Aug. 29, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:22:28
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Your show is fantastic. | ||
| It's really good, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Painkiller on Netflix. | ||
| Can't recommend it enough. | ||
| I'm only two episodes deep. | ||
| I started the third today. | ||
| It's so fucking good, dude. | ||
| And it's so disturbing because it's true. | ||
| It's an accurate account of how this all happened. | ||
| It makes you so uncomfortable to think that there's people in the world that would do what the Sackler family did. | ||
| Do you know anyone who's gone down from opioids? | ||
| Quite a few. | ||
| Quite a few people. | ||
| When they first came to me and asked me if I was interested, my buddy Eric Newman, who put the whole thing together, said, do you want to do something about the Sacklers? | ||
| Do you know who the Sacklers are? | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I knew they were the family behind OxyContin. | ||
| And he said, are you interested? | ||
| And I started thinking and I started counting the people I know who've died or whose kids have died because of Oxycontin and opioids. | ||
| And I quickly got off of both fingers. | ||
| And then I started thinking about... | ||
| Some of my heroes, my artistic heroes, Chris Cornell, Tom Petty, and one of my big heroes was Prince. | ||
| I was a huge, huge Prince fan. | ||
| I went to school in Minneapolis when he was coming up. | ||
| I was an extra in Purple Rain back in the day, you know, First Avenue in Minneapolis. | ||
| And, you know, those three guys, when Prince died, you know, Prince was, he was, had such a, he was legendary for his work ethic and his lifestyle, no alcohol, no swearing, and just incredible work ethic. | ||
| And the fact that OxyContin got him. | ||
| And that really kind of fucked with me. | ||
| So when they came to me and, you know, started talking to me about doing something about The Sacklers, I was like, yeah, I'm all in. | ||
| And the more I dug into it, the more experts and writers who have been covering this epidemic for so long, the more I learned. | ||
| I'm not necessarily the biggest conspiracy guy of all time. | ||
| If the proof's there, I'm down. | ||
| But the more I learned about the Sacklers and how they maneuvered What is essentially just heroin and like a little M&M pill, you know? | ||
| How they were so artful and so good at manipulating the system. | ||
| I was shocked and I was all in on painkiller. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you were all in because people need to know this story and a lot of people aren't going to watch a documentary. | ||
| You know, they're not going to read about it. | ||
| This is a very entertaining show that shows accurately how this went down. | ||
| And, you know, there's a moment, and I don't want to give too much away, but there's this one moment where this ethical doctor confronts this sales girl. | ||
| And that's a very, very, very powerful moment. | ||
| Because the ethical doctor who knows everything about opiates is essentially explaining to this very young girl, just a beautiful sales girl, that you're selling heroin. | ||
| This is heroin. | ||
| It's indistinguishable to the body. | ||
| It's heroin. | ||
| It's just you're calling it a different thing. | ||
| And this idea that it's only 1% Of the people have problems with it. | ||
| Those numbers are all lies. | ||
| They're always lies. | ||
| They lie about how many people died. | ||
| They lie about how many people get addicted. | ||
| It's all a lie. | ||
| And if they can keep lying and not face any repercussions, they'll keep lying. | ||
| Because they almost have an obligation to their shareholders to do that. | ||
| Yeah, and in this case, they didn't even have shareholders. | ||
| It was a private company. | ||
| Richard Sackler and his uncles were making all the money. | ||
| They completely lied. | ||
| I mean, there were doctors, and they knew how powerful the opioid dosage was. | ||
| And what else is crazy is they knew that if they just kept, they would make so much more money by what they call titrating up, right? | ||
| So, you know, we put you on 10 milligrams of OxyContin because you blew out your back in the gym. | ||
| And it works for a bit. | ||
| And then when it doesn't, we're like, oh, well, we just got to kick you up. | ||
| So let's put you on 20. And then let's put you on 40. And they got up to 85 milligram Oxycontins. | ||
| They call them Oxycoffins. | ||
| That was the word on the street. | ||
| And these reps, these cute little reps, these pretty little college graduates who are just looking to make some money, were paid bonuses based on the amount of milligrams in the pill. | ||
| So I'm trying to convince you, if I'm a rep and you're a doctor, just to kick it up, doc. | ||
| Prescribe 20 or 40 or 85 milligrams and everybody will make some more money. | ||
| And that was the game that the Sacklers were playing. | ||
| And, like, you know, I've said, like, I'm down with capitalism. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| Like, make money. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| And if you just look at the Sacklers, you know, from a capitalistic perspective and you apply, you know... | ||
| Rules of capitalism and you're on their grade. | ||
| They get an A+. They were fucking good at making money. | ||
| You put like that much morality into the equation and these are some evil human beings. | ||
| It's unquestionably evil. | ||
| And what's even more evil is they got away with it. | ||
| They paid off. | ||
| They had to give away a certain amount of money. | ||
| I think it's six billion. | ||
| See if we can find the settlement. | ||
| Around six. | ||
| And now they can't be prosecuted. | ||
| So they essentially bought their way out of going to jail for directly being responsible for the deaths of How many people? | ||
| Hundreds of thousands? | ||
| So in the most bizarre coincidence I've ever experienced in my years of being in the business, the day Painkiller came out, the Supreme Court paused that decision. | ||
| Have you heard this? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a fascinating story. | ||
| You should read about this. | ||
| The day we came out was about 12 days ago now. | ||
| The Supreme Court said, hold up. | ||
| You cannot cut a deal. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So, credit court blocks Purdue Pharma's $6 billion Sackler opioid settlement. | ||
| The justices will examine if bankruptcy court can force claimants to sign away their legal rights in a settlement. | ||
| So, let me break it down quick, because this is actually fascinating for anyone who's paying attention. | ||
| The deal that they cut, Purdue cut, was $6 billion. | ||
| We're going to pay $6 billion to all the victims of OxyContin, but we're going to do that over the next two decades. | ||
| We're going to parcel it out. | ||
| And Sacklers have maybe 15 bill in the bank, give or take. | ||
| So they're just counting on interest rates to pay that $6 billion. | ||
| And the deal they had cut said, we'll pay you the $6 billion, but there's no more. | ||
| And you can never come after any more of our money, and you can never come after us for any criminal charges. | ||
| So they were basically buying their way to safety for a sixth bill. | ||
| And that deal was taken, the Supreme Court just said, hold up, not so fast. | ||
| We're not going to accept that deal. | ||
| You may have to pay more and we may go after you. | ||
| So now the potential for them to face true bankruptcy and maybe more is on the table. | ||
| How accurate do we know, like some of the, I know this is a docudrama, right? | ||
| Is that how you would describe it? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or based on a real life, real life events. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Some of the things that Sackler said in both the older Sackler and the younger Sackler, Richard and what was his dad's name? | ||
| Arthur. | ||
| Arthur. | ||
| His uncle. | ||
| Yeah, his uncle, sorry. | ||
| Both of those, the statements, they're so horrific. | ||
| Do we know they definitely said that? | ||
| Well, so, yes, there's so many horrific things they said. | ||
| One of the things we know that they did said, which was, like, one of the original strategies that Purdue Pharma had that they were advised to adopt by, you know, their lawyers and their advisors and their marketing guys, when they realized that people were dying, that kids were crushing up OxyContin and snorting it and getting addicted and overdosed, and when they realized it was being misused this way. | ||
| Their strategy was, quote, hammer the abusers. | ||
| Hammer the abusers. | ||
| So your Joe, your 19-year-old daughter has just dropped out of an OxyContin overdose. | ||
| The response of Purdue basically is, well, your daughter was a drug addict. | ||
| Your daughter was a drug addict. | ||
| I'm so sorry for your loss, but your daughter was a drug addict. | ||
| Don't blame us. | ||
| Hammer the abusers. | ||
| And that was literally said out loud or written down? | ||
| That was the strategy to blame abuse on addicts. | ||
| And to say, anyone who has a problem with OxyContin, it's not our fault. | ||
| They're just drug addicts. | ||
| It's not our fault. | ||
| Yeah, we gave them heroin, but they're- Hammer on the abusers. | ||
| Mass Attorney General alleges Purdue Pharma tried to shift blame for opioid addiction. | ||
| Yeah, so think about that. | ||
| Think about you being the parent. | ||
| And if you see the show, we open each episode with a parent. | ||
| We were told right when I got ready to lock the show, I had to get on a Zoom with all the legal from Netflix and others because the Sacklers are really good at lawyers. | ||
| Giuliani was one of their main lawyers. | ||
| I don't know if you know who she is. | ||
| She's a very powerful attorney and others. | ||
| So there's a lot of fear about being sued. | ||
| I have my talking points here about what I'm not supposed to say. | ||
| Again, everything I'm saying is, you know, more or less my theory and things that have been backed up by books like Painkiller by the very talented Barry Meyer, who wrote, investigative reporter for The Times, who wrote it. | ||
| But we were told by legal that we had to put disclaimers in front of each episode. | ||
| You know, what you're about to see is based on fact, but some of the facts have been changed. | ||
| And, you know, it's not all true. | ||
| We've changed some of the facts. | ||
| And that didn't really sit right with me because, yes, we have interpreted things and changed some things, but the reality is the Sacklers did what they did. | ||
| And I thought just putting a standard disclaimer would be kind of letting them off a bit. | ||
| And I was thinking about it. | ||
| I'm like, well, what if we had a 50-year-old woman sitting, we opened the show, a 50-year-old woman staring at the camera, and she reads the disclaimer exactly as legal says. | ||
| You know, what you see is based on fact, but some of it has been fictionalized. | ||
| And then she stops and she says, but what hasn't been fictionalized is that my 22-year-old son, Tommy, and she holds up a picture, died of an Oxycontin overdose. | ||
| And that was, you know, the kind of thing that was, I think, very important to me and to all the makers of the show that if we were going to veer from the truth and we were going to potentially occur the wrath of the Purdue legal, we did it in a way that never let them off the hook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's so weird how many people are on it. | ||
| I had a conversation with a friend of mine about his mom. | ||
| His mom's 90. And, you know, she's had health issues. | ||
| But could you imagine when we were kids if you told me that your friend's mom was on heroin? | ||
| And that we had to get her more heroin and the doctor's not there's something wrong with her prescription So what had happened was the pharmacists the doctor had screwed up and prescribed more pills Verbally then he wrote it down on paper like he told her you have to take two a day You know and this is supposed to be good for you know, whatever it is 30 60 days, but he wrote the wrong number and Instead of like 180, he wrote 90 or something. | ||
| I don't remember what the mistake was. | ||
| He overprescribed by accident? | ||
| He underprescribed by accident. | ||
| Oh, under. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so they were thinking someone was stealing her pills. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So there was this like, she doesn't have enough. | ||
| Like it gets to the end of the month and she's out of pills and they're calling the doctor and the doctor's like, what's going on? | ||
| They're like, I don't know what's happening. | ||
| Is someone stealing her pills? | ||
| So there's this fear in the house that someone's stealing the pills. | ||
| So they figured out that's not what the case was. | ||
| The case was there was just a mistake. | ||
| The doctor inadvertently prescribed more in terms of take three a day every day or two a day every day. | ||
| But he just didn't give her enough pills to do that. | ||
| But imagine your 90-year-old mom is jonesing, because that's what's going on. | ||
| I mean, imagine you're like, I got a grandma heroin. | ||
| Hey, bro, you want to come with me? | ||
| Do you have your gun? | ||
| We're gonna go get grandma heroin. | ||
| Like, are you fucking crazy? | ||
| Imagine that thought. | ||
| No one would think that that, when we were kids, no one would think that was normal. | ||
| I gotta get my grandma heroin. | ||
| She's uncomfortable. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, one of the things that, I think, like, episode three or four, the patriarch of the Sackler family, Arthur Sackler, who started, got the whole ball rolling. | ||
| And he, you know, back in the day, they actually did prescribe heroin. | ||
| We found all these great old ads for heroin and cough syrup. | ||
| Cocaine for, you know, a fever. | ||
| Well, codeine used to be in cough syrup, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Used to be able to get, when I was a kid. | ||
| You still can get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there were literally ads that said heroin for a cough. | ||
| And like the whole history of how medicine started being marketed. | ||
| Heroin, look at that. | ||
| Bare pharmaceutical products. | ||
| The people who brought you aspirin. | ||
| And if you look up some of the old... | ||
| See if you can find the... | ||
| Look how they describe it. | ||
| The cheapest specific for the relief of coughs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this was real. | ||
| This was real shit. | ||
| And this is what doctors like Arthur Sackler, who was Richard Sackler's uncle and is arguably the godfather of Oxycontin and opioids, they were sending this stuff out. | ||
| Your child's having trouble sleeping? | ||
| Put a little liquid morphine on a blanket and let him suck on it. | ||
| This was happening. | ||
| Our grandparents were around for this. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Cocaine tooth drops? | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| But that's real. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Instantaneous cure. | ||
| You don't give a fuck about your teeth. | ||
| No, you feel good. | ||
| You're trying to start a business. | ||
| Or you're 12 and you're just being annoying because your tooth hurts so your parents just give you a bunch of blow. | ||
| Yeah, so crazy. | ||
| Stay fit and slim by taking amphetamine. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| It's so crazy how naive people were back then. | ||
| Still today, right? | ||
| Yes, still today. | ||
| So the catchphrase for OxyContin that Richard Sackler came up with was, OxyContin, the one to start with, the one to stay with. | ||
| And those were the ads. | ||
| And that's what the cute little 23-year-old graduates from Ohio State or Duke or wherever they were from, these cute girls would come into your office. | ||
| You're a doctor in some Midwestern town. | ||
| And in comes this beautiful girl with a... | ||
| Brochure that says OxyContin, the one to start with, the one to stay with, and you've never heard of it, so you just start, you know, and here's the thing about OxyContin. | ||
| Have you ever taken an OxyContin? | ||
| No. | ||
| I took it once, recreationally. | ||
| Did you do it before you started doing this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I did about, I don't know, eight years ago. | ||
| A friend of mine had one, and she's like, you gotta try this. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| Try anything once, right? | ||
| Try it. | ||
| Took it. | ||
| It was fantastic. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It was like being dropped in a vat of warm honey. | ||
| That's how I best describe it. | ||
| And I'm like, holy shit, get this away from me. | ||
| It works. | ||
| Heroin works. | ||
| We've talked to people who've done heroin and they describe the feeling, the actual moment of the high. | ||
| Yes, it's a powerful experience. | ||
| If you've got horrific pain and you take an Oxycontin or a Fentanyl, it's probably going to make that pain go away and you're going to feel really good for a little while, right? | ||
| For a little while and then you're not going to feel so good. | ||
| And then you're going to want it again. | ||
| And you're going to want it again and again. | ||
| And then your body becomes addicted to it. | ||
| And then it's not fun. | ||
| And I took it and recognized, okay, yeah, there's a lot of power in this little pill. | ||
| No thank you. | ||
| And I'm fortunate. | ||
| I don't have an addictive gene. | ||
| But I could easily see how... | ||
| And look, the Sacklers knew this. | ||
| They all knew how powerful that product was. | ||
| And they knew that if I put it in you... | ||
| You're gonna feel, as they say, as Richard Sackler says, life is about running away from pain towards pleasure. | ||
| If you feel pain, that's, right, the human condition is we wanna stay away from pain. | ||
| Anything to feel no pain and to feel good. | ||
| And so he knew he had this miracle because any pain, whether it's physical, emotional, you know, psychic pain that you're feeling, this little pill's gonna turn that off. | ||
| And you're going to feel like you've been dropped into a vat of warm honey for a little while. | ||
| And then that honey starts to turn into battery acid and it starts to burn. | ||
| I think it's funny that people make fun of people who believe in demons. | ||
| Because what would a demon do? | ||
| If you were a demonic entity and you wanted to steal lives and souls... | ||
| Would you just go around just pulling people out of their house with a pitchfork and being, like, obvious about it? | ||
| Or would you do it through a really evil sociopathic person who decides that they're just gonna manipulate this system and ruin countless lives? | ||
| I mean, how many people have been affected by this? | ||
| I don't know what the numbers are. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Millions. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| How many people have died from it? | ||
| From opioids, 600,000. | ||
| But that doesn't... | ||
| It's like war numbers. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It is a war. | ||
| You can look at opioids as an absolute war. | ||
| Much, much higher body count than Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Iraq added up. | ||
| Although I don't know what the full Ukraine body count numbers are. | ||
| When we were kids... | ||
| It was very rare that someone died of a heroin overdose, and it was always a lost soul. | ||
| It was always like some wild musician or some crazy poet. | ||
| Someone is like, God, he died of heroin? | ||
| Like, that's so crazy, right? | ||
| It's like heroin was reserved for the people that were just not coming back. | ||
| Every now and then someone would do cocaine or something like that and if you had a wild friend, he knew how to get mushrooms. | ||
| But heroin? | ||
| Nobody was like, yeah, let's go try heroin. | ||
| But now, when you look at those numbers from the introduction of OxyContin into now, how many people have died from that compound? | ||
| It's fucking... | ||
| Fucking insane. | ||
| Yeah, it is really dark. | ||
| And then, you know, something else we talk about in the show is, yes, the deaths are very high, but the amount of families that have been wrecked and destroyed and children who've lost parents and had to grow up with that kind of trauma. | ||
| You know, I have friends whose children have gotten hooked and tangled up in opioids. | ||
| And, you know, as a father, one of... | ||
| One of my biggest, biggest fears was, God forbid, my child should ever experience addiction because I've seen what that does to a parent. | ||
| To have to ride that chaotic roller coaster of childhood drug addiction and try everything you can to keep your kids safe and find that this pill has taken a hold of their soul, like you said, like a demon. | ||
| And, you know, sometimes... | ||
| Death is almost preferred. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what's so fucked up. | ||
| That's what's so fucked up. | ||
| Death brings peace. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's so terrible to even think. | ||
| It's true, though, that the chaos of dealing with someone, and it's not just OxyContin, any addiction, right? | ||
| I have many friends who've struggled with alcoholism and Other addictions, just trying to love somebody who's going through that kind of beast ride is just horrific. | ||
| And to think that people like the Sacklers were in the business of monetizing such hurt and pain, that's dark. | ||
| It's very, very dark. | ||
| And kind of ironically, because of the war on drugs, because so many drugs are illegal, now people are dying from fentanyl from things that are not supposed to have opioids in them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is even more insane because now people have this... | ||
| I don't want to say a taste for it, but it's so common. | ||
| Like opioids are so common in this country recreationally now because of OxyContin. | ||
| And then you've got like people try to buy like street Xanax and it has fentanyl in it. | ||
| Or street cocaine has fentanyl. | ||
| We lost a bunch of comics in LA recently. | ||
| Oh, I heard that. | ||
| In Venice, right? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know where it was. | ||
| Yeah, it was in Venice. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| They were like having a little house party and doing some coke recreationally and there was fentanyl in it and they all died. | ||
| One person survived, but the whole thing is fucking insane. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's so insane that it's so... | ||
| It's so common. | ||
| It's so common to hear about someone overdosing from fentanyl. | ||
| You read about it in the news. | ||
| It's in the news all the time. | ||
| Athletes, singers, you know, someone fucks up and takes the wrong dose and they're dead. | ||
| And I believe what happened with Tom Petty was he got off stage and I think he had some sort of an injury and he got a pill from one of the guys that was like a sound guy. | ||
| And it had fentanyl in it. | ||
| And it had fentanyl in it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, people are so desperate. | ||
| They'll take some stuff that's not even from the pharmacy. | ||
| They just need it. | ||
| And that a family was able to make so much money. | ||
| How much money did they make in total? | ||
| I mean, if you Google their value, it's between $10 and $20 billion reported. | ||
| Nobody knows exactly how much. | ||
| They're a really secretive family. | ||
| One of the most internet-scrubbed families, and Richard Sackler in particular, people I've ever encountered. | ||
| You just can get very little information on them. | ||
| And the other, I think, big part of the story that surprised me was the FDA, right? | ||
| And the FDA's role in opioid approvals. | ||
| And in the case of OxyContin, We think about the FDA as this big, giant, bureaucratic organization. | ||
| We were talking about stem cells a little bit earlier. | ||
| If you want to get an approval for a drug, you've got to send it to the FDA. It's going to be reviewed by this massive board of scientists and experts, and they're going to make a determination after careful analysis. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| In the case of OxyContin, The whole approval process came down to this one guy, this guy named Curtis Wright. | ||
| And Curtis Wright, when Purdue Pharma needed the FDA to approve, they'd spent 30 million bucks developing this drug. | ||
| The whole business of drug developing is fascinating. | ||
| But they were all in, and they needed this drug to keep the company alive. | ||
| They needed the FDA to approve it. | ||
| And this guy was like, I can't approve this. | ||
| This is heroin and a pill. | ||
| No. | ||
| And they kept trying to get him to approve it. | ||
| And they started trying to pump his ego up. | ||
| They started writing articles with him. | ||
| They started trying to schmooze him and charm him. | ||
| He wouldn't approve it. | ||
| Finally, and no one knows the facts, they took him to a hotel on the East Coast. | ||
| Purdue Pharma took Curtis Wright of the FDA, spent a couple of days in this hotel room. | ||
| They came out of the hotel room with an approval, with the language, OxyContin, quote, is believed to be non-addictive. | ||
| Is believed. | ||
| If you think about that language, it had never been used in an approval process before, ever. | ||
| Made no sense. | ||
| Is believed. | ||
| Not is not, but is believed to not be addictive. | ||
| A year later, he leaves the FDA. He's making probably 50 grand a year. | ||
| Where does he go work? | ||
| Purdue Pharma. | ||
| For 400 plus thousand dollars a year. | ||
| They bought the approval. | ||
|
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But the two days in the hotel, what the fuck did they do? | |
| Nobody knows. | ||
| And who agrees to stay in a hotel for two days with those people? | ||
| So I wrote a scene in Painkiller. | ||
| We were putting it together where we imagined what happened in that hotel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I had, like, everything from monkeys to, like... | ||
| Kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, massage parlors, to, like, everything. | ||
| And, like, I wanted to film the most debaucherous two-day, like, anything your mind could think of. | ||
| Like, the craziest of the crazy, right? | ||
| Water sports. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Like, jet water sports. | ||
| Whether they spray your house down with sandblasting. | ||
| Like just the crazy... | ||
| And we wrote it like this just Faustian orgy of absolute decadence. | ||
| And the lawyers called and they're like, are you fucking kidding? | ||
| We can't do this. | ||
| So we just shut the door. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I think it's episode three that that's it. | ||
| But he took a job. | ||
| I mean, like I was saying earlier, I'm not big on... | ||
| You know, conspiracies. | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| I heard you were talking about, you know, Kennedy being potentially killed by the CAA. I don't know. | ||
| I don't know who killed him, but I do think that it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald. | ||
| Well, it couldn't have been. | ||
| I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved, too. | ||
| That's part of the problem with people's argument about this. | ||
| They're like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| There's no evidence that he acted alone. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that he was involved. | ||
| When I was in fifth grade, we had a social studies teacher who was absolutely, like, before Oliver Stone in the film, this teacher was obsessed with the super bullet theory, right? | ||
| The magic bullet theory that, you know, went through Connelly's shoulder, through his knee... | ||
| Bounced out of his knee, then hit Kennedy. | ||
| No, hit Kennedy first. | ||
| Hit Kennedy first, and then it was Connelly, right? | ||
| Connelly's shoulder, hand, knee. | ||
| And wrist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we're just fifth grade kids trying to learn about George Washington or whatever. | ||
| And she's like, do you understand the ballistics don't line up? | ||
| And it's all she would talk about. | ||
| So we'd come home, and it's all we would talk about with our parents. | ||
| And our parents would call the school and be like, is this woman... | ||
| Like, this teacher? | ||
| Is she insane? | ||
| Like, why are my kids only learning about the magic bullet? | ||
| See, the thing is, the ballistics are not the big issue. | ||
| Because what people don't understand about ballistics is not a linear line between impact and exit. | ||
| It hits things. | ||
| You hit bones and they deviate. | ||
| People shoot people and the bullet comes out the front. | ||
| It's wild things happen, especially when you're at 22. The problem with that bullet is, first of all, they found it on the gurney. | ||
| Like, how fucking convenient. | ||
| Second of all, I believe there's more fragments, metal fragments, that were in Connelly's wrist than are missing from this bullet. | ||
| And the bullet looks pristine. | ||
| It looks like a bullet that you shot through water. | ||
| Anybody that shoots things with guns knows that when bullets hit bones, they distort. | ||
| That's part of, unless it's a steel-jacketed, you know, like armor-piercing round, that's what it looked like. | ||
| I mean, that's just bonkers. | ||
| That was what it looked like after it went through Kennedy and Connolly. | ||
| It's bonkers. | ||
| It's bonkers to believe that. | ||
| The idea that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't involved, though, I don't buy that either. | ||
| I think they set him up. | ||
| I think for sure he knew what was going on. | ||
| He seemed to have been some sort of an operative. | ||
| He went back and forth to Russia. | ||
| But that conspiracy, it's like, I don't know. | ||
| We're talking 1963. But there's conspiracies today that are real. | ||
| And this Sackler family is one of the best examples of one that was enormously successful and worked on multiple levels. | ||
| And this story about getting this regulator to approve it by putting him in a hotel for two weeks... | ||
| How the fuck is that not illegal? | ||
| Like, how is that not illegal? | ||
| I mean, they handle themselves. | ||
| He spent a year still working for the FDA before he came and worked for Purdue. | ||
| It's pretty intense. | ||
| I just saw a video that, I don't know whether it was TMZ or somebody found the guy, Curtis Wright, up in, I think he's in New Hampshire, just like two days ago, and they kind of went after him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| And I was like, they're like, what do you say? | ||
| What do you have to say about the show? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| And he got in his car and wouldn't talk. | ||
| And then they just interviewed the local police chief for this town in New Hampshire who said, well, we had no idea that this guy's living in our town. | ||
| I want to take him on a tour of our morgue and our cemeteries and show him... | ||
| I think you'll find Curtis Wright if you look him up. | ||
| That is the definition of living in hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| You know, I think that people have asked, you know, like, what is justice? | ||
| What does justice even look like in a situation like this, right? | ||
| Like, if you're... | ||
| That's the guy? | ||
| And the red. | ||
| Yeah, so that's Noah who plays him. | ||
| And that was just... | ||
| That's the actual guy. | ||
| That's the actual gentleman who approved it. | ||
| That's the guy who was... | ||
| So he just moved to a remote town? | ||
| Yeah, moved to a remote town, and after our show came out, I think it was... | ||
| Is that a gun on his hip? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's like a flashlight. | ||
| He's got like a rig. | ||
| He's got this phone in the front. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a whole vibe going on. | ||
| And a passport filled with trips to Thailand, probably. | ||
| But, you know, that's the face of a big part of the issue. | ||
| That, you know, this guy was a bureaucrat working for the FDA, living his life in the East Coast. | ||
| Someone came along and said, hey, you want to get out of here? | ||
| You're making 50 grand. | ||
| Just say that you believe this to be less addictive. | ||
| That'll get us the approval. | ||
| And you're good. | ||
| We're going to make you good. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| And that revolving door still exists today. | ||
| People go from the FDA right into pharmaceutical companies today. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And it's so weird that that's legal. | ||
| And another big part of the game are these medical journals, right? | ||
| Like there's something called the New England Journal of Medicine. | ||
| And like a big thing is for a doctor in some of these journals are owned by the pharmaceutical companies, right? | ||
| So think about it. | ||
| Purdue Pharma, you either buy or control medical journals that write favorable articles about your products, about your drugs. | ||
| So in the case of OxyContin, there was a small, like almost a letter to the editor written about OxyContin being less than 1% addictive. | ||
| In a medical journal, which sounds like official and like, okay, well, Damn, Joe was in the medical journal. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| But these are controlled by drug companies, and they're not legit. | ||
| It's fake news. | ||
| It's real fake news, and it's all part of the ecosystem of selling drugs. | ||
| And these are the big drug dealers. | ||
| Like we talk about Chapo or Pablo Escobar, you know, Eric Newman, my buddy who was the exact producer on this, he produced Narcos. | ||
| And I went deep on Pablo Escobar and he's like, when he first said you want to do this, he's like, these are the real drug dealers. | ||
| Like, these are the drug dealers putting up the real numbers. | ||
| And they're the drug dealers who put their name on museums, like the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris. | ||
| These are the big-time, hard-hitting drug dealers. | ||
| They're real gangsters. | ||
| Oh, they're fucking gangsters, man. | ||
| It's such a gangster move to put your name everywhere, too. | ||
| Especially on education institutions. | ||
| Dude, have you ever been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dender, the giant glass? | ||
| It's the biggest exhibit in the Met in New York City. | ||
| And that was the Sackler Wing. | ||
| And I would go in there when we were making the show, and it was this giant... | ||
| It's on the north side of the Met. | ||
| It's a massive art wing. | ||
| And you go in there, it says the Sackler Wing. | ||
| And you go in there and there's parents running around with their kids. | ||
| The last time I saw a guy get on his hands and knees and propose. | ||
| And it's just this happy, joyful room built on OxyContin. | ||
| And two, three months ago, they took the name down. | ||
| They finally took the name down. | ||
|
unidentified
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Finally? | |
| After all these years? | ||
| Yeah, so they've taken... | ||
| And this is the thing that, like... | ||
| What Arthur Sackler cared more about than anything, which is like the same as Alfred Nobel, right? | ||
| You know that Alfred Nobel made dynamite. | ||
| That's how he made his money. | ||
| It was a fascinating story that Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. | ||
| It's almost like an Oppenheimer situation. | ||
| Wow, I didn't know that. | ||
| And the story is that someone ran a false obituary. | ||
| They thought he died and they called him a merchant of death. | ||
| The great merchant of death is gone. | ||
| This guy, Nobel, who invented dynamite. | ||
| And at that moment, he realized, fuck, this is how I'm going to be known. | ||
| This is going to be my legacy, the merchant of death. | ||
| He took a huge chunk of his fortune and started the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| So when you hear the name Nobel, you don't think about dynamite, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| He invented dynamite. | ||
| Hand grenades, and howitzer rounds, and munitions. | ||
| That was all Nobel. | ||
| Now you're just like, oh my god, Barack Obama just won. | ||
| Dalai Lama just won. | ||
| Martin Luther King won. | ||
| This guy made it off of dynamite. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| And so the Sacklers were like the same thing. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| We know what we're selling here. | ||
| We know where our money's coming from. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Merchant of Death to Pioneer Nobel Prize. | ||
| The Nobel Peace Prize was a big bait and switch. | ||
| So nobody thought about the fact that this dude, you know... | ||
| Look at the body count of Vietnam. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| He said, many saw his invention, what Alfred thought would end all wars, just like Oppenheimer, as a highly lethal product. | ||
| When Alfred's brother Ludwig died in 1888, a French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred that referred to him as the merchant of death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Right? | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| I did not. | ||
| That's a mind blower. | ||
| But it makes sense because that's how evil fucks are. | ||
| They'll try to cover up what they're doing with humanitarian work. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| And that's what the Sacklers did. | ||
| Like, okay, we're selling heroin and pills. | ||
| We're up to 300,000 deaths and a lot of wrecked families. | ||
| Let's buy some art. | ||
| Let's donate to multiple medical schools. | ||
| Get our names on medical schools all around the country. | ||
| Let's throw our name up on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre in Paris. | ||
| They were putting their names on anything they could. | ||
| There was a bridge in London at one of the Sacklers, the Sackler Bridge. | ||
| Just anything to take your eye off the ball. | ||
| And so to me... | ||
| Whether they end up paying $6 billion or $16 billion, yeah, that's real. | ||
| That's deserved money. | ||
| But I think the bigger issue is the name. | ||
| The evisceration of the name is in deep process right now. | ||
| As it should be. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I just wonder how they're going to get away without paying criminal penalties. | ||
| I mean, not just criminal penalties, but going to jail. | ||
| It's hard to go to jail today if you've got a lot of money, Joe. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I can't imagine the Sacklers going to jail, but I think worse than jail is the fact that the name is now done. | ||
| And that hurts, because this was a family that was all about the legacy. | ||
| That's over. | ||
| This guy that approved it, what was his name again? | ||
| Curtis Wright. | ||
| Imagine being that guy. | ||
| Because you didn't even get rich. | ||
| You know, you got kind of rich. | ||
| You made a lot of money, but you didn't get like billionaire, I can just go hide on an island rich. | ||
| You're in a small town in New Hampshire, and then they find you when this series comes out. | ||
| Yeah, I don't... | ||
| I never know, like, someone's morality. | ||
| Like, I always have trouble, like, understanding how different people process morality and, like, what it would mean for... | ||
| Because you've got to assume a guy like that, after, you know, 25 years, has figured out a way of justifying to himself what he's done, right? | ||
| Like, we all do that, like... | ||
| We justify our behaviors. | ||
| We don't engage in behavior like that, but whatever we do, we justify it. | ||
| And I wonder how much it hurts. | ||
| We tried to contact Richard Sackler several times during the early—he used to live here in Austin, and we couldn't find him. | ||
| He has a house here in Austin still. | ||
| But how it feels. | ||
| You know, there's never been a moment where there's been any kind of accountability where, you know, Richard Sackler comes out and says, okay, okay, look, I am really fucking sorry. | ||
| Let's just start with that. | ||
| I am so sorry that this has happened. | ||
| I am so sorry for the pain. | ||
| And I can't undo it. | ||
| But I want to first acknowledge that I'm sorry. | ||
| I made some really bad decisions. | ||
| I thought I was helping people. | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
| There has never been... | ||
| And I think that's where the anger comes from, so much of it. | ||
| Do you think that that's because of legal advice? | ||
| I mean, even if he was... | ||
| I don't think you could admit that you're sorry in a situation as horrendous as this because I think it opens up the floodgates for further scrutiny. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I just... | ||
| Yes, you're probably right. | ||
| But I guess I feel like you've already... | ||
| You've lost... | ||
| You've lost. | ||
| You've lost so much. | ||
| And you've lost so much money. | ||
| Your reputation is destroyed. | ||
| And if you look at, there's like a 12-hour deposition of Sackler that we recreate some of in the show. | ||
| And the guy is just a fucking ice brick. | ||
| Like he offers nothing. | ||
| There's no humanity there. | ||
| And obviously his lawyers were advising him, yes. | ||
| And he can't say a lot. | ||
| But you want to... | ||
| You want to believe that everyone's human. | ||
| Yeah, like you want to see some version of like, okay, can I understand how it happened? | ||
| Do I think they set out? | ||
| To have all this death and destruction. | ||
| I'm going to say no. | ||
| I don't know, but I have to believe that they didn't intend for that. | ||
| Then the ball got rolling. | ||
| Then the money started coming in. | ||
| Then it all got completely out of control. | ||
| And by the time they realized how bad it was, they couldn't apologize, obviously. | ||
| And they were boxed in by legal advice. | ||
| But somewhere you're looking for some indication of like, look, ma'am, I am so sorry your son died. | ||
| Not, I'm sorry your son died, but your son was a drug addict. | ||
| An instant deflection, right? | ||
| That's just, like, that's rough. | ||
| That's rough shit. | ||
| It is rough. | ||
| It's just, again, it's hard to understand the way certain people function, their morals. | ||
| Like, what are their ethics? | ||
| And are they sociopaths? | ||
| Because there's a lot of people that are genuine sociopaths. | ||
| They do not care if other people are hurt. | ||
| They do not care about people's feelings. | ||
| They only care about themselves. | ||
| There are people like that out there in the world and they're amongst us. | ||
| And I don't know what the number is. | ||
| I think it's like 1% or something like that. | ||
| Is it something like that? | ||
| Or is that schizophrenics? | ||
| I think sociopath is probably even higher than that. | ||
| And some of it has got to be because how you were treated when you were young. | ||
| Some of it has got to be nurture. | ||
| But I wonder how much of his nature. | ||
| I wonder how much of your wires are crossed wrong. | ||
| And you just don't give a fuck about other people. | ||
| It's totally possible. | ||
| I mean, you look at, like, Jeffrey Dahmer. | ||
| His parents seemed to be normal. | ||
| They didn't seem to abuse him. | ||
| He didn't have, like, some horrific childhood where he was, you know, tortured. | ||
| It's like, what makes a person like that? | ||
| I don't fucking know, man. | ||
| But when you see it, it's so confusing. | ||
| Like, that Sackler guy in your show, it's like... | ||
| When you're watching him say what he says, like, how does a person like this exist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, like, obviously Dahmer is a fairly extreme example of... | ||
| But is it? | ||
| Because he only killed, like, six or seven people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I just mean, but he really put his hands on those people, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, he definitely did. | |
| The idea of a serial killer is such an extreme, real but extreme version of that. | ||
| But how many times do you kind of come across someone who's maybe not killing people or engaged in a lethal career, but you're like, whoa, that dude doesn't seem reachable. | ||
| I don't know what's going on there. | ||
| I'm trying to have some sort of human connection, but this dude is just like... | ||
| I've met many people generally who organize their lives strictly around making money. | ||
| Money is the prize. | ||
| Money is the art. | ||
| And I'm like, hello? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a very weird, non-human pursuit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like I'm about making money and my morality and sense of humanity is just not very readily apparent. | ||
| And I think that that's like... | ||
| On a spectrum, not necessarily that far removed from something that could turn into Jeffrey Dahmer. | ||
| Yeah, it's not that far. | ||
| I mean, do you ever, like, study Putin and try and figure out what's going on in that guy's head? | ||
| I could only imagine. | ||
| Like, I think it was Bush who said, you know, he had just come back from meeting Putin years ago, and he said, you know, I looked into his eyes and I didn't see his soul. | ||
| And I remember, like, I was younger when he said that, but it chilled me. | ||
| Like, and Bush looked, this was Bush too, and he's like, I looked into his eyes and I didn't see his soul. | ||
| Pull that quote up, because that's crazy. | ||
| I hope I said it right. | ||
| Oh, the opposite. | ||
| I looked the man in the eye. | ||
| I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy, Bush said. | ||
| I was able to get a sense of his soul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, it was either he got it or he didn't get it, right? | |
| I'm so glad we searched that. | ||
| Yeah, I am too. | ||
| Because I was confused. | ||
| I could have swore it was the opposite. | ||
| Well, okay, I was wrong about that one. | ||
| But he said he regretted it because he was wrong. | ||
| He thought he saw his soul, but he didn't. | ||
| He said that later? | ||
| Well, that's what he said, right? | ||
| He said he regretted it. | ||
| Pull it back up. | ||
| I think he said, I thought I saw Saul. | ||
| Bush later regretted saying this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Bush later regretted saying this. | ||
| So he thought he saw Saul, Joe, but he didn't. | ||
| That's what he came to believe. | ||
| What does he say later? | ||
| He just said he's regretted it, according to... | ||
| But then I was not able to get a sense of his soul. | ||
| I did not see the relentless ambition when I looked Putin in the eye 27 years ago. | ||
| But then I was not able to get a sense of his soul. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that's the line that stuck with me. | ||
| I was not able to get a sense of his soul. | ||
| Well, he doesn't speak Russian either. | ||
| That's got to be fucking hard as fuck. | ||
| Just talking to someone in two different languages is extremely difficult. | ||
| Have you been to Moscow? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| The architecture is insane. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| I've been there twice. | ||
| Rush is incredible. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| And, like, one of the many things that, like, sucks about this, I think, is, like, Moscow is just out now for such a long time. | ||
| For a long time. | ||
| Yeah, and I've gone there twice for film promotions. | ||
| And the people were so nice. | ||
| The... | ||
| Food was fantastic. | ||
| The architecture, I mean, walking through Red Square, I loved it. | ||
| I loved the culture. | ||
| And it's too bad. | ||
| Yeah, it is too bad. | ||
| I would hope one day to be able to go back there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing how many great chess players, how many great martial artists, how many great authors... | ||
| Russia's produced some incredible things, incredible works. | ||
| And the architecture in Russia is so different than anywhere else. | ||
| The Moscow architecture is so beautiful and so unique, uniquely Russian. | ||
| You know, it's really fantastic stuff. | ||
| I mean, but it's like the political aspect of it. | ||
| It's so terrifying, man, that we're like this close to a nuclear war. | ||
| God damn it scares the fuck out of me. | ||
| And I always wonder if the same sort of decision-making apparatus that exists in pushing through OxyContin also exists in pushing through wars. | ||
| Also exists in pushing through just things that like morally we would all say these are terrible, terrible things. | ||
| We should all agree on this. | ||
| And to be able to convince large groups of people to engage in them because you're the leader. | ||
| I mean, something that I've been looking at for a while now is trying to get into the weapons contracting business, meaning like the big ones, the McDonnell Douglas, the Raytheons, the Boeing, the companies that Are making so much money. | ||
| I was in Pearl Harbor working on a film and they had the nuclear submarines coming in and out of the harbor. | ||
| Have you ever seen one, these Trident submarines? | ||
| No. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| Like, you know, it never ceases to amaze me that, like, many of our greatest creative accomplishments are these weapon systems, right? | ||
| Like, have you been on an aircraft carrier before? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or, you know, witnessed the awe and spectacle of those planes, right? | ||
| They're incredible. | ||
| And we were filming on a carrier in Pearl Harbor, and the subs kept coming in and out, and they're these massive, sleek, they look like, you know, sharks, and they're cruising slow, and they dock in. | ||
| Can I see one, Jamie? | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we had handlers from Pearl Harbor there, and I'm like, you know, could I tour one? | ||
| And they went to the Admiral of the base, and the word came back, yes, you can tour one. | ||
| So they took me to a nuclear submarine that was tied up at Pearl Harbor, and they took me on it. | ||
| And I go in, I've got these, you know, public affairs people, and the captain of the sub, and they're showing me around the sub, and they're just awesome, and they're massive, and they're full of people, and And it's just all, like, the most, like, technical, high-tech shit you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| And they're like, this is the navigation room. | ||
| This is where we control the sub. | ||
| And they're showing me the equipment. | ||
| I'm like, how much does this equipment cost? | ||
| And they're like, well, we can't really tell you, but it's, you know. | ||
| 50, 100... | ||
| Between 50 and 100 million dollars for this area of the sub. | ||
| And then they take me past the nuclear reactors where there's armed guys guarding the nuclear reactors because they're propelled by nukes. | ||
| And I'm like, well, how much does it... | ||
| We can't tell you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then they get you into the torpedo rooms where there's these massive torpedoes. | ||
| Dozens of them. | ||
| And you're like... | ||
| How much do these things cost? | ||
| We can't tell you. | ||
| We can't tell you. | ||
| Then they take you to the fucking missile room where there's 10 missiles. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Missiles that have nuclear warheads that can go on them, right? | ||
| Sir, how much do these cost? | ||
| Well, we can't tell you that. | ||
| Then you start looking up the prices, right? | ||
| And you figure for a nuclear missile with the warhead and the guidance system and all the propulsion, you've got to be looking at least $30 million. | ||
| That's my guess. | ||
| What do you think a nuclear missile armed and loaded costs? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I'm going to say 30 million, minimum. | ||
| You're just guessing? | ||
| I'm guessing. | ||
| But I think I'm under-guessing. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| And I've done some calculating. | ||
| Oh, there was a question about this recently because the missiles that they shot at the Chinese air balloon, that balloon, the spy balloon, they missed one of them. | ||
| And then there was a talk of how much that missed cost. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A miss cost a lot of money. | ||
| But I'm on this sub and I'm looking at what appears to be... | ||
| That one was 400K. That one was 400K? The ones that are out of the plane, maybe it's different. | ||
| But that wasn't a nuke. | ||
| I'm talking about a nuclear missile fired from a submarine, right? | ||
| So now I'm on this thing. | ||
| I'm counting these missiles, 10 missiles, right, that I can see. | ||
| So I'm trying to do the math. | ||
| I'd say it's $500 million worth of missiles on one sub, right? | ||
| I'm looking, I can see eight subs docked in Pearl Harbor, right? | ||
| So now I'm like, there's 10 times 8, right? | ||
| There's 80 missiles in my visual at 500 a missile. | ||
| And these are just the subs I can see, right? | ||
| So I'm thinking, well, wait a minute. | ||
| If one of these subs fires one missile, right, we're fucked. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| The world is probably over, right? | ||
| One missile goes. | ||
| We've got at least 80 of them that I can see. | ||
| How many people are making money off of this game, right? | ||
| Where's the money going? | ||
| That we have to keep putting, loading these submarines with nuclear missiles, one of which is going to get it done. | ||
| That's not then including all the missiles that are in the silos, right? | ||
| All the missiles that are flying 24-7 in planes and bombs. | ||
| Like, we are loaded up. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We got enough. | ||
| Yet we keep making more. | ||
| And this is, you know, like Purdue Pharma, these companies, and now it's all turning into, like, AI-controlled drones, right, that are going to be, like, the new forefront of the weapon systems, where all the money is going to go. | ||
| But I was thinking, like, what would happen if you took two of these subs and took them offline and built, I don't know, schools? | ||
| What would happen? | ||
| Would our national security be threatened? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Would our country be better off? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| All the money, all the money is going into the military. | ||
| I support the military. | ||
| I've done multiple films about Our troops, and I understand, I've been to Iraq with the SEAL platoon. | ||
| I've had a front row seat to the reality of what these men and women are going through. | ||
| This kind of spending, it seems to me to be a bit reckless. | ||
| Well, at the very least, they're incentivized. | ||
| They're incentivized to be in conflict. | ||
| If there's that much money to be made, the same way Purdue Pharma was incentivized to pretend that it wasn't addictive, even though they knew it was, it's the same kind of thing. | ||
| Like, there's decisions that get made specifically because of money. | ||
| That's really scary for us because we want to think that if we have a leader, we trust someone to be a leader. | ||
| We have this thought in our head that this is our chief, right? | ||
| This is the best warrior. | ||
| This is the wisest person that's lived the longest and the best to govern us. | ||
| We would never want to believe that someone that he appoints and that's in that chain involved in running all these people is making decisions that will absolutely cost lives and souls. | ||
| People will be destroyed. | ||
| But they're making these decisions because of money. | ||
| Because of money. | ||
| And it's like the same thing with with some of these drugs is the same thing with some of the big weapon systems. | ||
| You know, some of like if you're if you're the if you're the president, right, if you're the next president of the US and you decide that you want to reduce spending in the military. | ||
| So say there's a jet program. | ||
| F-35 or some massive jet program that's costing a shitload of money and you want to try and slow it down. | ||
| Well, what they do is they build different parts of the aircraft in different states. | ||
| So there might be 30 states that are all contributing to making one weapon system. | ||
| So if you try and dismantle it, you've got the government, the representatives from 30 different states saying, you can't do it. | ||
| We've got a factory that's making the guidance system. | ||
| We've got a factory that's arming the ordnance on the missiles. | ||
| We're doing the landing gear. | ||
| And the weapons are now part of the economy, and they can't be divorced from it, and the spending just goes on. | ||
| Isn't there an argument on the other side, though, that we can't allow another country to achieve military superiority over us? | ||
| And if we stop innovation and stop the flow of money into developing these new jets, That we would run the risk of that happening. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And that's what's going on with China right now, right? | ||
| That we're in an arms race with China. | ||
| A lot of AI technology involved. | ||
| We're now starting to discuss letting AI... Fly and arm and release weapons on targets that are AI-assessed and AI-authorized kills because China's doing the same thing, and we don't want to be out-teched by China, and so we're in a never-ending arms race to have the best technology. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| It's just a lot of money. | ||
| You know, and I can't help but think, like, who's making money? | ||
| Okay, it says CBO estimates that plans for US nuclear forces as described in the fiscal year 2023 budget and supporting documents would cost $756 billion over the 2023-2032 period. | ||
| Okay, nine years. | ||
| $122 billion more than CBO's 2021 estimate for the 2021-2030 period. | ||
| Sorry guys, we underestimated by 122 billion. | ||
| This is our B61 Nuke that put on a lot of planes and stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you have a price tag on that one? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| It's roughly 28 million. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wow, you're dead on. | ||
| So this is what I'm saying. | ||
| We have 3,000 of them. | ||
| Jamie, how many do we have? | ||
| Somewhere in the range of 3,000 to 4,000. | ||
| So what's the total number just on that missile? | ||
| Can you do that multiplication? | ||
| 30 times 3,000. | ||
| Could you imagine the horror of... | ||
| How many missiles do we have? | ||
| How many of those? | ||
| There's something in the range of... | ||
| I found something that's going to be at 3,700 nukes. | ||
| Let's round it off to 3,500. | ||
| Imagine 3,500 nuclear missiles launching through the air. | ||
| The horrors of that. | ||
| One of those is the 83 Hiroshima bombs. | ||
| Just two. | ||
| Just one of them. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Game over. | ||
| One. | ||
| 83 Hiroshima bombs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's like, this is the issue. | ||
| Holy. | ||
| Yeah, even that one blew up in the sky and these can go underground and make things worse. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| But those are just air delivered, yes? | ||
| Can you show me that sub, that nuclear sub? | ||
| I mean, there's a few. | ||
| I don't know exactly the one he saw. | ||
| I was trying to find a good picture from Pearl Harbor of a bunch of subs. | ||
| It is pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| They have a sub that runs on a nuclear reactor. | ||
| They're beautiful achievements of engineering and skill and talent. | ||
| And to be on that thing was awe-inspiring. | ||
| But my God, are they expensive. | ||
| Like, really expensive. | ||
| Yeah, it makes sense. | ||
| I mean, you can't get one that does something like that for cheap. | ||
| But it is kind of amazing that our biggest accomplishments in the world are weaponry. | ||
| In the world of weaponry. | ||
| Other than communication, like cell phones and the like, and wireless internet, this is crazy that they develop a nuclear-powered underwater weapon That is... | ||
| Designed to deliver... | ||
| Taken out a country. | ||
| Yeah, designed really only to deliver nuclear missiles. | ||
| I mean, how many does this motherfucker carry on it? | ||
| How many cities can this thing take out instantly? | ||
| And how many do we have? | ||
| Like I've seen, like I said, I saw six of them in Pearl Harbor. | ||
| Imagine being those kids. | ||
| These kids look like they're like 20 years old. | ||
| Look how young they look. | ||
| That kid looks like it could be my friend's son. | ||
| And the bottom right with the glasses? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| To be that young, you're holding a machine gun on a nuclear-powered tank. | ||
| Oh, you're that dude. | ||
| That goes in the water. | ||
|
unidentified
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And you're the captain. | |
| Look at this guy. | ||
| You're the Vice Admiral Bill Houston. | ||
| You run that shit. | ||
| You run that. | ||
| Like, we talk about power, like what we think of power and, you know... | ||
| That's a crazy job that guy has. | ||
| Dana White has a tough job? | ||
| That's a job! | ||
| That's a job! | ||
| This has to be so nerve-wracking for all these people on board, especially when it goes in the water, when you know you're underwater. | ||
| Like, Jesus Christ! | ||
| I know they work, but do you remember there was a Russian one that went down? | ||
| There was a nuclear sub that went down? | ||
| And that's where the term can neither confirm nor deny. | ||
| That's when it was, because they had to answer. | ||
| So they had to have an answer to like, is this going on? | ||
| Are you guys retrieving a nuclear sub from Russia? | ||
| So because they had an answer, I don't think they have to answer now, but they had to come up with a phrase. | ||
| Can either confirm or deny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| Which sub was that? | ||
| I think they allegedly recovered it, which is crazy. | ||
| So we have the ability to recover a nuclear sub at the bottom of the ocean? | ||
| What the hell, man? | ||
| I mean, the more time I've spent with the military... | ||
| When I was writing Lone Survivor, I got to go to Iraq with the SEAL team and see them operating and see the skill with which they operated. | ||
| There's no technology involved there. | ||
| SEALs don't really need this kind of stuff. | ||
| That's just more like, give me a Jeep, give me some night vision goggles, give me some good intel on where the guy is, and I'll deal with it. | ||
| That was beautiful. | ||
| That was like the most elite team training and discipline and structure I'd ever seen. | ||
| So on a human level, what I observed with the group like the SEALs was such an incredibly advanced form of team behavior. | ||
| Then when you get into this stuff, have you ever seen an Apache helicopter up close? | ||
| No. | ||
| So these pilots for Apache helicopters, we use some in loan. | ||
| They're wearing – these helicopters pull up and they're just incredible-looking pieces of equipment. | ||
| And these 22-year-old kids are flying them. | ||
| And they've got a helmet with a mask. | ||
| And they call it slaving the ship to the goggles. | ||
| So they activate the goggles so that wherever they turn, the helicopter turns. | ||
| And they've got eye sensors. | ||
| So where their eyes go, the guns go. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So you look at it, you kill it. | ||
| And they're giving us these demonstrations. | ||
| And they're flying them all around the set. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| Okay, I've seen the pyramids. | ||
| I've seen the Notre Dame Cathedral in France. | ||
| I've seen a lot of Van Goghs. | ||
| They're beautiful. | ||
| I saw the Mona Lisa. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| Seeing this fucking helicopter turning as the guy's head turns with the weapon systems. | ||
| I'm like, who's building cooler shit than this? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It wins. | ||
| It is our greatest achievement. | ||
| These weapons of death, they're incredible. | ||
| Well, that's what you can make if you have an unlimited budget. | ||
| And really smart guys. | ||
| Yeah, really smart engineers. | ||
| Oppenheimer had a hell of a, like, that was a great build, right? | ||
| That was a great build. | ||
| But man, it's expensive, and it's kind of a bummer when this shit gets used. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| What do you think about all this UAP UFO stuff? | ||
| Have you thought about this? | ||
| Do you think that this is some sort of a government program, like they've developed these high-speed drones in secrecy? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Because that's one prevailing theory. | ||
| I have trouble understanding... | ||
| Like, take the UFO aspect of it, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, yes, there's absolutely zero question on Earth that there's life out in the solar system. | ||
| It's an infinite solar system. | ||
| It goes on forever. | ||
| I'm sorry, infinite universe. | ||
| Smoke some 5-MeO and you'll go out there. | ||
| Yes, it's out there. | ||
| The government keeping it secret and being that capable to find it and keep it secret, I don't know. | ||
| I took mushrooms with my friend Mike Dragorio and we tried to get on Area 51 one day and we drove up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just did mushrooms thing to do. | |
| Have you ever gone up there? | ||
| No, I have not. | ||
| Because it's this road, Area 51, it's this highway, and the base is over a mountain, but the road goes on forever, and you're driving, and we're high as fuck on mushrooms, and we're not getting any closer to the mountain, and we're driving, and we're driving, and we're driving, and suddenly there's a white van behind us, right? | ||
| With the light on, and we're like, oh, fuck. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| Like, this is kind of what we thought might happen, and sure enough, guys get out, military dudes with guns, and they're looking at us, they're like... | ||
| Okay, you guys are on mushrooms, right? | ||
| We've seen this. | ||
| We've seen this. | ||
| Turn around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so common! | |
| Turn around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious! | |
| It's almost like the mushrooms want you to go to Area 51. You're not getting on the base. | ||
| They're like, there's a hotel called the Little Alien. | ||
| Go down there with everybody else that's on mushrooms. | ||
| And you can sit out there all night and have all your theories. | ||
| And you're turning around. | ||
| And we're like... | ||
| Roger that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That's so funny that they called it. | ||
| Yeah, they knew it. | ||
| It just must be so common. | ||
| Buddies are like, let's take some shrooms and get on Area 51. And these guys, they weren't nasty or tough, but they're like, yeah, yeah, you're going to turn around, drink some water, turn around, and go to the Little Alien Hotel. | ||
| You're allowed to get a certain distance, and then it's illegal. | ||
| And I believe they had to expand that distance. | ||
| I want to say it was during the Obama administration. | ||
| They had to acknowledge... | ||
| It might have been before that. | ||
| It might have been Clinton. | ||
| They had to acknowledge the existence... | ||
| Or it might have been Bush, rather. | ||
| They had to acknowledge the existence of Area 51 in order to expand the forbidden zone. | ||
| Because they had a forbidden zone, but they did not acknowledge... | ||
| No flyover. | ||
| No drive. | ||
| You can't hike in. | ||
| Because people were filming things, John Lear in particular, a lot of people were filming things that set up like very strong telescopes and high-speed optics and they were filming these tests of these things. | ||
| Whether or not these things were UFOs or whether it's top secret shit they're working on, obviously the stealth bomber came from that program. | ||
| The Harrier jump jet, which would like vertically lift and then take off. | ||
| They made a lot of wild shit that is absolutely from us. | ||
| But the alleged claims, and the most fascinating one is this guy Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked at S4, which is a Site 4 of Area 51, and he was on a program designed to back-engineer this recovered disc. | ||
| It's a fascinating story. | ||
| Because if he's full of shit, oh my god, what a great story. | ||
| This guy's pulled the wool over people's eyes for 30 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because he told the story in like 1989 was the first time he told it. | ||
| So it's more than 30 years. | ||
| But he's also, he has like real knowledge of the area. | ||
| He has real knowledge of Los Alamos Labs where they tried to say that he never worked there, but then they found him on the employee roster from the time. | ||
| He went in there. | ||
| People knew him. | ||
| It seems like the guy really was a propulsion specialist, and they really did try to get some off-the-fucking-beaten-path scientists. | ||
| Because they have to get fresh eyes on these things, allegedly, every few years. | ||
| But everyone's sworn to secrecy, and it's very compartmentalized. | ||
| So the metallurgy guys are not allowed to talk to the propulsion guys. | ||
| No one gets together and goes, what the fuck is this? | ||
| They can't have a group of scientists. | ||
| So they exist in a team form, and it just doesn't work that way. | ||
| They need more people. | ||
| And he said no one was able to figure out anything about it, other than there's some sort of a reactor that worked on some new element. | ||
| It was theoretical back then, but now they know it's a real element. | ||
| I will believe it. | ||
| Like, I have no reason to not believe it, and to certainly not... | ||
| What I was getting at though is that like when you see an insane system like these helicopters and the goggles and then you see these insane nuclear-powered submarines and these insane aircraft carriers, like what we have built is so fucking mind-blowing. | ||
| Why wouldn't we think that we've hit some next-level propulsion system and that the reason why the Pentagon is talking about out of this world crafts, they're obscuring reality. | ||
| The reason why people are coming forward and telling you about their experience in this program, maybe that's obscuring reality. | ||
| It might be bullshit. | ||
| It might be that the government and the military and the contractors don't want any of our enemies to know that they have some fucking bonkers shit that can go literally like the speed of light. | ||
| That we have. | ||
| That we have. | ||
| So I was just working up in New Mexico and we were filming around Los Alamos. | ||
| Have you ever been to Los Alamos? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's amazing that people just haven't seen the laboratory, the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory. | ||
| Which is, you know, across the street from where Oppenheimer lived when he was doing the Manhattan Project, which was this boys school that they kicked everyone out and all the scientists moved in, which was not in the film, which is quite interesting. | ||
| Like Los Alamos, if you can ever go there and see the museums and, you know, it's just a fascinating place to see where they built that bomb. | ||
| But across the street, or actually across this river from where Oppenheimer lived, is now the current Los Alamos Research Laboratory. | ||
| Pull up a picture of that one if you want to see something mind-blowing. | ||
| It's bigger than UCLA campus. | ||
| It's this massive research facility. | ||
| In Los Alamos, which, and you can't see half of it. | ||
| It's supposedly a giant chunk of it is underground. | ||
| It's completely armed. | ||
| We would drive, there's a road, that road at the top there is this access road that we would drive every day to go up. | ||
| There's a ski mountain above it. | ||
| So for some reason they let you drive fairly close, but it's all Homeland Security protecting it. | ||
| Super fortified and armed. | ||
| And it's in the middle of fucking nowhere. | ||
| And this was birthed from... | ||
| Yeah, you can see where it is, right? | ||
| It's in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| Literally in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| We first got up there and we're like, what are they doing here? | ||
| And everyone's like, well, it's digital warfare. | ||
| It's nuclear maintenance. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Alien dissection. | ||
| Forget Area 51. This place was like... | ||
| So if we're inventing shit, this is the kind of place we're inventing it. | ||
| And we went out a couple of days to these... | ||
| There's some restaurants and bars in the town of Los Alamos. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| If I'm China, I'm just hiring hot girls, getting them to turn, and putting them as bartenders or cocktail waitresses because all the scientists from Los Alamos just go there after work and get drunk. | ||
| That's where everything's going down. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Half of it's underground? | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| We'd be up on this mountain. | ||
| There's a... | ||
| This place is... | ||
| That's what it looks like? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It looks dope. | ||
| And it's in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| It's in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| That's so wild. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I try and start conversation. | ||
| I'm like, gosh, what do you know about Los Alamos? | ||
| Jamie, what's that image to the left? | ||
| It's got all the... | ||
| I looked it up too. | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck is that? | |
| They've got like the accelerators, you know? | ||
| Have you ever heard of like... | ||
| Particle accelerators. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure half your listeners know what this is. | ||
| But this was all started by Oppenheimer. | ||
| It used to be a log cabin. | ||
| No, that's the school. | ||
| I think that's the school that they took over. | ||
| They showed a little bit of it. | ||
| Oh, for all the scientists? | ||
| Yeah, it was such a crazy story, like how these scientists just moved into this school, kicked all the kids out under national security order, and the scientists moved in. | ||
| And to your point, no one knew what anyone else was doing when they were building the bomb. | ||
| So you're working on one part, I'm working on another. | ||
| Our wives have no idea what's going on. | ||
| We're going out and building the bomb all day and coming home and just like drinking. | ||
| They all drank and like I think there was like a lot of wife swapping and weird shit going on too. | ||
| They were just partying and building fucking nuclear bombs. | ||
| And now you go out there and see what this and it's just like I just want to know what are we doing? | ||
| How much does it cost? | ||
| And who's in charge? | ||
| And Los Alamos now, so if there is those systems, in my mind, if there was an alien ship found the government wanted, they're going to take it to Los Alamos. | ||
| That's where they're going to take it. | ||
| That's where they're going to dissect it. | ||
| And whatever's going on out there is some deep and real shit. | ||
| That's where Lazar worked. | ||
| If you go from Orville, Wilbur and Orville Wright's invention of the aircraft, how long is the time period before someone drops a nuclear bomb out of one? | ||
| How much time is between... | ||
| Was it 60 years? | ||
| Like, when was Wilbur and Orville's first flight? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| Because if you think of that, just think of, like, what an insane jump in technology. | ||
| From the very first airplane to dropping a nuclear bomb out of one inside of a lifetime. | ||
| Or just dropping a bomb, right? | ||
| Like, weaponizing... | ||
| Yes, air flight. | ||
| Weaponizing air flight and, like... | ||
| But a nuclear bomb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even more insane. | ||
| Because of the technology involved. | ||
| Just what a... | ||
| 1902 is around when they credit them for flying. | ||
| That was Kitty Hawk. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'm trying to find the exact date. | ||
| I thought it was 1800s. | ||
| Yeah, I did too. | ||
| That seems late. | ||
| 1902. That's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's 45 years? | |
| Is that real? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| About 40. Oh my god. | ||
| 45 years before they dropped a nuclear bomb out of it? | ||
| That's what it is, right? | ||
| It's 47? | ||
| Yeah, I'm seeing like 1903 as the planes. | ||
| That's when I think they got the patent. | ||
| Was Kitty Hawk? | ||
| Kitty Hawk wasn't 1903, was it? | ||
| The flight? | ||
| I don't think it was. | ||
| I'll double check. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, December 1903. Oh my god. | |
| Well that makes sense though, because there's video of it. | ||
| There's film of it. | ||
| So it has to be, when did they invent film? | ||
| There's some stuff from the 1800s, but it's rough. | ||
| Yeah, it was bad film. | ||
| It was like jumpy, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, but so your point is like, how short a period of time... | ||
| What an insane jump! | ||
| And so where is it going, right? | ||
| And what do they have already? | ||
| Like, if they have programs If they have programs to do something like Area S4, if they can develop these insane machines in silence, What else do they... | ||
| AI-controlled aircraft that's going to fly. | ||
| There was just a great article in the New York Times yesterday about it. | ||
| All these companies that are now scrambling to take over the buildings, which is a threat to the established weapons manufacturers, jet builders, because the future are fighting China in a large... | ||
| Like, full-scale battle is going to be AI-controlled drone-dependent. | ||
| So rather than sending human beings in $60 million jets, they're going to send swarms of $2 or $3 million AI-controlled fighter drones. | ||
| And those are going to be self-driven, right? | ||
| Self-flown. | ||
| The way Elon's trying to get self-driving vehicles. | ||
| This is the plan. | ||
| Great article yesterday. | ||
| And that's where it's going. | ||
| And if Orville Wright could see that... | ||
| Robot Wars. | ||
| 100% Robot Wars. | ||
| Robot Wars. | ||
| Like, Cameron had it right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Terminator had it right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, AI, dude, right? | ||
| Like, it's on. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy, you know? | ||
| I mean, I think this is what—I'm not defending Ted Kaczynski—but this is what Ted Kaczynski's manifesto was about, was the construction of technology was going to replace the human race. | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| That's an AI drone. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, this is the future. | ||
| Look at this fucking thing. | ||
| My business is on strike, you know, the writers, and I support my strike, but AI is a big issue. | ||
| Everyone's worried about AI. Right. | ||
| Everybody's worried about AI, right? | ||
| AI is going to be fighting our wars. | ||
| AI is going to be writing books. | ||
| When Trump was talking about Space Force back in the day, this is Space Force. | ||
| This is real Space Force shit. | ||
| It's funny, they didn't even think of that in Star Wars. | ||
| AI? No, they didn't. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| Like in Star Wars, no one had a cell phone. | ||
| Yeah, but they had lightsabers. | ||
| They did have lightsabers. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Pretty dope. | ||
| Definitely dope. | ||
| Yeah, they had R2D2. R2 helped with some shit, but I don't know what he was really doing. | ||
| But he was so sad all the time. | ||
| He was so annoying. | ||
| But imagine that there's a giant difference between that and sending a pilotless jet to engage in combat. | ||
| It seems like that's the direction. | ||
| I get fucking so terrified when I watch those Boston Dynamic videos of those robots that they're inventing. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| They're getting so good. | ||
| They're acrobats now. | ||
| I went to MIT. We filmed something at MIT and they took me into the robotics department like down in the basement and they showed me like these 10 kids did a presentation. | ||
| You ever been to campus at MIT? Yes. | ||
| Fucking cool, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We got to film on the campus. | ||
| We're the first film, Patriot's Day, because one of the MIT cops was killed by the marathon bombers. | ||
| They killed him after the bombing. | ||
| And so they wanted to honor him, and they let us film there. | ||
| And they took us down to the robotics wing and showed us a robot cheetah that they had invented that was sprinting up and down the halls and jumping over little obstacles. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Can I see that? | ||
| Show me the MIT robotic cheetah. | ||
| Those little ones that look like dogs. | ||
| Oh, like that. | ||
| But it was a cheetah. | ||
| It was different than this. | ||
| These things scare the shit out of me. | ||
| Because you could just easily see them with a gun on them. | ||
| Yeah, that's RoboCop shit. | ||
| And if you watch that Netflix show, Black Mirror, there's a great episode. | ||
| Did you ever see the heavy metal episode? | ||
| Is that about robots? | ||
| It's about one of these things chasing after this lady. | ||
| It's fucking great. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| But look at how it moves and gyrates. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| So look at that and think about the progression from the Wright brothers to Hiroshima in terms of aircraft. | ||
| 50 years, that technology, that was what they were doing with the Cheetah. | ||
| Oh, this one. | ||
| Is that MIT? Yeah, this was 10 years ago. | ||
| 10 years ago. | ||
| Look how fast it's going. | ||
| This is what they showed me. | ||
| But they put a Cheetah skin over it. | ||
| This is 28 miles an hour. | ||
| I bet it goes 100 now. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| It's probably electric now. | ||
| We're talking about electric engines. | ||
| Think about that with a lightsaber attached to its head, just like charging through crowd control. | ||
| Look at this thing. | ||
| That looks like a giant dog. | ||
| See the cheetah tail there? | ||
| See that cheetah tail? | ||
| That was the room we were in. | ||
| That's MIT, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, that's the actual room we're in. | ||
| Laser distance data. | ||
| So it's figuring out distances between things. | ||
| It just got faster one year ago. | ||
| Wow, that fucker. | ||
| Like, think about the applications. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not going to teach people. | ||
| What's one kind, loving, positive application for that thing? | ||
| Rescue? | ||
| Pull people out of a mine? | ||
| I have a dog. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| I may be rescued. | ||
| But they're not going to use her for that. | ||
| No, they're not, dude. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| That's coming in your door. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Remember when Gates was the LA chief of police who first used a tank in South Central Los Angeles? | ||
| Do you remember that story? | ||
| I don't remember that. | ||
| I think it was Gates was his name. | ||
| His strategy was, okay, if you're holed up in your house and we want to arrest you, we're going to put a battering ram on a tank. | ||
| And he drove his tank and he got in tremendous troubles. | ||
| The beginning of the LAPD being called out for Militarization. | ||
| Excessive. | ||
| Nancy Reagan raided a South Central crack house. | ||
| What? | ||
| I think this is it. | ||
| This is it? | ||
| Yeah, it was like the first designer drug raid is what someone called it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| It says pure publicity stunt. | ||
| Nancy, look at this. | ||
| Nancy Reagan wanted to find a way to maintain her visibility as an anti-narcotics crusader, now that her husband was out of office. | ||
| Chief Gates was looking toward a possible gubernatorial run, which mercifully never came to pass. | ||
| For those arrested, it was another day in the war that American politicians and police had declared on black and brown communities. | ||
| They really rolled in with a tank. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| They put a battering ram on a tank And rolled in. | ||
| You know, that's another, you know, interesting element of painkiller that we touch upon was the parallels between Oxycontin and crack cocaine. | ||
| You know, the crack epidemic. | ||
| Oh, yeah, there it is. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's LAPD, like, going after, going after, that's the war on drugs in Los Angeles. | ||
| Rescue. | ||
| We need to rescue you. | ||
| From your life. | ||
| But that was how crack was dealt with, right? | ||
| In the 80s. | ||
| And if you look at OxyContin and what the Sacklers were able to do and how they were able to basically take something much more lethal and certainly more profitable than fucking crack and get away with it. | ||
| Like, that's something that we talk about quite a bit. | ||
| It's pretty insane. | ||
| It's pretty insane that this is the reality of our current generation, that money allowed this to happen, and that influence allowed this to happen, and most people just trusted their healthcare professional, and as it said in the film, or in your show, that guy's trusting the FDA. He's trusting that they know what they're doing. | ||
| What do you think you would do if, you know, you hurt yourself, you were training and, you know, had a really painful injury. | ||
| Say, you know, you really fucked up your shoulder and, you know, in between, the immediate pain was, you know, very high. | ||
| And a doctor was like, okay, here's the deal. | ||
| Like, this is going to really fucking hurt. | ||
| We recommend a low dose of an opioid. | ||
| How would you react to that? | ||
| Well, I've had that happen. | ||
| I have had knee surgery, and when I was in the hospital, they had like a morphine drip, and it was wonderful. | ||
| Apparently, you press the button and you get more morphine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think that's how it worked. | ||
| This is 92, somewhere around there, 93. But when I got my nose fixed, I got my nose fixed a few years back and it didn't even hurt. | ||
| And the doctor prescribed medicine. | ||
| I should bring it back to the first surgery when I got the drip. | ||
| When I got the drip, he did give me Vicodin. | ||
| It was either Vicodin or Percocet. | ||
| I can't remember which one it was. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it was Vicodin though. | ||
| I only took it once and I felt so stupid. | ||
| It made me feel so dumb and just dull that it wasn't a wonderful feeling. | ||
| It wasn't OxyContin. | ||
| It wasn't a wonderful feeling at all. | ||
| It sucked. | ||
| And so I only took it once and then I just dealt with the pain. | ||
| And that was a pretty significant knee surgery because it's a patella tendon grafts. | ||
| They take a piece out of your shin bone. | ||
| Piece out of your patella tendon and a piece out of your kneecap, and they open you up like a fish and screw into your bones. | ||
| But I didn't take anything else. | ||
| I was like, I'm not taking shit. | ||
| I'm just gonna deal with pain. | ||
| And then when I got my nose fixed, the doctor fixed it, and he prescribed me two different opiates. | ||
| One of them was Oxycontin, and I forget what the other one was. | ||
| How long ago was this? | ||
| 15 years ago. | ||
| And when he prescribed it to me, I'm like, but it doesn't hurt. | ||
| I'm like, it doesn't hurt. | ||
| Like, right now it doesn't hurt. | ||
| You did the operation. | ||
| It's done, right? | ||
| Like, it's not hurting. | ||
| I mean, it's uncomfortable because I've got these fucking sponge things shoved up my nostrils with little tubes in them to expand my nostrils and allow it all to heal in the right form. | ||
| Sounds horrible. | ||
| It sucked, but it's a really good move. | ||
| You have a deviated septum. | ||
| My nose, I broke my nose for the first time when I was like five, and I think I broke it who knows how many times after that. | ||
| Maybe a dozen. | ||
| It was destroyed. | ||
| The inside of my nose was all fucked up. | ||
| It was completely closed off. | ||
| So they fixed it. | ||
| The doctor was fantastic. | ||
| He fixed it, but he tried to give me two different opiates. | ||
| He's like, you're gonna need these. | ||
| And I was like, but it doesn't hurt. | ||
| Like, I don't understand what you're saying. | ||
| I'm telling you right now, I'm not in pain. | ||
| Am I going to be in more pain? | ||
| Like, how am I going to be in more pain later? | ||
| I think like right after the operation, it's the most pain. | ||
| You'd be maxing out. | ||
| And he goes, you're going to be very, very uncomfortable. | ||
| Just take this prescription. | ||
| And I took it home and I just put this prescription in the drawer. | ||
| I go, okay, if it gets crazy, if something happens and I just, I can't sleep and I'm in agony, it never hurt at all. | ||
| It was just uncomfortable. | ||
| Just a little, you know, like I got punched in the nose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But it wasn't like, I can't sleep. | ||
| I was like, this isn't fine. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Are you trying to give me heroin for this? | ||
| Yes, you was. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| He did give you heroin. | ||
| Two different kinds. | ||
| I forget what it was, but one of them was Oxycontin. | ||
| One of them was something else. | ||
| But I'm like, you're giving me two different kinds of painkillers? | ||
| And this is when I was kind of already aware of that because I already had people in my family that had had issues with pills. | ||
| And I was like, dude, what are you giving me? | ||
| Yeah, it's really disturbing. | ||
| My son broke his collarbone playing lacrosse, and I had to take him to a hospital in Connecticut. | ||
| And the doctor was like, okay, it's a broken collarbone, there's not much we can do. | ||
| He was 16 or 17, and he wrote him a script for OxyContin. | ||
| And I'm like, are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| And I'm like, I held up the prescription. | ||
| I'm like, are you out of your mind? | ||
| And the doctor's like, it works. | ||
| It works. | ||
| There's going to be pain. | ||
| And, you know, it's interesting because I do wonder, you know, I remember, you know, Marcus's brother, Morgan Luttrell. | ||
| Have you ever met him? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| Tough dude. | ||
| And when I was getting ready to do the film... | ||
| I had heard about Morgan but I never met him and he had fallen out of a helicopter doing training and broken his back and was in Recouping in Virginia and I knew he'd been hurt and so I wanted to meet him because they're very close and I knew if I was going to make a film about Marcus I had to at least meet Morgan because Morgan's a powerful figure in Marcus's life. | ||
| So I flew out there and went to his house. | ||
| I got there late at night and there were a bunch of seals in the house and Morgan was sitting in a chair and they were watching TV and he was just sitting there and every once in a while he would tremble and he decided he wasn't going to take anything. | ||
| It would have broke him back. | ||
| I'm like, dude, you're not taking anything? | ||
| And he's like, fuck no. | ||
| I'm not taking anything. | ||
| I'm going to experience this pain. | ||
| I'm going to process this pain. | ||
| I'm going to use this pain. | ||
| And he wrote out his broken back without any pain medication. | ||
| And it did make me... | ||
| I think, and I still think, you know, how pain-adverse we all are, right? | ||
| Like, oh, it hurts. | ||
| Make it go away. | ||
| Make it go away. | ||
| Give me the quickest path to being pain-free. | ||
| Drink this. | ||
| Smoke this. | ||
| Buy this. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| Whatever, right? | ||
| And that we're so bad at tolerating pain, and the expectation is, oh, okay, Joe, we just worked on your nose. | ||
| You're gonna feel pain. | ||
| Take this. | ||
| You don't want that pain. | ||
| No, you don't want that pain. | ||
| You can't handle that pain. | ||
| And we're just so fucking soft when it comes to pain. | ||
| Well, it's also I think we've been programmed to think that when you're in pain, you need to take medication, regardless of the dangers of that stuff. | ||
| I remember this sad story from COVID, where this woman overdosed on Tylenol. | ||
| She died from acetaminophen poison, which is apparently Fairly common. | ||
| If you take a lot of Tylenol, your liver can't process it. | ||
| You get liver failure. | ||
| And it's just from pain. | ||
| You know, just didn't want to feel it. | ||
| I don't want to feel like this. | ||
| Give me something that makes me not feel like this. | ||
| But, I mean, I have not had back surgery, but I've had three knee surgeries. | ||
| And I told you on the one, I took the one Vicodin. | ||
| But then after that I didn't take anything. | ||
| So my right knee, when I got it done, I didn't take shit. | ||
| And I got my left knee scoped, I didn't take shit. | ||
| And then I got the nose fixed, didn't take shit. | ||
| I was like, you just deal with pain. | ||
| But back pain I think is a different animal. | ||
| Back pain is debilitating in a way that I haven't experienced. | ||
| I could walk around on crutches if my knee was fucked up. | ||
| There's a difference. | ||
| And I think you've got to be really cautious. | ||
| I don't want to make anybody feel bad because they're taking medication for back pain. | ||
| Because I think back pain is something where it just overwhelms your existence if you have a bad herniated disc. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Overwhelms. | ||
| I've had them. | ||
| I had surgery on them. | ||
| What did you get done? | ||
| Did you get it fused? | ||
| I had a discectomy. | ||
| Okay, so they took a little bit of your disc out? | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| In the future, if you're ever going to do something like that again, like we were talking about stem cells, that's the fix. | ||
| And I avoided that kind of surgery. | ||
| You think stem cells for herniated discs? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Stem cells and traction, spinal traction. | ||
| It depends on how bad it's herniated, whether it's bulging, Or whether it's ruptured. | ||
| Whether it's ruptured. | ||
| They do have disc replacements that many people have done now. | ||
| There's titanium articulating discs. | ||
| My friend Eddie got it in his back. | ||
| Aljamain Sterling, who was the UFC Bantamweight champion, he got it in his neck. | ||
| The steel. | ||
| Yeah, it's a titanium articulating disc. | ||
| And was he able to fight after it? | ||
| He fought again and he defended the title. | ||
| He defended the title one, two, I think three times after that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, three times. | ||
| And he actually defended the title more than anybody ever has in that division. | ||
| Do you think his neck was stronger? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Like it was stronger than prior to the injury? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Not as strong as if he's not injured at all. | ||
| He wasn't like the bionic man that was rebuilt stronger and had an advantage. | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| But it might be the same. | ||
| It might be that his neck is the same. | ||
| Strength in your neck comes from obviously the structure, the bones, but it also comes from working your neck out. | ||
| There's a bunch of exercises that guys do to strengthen their neck, and sometimes when guys don't do that, then they run into problems like bulging discs. | ||
| But you're going to run into those anyway in combat sports. | ||
| It's inevitable. | ||
| But I know of many, many, many, many people now that have sought help, particularly overseas. | ||
| Whether it is in Peru, or Panama rather, Columbia, or Tijuana, the CPI Institute in Tijuana. | ||
| I know there's BioAccelerator in Columbia that's very good. | ||
| They've taken care of a lot of UFC athletes. | ||
| A lot of guys get stuff fixed. | ||
| Why can't this stuff be approved in the US? My suspicion is the same suspicion when you see the influence that these pharmaceutical drug companies have over the FDA. Wow. | ||
| My suspicion is that there has probably been an analysis done Of what would happen if stem cell use was ubiquitous? | ||
| What would happen if it was everywhere? | ||
| What would happen if you allowed people to use stem cells the way we allow people? | ||
| Surgeons would have trouble. | ||
| Well, maybe, but certainly more people would get healed. | ||
| More people would get fixed. | ||
| Look, I don't know of anyone who has had, and this is just my own anecdotal experience, I don't know of anyone who's had bad experiences with stem cells. | ||
| I've had people that I know that did it and it didn't help them, but upon further examination, either Their problem was too big, and it required surgery. | ||
| Or, in the most part, we're dealing with, like, fighters, and a lot of these guys just don't wait long enough before they go hard. | ||
| They go back and they train hard. | ||
| They have, like, a knee issue or a shoulder issue, and they go back and they train. | ||
| They're too savage. | ||
| They get right back into it as soon as they start feeling good. | ||
| And you really need a lot of time for it to take root in many, many months for it to really heal. | ||
| But like I've said many times on this show, and I told you earlier, I had a full-length rotator cuff tear. | ||
| My doctor assured me I was going to need surgery. | ||
| But why were you able to do it in the US? It was different. | ||
| There was different regulations when I did it. | ||
| I don't remember exactly what mesenchymal stem cells, and they used exosomes. | ||
| I don't exactly remember what it all was. | ||
| But I remember that it's all processed from umbilical cords. | ||
| So say if a young lady, I think you have to be 25 years or younger, has a baby through a C-section, then they harvest their umbilical cord, I don't know if they sell it or whatever, and then they convert that into stem cells and that is unique. | ||
| Particularly unique in its ability to help heal any kind of tissue. | ||
| But the difference between what you're allowed to do in America now is different from what it was back then. | ||
| But also the stuff they're doing in these other places overseas is much more dramatic. | ||
| Because they can use much larger doses and they keep you there for three days. | ||
| And they also combine it with hyperbaric therapy and a bunch of other different things that also accelerate your healing. | ||
| NAD, IV drips, a bunch of different things that help along the process of your healing. | ||
| And I know many people that have avoided surgery because of that, and now we're back to 100%. | ||
| But it doesn't mean you don't need surgery. | ||
| Like, there's certain disc issues that are ruptured beyond the point of repair, and you probably need something done. | ||
| And it's nice that there is all these different options. | ||
| You just, you have to be careful, you know, whenever you're getting something that's an operation. | ||
| Like, especially if you're getting a replacement, like a knee replacement or something. | ||
| All that stuff, you gotta be careful. | ||
| But you think that it's possible that the FDA is being coerced by other forces I absolutely don't know, right? | ||
| But it's possible. | ||
| I think if it's possible that a human being, a lone human being, could be taken into a hotel room for a couple of days and then comes out and he has a $400,000 a year job after he retires. | ||
| And this revolving door does exist. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| We know that exists. | ||
| Why wouldn't you protect your interests by stopping some sort of a novel, new sort of treatment that may lead to way less people on pain medication, way less people that need anti-inflammatories, way less people that need a lot of the stuff you sell? | ||
| It makes sense to me. | ||
| And then you go, oh, the dangers of stem cells. | ||
| But OxyContin is safe and effective. | ||
| Like, that's so nuts. | ||
| That's so nuts that they say that. | ||
| Because where are the bodies? | ||
| Where are the bodies? | ||
| I haven't heard about stem cell addiction. | ||
| I haven't heard of stem cell overdoses. | ||
| Yeah, where are the bodies? | ||
| We're the bodies. | ||
| I have a bunch of anecdotal stories from UFC fighters, jujitsu athletes, good friends of mine. | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| Like dozens of guys who have gone and had massive relief from stem cells. | ||
| Yeah, I got a buddy in the UFC right now who just went down to, I think, Bogota. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I have some back issues. | ||
| Go down there. | ||
| Yeah, I will. | ||
| You should. | ||
| Or Tijuana. | ||
| Or Panama. | ||
| It just sounds so crazy. | ||
| I'm going to go to Tijuana and fix my back. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It sounds wrong, but I'm starting to believe that it's not. | ||
| I think we have a fucked up system. | ||
| I really, really do. | ||
| And the process to making that stuff legal, they're in the process of doing that. | ||
| And Dr. Neil Reardon is deeply involved in this. | ||
| He's the guy that I had on with Mel Gibson back in the day. | ||
| And Mel talked about his own injuries that he got fixed with stem cells and his dad. | ||
| He was saying his dad was in a wheelchair. | ||
| And then, you know, like a few years later, his dad's walking around. | ||
| Where did Mel go? | ||
| They went to Panama. | ||
| And Dr. Reardon, he was like the first guy that I ever talked to about this stuff and he's written many published papers and books on it and very, very, very knowledgeable guy when it comes to this and they're absolutely convinced that it's beneficial and we should be using it everywhere. | ||
| One of the things that I don't think anyone really understands that hasn't done it is like, okay, you're going to go get stem cell therapy in wherever, in Panama. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Like you fly to Panama, you drive to some established-looking clinic, or is it like in the back of a strip mall? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I sent my mom there. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| In Panama? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I sent my mom to the panel. | ||
| Well, you should lead with that. | ||
| Yeah, I should have told you that earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, lead with that. | |
| Yeah, my mom had really good success with it, with her knee. | ||
| So that means you really believe in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a nice area. | ||
| Where their clinic is is very nice. | ||
| It's in a beautiful office building. | ||
| They take you there for three days. | ||
| And you sleep? | ||
| You go to a hotel. | ||
| Yeah, there's a hotel there. | ||
| There's a hotel right next to it. | ||
| And the treatment is what? | ||
| It's an injection? | ||
| It's a series of injections in wherever the injury is, along with IV infusions. | ||
| They do IV stem cells as well, which helps your whole body. | ||
| Like whatever little weird aches and tears you have. | ||
| My friend Gordon Ryan, who's the best jiu-jitsu athlete of all time, he had an issue with his shoulder. | ||
| So he got injections in his shoulder and it fixed his neck. | ||
| He had a neck problem for like a year. | ||
| And just by the fact that it's in the area, it literally goes to wherever the injuries are. | ||
| And it fixed his neck. | ||
| He's like, there's no other explanation. | ||
| He's like, four weeks later, my neck was better. | ||
| I always felt that one of the greatest recoveries from an injury that I've ever witnessed. | ||
| I'm interested to hear what yours is. | ||
| I was at the fight when Silva cracked his leg. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Chris Weidman. | ||
| Chris against Weidman. | ||
| And I was there. | ||
| I was like up front. | ||
| And I heard it, and I heard him scream, and I saw it, right? | ||
| You were there. | ||
| Yeah, I was there. | ||
| How did he recover from that in fighting it? | ||
| Well, he did, but he didn't. | ||
| In my mind, I think Anderson Silva was the greatest middleweight of all time, right up there with Adesanya. | ||
| I think Adesanya and Anderson, it's like different eras, but goddamn when they were on top. | ||
| I mean, Anderson was just... | ||
| In the Matrix. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| He was such an assassin. | ||
| In his prime, people forgot how great he was. | ||
| Like top five of all time? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Top three of all time? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't like a Mount Rushmore because there's only room for four heads. | ||
| I think there's a lot more because you have to have Hoist Gracie up there. | ||
| But maybe a Mount Rushmore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Close. | |
| He's one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| How did he recover from that? | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| He was never the same guy. | ||
| He did. | ||
| But if you watch Anderson Silva pre-Chris Weidman, pre-leg break, and then post-leg break, it's a different athlete. | ||
| He can't kick the same way with that leg anymore. | ||
| I bet it doesn't move as well. | ||
| I bet there's issues in terms of load balance and the way it feels. | ||
| It's probably in pain all the time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of factors. | ||
| You're probably very hesitant to throw that same kick again because you just had your leg snap in half and your leg was fucked up for a good solid year and a half after that and you had to have surgery and there's plates in there and rods and shit, screws. | ||
| But did he win? | ||
| He won fights after that. | ||
| He won fights afterwards. | ||
| Not as many. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, what is Anderson's record? | ||
| Should we pull up Anderson's record? | ||
| And again, this is not in disrespect of Anderson. | ||
| Chris Weidman just came back from a knee break, too. | ||
| Or a leg break, as well, rather. | ||
| And it was just last weekend. | ||
| Was that the worst injury that you've ever seen in UFC Silva? | ||
| Well, I saw it with Weidman, the same exact injury. | ||
| He snapped his own leg, too. | ||
| Which is crazy that Anderson was involved. | ||
| So look at that. | ||
| Go scroll up. | ||
| Okay, so Derek Brunson was his last win, and that was in 2017. Then he lost to Israel Adesanya, Jared Kananir, and Uriah Hall. | ||
| And then there's the loss of Michael Bisbee. | ||
| So you go like from Chris Weidman. | ||
| So the Nick Diaz fight was kind of crazy. | ||
| That was July 2013. Yeah, I think that was no contest because... | ||
| So you got two years or a year and a half from the Weidman leg break till he fights Nick Diaz again. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| What is that no contest? | ||
| Because I think Silva tested positive for steroids. | ||
| They both popped. | ||
| Yeah, Silva tested positive for steroids, which makes sense because he's recovering from this horrific leg injury. | ||
| There's no way you're going to do that clean and come back in a year and a half. | ||
| You need help. | ||
| That's the legit reason for those kind of steroids. | ||
| So if you go before that, though, you go before the Weidman fight, look at these fucking wins. | ||
| I mean, Stefan Bonner, Chael Sonnen, Yushin Okami, Vitor Belfort, Chael Sonnen, Damian Maia, Forrest Griffin, Paul Slatis, Patrick Coté, James Irvin. | ||
| It's just KO, KO, KO, submission, KO. Rich Franklin, KO. Nate Marquardt, KO. Travis Luter, submission. | ||
| Rich Franklin, KO. Chris Lieben, KO. Tony Fricklin, KO. I mean, he's just dominating everyone. | ||
| And then what? | ||
| And after the leg break, look, he won one fight. | ||
| After the leg break, he's got the no contest, which was kind of a boring fight anyway, but then you got lost, loss, one win, a decision win over Derrick Brunson, lost, lost, lost. | ||
| He was never the same again. | ||
| He was never the same again. | ||
| The Anderson Silva that smoked Forrest Griffin, the Anderson Silva that destroyed Vitor Belfort, the Anderson Silva that just dominated that division, he was never really that guy again. | ||
| The Anderson Silva that beat Dan Henderson, he was never that guy again. | ||
| And I think that it's a very, very, very, very difficult injury to come back from and be 100%. | ||
| What are your thoughts on, and I've talked to Dana about it, like, What, you know, you talk about, I've done work with the NFL on brain injury and worked on changing the way football players tackle, | ||
| started a heads-up tackling program with kids, trying to get them to stop leading with their heads for brain injury and for paralysis. | ||
| I've seen both and worked in that space a bit. | ||
| And, you know, What are your thoughts on what we're going to see in the UFC with some of these fighters in five, ten years? | ||
| I work with a lot of boxers, and I've seen a lot of boxers have a rough time, obviously, as they get older and they get out of it. | ||
| What do you think the long-term ramifications for fighters and their brains are when they get out? | ||
| It is absolutely never good to get hit in the head. | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| To deny that is crazy. | ||
| But this sport is You trying to hit someone in the head and them trying to hit you in the head. | ||
| It's a fucking insane sport. | ||
| It's you trying to strangle them. | ||
| You trying to get them to not hit you. | ||
| You try to take them down. | ||
| You try to submit them. | ||
| But it's this part of the sport, a big part of the sport, is getting hit in the head. | ||
| And some of these guys are getting kicked in the head. | ||
| And if you've ever seen someone get kicked in the head, and I've seen a lot, it is a terrifying moment. | ||
| You know, when a guy like Leon Edwards in the fifth round takes out Kamaru Usman, who's like one of the greatest of all time with one kick, that's when you realize, like, oh my god. | ||
| What a ferocious weapon a shin to your neck is. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy when you watch people get hit by those things. | ||
| There's no way that's good for you. | ||
| That is definitely bad for you. | ||
| The question is how bad and how much damage have you taken? | ||
| What steps have you made in camp to mitigate the amount of damage that you take? | ||
| In camp too, right? | ||
| Like sparring? | ||
| In camp, yes. | ||
| And you have to make sure when you spar in camp... | ||
| That you are being very careful. | ||
| That you're not going to war. | ||
| There's a lot of fights where guys have gotten big concussions before they fought. | ||
| And then when they fought, the first punch that hits them, they go out. | ||
| Even punches that don't even look like a devastating punch. | ||
| But they're so damaged already going into the fight because they train too hard. | ||
| And then there's this intangible thing where sometimes guys have an iron jaw. | ||
| Literally, you can't knock them out. | ||
| And then one day, it goes. | ||
| And when it goes, it's gone forever. | ||
| When it goes, they get knocked out a bunch of times after that. | ||
| And that seems to be indicative of Something wrong. | ||
| Something seriously wrong. | ||
| What that is, I'm not a neurologist. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It's gotta be damage to your brain. | ||
| It's gotta be damage to your body. | ||
| You're not durable anymore for some reason. | ||
| And that's the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| The long-term effects are severe cognitive decline. | ||
| It's pugilistica dementia. | ||
| It's trauma-induced Parkinson's that some boxers like Freddie Roach has. | ||
| It's a reality of the sport. | ||
| And you would hope that they have friends that can have that long hard talk with them when it's over and say this is not I'm not saying this because you know For any reason other than you you literally have to be told this you got to get out now Or you're not going to be normal in ten years like I have run into old boxers and Guys that were younger than me and I ran into Terry Norris once. | ||
| I was a giant fan of Terry Norris. | ||
| He was so fucking good. | ||
| And I ran into him at a fight and he slurred his words so bad. | ||
| They did a whole news piece on him where he talked about it and his wife is helping him and he's gotten better since then. | ||
| But the struggle that you see like one of the fucking great welterweight champions ever. | ||
| And then you see how he's dealing with things now. | ||
| Was he 154? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But you see how he's dealing with things now. | ||
| It's like, God, was it worth it? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking. | ||
| I saw you had Terence Crawford on the other day, who I love so much. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| And he just seems so sharp. | ||
| And his defensive skills are great. | ||
| But I watch it, and I'm like, man, I hope you know when to stop. | ||
| Yeah, it would be a tragedy to see a guy that sharp struggle mentally. | ||
| And I do think it's interesting. | ||
| You know, I've worked in boxing for a while. | ||
| I have a gym and I manage some fighters. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| It's in Santa Monica, Churchill Boxing Club. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's a great gym. | ||
| We were Wild Card West. | ||
| We started as Wild Card West. | ||
| Freddie let me use his name to get the gym going. | ||
| And then we were Wild Card West forever. | ||
| We've had Alvarez did four camps at our gym. | ||
| Canelo did? | ||
| Yeah, Canelo did. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Canelo used to do all... | ||
| The gym was actually... | ||
| We were about to close. | ||
| I was about to close the gym down. | ||
| And I was here. | ||
| I was in Albuquerque making Lone Survivor. | ||
| And the gym was falling apart and it's a fucking headache to have a boxing gym. | ||
| It's a real headache. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| And all the toilet, the pipes had blown, the toilet pipes. | ||
| So I had to fly back on a weekend and with my assistant mop it up. | ||
| And my assistant, she was a director's assistant, and she's in there cleaning shit in a boxing gym with me, and at one point she's like, I didn't sign up for this! | ||
| I'm a princess, and I'm meant to be! | ||
| And she was delusional and delirious from cleaning up shit with me in the gym, and she was like muttering about how she was a princess, and I'm like, okay, stop. | ||
| We cleaned it up, and I'm there for one more day, and I'm gonna go back to New Mexico to film, And I'm in the gym and I'm like, I gotta shut this down. | ||
| And you know, Gary Shandling was a partner of mine in the gym. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Do you know Gary loved boxing? | ||
| I met him once. | ||
| He loved boxing. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| And I called him and I'm like, Gary, I'm closing it down. | ||
| It's too much of a headache. | ||
| It's just nothing but a liability all the time. | ||
| And I'm in the gym by myself. | ||
| My last day there, I'm gonna go back to New Mexico. | ||
| And it's clean, and I'm kind of looking at it. | ||
| And I'd had it for like six years, and it was fun, and I love boxing. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, I've got to shut it down. | ||
| And in the mirror, I see this little flash of red in the mirror, and I see someone's come in. | ||
| And I turn, and this guy's standing there. | ||
| He's like, are you Peter? | ||
| I'm like, yes. | ||
| He goes, Freddie Roach told me to come down. | ||
| I'm looking to train for my next camp. | ||
| My name's Saul Everaz. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I know who you are. | ||
| Fucking Canelo in my gym, right? | ||
| Red hair. | ||
| And he's like, very polite. | ||
| He's like, could I train? | ||
| Could I do my camp? | ||
| He was fighting this kid named Lopez. | ||
| He was getting ready for his camp for Lopez. | ||
| This was before, you know, he'd really taken up, but he was emerging, right? | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, you can train here. | ||
| And I'm about to close the gym down for good. | ||
| And I show him around. | ||
| He's like, I see the gym. | ||
| I'm like, well, here's the gym. | ||
| It's not much. | ||
| It's a ring and our heavy bags, our speed bags. | ||
| Here's our sauna. | ||
| He looks around. | ||
| He goes, okay, could I train here? | ||
| I go, yeah. | ||
| He goes out. | ||
| There's two Suburbans out in the parking lot full of his camp, Eddie and Shepo's trainers, five fighters. | ||
| They're like, come on. | ||
| And they all come running in, turn on the music, start eating. | ||
| And he came in and started doing his camps there. | ||
| And that got my gym going. | ||
| Like once he came to the gym, and we've had everyone do camps there. | ||
| And I've had a front row seat to boxing. | ||
| And man, like one of the many things that I look at is how hard it is for these guys to let go. | ||
| So you talk about Terry Norris staying a little bit too long. | ||
| Freddie Roach stayed in the ring probably a few too many fights. | ||
| Ali certainly did, right? | ||
| And watching these guys And we have a lot of UFC guys have come in and worked on their boxing in our gym and seeing the struggles that they go through. | ||
| And you hope, yeah, there's someone that's going to say, okay, enough. | ||
| It's time. | ||
| But, man, is it hard to let go of that. | ||
| It's very hard to let go. | ||
| And I think there's a bunch of factors at play. | ||
| At play in that. | ||
| One of them is their identity. | ||
| Their identity is all wrapped up in them being a fighter. | ||
| It's very hard for people to let that go. | ||
| Also, it's the only thing they've ever dedicated their time to. | ||
| A lot of these guys don't have serious other side jobs or serious other side professions. | ||
| Some of them do. | ||
| Some of the really smart ones, they kind of, they break off and they start little businesses and they do stuff so that, like Eric Anders, guy's been on the podcast before, he's invested in real estate, bought a bunch of houses. | ||
| So he's good forever. | ||
| UFC or boxing? | ||
| UFC. Yeah. | ||
| So some guys are smart like that. | ||
| You know, Conor McGregor obviously did. | ||
| He's very smart. | ||
| I mean, Conor started that whiskey company, did the Floyd Mayweather fight, he made $100 million and he starts this whiskey company, it's worth like a half a billion. | ||
| He doesn't have to do shit forever. | ||
| And he's only fighting if he fights again because he wants to. | ||
| But most of them, when it's over, they're confused. | ||
| They don't know what to do. | ||
| And the high of winning a fight... | ||
| It's like nothing else in all sports It's there's no other because you might lose and if you lose it's gonna be more Devastating than anything else in sports if you lose a basketball game. | ||
| I'm sure it sucks I'm sure you feel terrible, but you can go home You don't go to the fucking hospital with your face battered in and the whole world saw you get kicked in the face and there's memes of you getting flatlined and there's like animation of you get knocked into orbit and And you have to have all these trolls and haters talk shit about you on Twitter when you got knocked out in a world championship fight in front of the whole world. | ||
| Yeah, and if you're on a basketball team or a football team or any other sport really, at least you know, guess what? | ||
| I'm playing next Tuesday. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I got a contract. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I got a player's union. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I got a whole bunch of stuff. | ||
| And I got a league. | ||
| Yeah, it is a lone wolf sport. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck. | |
| It's for people that don't play well with others. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And it's for people that also value the camaraderie of other people that are similar to them. | ||
| And like what gets me with boxing, which is like, you know, UFC, at least there's an organizing principle uniting it, right? | ||
| Like there's the UFC. There's Dana, right? | ||
| There's you as part of the face of the UFC. There's owners that have, you know, built a system, right? | ||
| I think Frank Lorenzo did a really good job of giving birth to. | ||
| But, like, boxing, it's like, do you know how many weight classes there are in boxing today? | ||
| Can you name them all? | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| But I don't think that's a bad thing. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| And how about multiple promoters and multiple... | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| And multiple belts. | ||
| Like, too many belts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Too many promoters. | ||
| So, like, you've got 440-pound champions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That are all promoted by different guys. | ||
| And then 447 pound champions. | ||
| And so there's no continuity of organization. | ||
| That is absolutely true. | ||
| When we get to a level like a guy like Terrence Crawford. | ||
| Who is the only man to ever be undisputed in two weight classes. | ||
| Which is pretty insane. | ||
| Manny Pacquiao won. | ||
| I love him so much. | ||
| He's so good man. | ||
| He's such a great guy too. | ||
| Manny Pacquiao won world titles in eight different weight classes. | ||
| I mean that's insane. | ||
| How many world titles did Manny Pacquiao win? | ||
| Let's pull that up. | ||
| Look at his body progression from when he started to when he ended. | ||
| He got saucy. | ||
| Something was going on, man. | ||
| He got saucy. | ||
|
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Oh my god! | |
| Like, wow! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| Twelve major world titles in eight different weight divisions. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| Those accomplishments are so insane. | ||
| But what were the weights? | ||
| What did he start? | ||
| Like 118 and went up to 147 maybe? | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I think his first one was... | ||
| So the first one was flyweight. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What is it, 126? | ||
| In the UFC it's different. | ||
| I think it's lighter than... | ||
| I think it's like... | ||
| What's bantamweight? | ||
| What is bantamweight? | ||
| Well, lightweight is 135. This is my point. | ||
| There's too many weight classes. | ||
| And then super featherweight is 130. So featherweight must be 125. And then Bantamate must be 120. And Flyweight is like 118. Yeah, there's weird numbers, right? | ||
| Like welterweight is 147. You don't think there's too many weight classes? | ||
| Here's the deal. | ||
| The thing about weight cutting, weight cutting is so bad for you. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| But when there's only a few weight classes, there's massive advantages. | ||
| And one of the best ways to disincentivize weight cutting, which is As bad as anything else in sport. | ||
| Might be as bad as the strikes that you take. | ||
| With some guys. | ||
| I've seen guys that look like they're on death's door. | ||
| But they are. | ||
| Death's door. | ||
| They are on death's door. | ||
| And then 24 hours later they have a cage fight, which is so nuts. | ||
| But the problem is, if you're a guy, and you're 5'9", and you want to fight in the welterweight division, Can you make 55? | ||
| Because if you can make 55, dude, it would be better for you. | ||
| Because if you make 55, those guys will be your height. | ||
| You're dealing with... | ||
| You mean if you can come down to 155? | ||
| Yeah, if you make 155, then those guys will probably be your size. | ||
| Because if you just walk around like 180 pounds, you want to fight at 170, you're dealing with guys that are 200 plus. | ||
| And then they suck down to 170 for a very brief amount of time. | ||
| And then when you get in that octagon and they're fully hydrated and you look at them like, Jesus, they're so much bigger than 170. | ||
| Yeah, the rehydration is crazy. | ||
| So, but my point is, if there's multiple weight classes in between that gap, you wouldn't have to do that. | ||
| I think there should be at the very minimum a weight class every 10 pounds. | ||
| And I don't think that's outrageous, and that's way less than boxing. | ||
| But you would start at 125, like there is now, and 135, which already exists. | ||
| 145, already exists. | ||
| And then you go 55, which already exists. | ||
| Are you saying UFC? Yeah. | ||
| 65, 75, 85, 95, 205, maybe 215, or just go right to 225, and then maybe even a 265. And then super heavyweight, which doesn't exist. | ||
| Which is really wild that the heavyweight champion of the UFC has to make weight. | ||
| The heavyweight champion of the UFC has to be 265 pounds or less. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because there's a weight class. | ||
| There's a super heavyweight. | ||
| Oh, there's a super heavyweight. | ||
| But it's never been used. | ||
| Has there ever been a 300-pound fighter? | ||
| In the early days of the UFC, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Paul Varlin's, I think, was 300 pounds. | ||
| One of the really early ones when he fought Marco Huas. | ||
| What was Kerr? | ||
| Was it Mark Kerr? | ||
|
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|
Oh, geez. | |
| He was big. | ||
| He was gigantic. | ||
| Mark Kerr. | ||
| How good was he? | ||
| Oh, he's phenomenal. | ||
| He was phenomenal. | ||
| He was an elite wrestler. | ||
| I thought that would be a good film. | ||
| Who was on all the Juicy Juice. | ||
| Yeah, I looked at doing a film about him for a minute. | ||
| There is one out. | ||
| A documentary? | ||
| Yeah, The Smashing Machine. | ||
| Have you ever seen it? | ||
| No, but I meant a scripted. | ||
| Oh, scripted. | ||
| I know Dwayne Johnson was interested in playing him for a minute. | ||
| He's the one that turned me on to him. | ||
| They call him The Smashing Machine. | ||
| Is that the best fight name ever? | ||
| Oh, so good. | ||
| I saw him submit a guy with his chin in the guy's eye socket. | ||
|
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Oh, fuck. | |
| It was an early, early, early UFC. He mounted this guy, this guy Dan Bobish, and he stuck his chin in the guy's eye socket. | ||
| He just fucking drove his chin. | ||
|
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|
Is that legal? | |
| It was then. | ||
| Is it now? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No one's ever done it before. | ||
| But also, no one's on the same amount of sauce as Kerr was. | ||
| He looked like a superhero. | ||
| He didn't even look like a real person. | ||
| Super nice guy, by the way. | ||
| Sweet guy. | ||
| It does not make sense when you talk to him, his personality, that he's such a murderer. | ||
| I think he had the wrong woman in his life, as I recall. | ||
| That was a part of it. | ||
| I can't believe that. | ||
| I think he's a pain guy. | ||
| I think he got hooked on pain pills. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It'd be an interesting film. | ||
| Well, it would be interesting because I think... | ||
| Have you seen The Smashing Machine? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
|
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|
I will. | |
| I'll watch it. | ||
| That's why you don't know. | ||
| He was addicted to pain pills. | ||
| Yeah, I knew that. | ||
| Painkillers. | ||
| I knew that. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what happened. | ||
| So what happened to him is very related to your series. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm going to look at it because someone sent it to me. | ||
| Dwayne sent it to me. | ||
| He was obsessed with them. | ||
| It's a very interesting story because at one point in time when they were following him, they were following him because they thought they were following this unstoppable force in Pride, which was the rival organization to the UFC. Yeah, that's him in his prime. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| What a stud, huh? | ||
| He was fucking people up. | ||
| Look at him down there. | ||
| That's me interviewing him. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, that's 1997. Oh shit! | ||
| Do you remember that interview? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Where was that? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I only did, like, a few of these back then. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| I did it from, like, 97 to late into 1998, and then it became... | ||
| It wasn't cost-effective. | ||
| I was losing money, and I was like, I did it. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| But wait, that was the UFC? Was that UFC then? | ||
| That was UFC, yeah. | ||
| I was the post-fight interviewer for the UFC from 97 to 98, and then I quit. | ||
| And then I'm doing news radio, and then I wound up doing Fear Factor, and then Dana White contacted me and was getting me tickets to the fights. | ||
| I was like, oh, this is amazing. | ||
| The fights are in Vegas now. | ||
| Because my friend Eddie and I, we'd always had this dream. | ||
| Because we always loved the sport, but we were like, you know what would be amazing? | ||
| If these fucking billionaire dudes just fell in love with the sport and dumped a bunch of money into it. | ||
| And that's exactly what happened. | ||
| That's exactly what happened. | ||
| And so when they said that they had actually done that, I was like, oh, that's fantastic. | ||
| And so I went and I did some press for them. | ||
| And then I started asking Dana about fights. | ||
| I was like, do you know about this guy? | ||
| Do you know about this guy who fights in Japan? | ||
| Do you know about this and that? | ||
| And he goes, you want to do commentary? | ||
| Did he know that you knew so much about it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what he knew. | ||
| You know, he knew eventually. | ||
| Once we started talking, I was saying I trained jiu-jitsu five days a week and, you know, I'm obsessed with the sport. | ||
| But look at me with all that hair. | ||
| You look great. | ||
| You still look great, Joe. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| But you look great there, too. | ||
| Different chapters. | ||
|
unidentified
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UFC 15. UFC 15. Oh, shit. | |
| 1997. But see, that... | ||
| My theory, being, you know, a big boxing fan... | ||
| We need a couple of billionaires to buy boxing. | ||
| And like, it almost happened with DAZN. I don't know if you follow, like, this guy, Lem Blitnik, the... | ||
| I didn't follow it. | ||
| A Russian oligarch, basically, gave Eddie Hearn a shitload of money and said... | ||
| Roll up boxing. | ||
| And I always felt like one guy could have rolled up boxing because it's controlled by... | ||
| There's Al Heyman, there's Bob Arum, and there's now DAZN, Eddie Hearn. | ||
| Golden Boy. | ||
| Huh? | ||
| Golden Boy. | ||
| Yeah, and Golden Boy's lurking around. | ||
| But it's actually an asset that if you look at what it's all worth, it's conceivable that one billionaire could come in and for, I don't know what the number is, a couple of billion, buy out everyone, roll it up, and create one international boxing league. | ||
| Kind of like what UFC's done. | ||
| It's hard, but if they did it, It's almost like boxing now. | ||
| It's like if there were four different NFL football leagues. | ||
| So there wasn't one Super Lombardi trophy. | ||
| There wasn't one UFC belt. | ||
| People don't understand that. | ||
| Oh, I'm a UFC. I'm a WBO 140 pound champion. | ||
| He's an IBF 140 pound. | ||
| What? | ||
| If one person could roll it up... | ||
| I've asked Dana several times to do it. | ||
| To roll it up. | ||
| How much would it cost? | ||
| I mean, I would think... | ||
| You're pretty good at guessing missiles. | ||
| I would say... | ||
| I would say to really roll it up. | ||
| And buy all... | ||
|
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IBF, WBO, WA, WBC. Buy all the belts and get Eddie to... | |
| Because I put Eddie in charge of it. | ||
| I think he's the smartest guy in boxing. | ||
| Eddie Hearn. | ||
| The face of boxing at this point. | ||
| Bob Arum. | ||
| God love him. | ||
| He's 95. Yeah. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta get Eddie Hearns. | ||
| I don't know what Al Heyman's experience is, what he really... | ||
| De La Hoya, I don't... | ||
| Eddie Hearns, like, to me, the guy. | ||
| I like him. | ||
| Knows a lot about boxing. | ||
| You take Eddie and Dana, partner him up, have Ari broker the whole deal, right? | ||
| And probably 1.2 billion buys the whole thing. | ||
| And you then create a league, okay? | ||
| Mm. | ||
| Here's what I picked. | ||
| That's a good idea. | ||
| Okay, and then how about this? | ||
| What's the biggest fight you could make in UFC right now? | ||
| The biggest fight. | ||
| Or a huge fight? | ||
| The biggest... | ||
| Well, Francis Ngannou just left. | ||
| That would be the biggest fight. | ||
| If you could get Francis Ngannou versus John Jones. | ||
| John Jones and Ngannou, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that would be the biggest fight in history. | ||
| What's your best venue? | ||
| Is it Vegas? | ||
| Does it matter? | ||
| Madison Square Garden? | ||
| Vegas is kind of like Madison Square Garden. | ||
| You can't go wrong with Vegas or Madison Square Garden. | ||
| Okay, so let's go to Madison Square Garden just because I'm from New York. | ||
| So you have that fight, and let's think about the biggest fight in boxing right now. | ||
| Is it... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Terrence Crawford's talking about fighting Canelo. | ||
| Crawford-Canelo. | ||
| That would be the biggest fight. | ||
| At 100 and what? | ||
| 150? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| 150? | ||
| No, he's going to go up to 68. I was talking to him about him. | ||
| You're going to go up to 68. That's crazy. | ||
| Let's say that could happen. | ||
| It's hard for me to imagine that happening, right? | ||
| From 147, what did he just find out? | ||
| 147? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But he said he met Canelo. | ||
| He's like, he's kind of my height. | ||
| Canelo's, I think, shorter. | ||
| Yeah, he goes, just give me time to put on some weight. | ||
| He goes, I wouldn't do it immediately. | ||
| He goes, but how, like, six months to really put... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, look, Canelo's a monster. | ||
| He's a monster, and his power... | ||
| The fact that the guy knocked out Kovalev at 175, his power's unstoppable. | ||
| But... | ||
| So let's say that fight happens. | ||
| You've got Canelo Crawford at whatever weight, and you've got Jones... | ||
| Ngannou. | ||
| Ngannou, right? | ||
| So you fill up the garden. | ||
| I don't know who goes first. | ||
| Oh my god, you have both fights in one night? | ||
| Okay, the ring is an octagon. | ||
| You have the UFC fight. | ||
| You're there. | ||
| Whole thing. | ||
| Fight ends. | ||
| The premier fight. | ||
| The ring lifts up. | ||
| The octagon lifts up. | ||
| Flips over. | ||
| Drops a boxing ring down. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Drops a boxing ring down. | ||
| And in one night, one league, Dana owns all of it. | ||
| I pitched him this in Mexico. | ||
| How drunk are you? | ||
| I'm like, you don't understand! | ||
| And he's kind of going for it, but why not? | ||
| Combat sports, roll them up and clean it up. | ||
| Because boxing is fucked up. | ||
| Well, maybe the Saudis. | ||
| I mean, who has more money than them? | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| And they're also doing a lot of boxing events now. | ||
| Like, Tyson Fury vs. | ||
| Francis Ngannou. | ||
| Isn't that in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, so they've had some major fights in Saudi Arabia, and they have a lot of money. | ||
| They could do that. | ||
| Maybe someone's listening right now, and they'll go, you know what? | ||
| Hey, I like it. | ||
| Let's broker a deal. | ||
| Have you seen the line in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Let's pull it up, Jamie, because it's insane. | ||
| I was just in Europe, and I had lunch with this guy, Saudi guy. | ||
| He's like, what do you do? | ||
| He's like, well, I'm in charge of all the insurance. | ||
| For the line. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| So let's explain the line. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| And then he started telling me, like, this... | ||
| You think, like... | ||
| We think we know what money is. | ||
| This is where the money is. | ||
| So what this is, is some mega city that's many miles long, that they're building that's all completely integrated, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| So it's like one building. | ||
| No roads, look at this, read that. | ||
| No roads, cars, or emissions that will run on 100% renewable energy and 95% of the land will be preserved for nature. | ||
| People's health and well-being will be prioritized over transportation and infrastructure, unlike traditional cities. | ||
| That might be amazing to visit. | ||
| But fuck that. | ||
| Nine million people. | ||
| It's in the middle. | ||
| They're building this thing. | ||
| And it's like, I don't know. | ||
| Look how cool it looks. | ||
| Oh, it's insane. | ||
| Little pictures. | ||
| Scroll down, Jimmy. | ||
| Like, those photos. | ||
| Like, look at that. | ||
| But you can see actual construction. | ||
| They're building it now. | ||
| Like, I saw there's a whole city, you know, couple of thousand workers living out there in these little air-conditioned cubicles. | ||
| This guy was showing me. | ||
| This sort of brings us... | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That's so Star Wars. | ||
| They're building that shit. | ||
| That is so insane looking. | ||
| A revolution in civilization. | ||
| Nine million. | ||
| It might be dope to get a fucking spot there to visit. | ||
| It's like Dubai, right? | ||
| Remember when they were building the Palm Tree Islands and everyone thought it was crazy? | ||
|
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Look at what it looks like inside. | |
| That's insane. | ||
| Autonomous services. | ||
| Look, you got drones that are fucking delivering you food. | ||
| Bro, that might be sick. | ||
| Look how high it is! | ||
| It's higher than the Empire State Building! | ||
| They're building it now. | ||
| It's 200 miles wide? | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
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It's on. | |
| Mirror glass facade. | ||
| I want to see the Black Mirror episode. | ||
| Bro, this literally is science fiction. | ||
| Science fiction turned reality. | ||
| Saudi Arabia is going off. | ||
| But it's what we were talking about before. | ||
| If you have endless money, like with the nuclear submarines and the battleships, if you have endless money, you can get a lot of cool shit done. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| But what's disturbing to you and I think to I as people that you like to think about everybody, like where's this money coming from? | ||
| Taxes? | ||
| Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into new schools? | ||
| Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into cleaning up communities and stopping crime? | ||
| Why aren't we putting an enormous amount into healthcare? | ||
| Because the companies that make the weapon systems are not going to let it happen. | ||
| It's just this ecosystem of money I think it was Truman. | ||
| It was either Truman or Roosevelt who said, be careful because we're going to have an economy that is forever interconnected to our military. | ||
| It was Eisenhower in his departing speech. | ||
| Eisenhower, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have an economy that is now linked to the industrial-military industrial complex. | ||
| So you can't separate them. | ||
| You can't turn it off. | ||
| But I'm not even saying turn it off. | ||
| I'm saying if you have enough money to send how many billion dollars to Ukraine, where was that money when we needed infrastructure in cities? | ||
| Where was that money when we needed better education? | ||
| But where was it? | ||
| It's crazy that we prioritize certain things to the tune of Just insane amounts of money. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| No one's asking this question. | ||
| Okay, this is not even a commentary on whether or not we should be funding Ukraine. | ||
| I'm just saying, if you can do that, why haven't you looked at the state of emergency that exists in many of the cities in America? | ||
| Oh, fuck yes. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| It should be a statement. | ||
| It should be on the front of everybody's lips. | ||
| It should. | ||
| If you can put... | ||
| 20 nuclear missiles with warheads guidance systems propulsion systems on a billion-dollar submarine 20 missiles yeah and put them on however many subs One of which being detonated means we're done anyway Why can't we take two or three of those fucking missiles and do something? | ||
| According to what's going on in Ukraine because we we don't have to because they're doing both They're doing both. | ||
| They're funding Ukraine, and they're building these weapons systems. | ||
| I don't think it has to be an either-or, or you even have to, like, have less of them. | ||
| But it's just like, where did you guys get all this money? | ||
| And why didn't you use it for stuff that we need? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I understand that it's all inflation. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I understand what the problems that it causes, spending all this money and just printing all this money. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But I'm saying, like, maybe there would be an overall net benefit for the country and for all the human beings involved. | ||
| How many less people would we have that were addicted to opiates if they had a better situation in their life? | ||
| And how much of that could be fixed if we invested money in it? | ||
| How many lives can we save? | ||
| How many people's lives can we enhance? | ||
| How many trajectories of their life could we completely change for the better forever? | ||
| I bet a fuckload. | ||
| I bet a fuckload. | ||
| And if they just invested in people the way they invest in other shit, I thought about that, like, if you could actually see what it was like when we started, like the literal, if you get into the weeds on how we armed Ukraine, right? | ||
| So you've got a bunch of 20-year-old Ukrainian, whatever, kids, college students, electricians, plumbers, whatever they were doing, the trucks pull up and the equipment that gets presented to them, night vision goggles, drones, drone technology, You know, Kevlar body suits, the weapon systems and the clothes and the value of that. | ||
| And you think about we're just we're giving it. | ||
| OK, I understand why we're giving it. | ||
| But think about those trucks rolling up and the amount of money being handed through equipment to young Ukrainian men. | ||
| What comparable value or asset we're giving to young American men of the same age, it just doesn't happen. | ||
| But we can do it. | ||
| We can fly all the way over there and deliver it. | ||
| I mean, the amount of money we're putting into the hands of all these young soldier slash men from Ukraine compared to what that money could do in our cities, it's worth, I think, talking about. | ||
| It is worth talking about. | ||
| It's not some radical socialist idea that we should fix cities. | ||
| It's in everybody's best interest. | ||
| Also, just for the human race, it's in everyone's best interest. | ||
| The world would be better off if there was less people who were losing. | ||
| And what's the best way to stop that? | ||
| Give them a better start to their life. | ||
| So what's the best way to do that? | ||
| You have to improve upon community somehow. | ||
| I'm not an expert in this, but I recognize that's a giant issue. | ||
| I don't know what you would do, but I would imagine there's got to be some strategies to improve things. | ||
| Well, schools are good. | ||
| Like schools, parks, community centers, counseling, places where people can have healthy food and be safe. | ||
| Schools and teachers. | ||
| And teach them things. | ||
| Have places where people can teach them whatever it is. | ||
| Things outside of how to play music, martial arts. | ||
| The more people can learn, they have opportunities to do things, the better off everyone's going to be. | ||
| The more safe they feel. | ||
| The better off everyone's gonna be. | ||
| The more human beings that have a better shot at having an enjoyable life, the better off we'll all be. | ||
| But the fact that we don't think about it that way, everybody just goes about their business and thinks about themselves, but then complains about all these problems that are happening in our cities. | ||
| While you've got a Ukraine flag in your fucking Twitter bio. | ||
| You know, it's wild. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Yeah, and I just go back to the time in Pearl Harbor when I was getting toured around that sub and I'm just trying to do the math in my head. | ||
| Yes, it's beautiful. | ||
| Are you going to do a piece on this? | ||
| Are you going to do... | ||
| Yeah, so I want to do... | ||
| So then it starts getting, like, you go down the rabbit hole of it and you look up the ten biggest arms companies, weapons manufacturers, and you start looking up the CEO pay packages and, like, you start getting a sense of how... | ||
| Like, it gets pretty dark pretty fast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look up, like, you know, just... | ||
| Satan's real. | ||
|
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Yeah, fuck it. | |
| I mean, this whole conversation started when I'm like, well, okay, I learned this about Big Pharma because, okay, I've heard conspiracy theories on Big Pharma and be careful, but until I really went deep with Purdue, I understood it intellectually, but I never viscerally felt it like, oh shit, this is real. | ||
| This isn't some left-wing conspiracy theory that there's greedy people out there manipulating the FDA. No, this is actually fucking real. | ||
| And they got away with it. | ||
| And they got away with it. | ||
| And I'm not saying that... | ||
| I support the fuck out of our troops. | ||
| And I have. | ||
| And I do. | ||
| My father was a Marine. | ||
| The time I've spent working in that space, 100% yes, support. | ||
| However, when I see all the other people that are making money off of the backs of like, at the end of the day, what I observed when I went to Iraq was not big technology out there, you know, saving the day. | ||
| These were 25 year old men. | ||
| Like kicking in doors, fighting a war that nobody cared about back home anyway because it was over there. | ||
| So when I see like all this money and all this tech being thrown into systems that like, I don't know, are we ever going to really use this shit? | ||
| Because if we do, It's game over anyway. | ||
| I see all these people making so much money. | ||
| I'm like, this feels like we're in the same waters that we were swimming in when we were dealing with Purdue Pharma. | ||
| So yeah, I would like to do something in this space. | ||
| Well, listen, Painkiller's fucking fantastic. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Like everything you do. | ||
| You've done so many fucking great movies, man. | ||
| Lone Survivor's incredible. | ||
| You know, you're the shit. | ||
| So, appreciate you very much. | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| And ladies and gentlemen, please watch it. | ||
| It's on Netflix. | ||
| It's fucking great. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
|
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Thank you. |
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