.
Maybe.
But you've got to find some young lady who's still got eggs that's willing to let you fuck her.
And it's increasingly less likely as you get older that they want that.
I'm amazed at how when my wife and I got married, I was not...
I was indifferent towards having kids, really.
I didn't think it was like...
And I was like, yeah, I mean, I guess so, if that's what you want.
And, of course, I feel the same way you do, which is, like, you know, most important thing I've ever done.
You know, greatest source of pleasure is actually kids, but not without pain, right?
I mean, it's really hard, as you know, to raise kids.
You know, a friend of mine gave me the greatest piece of advice recently, which was something his wife does.
Now, we have two boys, right?
So we have this experience where they're like, and they're feral, right?
Like they're full on out of control.
Much more difficult than our daughter was.
And at least three times a day, they do something that just makes you want to like kill them, right?
And my friend was like, anytime you're getting frustrated with them, just close your eyes.
And imagine you are 80 years old, and you have a time machine that is bringing you right back to this moment, and this is the only moment you will get with them again when they're young.
And also no one is doing anything – that's the crazy thing, right?
No one is doing anything to fix shitheads.
It's just this wild rat race.
As much as we know about psychology and human development and what can and can't be fixed, you would imagine that if you wanted to make the world a better place, one of the – I mean really you want to make America great again?
Forget about economics.
Although that's important.
What you really would want to do is concentrate on the psychology of all of its citizens.
You would want to concentrate on prospects, like your prospects for a future healthy, happy life and what's the impediment of those prospects and how do we mitigate all these issues like inner-city crime, violence, gangs.
All that should be of primary concern.
To anyone who's like, if you're running this country and you're saying, you know, we want to make the greatest country the world has ever known, we think we have the greatest country, we can make it even better, and here's how.
The number one, number one would be we've got to fix the ghettos.
Number one, number one.
Number one, the economic disparity, the disparity in terms of the prospects that people have for living a normal, healthy life without violence and crime, the difference between someone who's born in Baltimore and someone who's born in Beverly Hills are so off the charts different, and no one's doing jack shit to try to even that out.
Like, this idea about, like, Financial equality, you're not going to achieve that because you're not going to achieve effort equality.
Certain people are just going to always work harder than other people.
This idea of like, we need to redistribute.
I was watching this maddening conversation where this fucking dork was trying to say that all money over $3 million that a person makes should be taxed at 90%.
That's great for you to say, because you're never going to make three million dollars, you fucking idiot.
But that's so stupid.
The idea behind it is so stupid.
The understanding of where that money goes is so stupid.
The understanding of incentives.
What about fucking venture capital money?
What about all the fucking money that you need to make an iPhone?
Do you think anything's gonna happen if you tax everybody over three million dollars, 90%?
No.
And where's the money going, by the way?
It's just going to some fucking magical fairy who's gonna evenly distribute it to everybody else, and we're all gonna live a great life?
Get the fuck outta here.
You're just gonna empower the government to steal money.
That's what you're gonna do.
It's so dumb.
But, on the other hand, there has to be something better than what we're doing now.
Having community centers, having outreach programs, having counselors and people that are available to young boys and girls who don't have a father or don't have a mother or whatever it is.
And it's also upsetting when you see how much money we have to send to Ukraine.
And like, okay, whether or not you agree with that or not, like, where was all that money to deal with all these inner-city problems?
Like, where's all that money to fix the south side of Chicago or to fix Detroit?
Nothing.
Zero...
Zero effort in that regard, which is very strange.
But the answer is not like taxing people 90%.
You're just empowering the government.
Not only that, they suck.
Like, to make the government larger and more bloated, you think somehow or another by giving them 90% of the money over $3 million is going to make them efficient?
The woman who had to flee her home because her husband was beating her versus the untreated person with mental illness versus the person who's addicted to drugs, those people are not the same.
The solution to help those people is not the same and yet when we try to treat everyone as the same in that regard, we end up with San Francisco.
Big government is not the answer and more money to government is not the answer.
It's just there's too many people that are involved in government that are, first of all, they're finding legal or illegal ways to siphon off money in one way, shape, form, or another.
And that's why they're motivated to get into it in the first place.
They're motivated to get into it.
It's like ugly version of Hollywood.
They want attention, they want power and control, and then ultimately once they're in there and they understand the system, they realize that there's an incredible incentive to go along with the program, and you make extraordinary amounts of money if you do that.
And if you're one of those congresspeople that does insider trade, and you look at how much money they've been able to...
When you look at someone like Nancy Pelosi who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars on a six-figure salary, you're like, how?
How?
How'd you do that?
What are you doing?
How is that legal?
How is that legal when they put Martha Stewart in jail for insider trading and what she does is totally legal?
You would imagine that a sane world, in a sane world, you would not be able to know a law is being passed and then make a stock trade based on knowing that that law is being passed, that A certain industry would benefit, and that industry, the stock, is going to go up extraordinarily.
You would think that, no, you have insider information.
You can't do that, especially because you're a public servant.
You're supposed to be a politician that's serving your constituents.
Instead, you're just using this information, and you have advanced knowledge of it.
You're making insane amounts of money.
You're doing better than Warren Buffett and George Soros in the stock market.
Fuck you.
This is crazy.
But that's the reality.
There needs to be something different than what we're doing now, but, you know, I don't know how to do it.
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like there's not a lot of effort or discussion that's being put into trying to figure out what that is or how to do that.
The idea of like, you know, I know people love to talk about income inequality, but it's like such a bullshit conversation because they always like to pretend.
Like people always like, for instance, they always want to do the income inequality thing with men and women.
You know, like, oh, women get paid 75 cents to every dollar a man makes.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine about that where he didn't even know that that was about different occupations.
Do you understand there's different occupations in different hours?
He was like, what?
I was like, yeah, you're arguing something that you like saw on fucking MSNBC. Like this is nonsense.
Like if you actually look at the real statistics and then there's also – You're never going to get income inequality because there's certain people...
Because there's certain people that are just always going to push further and harder in sports, in art, in finance, in anything.
In anything.
You're not going to get equality with human beings because you're not going to get equality of effort.
You're not going to get equality of desire.
People have different motivations.
What you want is a level playing field.
That's what you want.
Where people can do their best with what they have and not be hindered by some shenanigans and bullshit and manipulation.
That's what you want.
If you want to work towards that, like a level opportunity field, a level opportunity to make money, okay.
But if you want to say we need income equality, goddammit, there's people that are psychos that work 79 hours every fucking week on Adderall.
You're never going to make as much money as them.
You're never going to push as hard as them.
You're never going to want it as much.
You're never going to pump your fists up in the air when you fucking sign a deal like they do.
They're out of their mind.
You don't even want to be them.
You don't want to be them.
Income equality is not our ultimate goal.
Our ultimate goal is happiness for human beings.
What makes human beings happy?
Well, having fucking health care would be nice.
Having some sort of like a real health care system in this country that you can absolutely count on.
Not being in massive student debt.
Student loan debt is so goddamn crazy that you go bankrupt You can never absolve your student loan debt.
There's people that are they're getting their Social Security docked because they owe student loans You want to talk about getting to the end of the fucking game and you're a loser like that's gotta suck Your student loan debts are taking your fucking Social Security money.
Oh my god That's gotta be so depressing the fact that that's actually true Those two things That's a system.
That's a fucked system.
That's not good.
When you got subsidized education, they jack the rates up and you can never get out of the loans.
Did you see the thing I posted a couple weeks ago about this bill we got from when Jill was with our middle son in San Diego visiting a friend and he was sick.
So she had to take him to an ER, right?
Our doctor's not there, right?
Obviously we live here.
So, they did, like, regular chemistry lab on him.
That's like about a $12 blood test.
And gave him like, I don't know, 250 to 500 cc of IV fluid.
If that problem was really tackled by our government and they did it in an efficient way, one of the ways they would have to do it, one of the ways they would have to address it in order to be efficient would be to encourage people to become metabolically healthy.
There's encouragement for people to have body positivity and to not be fat phobic and to not fat shame.
There's zero discussion about healthy diets and vitamin supplementation and the benefits of that.
Imagine if the government was responsible for our healthcare.
And they realize, hey, guys, guys, guys, we've got a real problem here.
We're spending too much money and we're losing money because what if the amount of money that they made was dependent upon the percentage of money that was spent on health care?
Like imagine if politicians, if their salary depended on the...
Okay, so the big reason comes down to made-up numbers.
Look at my ER example.
The blood test cost, the actual cost of ordering that blood test is $12.
The bag of IV fluid is probably $38.
So why do they inflate the cost so much?
It's because they play a shell game with the insurance company.
So they say, we negotiate different rates with different insurance companies, and we're gonna build up the price enormously, but we're gonna offer you a really big discount.
And we're going to make you our preferred network.
We're going to be your preferred network.
And there's a quid pro quo here, which is the price is enormous, but you don't actually have to pay that much.
We're going to discount it to you.
But if somebody comes in out of network, which we were, right?
We were out of network because, you know, probably our network is optimized around being in Austin and not in San Diego.
You're going to get screwed.
And of course, if you don't have insurance, forget about it.
The other thing is we don't have the same laws around drug pricing.
The United States basically subsidizes the rest of the world in drug pricing.
So we, in exchange for getting first dibs on the best drugs, we pay a higher price for them.
And other countries are basically not going to pay that because you also have better purchasing power.
So if you look at Canada, for example, like the government is buying the drugs, not the payer, right?
So it's a totally different system.
And the challenge is no system is going to be perfect, but what really bothers me about the discussion is we're missing the point that there are three variables that need to be optimized around.
And everybody just talks about their favorite one.
But you can't talk about one without talking about the other two.
Because if you pull on one lever, you gotta let up on one of the other levers.
So first of all, I mean, at least, I don't know if, I don't want to speak out of school because I'm so far removed from it, but when I was growing up, they had introduced salary caps.
So physicians' salaries were capped.
So when you hit your cap, you stopped working for the year.
So high-earning surgeons, like, would retire, not retire, would stop working in August because they'd hit their salary.
Like, let's say the salary cap was $300,000.
If you earned $300,000 by August, you weren't going to get paid anymore.
And is the problem that because of these made-up numbers that you discussed earlier, that these people, in this country at least, are accustomed to charging these exorbitant fees, like $6,000 for a bag of IV? Oh, yeah.
I mean, I get a colonoscopy every three years, so I had my last one this time a year ago.
It's funny, that one should have been covered.
I don't remember the details on it, because I was over 45 at that point, so it counted as a screening colonoscopy.
But I've historically always had to pay cash for my colonoscopies, because I started doing them when I was 40. And the cash cost of getting a colonoscopy at one of the best guys in New York City, who I've always gone to, is $2,000.
That's the fully loaded cash cost.
That means that's covering the facility fee, the anesthesia, his fee, et cetera.
The one I got here in Austin, where I did it through insurance, the fee was $6,000.
I got the bill.
And my insurance picked up...
Maybe this is the one I... Anyway, my point is my cash out of pocket was almost as bad as the cash I paid for just a full-up cash one.
It had a whole bunch of made-up numbers.
I actually called my gastroenterologist, the guy who did it, and I was like, you've got to walk me through this.
Because I'm struggling to understand these costs.
And he couldn't really explain it.
He's like, I mean, I don't know.
Like, I don't really understand it.
He's like, but, you know, like everybody has sort of a different amount.
You know, it's like being at like a bazaar where it's like, oh, I have special price for you today.
It's one of those things where healthcare is, you would think that in a healthy community, healthy like psychologically healthy community, where you really respect your citizens and care about them, it's a basic human right.
If we're considering ourselves a country, if we're considering ourselves a community of people that all live together on a certain patch of dirt, Being able to exist and to be able to be treated if you get injured or if you get ill, it should be a primary concern.
That's one, and the other one should, like, what is the negative about educating everybody?
There's zero negative.
It's only positive.
You're only going to get more contributors to the economy.
You're only going to get more people that are excelling in life and pushing the boundaries of whatever their occupation is, whatever they're doing.
You're going to get more people that have this opportunity to thrive in life.
You have a country with less losers.
You have a country with more people that are successful.
Investing in that seems like.
But instead, we do the opposite.
We make it so you can never get out of your debt.
We charge you a fucking insane amount of money for your education that you often are not even going to use.
There's so many things wrong with it and it just continues over and over and over again.
And then there's the indoctrination of children into these fucking leftist ideas that they promote to very easily manipulated and kind of naive young people.
And these people that have never existed out there in the real world at all, and have only existed in academia, are now teaching your kids and influencing your kids.
And your kids are finally free of their parents, so they're going to spread their wings and adopt these fucking Looney Tunes ideas from these douchebags.
And, you know, then they have to go out in the world and go, oh my god, what did I learn?
Yeah, it is amazing when you look at the sort of inflation of administration within the universities and how much it is driving up cost and not driving up outcomes.
Because, again, it all comes down to the ROI, right?
Like, if you have to spend $100,000 to get an education, but the education is so good that you get a job that pays you $200,000 a year, well, then, it was worth it, right?
But going back to your point, I mean, I think the biggest problem with why that system of incentivizing based on health would be difficult is...
Think about what all the variables are that you have at your disposal to be healthy.
There's basically five as far as I can tell, maybe a sixth.
So what you eat, your exercise habits, your sleep habits, how you manage emotional health and stress, what drugs, supplements, hormones you take, and then kind of call it the grab bag, like sauna, avoiding air pollution, like all the other stuff that you could do that can have a positive impact on your health.
Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons why we're so terrified about those people that decide to do that.
Like when you get a Ted Kaczynski who's out there in a fucking shack in the middle of Montana, those people are terrifying because there's something so wrong with them that they want to be alone.
I mean, I literally had zero education in nutrition, zero education in exercise.
So even if a doctor knows the literature, which says, okay, you know, stuff you and I have talked about many times before, if your VO2 max is this, It's three times more beneficial to your lifespan than not smoking is.
All that kind of stuff.
Even if they knew that fact, they don't know how to tell you to train.
They don't know what workout to tell you to do.
And yes, a good doctor should know that you're better off being a normal weight than being overweight.
But if you actually ask them, what should I eat?
How should I achieve this goal?
Eat less, exercise more.
Yeah, yeah, I get that, but give me more specificity.
Well, one of the great benefits of the time that we live in today is that someone could read your book or listen to your podcast or...
Like Huberman or many of these people that have these really, really educational shows that can – Huberman's fucking – all this list of different topics that he covers.
We went over it when he was here last week.
He was like, what a resource.
What a great thing to be able to have something like that.
And that this exists today and that I think more people who are seeking out this information have a greater understanding of what's required and what works and what doesn't work.
Well, that is also what's happening with mainstream media.
There's so many hucksters and bullshit propagandists on mainstream media that people are turning to alternative media sources that they know are reliable and people they can trust.
One of the great things about having a podcast like mine is that I can turn someone on to you.
That I can turn someone on to Huberman or to any of these fascinating people or these independent people like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points that have independent news podcasts or Glenn Greenwald or whoever it is.
But that people trust me because they know I'm not full shit.
They know I'm not going to lie to them.
I'm not going to do that.
So I might be wrong, but if I tell you something, it's because I believe it.
If I'm wrong and if I find out I'm wrong, I'm going to tell you that too.
But there's a benefit in that.
There's a benefit in that that didn't exist before.
There was no media outlet like that before where you could find out about people who are reliable and are giving you accurate information and provide a real benefit.
That's one of the cool things about this weird time where you got these v-shred guys and a lot of hucksters out there.
For the longest time, I was telling people, listen to me.
There's no fucking way that guy's natural.
Not possible.
There's some freaks out there that are natural.
There's some real athletic freaks in this world.
Absolutely, 100%.
That's not one of them.
That's not one of them.
And for the longest time, that guy was getting away with it.
But Derek exposed him, fortunately.
You know, it's one of the great things about this time is that, yeah, there are bullshit artists and there's a lot of noise, but there's also a lot of solid signal.
I've never listened to an audiobook at regular speed.
I can't.
They sound too slow.
But she's like, that's how you actually have to read it.
And the second thing she said was, you are so sick and tired of this book because it's all you've read over and over and over again for six years, but you are going to have to be so mindful and present that you have to read every sentence like it's the first time you've read it, like with that level of surprise.
Well, listen, brother, I'm very happy that you got this done, and I'm very happy it's out, and you are one of my favorite sources of information when it comes to health and wellness and longevity and the science and art of longevity.