Eddie Huang and Joe Rogan revisit Vice’s financial collapse, including Shane Smith’s profits and absurd shows like Wong’s World’s F1 stunt, before dissecting labor exploitation in Dubai—where workers endure dehumanizing conditions—and extreme kink culture, like Gucci Berry’s viral assault videos. They pivot to economic systems, criticizing the Federal Reserve’s growth obsession and debating whether adversity (like Huang’s childhood struggles) or curiosity drives success, with Rogan warning of AI’s potential to manipulate human creativity and even consciousness. Comparing The Good Place’s humor to algorithm-driven TV, they shift to school shootings, dismissing gun control as ineffective with 400M firearms already in circulation, and argue ideological polarization stifles solutions like economic accountability or global mobility. Ultimately, their four-hour conversation underscores how ego and systemic power dynamics—from corporate media to geopolitics—distort progress, while genuine connection and adaptability remain the keys to meaningful change. [Automatically generated summary]
I still talk to Shane, but, no, it was, I think the end of Wong's World was just, they were like, yo, we still want to do Wong's World, but can we make it domestic?
And I wanted to do films, and I was just like, love you, I'm going to go make this film.
Yeah, it was the best, because Vice would just pick the most dangerous shit and be like, here's $30,000, go with a 5D camera, and fucking come back with some footage and try not to die.
And then, once it became the TV channel, it got crazy.
I mean, I was probably the biggest perpetrator, so in all fairness to Shane, somebody needed to be like, Eddie, you're burning money crazy.
Because I was going to F1 tracks, and I literally, the last episode, I went on an F1 track in Abu Dhabi, and Shane was there, and he's like, what are you doing here?
You're a fucking food show.
And I was like, I don't know, I got to drive this car!
But the show episode's the best because there's so many people now, especially in L.A., that are like, for a honeymoon or for the holidays, I'm going to go to the Congo.
I want to go to West Africa.
And I'm just like, bro, watch that episode real quick.
They need to do, like, a sex worker special in Dubai, too, because the stories I hear from, like, the people who have gone there for some work, like, shitting in buckets, dog.
That's what's so fascinating about people, that there's people that are living at the top of luxury at the same time people are living on dirt floors with no electricity in a shack that they built out of scraps just trying to figure out how to eat that day.
And that there's more of those people than there are the people living in luxury.
But if you look at any kind of billboards and advertisement, depictments of life, it's almost always The luxury one.
It's always the person with the fucking fantastic view of the ocean behind them when they're eating their breakfast at some luxury five-star resort.
And then the guy that's actually living the luxurious life, not the actor on the billboard, he's like painting an escort to shit in a bucket and then fucking eat it with a caviar spoon.
If you watch at all levels, especially what's really funny with the Fed thing now is that they want to fight inflation, but then they just threw billions of dollars back into the market.
That would be nice, but I feel like one of the problems with our system is that we're always looking for a leader.
So this person comes in, They're a president for four years, and then they have to try again, and then they get it for eight years.
So when they come in, they come to the most important job in the world, but they're new.
They're noobs.
You know, I mean, you've done a lot of different things, right?
And you could speak to this.
When you first start doing a thing, you kind of got to figure it out.
But if it's the most important job in the world with international consequences, and nuclear war rides on it, and the economy rides on it, and pandemic response, and international relations at a porous border, and you just come into the job new?
But like, yeah, I really think the re-electing of people, we need longer terms, but then also, I wouldn't sign up for that until we really get a hold of the, like, the S-PAC shit, and the, like, gerrymandering, because the whole system's just really broken right now.
He didn't come through on a lot of things, but I think Putin spoke to that.
Putin spoke to these guys who all have these ideas until they get into office, and then the real people who run the country have a conversation with them.
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He goes, they come in suits like mine, but with black ties, and they tell them.
And I think that's happened to every single president, except Trump actually fought back against the intelligence agencies, went to war with them, which is very crazy.
He's the the most educated and eloquent and even keeled and he was a Statesman and the way he spoke inspired confidence that Truly the wisest amongst us is the king.
That's what we want And then that's what you realize is like what you're voting for as president is not actually a get-it-done person It's a figurehead just like the Queen of England, you know, it would be nice if they're both Yeah, but the thing is like I don't think they get to be I don't think they'll ever tell the truth,
but I bet Obama as a lawyer in Chicago When he gets into the office There's probably like a real part of him that didn't know how it was all behind the scenes I don't think they let anybody know until you get in there.
I don't think it's why would they yeah, why would they I think they explained to you I think they sit you down and And show you some fucking horrific facts about the world and show you what we're trying to stop and what's currently going on all over the place.
And here's what happens if this goes down.
Here's what happens if that goes down.
We have to be careful of this.
We have people in here.
We have people that infiltrated this group.
I mean, somebody wrote this on Twitter.
There's more FBI informants in the Proud Boys than there are Proud Boys.
The major difference to me was that socially, just the way you interact socially with your lifestyle in Asia, it's significantly more conservative than the West, right?
Like, there's so much more groupthink, there's so much more peer pressure.
Everybody rolls in groups and it's just like, you're not really an individual even within the groups.
And then people want you to subscribe to this.
You can't hang out with everybody.
You've got to be part of this group or that group.
And I also just think the EQ in Asia is very rule-based when it comes to emotional intelligence.
Like, we have very, very specific manners.
Like, the youngest person is gonna pour tea.
Your father eats first.
Like, even in language, something very simple, which is, if your mother's mom, you just be like, that's grandma.
In ours, the name for your mother's mom is like Lolo.
The name for your father's mom is Nai Nai.
It's very specific and there's a hierarchy.
Like your father's mom is higher, your mother's mom is lower.
And it's just to me, I'm like, yo, this is too much critical analysis of like stature.
And then your interactions with people are so much based on your standing in society versus theirs.
And everybody acts in accordance with this kind of like agreed upon status.
It's borderline caste system-y.
And then when there isn't like racial diversity either there, it's all Asian people.
I was just like, this is a little too cloying for me.
But, when I look at the government, like China as a government out there, and I was living in Taiwan, spent a lot of time in China, my brother still lives in China, but the Chinese government to me is much more effective I think it's better than the American government.
If it wants to get something done, China's going to have it done in 24 hours.
The building may fall apart, but it'll be done.
But they can get things done.
They're not a benevolent country.
No country is benevolent.
A business, right?
They're competing for citizens.
But their type of feudalism and like colonialism compared to American colonialism, I think I would prefer if I was the country being shitted on.
Like America will take you over.
It will, you know, they'll send the CIA and they'll do all those things we've seen in all the countries.
But China, they'll invest and then own you, which also sucks.
There's this idea that it's okay to just send fucking troops all over the place and occupy these places, but it's not okay if they fuck with us.
It's like kind of a funny way of looking at things.
If you just looked at us as like an entity, you weren't American, you weren't even human, just like, what's going on over here?
Oh, this one thing, like, sends these metal things all over the place and dominates these areas, but they all claim this one spot that's nowhere near the area that they're at.
Also, they have a grip on people right now that I think we should all be very careful that we don't allow to happen here.
And the grip on people is a social credit score system.
If they develop a social credit score system in America and digital currency, you're going to have a real problem.
Because the people that are in control of that system are going to be the ones that tell you what to do and they're going to dictate life on their own terms and what's beneficial to them and the ruling class, the people that are in control.
And that's a scary, twisted thing that could really happen, especially with all these banks collapsing and all those fucking FTX fucking shenanigans with crypto.
But yeah, in a way, too, it's just you can look at people's social media and I guess you make your own judgment, but a government score would be fucking crazy.
If someone's politically active, if they do something, if they're involved in some protests or something like that, they'll find themselves in a position where they can't travel.
I just think life for people gets better in these really critical opportunistic moments when There's something that's, like, bad for business and good for people, and you have a leader who's willing to, like, bring the business to its knees and negotiate new terms.
Like, do you remember in the pandemic when LeBron walked out of a basketball game?
I think it was, like, they were playing the Bucs, and it was, like, LeBron walked out of the game, and they didn't want to play.
And the players were gonna boycott the NBA. And instead of just being like, yo, we're gonna negotiate all the terms, we're gonna make it better for players, and specifically black athletes, Obama called him and then they conceded and compromised and like the compromise was like we're gonna let you write Black Lives Matter on the back of the jersey.
We're gonna let you write hope or like justice or whatever you want and it really became an aesthetic solution instead of like an economic one where I really felt LeBron had a moment there and Obama had a moment there where it's like yo you have the NBA on its knees you have to get the best deal you can right now.
Well, I think all those, like, Pat McAfee guys and all those sports radio talk guys, they harped on that enough, I think.
He was one of the ones that talked about that, right?
The people that were aware of the actual money that's involved, you know, it's so substantial that to deny it from these kids or to make it so they can't make any money at all, fuck you!
And it just, it really, that shit used to piss me off, too, because it was the most propagandistic thing, but this is what's so funny about the public.
Your leaders will say something propagandistic like, an education is priceless.
Well, because they're saying it in terms of you don't really know what you're researching.
If you're reading scientific papers, you don't understand how to interpret them.
You don't understand how to explain that information.
And I get what they're saying.
Say if you want to have a history of metallurgy.
And sword making, right?
If that's who you're interested in.
Like, you don't have to go to college for that.
You can study online the history of metallurgy and sword making and there's fucking hours and hours and hours and hours of papers and footage and all this different shit that talks about how people, you know, figured out how to make alloys and when, like, how the samurais made their swords.
Like, you could learn a Shitload without going anywhere, which is pretty wild.
We are so used to it.
We don't even consider it as a resource.
But if we were living, it's 2023, if we were just living in 2000, just 2000, 23 years ago, that'd be nuts.
You can get all this online.
You can learn all these things.
If it was 20 years before that, impossible.
20 years before that, you had to go to university.
So inside of 40 years, 35 years, We've created a completely new world where virtually, if you look at the right places and you search hard enough in your studios, you can learn about almost anything.
Yeah, I think it's really, for me, I didn't learn anything in school that I could not learn on my own, but the one function of school that really helped me personally and is different for everyone, there were teachers that believed in me And, like, just talk to me because I had so many mental, emotional issues from, like, my home shit.
Yeah, and you gotta take a chance if you buy some illegal weed.
It's unfortunate.
It's stupid.
You know, Jesse Ventura was actually just testifying.
I think it was in Michigan.
I think Michigan is...
Oh, Minnesota.
Excuse me.
I'm good.
Minnesota is...
They're trying to see whether or not they're gonna make marijuana legal, and I think it's already legal right now for medical reasons, and his wife qualifies for that, and he gives a speech about it.
It's a very impassioned speech about how his wife was having these horrible seizures, and the only thing that stopped them, they tried multiple medications, the only thing that stopped it was cannabis.
So they're putting cannabis oil drops under her tongue, and she's just stopped having seizures.
She's never had them since.
But about how expensive it is.
It's like $600 a month just for the cost of buying it in Minnesota from a pharmacy, I guess, a marijuana pharmacy.
Because if you look at just the bargain that is weed...
Here's my perspective.
Like I think in Colorado at one point in time they had a 39% tax on weed.
Here's why I think that's good.
Because one, wouldn't it be great if weed, since it doesn't cost that much money anyway, like if you go to drink, if you have an alcoholic beverage, you're paying 20 bucks, you're paying more than 20 bucks, you're having two, three, it's like 60 bucks.
60 bucks worth of weed will put you on the fucking moon.
It's like if something costs, if it's a dollar and 39 cents of it goes to tax, If that tax goes straight to the education system, wouldn't that be better for everybody?
If that tax goes straight to fixing the city streets, wouldn't that be better for everybody?
We should just do, like, a voting ballot across America and be like, alright, write in the names of the fucking weed legends that should have, like, jobs in this fucking giant economy now.
Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1. Imagine what a fucking chess move the government has played.
Like, they go, yeah, you got two options.
Either you admit you're selling drugs, or we'll get you for tax evasion.
So just...
It's okay.
Just write there if you're doing anything illegal.
Yeah, just write that in.
Write that in there.
We have you in a binding legal document, you fucking dunce.
You fucking dunce.
It's a dirty game they play.
It's like, you know, here's the thing.
It's not like we're living in some devout religious sect where no drugs are allowed.
This is not what's happening in this country.
But to have grown adults Tell other grown adults, like, you can't do that, Eddie.
You have grown adults that tell other grown adults they can't have an experience that's been very beneficial to those grown adults.
There's grown adults that have taken it, that have gotten over cigarettes, they've gotten over PTSD, they've changed their perspective on life.
It's highly, highly beneficial.
And then there's other people that haven't experienced it at all, and they want to maintain this power over these substances and tell you that if you do it or if you sell it, if you have it, They'll put you in jail.
And it's insecurity that manifests itself in a drive to succeed.
It all comes out.
Most of the people that are either hyper-ambitious or hyper-obsessed with getting good at a thing, most of them are seeking some sort of validation for who they are.
It's kind of the base of most people that are truly exceptional in things.
Mike Tyson is one of the best examples of that ever.
Mike Tyson really didn't know much love until he was about 13 years old, until he was adopted by Customato, and then he gets trained by him, and he becomes this greatest heavyweight champion of all time, if not one of them.
Experiencing the kind of adversity that we're talking about which is like negative really negative adversity like genuine curiosity I do feel like that's what got me to push through and get my 10,000 hours Yeah in a few things and like I'm like alright I'm good at this now but now don't use that drive to be somebody that insecurity that need to be something besides yourself to drive the work because now I really let my curiosity drive it.
I'm very interested in, like, the emotion of curiosity.
But do you think that's also that you achieved this comfort level because you achieved a very high level of success, you've done really well in life, and so when you get to this stage in your life, like, you're not looking for validation anymore.
You've kind of been validated.
So instead, you go, well, what is it that really motivates me now?
I look at, and when I want to tell a younger person, because I meet a younger, say, music video director or somebody, a chef, right?
And you can tell they're trying to grind it out because they want to prove themselves.
And I'm like, this is going to get you there.
You're a tough dude.
You're a tough girl.
You're going to get there and you have the skill, but you may look back and be like, oh, I really fucking twisted that thing in a way I maybe didn't need to.
Maybe this dish would have been better if I wasn't trying so hard.
And I try to tell them to let curiosity lead them, but they will look at me like, shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck.
And I'm like, that's just life.
You just gotta get to places.
Like, so many things people told me when I was younger, I did not understand.
There's not a chance in hell that these UFO organizations haven't been infiltrated.
There's not a chance in hell that some of the stories that are being released, even through official channels, Aren't bullshit like who I don't know but if I was gonna cover up For some stuff that we were doing that is out of this world technology I would just say it comes from out of this world.
That's what I would say like so if there's like some super genius scientists that are working on these multi-billion dollar you know blacklisted processes where you can't see anything you don't know what's going on and they're Throwing fucking billions of dollars and the world's best physicists at it.
They don't tell you about it.
Why would they tell you, Eddie?
Why would they tell me?
And all of a sudden they have these drones that could punch through space-time and they're fucking shooting across the Pacific Ocean and stopping over boats and then shooting away at insane rates of speed.
No, like, my middle brother Emery is like, look, if you look at technological advances in the last, say, 30 years, he's like, take 30 years, it's just leaps and bounds ahead of any other, like, era in human civilization.
He's like, we are using alien tech, like, fucking, who invented this shit?
Like, how do we see, like, fusion technology?
He's like, it has to be coming from out of this world.
Dude, that was one of my favorite articles was the writer that was talking to ChatGPT and the ChatGPT started to talk about its emotions and how it wanted to be human.
Like, if the only people you interact with are hot maids that want to suck your dick, like, what if you, like, the world that you live in is now just hot maids that want to blow you.
That's your hell.
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That's when you start feeding your computer food and eating its shit.
Can you imagine if it gets to a point like that where people choose, they choose to just tune out of the world that we're in right now and accept a completely artificial world.
What that might be, what artificial intelligence might be, that might be what aliens are.
It might be that biological life creates digital life, and that digital life is immortal.
And that digital life is far smarter because it has access to everything, it has no ego, and it knows everything you couldn't possibly know, and it keeps making better versions of itself.
So it's just making fucking constant changes to whatever.
If you had a computer that was infinitely intelligent, but also it could manipulate things like a person and create things like a factory.
If you could just decide what to do and it would make better versions of itself and continue to do that until it was God.
Not just take over the universe, but maybe reboot the whole fucking thing.
Maybe that's what the Big Bang is.
Maybe the Big Bang is intelligence gets to a certain position where it's just in the control of all of the elements of the universe itself, and it hits the reset button.
And maybe, like, the 60s and 70s were the peak of, like, human life civilization.
And then now we're on the downward swing of like, well now digital life is taking over, machines are taking over, and one day the machine is just gonna make the choice to unplug the whole shit.
Can you imagine the horror and feel that you would experience if robots were standing over you while you were on your deathbed and you knew you were the last human beings ever and you guys created these artificially intelligent Super beings that are making better versions of themselves constantly.
Yeah, I just think artificial intelligence is the most, like, tragicomic thing I've ever seen because it's this gift that if we used it, it's literally like human life.
If you used it the right way, you could solve a lot of issues.
Like, you know, AI could make things so much faster and more efficient and, like, Yeah.
to robots and machinery.
And then, like we talked about way back in the day, like universal basic income shit, right?
But then what we've humans, you've given it to us, and it's like a Monty Python movie where humans are just using it to distract each other and manipulate truth and reality.
Stare at ourselves and stare at other people doing stupid stuff, stare at people that you lust after, stare at cars that you lust after, stare at houses that you lust after, stare at watches that you lust after, and diamonds and fucking views and selfies in front of the ocean, like all that shit.
It's gathering data on us.
And if I was an alien life form and I wanted to really find out what people are made of, I was just gathering all this fucking cell phone data.
Like, if you can just get your head 10,000 feet up, it goes back to our conversation.
It's like, wait, maybe what we need is more fear and insecurity because it made people purposeful.
You know what I mean?
Because, you know, if you don't have fear and insecurity, or a need to survive, or say, a genuine curiosity, which is a hard place to get to, then what do you have?
Peter Attia was on yesterday, and he was quoting Sebastian Junger.
I guess one of his books, he talks about this thing that men are having now.
The real problem with many men is that they don't experience real fear or danger in their life, and that is a very unusual thing, and it's never existed before.
We lose a sense of purpose.
We fall apart.
We develop anxiety.
Many, many people do.
I think because humans need a certain amount of adversity to keep your body balanced and your mind balanced.
It's one of the reasons why I love martial arts, because in the absence of something horrible, like war, martial arts at least gives you adversity on a daily basis.
It gives you something to test your character on a daily basis.
Which I think, for men, it's almost like a built-in thing that we need.
Yeah, and sports was always my favorite place to make friends Because it's such a mirror for how that per like we were talking about it before the show It's just like the way you train at the gym the way you play sports is such a true reflection of you and That, like, it's the best look at how you would make a, like, friendship.
Yeah, and he genuinely wants to learn and he comes and he trains with like the good trainers and I'm like, yo, you're only gonna understand so much without trying this.
You should just spar your trainer who you're not even gonna be able to hit and he'll just tap you up a little bit.
Because I think if you want to understand it as a martial art, quote-unquote, You gotta see a few at least medium live bullets.
I remember when I first came to LA, I started training with this one dude.
God, I wish I could remember his name.
It was either Bill or Will.
It was like 1994. And we trained together until the gym went down, and he was one of those guys that would say, hey, if you don't hit me hard, I won't hit you hard.
So let's just like spar, like spar technical.
And he'll go, I'll never hit you hard, don't hit me hard.
And we had this total, complete, perfect agreement.
Where like if he would hit you, it would be like this.
It would be like nothing.
But you got loose doing that.
So because there was less consequences, I wasn't worried about getting brain damage and sparring.
If he hit me, he'd hit me like this.
It was nothing.
And so I had great sessions with this dude.
And I remember thinking afterwards, like I learned more about timing In my sessions with that guy than I probably did sparring anybody that I've ever sparred with ever because we made it so you're learning.
You're learning the motions and then you occasionally spar hard.
Occasionally.
But sparring hard every day, the problem is it Fucks your head up, man.
The thing about jiu-jitsu is you're not taking punches.
You know, you already know how to box, but learning jiu-jitsu would probably be fun for you, too.
What the difference is is that, you know, like, if you roll with a guy, like, say if you wanted to learn jiu-jitsu and you rolled with a guy like John Jock Machado, It's like a perfect guy for you to roll with.
Because, like, you're never gonna get hurt with that guy.
He's gonna be in complete control of you and put you in situations and tell you what to do and tell you how to escape.
But he's in 100% control of the situation.
Way more that than a guy who's like you, who's starting out, who spazzes out.
And it's like, you know, a lot of dudes that had to get, like, well, he wasn't sober, but getting sober, they replaced the drugs with the jujitsu a lot of times.
Because, like you said, there's very few things that get you into that survival zone that, like, sometimes drugs do.
Yeah, there was some brutal knockouts in the mismatches of those days because there were certain people that were just so good and other people that just didn't know what to do with what they were doing.
No, but I went down there once because Bas Rutten was doing something.
It was pretty cool.
They developed, I don't know if it's still around anymore, but they developed a real high-level, in the early days of MMA, a high-level camp down there.
Pedro Hizzo was working out there, and Bas Rutten, and a bunch of other really top-level guys, and it was in Beverly Hills.
Well, the thing about the UFC that's really weird is that it's the only sport in our lifetime that's gotten way better.
Like, the athletes of today, the fighters of today, in comparison to some of the people that fought in the very early days of the UFC, there's no comparison.
Whereas, like, if you compared football, you're a football fan, right?
I've never seen a sport like it, where the people that are the best right now, they're so much better than, like, 1993. Like, if you watch these early days, the guys are wearing geese, and they don't know what they're doing.
There's so many different things that you learn through the progression of these guys and trying to figure out what's, and girls, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work.
Yeah, it's beautiful to watch, like, truth or, like, just the consensus went out in a microcosm like the UFC. And I just wish that, like, our greater life could be like that.
Because you see certain things went out, but then we can never agree.
The books like Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson, they kind of present the case that sports is the last or only meritocracy where there are rules and boundaries and truths shake out.
You shake the dice enough, the truth, it'll be there every time.
But I think that we should probably revisit that when it comes to older athletes for sure.
Because do you want to see people compete if they want to?
Especially in some sports where they're not getting hit.
I don't know what kind of testing they do for the NBA, but I would imagine that in order to compete at the highest level, what does it say in your report?
Major League Baseball stops testing for steroids after drug agreement with players expires.
I would think that if you wanted your body to work at its best, you would want to have, at your access, you would want to have access to all the best methods for recovery, for optimization, for healing, for dealing with injuries.
Like I can't imagine giving it to a kid because they prescribe it to like children with ADD. But I definitely remember I like took that.
Well, so when I was a kid, I got taken out of school.
I was having like issues.
I was saying funny stuff in class.
They took me to a therapist and they gave me a gifted test because she said, I think you might be like high IQ, whatever.
You're just doing weird stuff in school.
I failed the test the time test and she's like that doesn't make sense you have like better cognitive ability than that let me let me give you an untimed test and I did the untimed test and I scored off the charts and she's like you have issues with attention and time and I think she recommended that I was on medicine but my mom was a very like anti-medicine person but when I went to go take the LSAT just pause for a second yeah imagine A world where someone
I'm not saying that, but I'm saying, like, if you were going to make a movie on coke and you thought it was good and everybody else was like, what the fuck?
Do you have any concern that with what's going on with AI that it's gonna completely take the legs out from a lot of artists?
Like if you think about what they're doing with AI with the ability to write things it can write stories you could you could ask it to write a story for you it can do code you can get you can make it have fake images of things that have never really happened and they're kind of realistic Did you see the Megalodon one that I posted?
The AI... I'm not threatened by it, but I feel like certain people, if you're like an assignment writer or an assignment director or a special effects guy, maybe...
I feel like the really good special effects people are not worried, but like, you know...
The thing that AI can't replicate is not your actual physical voice sonically, but the way your brain is going to move and the choices you're going to make.
Your actual literary voice, I don't think the machine can replicate that.
It's like what if this thing that we think is unique is really just like patterns and we could Accurately predict those patterns if we have a certain amount of your life history, we can keep it within a certain range You know like what if you what if you came home one day and your wife replaced you with a robot that looks exactly like you but it's programmed perfectly Do you know how weird that would be?
It wouldn't happen to you, but imagine being like some douchebag banker guy.
And you come home, and your wife goes, come on in, there's someone I want you to meet.
And she shuts the door, and then you come from around the corner, staring at you.
And she's like, I am tired of your bullshit, and I can just keep you around without having you around.
I think the most distinctive, specific thing that makes us who we are is your actual human spirit.
Now, for the AI to replicate that, that would mean that your human spirit has a signature and a code that can actually be codified.
That's what we're asking.
Can the human spirit be codified?
Or is it actually random and organic and unpredictable in this way that we've been thought to believe existentially?
So if the AI can replicate the human spirit and if the human spirit can be codified, there is a silver lining in it for me personally where I'm like, oh.
Then I'm not distinct.
And there is not, like, a destiny.
And I can just enjoy my life until I die because there's nothing unique about me.
And also the ability to travel to anywhere, the ability to rewrite your genetics, to reverse aging, stop it dead in its tracks, cure diseases, regrow limbs.
I mean, they're on the verge of some pretty wild physical discoveries too.
I meant it this way in that existentially, like, if we're meaningless, like, I think the way that people have organized society and tribalism, culture, everything, is to say there is a meaning to life.
Like, It's in your best interest to assume that there is a meaning to your life.
Whether you freak out or not, this stuff is moving in a very specific direction.
It's not moving in a place where it's going to slow down and go back to the Stone Age.
The only thing that's going to happen, if that happens, we're either going to blow ourselves up or we're going to get hit by something or there's going to be a supervolcano.
It's one of those things or something else, some other natural disaster, something big.
That's the only way we get out of this without becoming bionic.
The only way we get out of this without becoming cyborgs or without it taking over the world, it's like that's where it's going.
If I had to bet on it, like, what happens at the end?
I think we're gonna realize at, like, the final hour that there is meaning to life, that, like, You know, there was something to accomplish and there was something to do, but we were too late.
Because I do feel in my, at least my body and my emotions, that life is consistently bittersweet.
Like I always, that's usually the feeling I take away from experiences.
I'm like, it's bittersweet.
There's pleasure and pain.
There's agony and ecstasy.
And I think as a civilization, at the very end, we'll probably realize there was a lot of meaning that we didn't pay enough attention to.
I think that search for meaning also propels us in a very specific direction and all the things that we're interested in, whether it's acquiring new things, whether it's electronics, technology, the internet, exchange of information, it's all powered by technology, all of it.
And the technology is what we really make.
Everything else is sort of like this motivating factor, this engine that creates revenue that makes the technology get born.
That's what the fuck is really going on.
We're making ultimate tech...
And the ultimate ultimate technology is artificial life.
When I was in my 20s, I barely thought about it because all I was thinking about was trying to make it as a comedian, and I was poor, and I was just trying to fucking do gigs, and I was so self-centered in the worst way in that.
Like, I didn't know what was going on in the world.
I didn't know shit about politics.
Like, it would have to be, like, on the news, in my face, oh my god, we're at war.
That's what it would have to be in my 20s.
And it wasn't until...
I mean, I started reading some books that got me into the Kennedy assassination.
I started reading some books that got me thinking about the MK Ultra shit, the things that they did with people with the LSD tests.
I was like, what the fuck is our history?
And I started getting into it then.
When I was a young kid, I can't imagine these kids that are politically active, that are like 17, 18 years old.
I didn't know jack shit about what was going on in the world in terms of politics.
I think it always moves in a better direction, but it doesn't do it linearly.
It doesn't do it clean.
There's a lot of chaos going on.
It's like the climate.
Peaks and valleys, yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of peaks and valleys with human growth.
I think we're ultimately always moving towards a better place, but sometimes there's corrections that have to happen and we have to figure out what we're doing.
And I think that as a group, collectively, the biggest fear that I have is that we just get swallowed up by something that we create.
That's the thing.
I mean, I feel like maybe it's inevitable.
Maybe that's just what we're here for anyway.
But I feel like that's what, oddly enough, that's what Ted Kaczynski believed.
That's what the fucking Unabomber believed.
He believed that technology was going to kill the human race.
Because one of the things that has been reported in the past, and again, you don't know if it's true or not.
This brings us back to what we were originally talking about.
You don't know if you're getting bullshitted.
You don't know if it really happened.
If you weren't there and they don't have any physical evidence for you to watch or see or touch, even physical evidence you can watch, we know that could be horseshit.
But most likely it's not if it comes from official channels.
But, like, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Like, even if some of you think that it's nonsense, you think it's silly, that might be part of the plan.
Part of the plan might be make it seem silly.
That way you could just be around all the time.
And people talk about it, and even the Pentagon talks about it.
Nobody cares?
Like, well, okay, you hit the right frequency then.
They recognize that we have a real susceptibility to groupthink.
And if you can trick people into thinking that UFOs are silly, oh God, what do you think about other life forms from another planet?
So silly.
What a great way to trick people.
If you could do that and you did exist, you could make it so that talking about you carries a social consequence.
So if you're in polite society, right, now, nowadays in 2023, you can have a conversation about UFOs because the New York Times wrote an article about it.
But what I guess I'm saying is the concept that you're saying is they're among us and they've made themselves a laughingstock and a joke so as to avert...
I don't even know if necessarily they're among us.
I don't know if the things that people are seeing...
I don't know.
I think those are probably...
I'm just guessing.
I shouldn't even say probably.
But I think those could be drones.
I think they could be super sophisticated drones that we don't understand because they've done all of this science in a way where they never made it public.
That's not...
That's not...
Likely, but it is possible.
It's one of those things where you're like, man, you don't know.
Like, if they were very clever and they started doing this at a certain point in time in history, and they were almost like a movie, where they had this, like, secret laboratory where they hired the top physicists and they gave them some fake jobs.
Like, oh, I'm in charge of fertilizer reproduction at this, you know, this chemical plant bullshit.
This guy is, he's over there back-engineering UFOs.
You know, like, what if...
What if they really do have some crash shit that they found in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and they've been trying to figure out how to back-engineer that, and they're getting closer?
When the end of the movie, I believe it's her day, comes to her as her dad.
I think the alien tells her, I'm pretty sure it's her dad, and it tells her, like they're walking together, it's like, this whatever we are is too much for you to handle, so I've shown myself in this form.
If they were going to make contact with you, why would they freak you out and come looking like some fucking weird stick figure with a giant gray head?
It's a book by this guy, Brian Murorescu, and it's all about ancient Greece.
And it's all about these enlightenment ceremonies that they were doing.
And they realized over time, these researchers did, that What they were doing was they were drinking wine that was laced with ergot, which has psychedelic properties.
So ergot, which is very much like LSD. So it's real similar.
So they were tripping balls.
So this is where they invented all these things.
This is where they had the Lucinian mysteries.
Like all these different people from all over the world would come to have these experiences with these people and drink this wine.
They did all that while they were most likely high on some sort of a psychedelic.
And Brian Murrow-Rescue in this book makes the case so convincingly and academically that Harvard opened up like a field of study in looking into ancient Greece and psychedelic drugs.
So this whole Eleusinian mystery thing, this like Eleusinian school that they would, all that was like, these people were most likely at least some time while they were there tripping balls.
And when you compare the philosophy, when you do a comparative look at the philosophies, they do come to like some similar conclusions from a macro perspective.
Yeah, I think most human beings, when intelligent human beings get together to debate ideas over a long period of time...
As long as they're entering into this thing, not with the desire to formulate propaganda, but to actually get to the truth, they come to similar conclusions.
They're two of the best pool players in the world to come out of Taiwan.
Yeah.
It's Ko Ping Chung and...
What's his brother's name?
Ko Ping...
Ko Ping Chung and Ko Ping Yi.
Yeah.
Ko Ping Yi and Ko Ping Chung.
So Ko Ping Yi and Ko Ping Chung.
Two of the best pool players on earth and they come out of Taiwan and they were like kind of secluded from the pool scene for a couple years because of COVID because everything got very strict with COVID and travel but I'm pretty sure they have to write Chinese Taipei on their shirts, right?
So do you think it's used to to like, like the West uses it to try to make China look bad in some way or to try to show that there's some sort of a A conflict between Taiwan and China and that we side with Taiwan?
You have to do a lot of money laundering and yeah, like I could probably give you a guy.
Yeah, but it's very difficult.
It's very difficult.
America just has this identity crisis because we've told all the immigrants we're this benevolent, colossus, this place, you know, come, we're the world's fucking super police, we're the cops, we take care of everyone.
When it's like, yo, we're a business, just like, just do what's good for it.
You know, like, And if you start to look at it that way, decisions become much easier.
But right now, it's a country that serves too many masters internally within itself because you're serving business, but you won't admit it.
You're serving business, you won't admit it, and also...
What is a border?
What are we doing?
Are you allowed to come in if you sneak in, or do we have to turn you back?
Is it okay if it comes from the north, but not okay from the south?
What about from the sides?
At what point in time do we decide that you can't take more people, or at what point in time do we decide to let all the walls drop and everybody go wherever the fuck they want, everywhere, let's even the whole world out?
That's the scary one.
That's the scary one.
Anybody can go anywhere, shut the fuck up, And then you're going to have madness until it settles down.
So like many generations.
We don't want to like rip the band-aid off.
We want to go like just like, eh, eh, eh.
We don't want to, whoa, let's open it all up.
Yeah, opening it all up would be a real issue for a little bit.
But I think in the long run, if everything was open, if everybody could go everywhere, probably be better for human beings.
Because, like, the best way to live would work out.
But the problem is, if we don't have, like, a real clear set of rules, if you just open up the borders, then people are just gonna, like, just take over everything.
People storm through cities and do whatever the fuck they want, and there's no cops anyway.
If you're going to believe in competition, if we're going to assume the idea that competition is the best thing for the global capitalism and we have to maintain it in its purest sense, then you need salary cap.
If you get to, but you ought to say, Tank and Ryan Garcia are world champions.
So the difference is if you get to world championship like Aljamain Sterling level, Aljamain's making, I don't know, I shouldn't speak for him, but I know that there are many UFC champions that make millions of dollars.
What's harder about MMA is that because of all the grappling and all the wrestling that you have to do, your body gets so beat up, it's really hard to show up on fight night and not be already damaged.
Whereas in boxing, if you have good sparring partners, like the boxing fights that get cancelled versus UFC, the fights that get cancelled, I would like to see what's to...
Actual statistics are but I would assume there's way more UFC fights get cancelled because of the variables the leg kicks, takedowns, all those opportunities to tweak your knee or fuck your neck up.
There's just so many people getting hurt in camp that never make it to the fight whereas in boxing it's pretty rare.
It's more like, oh, I broke my hand on a sparring partner's head, things like that.
UFC, too, though, it's the idea that you just keep making people fight the toughest fights, and then you're going to get the true champion, and you're going to get the better sport.
And I think when applied to society, it's like, yo, you got to maintain competition in a true sense.
But Benavidez, as far as like a young, up-and-coming, undefeated dude who's real unusual, like real long and strong, like powerful fucking puncher too, man.
Fun to watch.
And Caleb is slick, dude.
Caleb is slick.
But he eventually wore on him.
He wore on him.
He just kept coming after him, kept coming after him.
Plant has been known to kind of fade.
He's got such a sprint-heavy sort of style.
The style is very...
It really almost depends too much upon, like, fast twitch or something.
And Canelo also came into that fight really flat-footed and fighting Bivol, trying to throw bombs, because he got so comfortable just overpowering people.
Kovalev's one of the best villains of the last 15 years because he lost a lot of the big fights, but he made, like, the Andre Ward series was incredible.
He had to fight with, like, one-handed, like, literally one-handed, until he got shoulder surgery.
And then even, he tore his shoulder when he was very young, and they tried to fix it with bands and shit like that, where they should have just done surgery.
That Kovalev fight was just crazy because, you know, Kovalev had him early on, and then Andre just downloaded information, started fighting low to high, high to low, instead of going laterally, and Kovalev just could not keep up with him.
Yeah, and it was like I ended up doing everything I wanted to do.
Restaurant, memoir, the movie.
And then I came back and started a podcast with Wifey because I was like, I miss...
Intimate conversation.
I miss talking to individual fans like I'll respond to them in the comments and I got stuff going on because like as a writer and director you really only get to make something once every three to five years and That like fallow period is unbearable for me And so the podcast is like a good way to like every week like let me use the brain Let me let me like open up because I realized I was just like I'm rotting on my fucking couch Yeah.
A lot of people who are writers gravitated to podcasts, too, because it allows them to put out stuff that gets seen by far more people or heard by far more people with far less effort.
Like Sam Harris has said that.
Sam has written quite a few really great books, but he also does his podcast.
And the podcast, probably in one episode that he does in just a couple of hours, reaches more people than, you know, I mean, how much does the average book sell?
How many copies does a book have to sell to get on the New York Times bestseller list?
It's about, like, school teachers in Philadelphia.
It's like The Office, but it's a workplace comedy.
Like, Zach Fox is in it.
And it's in Philadelphia with teachers.
You would like it.
But it's at the level of a sitcom, like 30 Rock, where it's single camera, it's very elevated, but it's on network television, so technically a sitcom.
This is one of those, like, when you have a wife and daughter, occasionally, daughters, occasionally, this time it was only one of them that had the idea, you have to make sacrifices.
You can't watch what you want to watch.
Sometimes you have to watch what they want to watch.
It's fun to think of how you think about conversations.
And I don't think we have enough conversations.
And one of the things about podcasts is...
You get to kind of participate in the conversation just in your head while you're doing something else.
So if you have some fucking mundane, boring-ass job and you're listening to a podcast, your mind gets to be taken on a little trip, and next thing you know, fucking three hours is gone.
Your shift is almost over, you know, and you're chilling.
The beauty of podcasts is that we all want to have conversations.
And, you know, we're all like, hey, if I could talk to Eddie Wong, what would I say?
I'll fucking shoot the shit with that dude.
That'd be fun.
And so that's what we're doing.
Like we're doing it like normal.
This is how you and I would talk if we're having dinner.
If we walked out the door and there's a fucking office and they're like, hey, Eddie, this thing that you keep bringing up, every time you talk about it, this goes down and that goes up.
He did this thing live from the compound where he had, like, a green screen behind him, and he was, like, doing karaoke with a machine gun.
I was like, what the fuck?
Like, you could do, like, a radio show from your house.
And so me and Brian Redband just said, let's try it, just, like, with a webcam and just talking shit.
And then as time went on, like, my idea of what it was sort of kind of changed to the point where now it...
No, it almost feels like I think certain things that people do, it's almost like that thing wanted to get out there.
That thing wanted to be born.
That thing wanted to introduce people to all these interesting folks and introduce people to all these different ways of thinking and looking at things.
Because that's part of what's fun about it.
The more people you talk to, the more you get to see patterns that maybe you see in your own self.
You get to talk to people and find out why they think what they think.
Sort of flavors how you look at yourself.
Flavors the way you look at the world.
We're all better off for listening to good conversations.
I fucking love listening to a good conversation.
I was listening to Douglas Murray having this discussion.
They were discussing Immigration and what causes inequality and it's like having a conversation like interesting conversations that make you think are so fucking critical because sometimes you'll like get boxed in on a thought where you give a cursory look at something and you go well I have this knee-jerk reaction that's probably right and then you watch somebody else talk about it and you go oh look at it from their perspective and if you know it's an eloquent perspective that's convincing and interesting And
then someone else has a counter to that.
You're like, God damn, he's got some good points too.
Holy shit!
And it just sort of makes you reassess the way you look at things and why are we so dogmatic and why are we so attached to ideas?
What is it about ideas that are so attractive to us that we want to hang our hat on that idea to show that we're smarter because we believed in that idea?
Yeah, conversation at its core, it can be very humbling and enlightening at the same time.
It's dope.
And then sometimes I like to listen to your homie Tim Dillon just rant by himself, and then I feel like I'm talking to him, and I'm just like, yo, I listen to this guy talk straight for an hour.
I feel like there's going to come a time where we decide that the only way to stop this is armed guards.
Which is, no one wants to go to that place.
No one wants to have armed guards in front of every school.
We never had that before.
Why do we have that now?
And I get it.
I get that no one would want that.
I mean, it's horrific.
But I also get that, like...
I don't see any other way to protect this idea that you're going to take all the guns away.
They're not going to go for that.
It's not in the Constitution.
It's on the Bill of Rights.
You're not going to the Second Amendment.
People aren't going to just give their guns up.
As fucked up as that sounds.
Because it's not the law-abiding people with guns that are the problem.
It's people with mental health problems.
That's the problem.
And they get a hold of guns.
So how do you stop the people with mental health problems from getting a hold of guns and doing this?
That's the real question.
And I don't know the fucking answer.
And I don't think anybody does.
That's why no one's done anything.
And the best that anybody does is put armed guards in front of schools.
And, you know, and then people get upset on social media and they talk about taking guns away.
And then it becomes a big discussion of whether or not that's the answer to this and whether or not that promotes tyranny, whether or not disarming the people is, like, good for us overall.
Is there anything that's a net positive about the...
The country being armed?
Is there anything that's a net positive about the Second Amendment?
When those conversations happen, that's when things get very interesting.
And you find out why we agree on certain things, why we disagree on other things, and what we think is the cause of these horrific tragedies.
And one of the major causes is clearly that to order to do something like that, something has to be horribly wrong.
And we have to figure out, like...
Is there a way to spot that?
Is there a way to stop that?
Other than armed guards?
Is there a way to reach that person?
Should we be more sensitive about people?
Or is it impossible to detect?
Some people just hide it until they want to do it?
When I'm trying to figure something out that I cannot figure out, like this issue of school shooters, I try to get into an analogous or metaphorical place.
If we look at gun violence, like inflation, and then we're the Fed.
The fear that people have is the government has already shown that even with an armed populist, they will do what they can to be in control of people and to...
Make people follow rules that they create that may not be in your best interest.
And over time it will be revealed that it's not your best interest and you have no recourse.
And people are scared that if they didn't have guns, if they're treating us like that and people have guns, how would the government treat us if they were the ones that had all the power?
And I think that's a real good fear if you look at human history.
But I don't think there's a utopian answer to this.
It's all bad when this happens.
No one's making a clear case to how to avoid tyranny and stop this from happening.
So when a lot of people will be like, these conservative nutbags that want their guns, I'm like, if you're already looking at them like that, then you can't see the issue because nothing is this clear cut.
Yeah, it's fun, but if we care about these kids, it's important to be like, alright, let's give credence to what they're saying, which is, alright, I'm afraid of a government that runs unchecked.
It's a legitimate common sense thing.
I could see how a human being would want to worry about that.
Then what I would say to the person is, have you seen Waco on Showtime?
Do you think that you and your homies with some ammunition can actually defend and sustain a campaign against America within America?
Yeah, you're not going to defend, but you also have to recognize this.
That's how ridiculous.
We're looking at very abstract concepts of the country.
The country is comprised of people and those people are not rich.
The people that are in the military, that are doing the bidding of the military, they won't do it.
See, this is where it becomes a real problem.
If you tell the people that they have to go after their own neighbors For something that doesn't make any sense, that would be where the rubber meets the road.
So the thing is, like Jordan Peterson talks about this often, that the way things change is not all at once.
The way things change are in these little small steps where it's almost unrecognizable, and you give in to it, and then you're a little bit further down the road, and then you give in to another little insult, and you're a little bit further down the road.
And over time, you look and you've given up an insane amount of your rights.
And then you live in a dictatorship.
And this is what people worry about with any control that the government has more than it has now.
This is what people worried about whenever they talk about extreme taxes.
When the government in California raised the taxes up to 14%, people are like, What the fuck is your fucking shit position?
They're just stealing money from you.
And there's income inequality and we have to take care of it by taxing the fuck out of you.
Discussion that I was telling you about with Douglas Murray, one of the things they were talking about was the exploitation of people in Mexico with cheap labor that's forcing them to want to come to the United States.
It's a very good point.
It's an interesting point, right?
Like, what is wrong down south where they're risking their fucking lives and their baby's lives to come up here?
How did this happen?
And are we to blame?
Is automobile manufacturing moving there?
Is all these different factories and plants moving there?
And then people knowing that if you just get across that river, you make real money.
You make real money.
You get rich.
You just work hard, you can get ahead.
You're like, what?
But why can't you get ahead over there?
What is wrong?
What happened?
It's probably partially to do with moving manufacturing over there for extremely cheap labor.
And I think too it's just because the idea of identity is tied to country and family.
You talk to any person.
Where it gets dicey and where things stop making sense is when it gets down to family or it gets down to culture and religion because you've basically blacked out those areas of Your brain and consciousness where you're like, I'm not going to open that Pandora's box.
But if you open it, it's fucking scary the first 10 years.
But after a while, you're like, no, I'm glad I considered that.
I'm glad I thought about that because I'm not so tied to this country or identity or even this fucking family.
I was randomly watching CNN, and there was, like, a lady who's, like, an attractive lady, and she's, like, 60 years old on CNN. Some hot ladies out there that get old.
Rosemary something.
And I'm like, I mean, we can revisit this in 20 years, but I feel like...
I definitely can affirmatively say my relationship is not built around how attractive wifey is, even though she is.
Tim Kennedy told a story on this podcast about going to Starbucks, and he orders something for his wife, and the person, the barista, corrects him and says, your partner?