Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin join Joe Rogan to dissect modern chaos, from Afghanistan’s "resolved" trans debate to AI-driven sex dolls risking societal collapse by replacing real connections. Rogan critiques manufactured conflicts like microaggressions and censorship—defending Elon Musk against Australia’s violent video ban—while Kisin warns of hate speech laws enabling arbitrary control. They expose absurdities, from Scotland’s misapplied hate speech rules to JFK’s assassination cover-ups, and debate conspiracy theories, false flags (e.g., Gulf of Tonkin), and government suppression. Jordan Peterson’s pragmatic influence contrasts with polarized protests, like "from the river to the sea," where slogans often lack nuance. Foster and Kisin advocate for humanizing opponents and solutions-focused dialogue, while Rogan praises Austin’s collaborative comedy scene over Hollywood’s stifling culture, emphasizing organic networks over ideological rigidity as keys to progress. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I think that's a real issue with human beings.
I think we're just so hardwired to be prepared for tribal conflict, predators attacking.
I think it's just inescapable in the very fiber of our core.
Like, whatever it is, whatever our DNA is, whatever epigenetic memory, whatever the fuck is in our system, it just seems to expect Horrible things happening, and if they're not, they find mundane things to be horrible.
Right.
Microaggressions.
The dumbest shit to be upset with.
Because you don't have real shit to be upset with.
And so you go looking, and then also the, one of the things with microaggressions and a lot of those things is people find value, like perceived value in being a victim of something.
And so they start pushing and they realize, I'm getting results by pushing it.
We were talking earlier about people that kind of create fake narratives because they see a grift, they see a business to get into.
It's not really their opinion and how annoying those people are to talk to.
That's what that is.
It's like you're not really upset.
You just know that you can say you're upset.
And then people go, oh, I'm sorry you're upset.
And then all of a sudden we have this little scenario where you're the highlight.
We're programmed to want to search for conflict, look for conflict, engage in conflict.
And it's always a way, just to take it back to the staff room point, I found it so interesting on a psychological level that people would bicker about the smallest of things and they would blow it up into this big thing because it was easy to teach.
You had an easy job, comparatively speaking.
You're not gonna get that upset about a microaggression when someone's about to throw a chair at your head.
I almost feel like there should be a nationally mandated morning run that everybody has to go on.
Like the whole country.
It's 7 o'clock in the morning.
Everyone's got to run a mile.
I know that mile's not even that far, but just fucking one mile, everybody.
You know how much better the country's attitude would be if we all agreed to have like a mandated morning workout together?
It sounds crazy, like that's the solution, but what it is, it's injecting a difficult, a physically and mentally difficult thing to do first, especially for people that are out of shape, to do first thing in the morning.
A physical, mental challenge, the first thing of your day.
And I guarantee, the rest of the day, people will be like, eh, what's the big deal?
A lot of the things would be like, what's the big deal?
And also, you'd realize the value of doing something that's difficult to do, which most people don't do, ever.
Most people run away from that, like it's a fucking nuclear fire.
I think one of the other reasons as well that people are struggling meaning and purpose is that You know, this whole thing about the population not being replaced enough and we're not having enough kids.
Well, it's not so much that women aren't having as many kids as they used to.
It's that fewer women are having kids.
That means far fewer people are now parents.
And like when you become a parent, it sort of changes your outlook on things.
And if you had a lack of meaning and purpose, you quickly find it at least in providing for this tiny thing that is entirely dependent on you.
You know, you go down the wrong path and you're a fucking accountant and you're fully invested and you've got a mortgage and all this bullshit and you've got a family to take care of, but you really want to be a comic?
Francis, you're fucked.
You know, you're fucked.
And if you go all the way down the road with a bad woman and a woman that you're not compatible with, or maybe you together are bad, whatever the fuck it is, find a good one.
And I have friends that are in hell and they stay for the kids.
And I have friends that are in hell and they don't even have kids.
And they both do it to each other.
It's not just the man.
It's not just the woman.
Some people just don't work together.
It just doesn't work.
And if you get one of those pregnant, dude.
And then they do things to hurt you, and you try to hurt each other, and they try to get more money out of you, and they want to take you to court, and they want to turn your kids against you.
I can tell you horror stories, but I won't because some of them are too personal, you know, my friends' stories.
But one of them is just so fucking insane, I mean, I can't even get into it, but it ruined his life.
It took 15 years to resolve.
It completely destroyed his life, completely destroyed him financially.
That's the other thing that becoming a parent does to you is it makes you more vulnerable because you now have this thing that you care about more than anything.
This view of just the vibrancy of this life, these trees and the grass.
Just take it in.
Every now and then just take it in and fucking enjoy this beautiful experience.
If you were on your deathbed right now, if you were some 98-year-old guy with just nothing left, looking back at you at this age, you'd be like, God damn, why didn't I have more fun?
I had this kind of like epiphany once on psychedelics and it was just...
I just think we don't have enough fun.
We just don't.
And I'm as guilty of this as the rest of people where I'm just like, right, I'm going to do here and, you know, and I've got to do like this spot or whatever else.
So you've got to do it and I've got to make sure that it's got to be perfect and it's got to do this and this and this.
you go, is that actually what I got into this for?
Did I actually get into to be so rigid, to live my life on train tracks?
Or did I get into it to play, have fun, meet people, enjoy life?
So the thing about the difficult work, difficult work of like putting together a set or putting together a joke, like I literally fell asleep at my fucking keyboard last night.
I was sitting in front of Microsoft Word and I just nodded out.
Yeah, you could just do weights with jeans, but you shouldn't just do weights.
Cardio should be like vitamins.
You need it like you need everything else.
You need protein, you need fats, you need vitamins.
You need cardio.
Cardio is important.
Your system should be stressed.
Your system should be able to perform work for long periods of time.
If it can't, it's a bad system.
And if you just want a system that looks good at the beach, that's dumb.
That's dumb.
That's a stupid thing.
Like, you can have both things.
You could have a system that looks good at the beach, but also have a system that you can run.
You could do stuff.
You could put in, like...
If you have to hike somewhere, you can make it there.
Some people won't make it, you know?
Like, that's one thing to understand.
Like, you're trying to get over a mountain...
Not everybody's gonna make it.
There's a lot of us that are out there in society listening to this right now.
They can't go over a hill, a really big hill.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
So if you go to the gym and you just do like bench press, and you know, you just do like fucking trap pull downs and shit, and you got a big upper body, and then you can't go over a hill, and you could die, like something's chasing you, you can't get away.
But let me just say also I'm a hypocrite because one of my favorite guys to watch online is this guy Tom Haviland and this guy is this psycho that lives in Australia and he was some Australia special forces guy, I think.
He's What is he, like, 6'9", 360 pounds, and he wears, like, work clothes when he works out, and he's squatting, like, I don't know, 1,000 pounds or something, and carrying giant fucking barrels and shit.
He's a freak, but everything he does is in, like, work boots and work pants and work shirts.
Yeah, like his whole feed is this kind of shit, like weird kind of bizarre weightlifting movements, zurcher squats, farmer's carries.
And he's got an interesting philosophy about that, I think.
What I'd read, I don't know if this is disinformation too, but it's that like carrying things apparently is very underrated in terms of like your ability to like increase your overall strength.
Like walking with things is really good.
Which a lot of people don't do.
Actually, picking up weight and carrying it around is very good for just your overall general strength.
A lot of people do them with a kettlebell in each hand, and I do that too.
But they say one of the best ways to do it is actually a kettlebell in one hand and then just go back the other way with it in the other hand because it's really awkward.
Because you're not balancing it out with the weight on the other side.
So all of your stabilizer muscles have to work overtime to keep that thing in a certain position, whereas it would be kind of like locked out with both arms if you had the weight in both hands.
It's a thing, there's certain positions, like that one when you're standing up and you hold your foot out extended, like if you have a weak lower back, that one can be really tricky.
You could be crushing it in every area of your life.
You're like, yeah, you know what, I am the shit.
I'm doing this, I'm doing that.
You get to the, you know, you get to the, this didn't happen, you get to the, what's it called, the pec deck or whatever it is, and then you grab that thing and you try and slide it off where the weights are, and then you're struggling to do it, and you're like, yeah, I'll just do this weight.
What was that movie where they're all being like carried around on these, like they're all fat and they're all getting, it's like a kids animated movie.
Was it Wall-E or something like that?
Where there's like this spaceship and they're all on these like pods that they just get.
I think that was Wall-E. Was that Wall-E? And they're constantly sucking on a milkshake or whatever, just endless sugar and calories.
Yeah, because, you know, you guys were talking about, you know, if there's a decline in population, right?
That means, and there's like a severe decline in America, the amount of men that are single is very high.
The amount of men that haven't had sex in like over a year is very high.
And there's a lot of people that are just locked into their computers, and they're just on their computer all the time.
It's super, super common.
If something came along that allowed, like, with these exponential increases in technology, What you're seeing with these AI programs now, which are really stunning visuals that they can create in seconds, in minutes, they can have a short film.
It's crazy what they can do now.
If they can do that with a physical moving object, if they can get A real humanoid object that has perfect features and is your girlfriend and is warm and sweet and gives you everything you want from a human.
Like if I was artificial intelligence, I wouldn't kill everybody.
I would just let them die off.
Like, the most humane way to do it is to let them realize that they're unnecessary and there's no need to have kids when you can fuck your Jennifer Lopez robot.
And that's what they would do.
They would just live with their robots.
And no one would have, like, real relations anymore.
It would go away so quick.
Then they started having robot babies, so you don't have to, like, for women that want kids, like, you just have a robot baby.
Since you can't have a regular baby, they'll just give you this baby.
She wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
She's very, very good, based out of the UK. And the first time we had her on, you know how we always ask, what's the one thing we're not talking about at the end of the show?
This was her answer.
She was like, I think sex robots are coming and they're going to ruin everything because the male desire to do things, to create, to build, to innovate, to research, to stand up for what you believe in, to fight, all of that is tied in.
To wanting to raise your status to be with a woman 100% and so you take that away You're gonna be left with a bunch of fuckers on pods sipping milkshakes.
I think it's gonna happen before we even realize it's happened I think it's gonna happen very quickly because I think once those things get implemented we're gonna see it just a giant steep drop off of childbirth and And of regular relationships.
And what happens to women?
What do they do?
Because they don't have that same desire.
They want to actually emotionally connect to someone.
I don't know if it's a true quote, but I remember reading it and thinking it was, and I'm not sure if it is now.
George Harrison, or someone who attributed to George Harrison, said, All I need from a woman is to be attracted to her.
Everything else I can get from a man.
There's people that think that way, right?
So if you're a guy and you think that way, and then all of a sudden you have your robot fuck doll, and you're just hanging with your buddies.
Well, you've got to be just honest about what you're doing.
I'm certainly generalizing.
But I think there's going to be a whole lot less women that want a robot fuck boy.
They're not going to want a robot fuck boy.
They're not going to respect that guy.
It's not a real person with real struggles that can really provide.
That's just like some robot dick that plows them when they come home from the club, which maybe that's great.
Maybe that's fine, but I have a feeling it won't be.
I have a feeling that the ingrained human reward systems in us that were designed to ensure that we replicate, those are all gonna get fucked up by robot fuck dolls.
Men and women are the basic building block of human society.
It's what we evolved to be and it's why that you talked earlier about finding your soul maze.
I think, look, this is a massive generalization, and obviously it won't be true for some people, but I think it's very difficult to be truly fulfilled until you have that and until you have kids.
It's very difficult.
People can do it.
People manage it.
People find other ways.
But it's such a basic building block of our evolutionary history that it's going to be very hard to live without those things being in place, without those things being available.
And no matter how nice and pretty and compliant your AI girlfriend is, it ain't the real thing.
And it's also as well, I don't think people talk about this enough, is that you look at a lot of guys, and when they get with the right woman, they change.
They become a better person in every aspect of their life.
Women tend to have a civilizing influence on men, and if that is taken away, then all you've got is something that is going to appeal to males-based instincts.
Which is to fuck, to have sex.
Alright, I've done that.
I've satisfied that biological urge.
You know what?
Let's go for another dopamine hit.
Let's go for a dopamine hit here.
Let's go smoke some weed.
And then let's go and play video games at whatever time in the morning.
The problem is a lot of the people that want to cancel people have cancelable offenses in their own past.
A big part of them.
So I think that's all going to be out there.
All thoughts are going to be out there.
I think it's a matter of time, and I don't think it's that long.
I think within a decade we're going to have some ability, because they're getting so close to it, There was a Japanese study where they got some sort of visual evidence of dreams.
It's not like you can see the dream, but they're getting close.
They're zeroing in on particular images that people were experiencing while they were dreaming and they think they could decipher those.
They got that guy wearing the first Neuralink patient, who's wearing Neuralink in his head now, and he's operating a computer for the first time, paralyzed.
And he's playing video games, he's talking to people, it's wild.
So we know that's already been done.
Okay, MRI scans reveal what we see in dreams.
Japanese researchers unveil visuals with 60% accuracy.
Using innovative MRI scans in pivotal Kyoto studies showcasing a breakthrough in sleep science.
60% accuracy is bananas.
So this is like Morse code.
It's not...
You know, having a FaceTime chat.
That FaceTime chat's coming.
Okay, Morse code, we had to do that first.
Got through the smoke signals, out there fucking making circles in the desert.
And now, instead of smoke signals, we have impossible technology that anybody a hundred years ago would have thought of as complete magic.
Well, this is gonna make that look like a fucking walk in the park with your friends.
It's gonna make it look it's gonna make it seem so mundane that that what that shit is gonna do is unite all brains all brains united in the weirdest sort of hive mind situation that anybody could ever You couldn't imagine what that would be like.
Just like we couldn't imagine in the 1700s what it's like to just get on Twitter and read news about Beirut.
You know, how could you know?
How could you instantaneously get news about another part of the world that you're nowhere near?
In certain circumstances, but when they get old, it gets rough.
It gets rough.
Because men are mean.
They're mean and you're an old man and he doesn't want to suck your dick anymore.
Sorry.
They want to go get a young guy.
And that's the difference between an old man and woman couple.
They're just hanging out together versus an old guy who no one wants to fuck him anymore and he has to try to pay young guys to be with him and then it gets ugly and sad.
The reality is without all those natural processes that are in place that you don't even understand until they're actually happening, if you don't have them at all, you don't have them at all in this thing.
This thing wasn't bonded to its mother.
It didn't have like fights with its sister where they made up.
It didn't have like someone who's mean to them at school that became their best friend.
Didn't have all that stuff?
None of that stuff?
So is that a demon?
Like, what is that?
What is that?
What is this new life form that's smarter than you that has no real emotions because it has no real stake in the game because it was created with a fucking 3D printer?
What is that?
That thing you're sticking your dick into, sir?
What is that?
You're literally fucking a demon and it's the thing that's going to overcome us.
And if it overcomes us just by seducing us into putting our seed inside of it instead of women, because you can't be bothered, because then you can't play Call of Duty all day.
For a lot of young guys, especially if they don't have status, so it's very difficult for them to get a woman that they're attracted to.
They don't have money, they're not attractive, whatever, fill in the blank.
If they can just have the literal hottest woman that's ever lived, and they can have sex with her, and it costs like, what, 25 grand?
Yeah, Dune is great, but it's not along these lines.
So what I mean is like when we first started getting the technology for space travel, you had these people like Isaac Asimov and robotics was coming.
And they would have really interesting stories and books exploring the idea of, you know, what does that look like when there are robots?
What are the – how would you run that?
What would be the potential downfalls and stuff like that?
And it was – you know, I remember when I was in my – as a teenager, it was the golden age for that kind of stuff.
And now we seem to have these giant breakthroughs coming and we don't seem to have enough authors and artists thinking about some of the dilemmas involved and really kind of trying to think that through through a story lens about what the impact might be.
And that's interesting to me because I think we just genuinely have no fucking idea what's coming.
Well, I also think that the leaps between the initial rocketry program, NASA, Apollo program, and then what could come next is a lot easier to chart out.
And they were wrong about a lot of shit.
There was a show called Space 1999. I remember I used to watch it when I was a kid.
Wow, 1999, they're in space.
Everything was super futuristic, crazy, Star Wars-like in 1999. That's what they thought.
I mean, there's some manufacturers that have made one.
One guy has made one.
I think it's a Chinese company.
And it's like a drone, essentially.
It's like you have a single seat in the center of it, and you close it like a helicopter, and you have drone, you know, like the same kind of propellers that drones have.
So you just operate it like a drone.
There's a couple other ones, but there's nothing that's commercially viable where they're gonna be able to sell them as many as they sell Teslas.
It's not there yet, but it's probably not gonna get there.
When the AI hits, Everything stops.
When it goes live, when it becomes sentient, it's literal Skynet.
You're going to have an organic thing that's made out of electronics.
It's going to be a life form.
And we're going to give birth to this stupid fucking thing.
And I think everything's going to be doomed.
I think we're going to have a government that's run by AI because it's going to be the most efficient.
And then who controls the AI? Oh, the most equitable, ethical people.
It could be real weird.
It could be real weird because it's going to be so much smarter than all the human beings combined.
And you're going to be able to use it to manipulate people.
And if people are still allowed to vote, then you could use AI to sort of just manipulate them perfectly into leaning.
They'll figure out, like, what is the issue that keeps you from voting for Biden over Trump?
What is the issue that keeps you from voting independent for RFK Jr.?
Let's see what it is.
Monkey with the data and let's get you information that stimulates that part of your brain just enough for all those fence-sitters go to the other side and then who knows what's going on?
Who knows who's running anything?
If AI video is so goddamn good they could take a photo of you and have you say anything.
So who knows what Putin's saying and who knows what Zelensky's saying and who knows what anybody's saying anywhere in five years.
She's saying he should be locked up for what he's doing on social media.
Like, what is he doing?
I want to know what.
Imagine.
Imagine that's your threshold for locking someone up.
Allowing people to talk?
What is he doing that's so egregious?
I feel like if you make that statement, if you're a person that's an elected official and you make that statement, like, this person should be locked up.
If it's not for something very specific, you're terrifying me, because you're in a position of power and you just want to just flippantly lock people in a cage because they disagree with you?
It's going to be, yeah, you're going to open up the door to more hate, but you're also going to open up the door to free conversations and people are going to figure out what's what.
And that's the only way it really works.
It doesn't work by government mandate, especially when we've seen, particularly with our government, with the Twitter files, how there have been people that worked within the government that contacted Twitter and tried to get Factual information taken down and trying to get the accounts suppressed of people that were experts in the field that had a differing opinion other than what was being promoted.
That's crazy.
You can't have that.
Like, that can't be a thing.
Because that's not good for the government.
It's not good for us.
It's not good for anybody to allow that kind of shit.
It's un-American.
You should be ashamed that you want to do that.
It's unpatriotic.
You shouldn't be allowed to do it just because you're in a sneaky secret squirrel position Where you can contact Twitter through some government agent and then they feel pressured and then they give in to something that you're doing that's super unethical.
And you have to fight off that urge to control people.
You have to recognize that if you're in a position of power, Whether you're a cult leader or a president or whatever the fuck you are, there's this desire to control people that gets people to that position in the first place.
This ego that makes them think, I should be the one that talks for the whole group.
I know it's better for all of them.
And as soon as you start using that in an unethical way like that, like censoring people, especially censoring factual information from experts, you're un-American.
That's un-American.
It's unpatriotic.
In fact, it's...
It's one of the grossest things you could do in a place that values free speech.
And we've seen so tangibly what's come out of this country, like culturally.
The music, the comedy, the literature, all the crazy shit, the movies that have come from this experiment in self-government.
And the only way it works is if you let people work it out.
You gotta let people talk.
And you're gonna get people that are wrong, and you're gonna get people that are racist, you're gonna get people that are sexist, and you're gonna get people that are homophobic, you're gonna get all that.
But you're also gonna get people that battle those people, you're gonna get people that have better arguments than those people, you get people that sort of start posting links and quotes, and people start figuring things out for themselves.
And that's the only way this works.
It's the only way.
You can't let these people that are elected officials decide what you can and can't consume.
Because I don't know you.
I know the you that ran for mayor.
I don't know you.
You might be a piece of shit.
You might be a sociopath.
You might be a smiling con artist that tricked a bunch of people because nobody wants to run and everybody who does run sucks.
It's like you're literally boxing with five-year-olds.
Like, oh, you're the champ.
Yay.
No one's doing it.
No one's doing it.
Like, no real quality human beings are out there running for office in Los Angeles.
They're not running for—I mean, there was that Rick Caruso guy.
They didn't give him a chance.
He could have done something.
That's a rare thing when you have a very wealthy person who wants to try to save a city.
But you know, Francis and I, we've been warning about this for ages, and most people pretend it's not happening, they ignore it, and it's like, first, a couple of years ago, a guy called Jerry Sadowitz, who's super funny, Super offensive comic.
Like, none of his stuff is online because it's too offensive.
But you go and see him.
He's absolutely incredible.
So they pulled his show from the Edinburgh Festival.
And we were like, this is a problem.
It's like, no, no, there's no problem.
Now, you literally have the police potentially arresting comedians.
There's people that I think are running for office and they're legitimately trying to do Well, for the world.
They're trying to make a better place.
They think they have ideas that would sort out some of the problems that we have, and they're one of us.
That's real.
But then there's these fucking people, the rest of them, they're just these partisan fucking robots, and they just get connected to the system, and they know which wheels to grease, and they all get connected together, and they support each other, and it's just...
And even with good, well-intentioned people, I think as we were talking about free speech, there are some certain principles that have got to be there because good intentions can be misused.
Yeah, which is interesting because it's obviously so heavily influenced.
But, you know, to the point that we were talking about, you know, you see even something like diversity.
The Scottish First Minister, there was a very famous speech where he came out and he listed people who were working in certain places, I can't remember, in certain parts of government, and he just went, white, white, white, white.
And do you know what happened is the week they passed that bill, But there were more reports of hate speech on that speech that he gave than there'd been for years.
It's such a basic principle of our civilization that people should be free to speak their mind.
And it's important at every level.
Like our armies fight better because they're less hierarchical so the soldier on the ground can pass information up the chain of command without being afraid.
It matters in every single aspect of what we do.
It's the reason for our scientific progress.
It's the reason for our technological progress.
It's the reason, as you say, for the cultural creativity that we have here that they don't have in other places.
It's the bedrock of our civilization.
And you've got well-intentioned quote-unquote people running around trying to tear it down.
I had this experience when I last...
No, not the last one.
The penultimate time I did Question Time, which is like a big discussion show in the UK on TV. And they, it's a, there's like five people from different perspectives, different angles.
And before they start, they do one question that they don't broadcast.
There's like a warm up, right?
And the question at the time was Donald Trump had just been unbanned from Facebook.
And they were like, well, should that have happened?
And I, you know, made the controversial point that the former president of the most powerful country in the world should be allowed to say something in public.
And then they went to the left-wing politician, the Labour Party politician on the panel, and she went without missing a bit, she went, we must have the safest internet in the world.
And I was like, what, safer than North Korea?
They've completely lost their understanding that there is a trade-off between freedom and safety.
And when you go for more freedom, yes, it means there's less safety from people's hurty words or whatever, but you get more freedom and that's actually worth it.
And it's always these people that want to assume those positions of power that have this sort of fucking limited view of human psychology.
And the way we accumulate and process information, that it has to be We have to be able to talk about stuff.
If you can't just talk about stuff, you get one side of the story, and that side of the story's gonna favor whoever the fuck is in control of what you get to talk about.
Period.
It's always how it's been.
And to think that it's gonna be different now because we're better and we're more civilized, well, we can trust our leaders now.
Like, no!
No, it's a human thing.
There's term limits, so you can only get corrupted so much over eight years, and hopefully someone could say, this guy sucks, let's try a whole new crew of people, see how we run this thing.
You see, that's why I found COVID so fascinating, because that was when the mask slipped, and you saw some leaders, and you were like, okay, you're trying to do your best, and then you saw the petty little authoritarians come out.
And you really saw them.
And then what was interesting about it as well was that there was some things that were so funny because they were so ridiculous.
Do you remember in New Zealand when a guy got arrested for transporting KSC across county lines?
Yeah, and that was the whole thing with COVID. And for me, and I think for probably Constantine and you as well, that was a real wake-up moment for me, where I was actually going, OK, how much of this is about keeping people safe, which I can understand?
And by the way, I can understand an overreaction as well when the virus was about to hit.
I remember saying to Constantine, we're going to bank episodes.
They had to show that they had some sort of a measure of a plan.
In California, the big one was closing the outside dining.
I've said this before, so I apologize for people who've heard it, but my friend, his brother, worked on the whole COVID force in Los Angeles.
And they were closing outside dining because there was a spike in cases.
And he goes, but there's no evidence that outside dining, you're going to kill these businesses.
She goes, it's about the optics.
So, about the optics, to make a decision that kills businesses.
Like, these people were barely hanging on.
They were only able to serve people outside, you know?
I mean, who knows how many bartenders and waitresses were just fucked.
The restaurant owners, fucked.
Everybody got fucked.
And it was about the optics.
That's just dumb people.
That person should not have that position of power.
There's no fucking way.
That person, to make that kind of a decision, should have to debate a champion of the restaurant industry.
Should have to debate a champion of health.
Should have to debate a champion who understands, like, how is this stuff being transmitted?
Is it not being transmitted at all outside?
Is that real true?
What is the safety threshold of outside dining?
Have someone fucking talk about you can't just wave a magic wand and decide that everybody has to go home That's crazy and so many people lost decades of their lives decades of their lives work and and it goes back to the importance of debate the importance of free speech yes one of the most Dreadful and terrible ideas that was allowed to propagate.
And we've come to this point where you just see this stasis because terrible ideas are allowed to flourish without people going, no, you can't become a woman.
And the thing as well, to your point, Francis, I feel like we've got to a point where it's become quite hard to criticize people's ideas without people thinking that you're criticizing the person.
I mean, it happened with your interview with Tucker.
Tucker said some things that people didn't agree with, and I think rightly, and they pointed out some of the gaps in what he was saying.
But lots of people defended him on the basis that he was being attacked personally, even though people were simply disagreeing with a particular thing that he said.
I didn't understand the science enough to argue it, unfortunately.
If Brett was in my position, it would have been much better with that subject.
I think there's...
Tucker has a very...
I like him, first of all, a lot.
He's a very nice guy.
I've got to hang out with him a couple times.
I hung out with him at the UFC. I had dinner with him with Lex.
And then I brought him on stage to kill Tony.
Didn't even know he was going to go on there.
And went out and handled it amazingly.
He's a good guy.
He's also bitterly embattled and has been for a long time, and I think that can make you more aggressive or shittier about certain things.
And in that regard, he's handled himself pretty well.
He's pretty smart about it.
He doesn't use a computer.
He doesn't watch television.
He just has a phone.
He does everything, schedules everything through his phone, and that's it.
And he's managed to sort of filter himself out.
But...
He's got a very religious bend to a lot of the things that he believes.
And, you know, he's a smart guy.
You're allowed to have that.
But he believes God created people.
And he has this belief that he operates from.
And that makes...
The universe is so crazy, the idea of God is not that crazy to me.
It's just not.
I don't think it's any more crazy than anything.
I think maybe the universe is God.
Maybe that's what's going on.
Maybe there's this like constant creative force that's so immense you can't even possibly calculate it.
And that's God.
And he's got some ideas about spiritual things that are interesting, like about good and evil and these UAPs, the UAPs being spiritual things.
But it seems like, with all respect, I feel like that's what he wants to think.
Do you know that he wants to think that they've always been here and they're spiritual things?
And he might be right.
But it is also possible that there's a life form that's so advanced that it can avoid detection anytime it wants and then slowly trickles out little bits of information to us.
Whether it's a crashed vehicle or letting a vehicle be seen or hovering over Phoenix.
Do whatever it wants to do and then It fades away again, and then every decade or so as human beings evolve, it introduces more and more to the landscape, which if you kind of looked at it on a graph, seems to be the case.
And oddly seems to be the case that it's like primarily happening in the United States.
Like if you look at the difference between the UFO sightings around the world and the UFO sightings in the United States, we're locked in.
Also, as an American, I have to say, it's probably because we're the shit.
And if I was an alien, what am I going to do?
Go to Czechoslovakia?
Get the fuck out of here.
I'm going to go check out San Francisco.
Look at all the shit in the streets.
Look at all the needles.
These people are crazy.
I think there's probably both things going on.
I think there's probably some sort of extra-dimensional possibility that I think occurs during psychedelic drugs and during certain states of altered consciousness that I have a feeling you're tuning into something that's not always available, but probably is always there.
And then there's probably a physical element of things coming here from somewhere else.
Because we do that.
It just seems so duh.
Like, allegedly, we went to the moon.
But we definitely sent rovers to Mars.
We definitely send satellites into space to take incredible imagery of Jupiter.
We definitely do all that.
Why would we not think that another species would do that?
Especially if they get to some position where they're using some unique novel form of propulsion that manipulates gravity and they don't have to worry about g-forces.
They just appear places, which seems to be like what they think these things are doing.
Have you heard about that?
There's a story about this Chinese scientist that was working on anti-gravity and she came from China to the United States to work on anti-gravity and she was working on some anti-gravity propulsion system and then vanished.
I was reading about it the other day and I remember like someone – you guys are perfect to talk about this because that would be the ultimate thing that you'd have to keep secret from another country.
Because if you have espionage, if you have people that have infiltrated your universities, they certainly do.
And if you have people who have infiltrated your military contractors, they certainly do.
But if you're making something that is some sort of a gravity propulsion system and you've made a breakthrough, you're not going to put that on wired.com.
You're not going to broadcast that on CNN. You're not going to tell anybody that.
Because if the other countries find out, if the other superpowers, if China and Russia find out that we have some sort of a gravity propulsion, everyone's going to die.
Solving the mystery of Huntsville's brilliant anti-gravity scientist, Dr. Ning Li Sun talks about her mom's career and legacy, along with the Internet's obsession with her disappearance.
In the late 90s, she claimed to have created anti-gravity devices that were fully functional.
And this was big news in both scientific journals and mainstream press.
In 1997, Dr. Lee continued to expand on her concept and conduct more experiments.
She published papers describing the anomalous weight changes in objects suspected over a rotating superconductor.
To say her work referred to as taming gravity could change the world is an understatement.
Taming gravity would drastically change the way we transport on every level.
Humans could travel the world at ease and we could finally get our hands on those sweet hoverboards from Back to the Future.
So, did she really do it?
So what happened to her?
In 99, Lee left UAH to start her own company, AC Gravity, and commercialized a device based on her theories.
Oh, you fucked up, lady.
Her colleagues obviously believed in her work as a chair of UAH's physics department, Larry Smalley, Also departed the university to join their public records show that in 2001 the US Department of Defense gave AC Gravity a grant for $448,970 to research the technology.
However, these results were never published.
In fact, Dr. Lee never published anything again.
Even though the business license for AC Gravity was updated yearly through 2018, there's no record of any further work done by the company.
Lee's career after 2002 is a subject of great mystery.
Barely Sociable's research turned up a document showing that she gave a presentation at the 2003 MITRE conference titled, Measurability of AC Gravity Fields.
The MITRE Corporation challenges federally funded research for several U.S. agencies at the conference.
She presented along with a Redstone Arsenal official from U.S. Army Aviation Missile Command, meaning that her research was still being conducted up to that point.
But if you scroll back up, what I was going to read a little bit more, there's something about her, right there, a little bit higher, confirming her well-being that she was still working with the DOD, but was unable to talk about her work.
So she's working with the Department of Defense.
He also told Ventura that he was unable to get a working email address or phone number for her.
They probably made a breakthrough, and that's probably what happens when you make a real breakthrough.
They probably give you a very clear indication of how this is gonna go from here on out.
You're gonna be completely isolated from the rest of the world.
There's no way we can trust that you're gonna tell anybody about this.
We're gonna have to fucking monitor everything you do and just you stop publishing, you stop doing anything.
Is that the wrong approach to take when somebody has created something that could be such a monumental tool, potentially a weapon, that an enemy or somebody you perceive to be an enemy could use it against you?
I mean, I think if you're, especially if you're dealing with someone who came over here from China, it's like, where is she going?
Like, keep an eye on that lady.
If she really cracked it, And she cracked it with, what if she's sharing?
That's the thing, is like some of these drones that they're seeing, and that's what I've always assumed that a lot of these things are, especially the square within a sphere that seems they keep finding.
She's disappeared and gone back to China, said Sephardi.
She was working with NASA and the Redstone Arsenal, but she disappeared for several years now.
The people at the Pentagon cannot reach her anymore.
She's allegedly back in China, and the Chinese are pouring money into similar experiments now.
Uh-oh.
That's why our intelligence guys are very interested.
The most likely people to develop the first anti-gravity propulsion technology are the Chinese.
Well, 2004 was that big sighting Commander David Fravor when he found that thing that looked like a tic-tac that was hovering over the water and disappeared at an insane rate of speed.
They got video of this thing, different fighter jets saw it.
They said this thing just took off.
Just no visual means of propulsion.
There's no windows, no rockets, just...
Just gone.
And there's video of it.
There's video of this thing just moving at this insane rate of speed that would turn human bodies into jello.
I think it's a drone.
I think they probably had a few of those.
That's why they're always occurring around military bases.
Like San Diego is filled with military.
It's all military out there.
So if they're off the coast, they're near the Nimitz, right?
So there's fucking all sorts of tests and training things that they're running out there.
That's what they do.
Of course, that's where they're gonna train their fucking drones, too.
Of course, if you've got some crazy high-tech thing and you want to see, how do the fighter jets see it?
You fucking don't tell them, and you put it in the ocean, and then you say, go, fly over there.
And they fly over there, and they see this fucking thing that can go from 50,000 feet above sea level to zero in, like, a second.
News outlets have painted a hauntingly vivid picture of a towering 1,000 foot tall radioactive tsunami.
I know you wrote tabloid.
I know.
Tabloid news.
But is that possible?
A thousand foot tall radioactive tsunami violently crashing into British shores, pulverizing everything in its path and transforming the whole cities into barren, lifeless lands.
Isn't...
The kind of power that they have now is how much more powerful are they than Fat Man and Little Boy?
So if they have some top of the food chain, best of what we've got today, nuclear weapon, and they detonate it into the ocean, what does that look like?
Imagine God's trying to tell you that, like, through the most horrific thing that human beings can do, the indiscriminate murder of hundreds of thousands of people instantaneously.
At least, let's say you create this incredible movie, a work of art, that will go down in history for generations as an iconic piece of cinematography.
And that happened.
It would still be awful, inexcusable, but you'd go, but look at what they created.
Yeah, and it's also your listeners and your viewers as well are getting that education as well.
How many people, like men and women, grew up in a really poor rural part of America, all over the world, and they don't have access to a quality of education?
Because of whatever reason, all of a sudden they can go online and whatever they're interested, they can find.
If they're interested in astrophysics, they can sit down and listen to one of the greatest astrophysicists in the world explain string theory, whatever it may be, and they have access to that information.
Whereas before, forget it.
It doesn't matter how talented you were.
If you didn't have access to that information, You're done.
And by the time you're dying, you're just recognizing the hustle.
By the time you're...
I mean, if you're a 40-year-old man, you're just starting to really...
Oh, this is kind of...
I think this thing's rigged.
You know?
It takes a long-ass time to see how complicated...
And then to have so many interactions with people that you realize, like, how sometimes people don't really say what they think.
They kind of say what they're expected to say.
And they self-censor.
And you see that, and people are like, God, I can't talk to him anymore.
And you get an education of human beings.
It's based on interactions, and it takes forever.
And everyone's so different.
We all assume that other people are gonna think the way we think, and they just fucking don't.
They don't.
And if you have this rigid idea of how people should think about things, And you encounter just this wide variety of different ways of thinking about things, it makes you a little more hesitant to cling on to your ideas.
Because I think too many people think of their ideas as a part of them.
Like, they're just ideas.
You're you, and who you are, the value in you is your ability to not attach to ideas.
The ability to look at ideas, even if you think they're amazing.
Say why you think they're amazing, but they're not a part of you.
So don't argue them like they're a part of you.
Let people have differing opinions on them, and then address those differing opinions in a relaxed way.
That can be done.
Instead of all this yelly, shouty, Childish bullshit that so many people engage in that just makes people more tribal.
It just makes people and then they fucking dunk on each other and back and forth.
It's what happens when you let your ego get involved.
When your ego is the most important thing, when you think you are the most important thing as you walk into any room or you participate in any conversation or interaction.
And the reality is you're not important.
You're important in some ways and to your family and whatever else, but in the grand scheme of things, you just see these people and the outrage and the anger they feel because all of a sudden Their sense of self has been challenged and they are not mentally or spiritually robust enough to be able to push back on that challenge or to be able to accept that challenge.
And it creates this kind of, you almost see it like this kind of mini ego death where they just freak out and you go, we're just having a conversation.
Well, this is what I was saying earlier about we have to be able to disagree with each other and criticize other people's ideas and what they say without thinking that it's about the person.
Yeah, I also think that men in particular, a lot of men, have a desire to compete in things.
And if you're not competing with yourself, like you're not running and trying to like make your time better or working out or whatever, whatever the thing that's difficult to do, if you don't have one of those, then you start using whatever your job is or whatever your ideology is as your way of competing.
And you try to enforce it on people or come up with better arguments or dunk on the people that disagree or harshly criticize them as a human being because you have differing opinions.
Yeah, I sometimes fall into that trap and it's something I'm really trying to work on because like whenever I watch you disagree with people, I think it always makes me think that that's a good way to do it because you're always very careful, you're very respectful, you're very calm about it.
Well, not always.
I think you and crowd are over weed.
That got pretty intense.
But apart from that, lots of times I've seen you disagree with people and it's clear that you don't agree, but you're just trying to explore the argument.
It's also important to recognize how people are taking in your words and thoughts.
Especially when we're doing the kind of stuff that we do where we're just kind of free-balling.
You're making a thing, right?
You're having a conversation, but you're also making a digestible piece of media.
You're making a thing.
And the best way to make that thing is to try to get the most understanding of what this person is trying to say, even if you disagree with them.
So I want to know why you...
I don't want to just know that you think this.
I want to know why you think this.
And I'll let you go.
Even if I disagree.
I want to hear you.
Even if I disagree, sometimes I don't even have to challenge you on it.
I'm really interested, even if I don't agree, I'm really interested in how you come to your conclusions.
And what other information do you take into account?
And what is your personality like?
Is this your identity?
Are you fighting for this?
You see this a lot with these really...
Aggressive liberal men like it seems to be their their station in life.
They're the watchmen on the tower.
There's like this Aggressive and it's generally these weak really weak physically weak Mentally weak men that have adopted this aggressive stance like finally like they're the bullies now and they're gonna go out.
It's it's interesting So if you talk to someone that has like that sort of a philosophy, if you just talk to them about general life enough, it sort of reveals itself.
The cracks in the way they think and the lack of character and the lack of discipline and most importantly the lack of compassion.
When people disagree with someone and they hate them as a human being because they have differing ideas, instead of saying, I think that if I talk to them, I could give them my perspective and maybe it would be enlightening or maybe we would find common ground.
No.
It's like hate them as a person.
It's cherished.
It's saluted online in the mental illness known as social media, the mental illness factory.
These people are all engaging in this back and forth.
And you see these people that have finally found their competitive realm.
And that flavors a big part of why men talk and behave that way.
There's an instinct to want to be good at a thing and beat people at a thing, whether it's chess or whether it's Golf, whatever it is, there's a thing and maybe for you it's politics and for a lot of guys I know it's politics because I see them online.
I see what they're doing.
I see the writing they're doing.
They're just fishing for the right words and saying the right things to try to dunk on people.
The really shitty right-wing people that are very dismissive of entire swaths of people and culture and don't take into consideration the nuance involved and...
Say, like, crime-ridden areas and how those things became that way in the first place.
All that pulled them up by their bootstraps bullshit.
All that no need for any social safety net stuff.
Like, all that, like, lack of compassion, lack of caring about people that masquerades as conservatism.
Well, I wrote a piece, actually, when Tucker went to Moscow, because I thought that...
His conversation with Putin was – I clearly didn't go the way he intended, but it was fine.
I had no issue with him interviewing Putin.
But the videos he did afterwards, it was kind of like – it felt to me like he was starting to – you know, the woke people, they hate America and they hate everything the West stands for.
And there is a movement on the right where it's like they hate the elite so much that they will go to Russia and be impressed and think that the food is cheaper when it's three times more expensive for the average person.
So in the 90s, the oligarchs basically seized all the money and then Putin came in and he got rid of all the oligarchs and all his buddies are now the oligarchs.
Well, it was an interesting conversation about the Mafia life and everything else, but when we did the paywall section for locals at the end, he talked about how it was an open secret in his circles that the Mafia killed JFK, basically.
And they were talking about it for ages, and they were even joking about it.
So when, for instance, Bobby went after the mob, people in the mob were going, huh, killed the wrong Kennedy.
You know?
And he was saying that it was...
J. Edgar Hoover, who was in cahoots with the Mafia, and the thing with J. Edgar Hoover was he was gay, Mafia ran gay clubs, they had the dirt on him being a gay man, which whenever this was in mid-60s, early 60s, you couldn't be an openly gay man.
I would like to know if real photography experts have ever examined it.
Because I know that it's a subject of a lot of controversy.
They think it was a doctored photo.
But he most certainly was a CIA guy.
He went to Russia.
He married a Russian lady.
They let him come back over here.
They were probably all in on it.
He was probably in on it, too.
And they probably had him set up as being the dummy that they were going to say, and then they had Jack Ruby set up to kill him, so that would be, that's it.
We're done here.
And until the Zapruder film got aired on the Geraldo Rivera show, no one had any idea there was some weirdness to that assassination.
Everybody assumed.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a terrible man, and he shot our favorite president, and then, you know, this guy who ran a club hated him because he shot the president, so he shot him, and that's it!
Mate, it's just, when you look at these types of things and the more you dig, the more you kind of realize that there's cover-up upon cover-up upon cover-up, and what is initially being fed to you ain't the truth.
A pioneering researcher in digital forensics whose team developed mathematical and computational techniques to detect tampering in photos, videos, audio recordings, and other documents.
Fareed has examined the photo closely before in studies in 2009-2010, but these studies did not address the questions about Oswald's pose.
In the new study, Farid and his team conducted a 3D stability analysis concluding that, in fact, Oswald's stance does not support the claims of photo tampering.
The study appeared in the Journal of Digital Forensic Security and Law.
So it seems like in 2009 and in 2010, they thought it was monkeyed with.
It's probably proof that someone that is trackable had Kennedy assassinated and there was a conspiracy probably involving at least some members of the intelligence agency.
People would lose confidence entirely in the intelligence agencies.
If they knew that the intelligence agencies had not just gotten rid of Richard Nixon, which Tucker explained.
I'm sorry you saw that.
Like, that's a wild thing to know.
That a guy who was a naval intelligence officer gets a job as a reporter and his first job as, like, an aspiring reporter is...
You get the biggest story in fucking United States history and that CIA agents broke into Watergate and that the guy who they had put into position as the vice president, Gerald Ford, was the guy who was on the Warren Commission report and that Spiro Agnew, who is the real vice president, they got him on tax evasion and locked him up.
It seems like a coup that Woodward was getting his information from the FBI. The whole thing was wild.
When you hear about it that way, the way Tucker laid it out, you're like, whoa!
So they killed Kennedy?
And apparently what Tucker was saying is that Nixon had said that he knew why they killed JFK. Was it the head of the CIA he was talking to?
Is that what it was at the time?
Did not respond at all.
And then next thing you know, within a short amount of time, Nixon's out.
I was in New York and a friend of mine gave me a book.
He said, you've got to read this.
It's called Best Evidence by David Lifton.
And it's all about this guy who was an accountant went over the Warren Commission and he found all these No one thought anyone was actually going to read the entire warrant.
It's like 9,000 pages or something.
And he did.
And there's a lot of problems with it.
The big one for me was always the bullet.
The bullet's ridiculous.
The bullet's ridiculous.
That bullet did not go through two fucking people and come out looking like that.
That's not what happened to bullets.
Bullets get destroyed.
They get blown apart.
They've never been able to shoot a bullet through two people's bodies and have it ricochet and move around like that and not distort and look like they just shot it into a pool.
Looks like they shot it into a bag of pillows.
It doesn't look anything like something that shattered bones.
And they found evidence of fragments in Connelly's wrist.
And there's not enough fragments missing from this magic bullet that they found.
And the only reason why they found the magic bullet at all, they had to come up with this theory because a guy had gotten hit by a ricochet in the underpass.
So then they had to attribute all these different wounds to one bullet.
Wounds on two different people.
And bullets do weird shit.
The path of the bullet doesn't bother me as much.
When people say, like, a bullet's not gonna go here and here and here.
Yeah, it would.
Yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do.
You can shoot someone in the eye and the bullet will bounce around inside their head and come out their face.
Weird things happen with bullets and guns.
That doesn't bother me as much.
But the idea that you're completely discounting the fact that he grabs his neck in the beginning and then his head goes back into the left.
Like, what's going on there?
Is he getting shot from behind and it's a spinal movement, just like a shock nerve thing?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps he's getting shot in the head by two different people, too.
It could be someone from behind and someone...
There could have been, like, a whole line of fire where they're shooting on this guy.
And...
The only reason why they tried to attribute all those wounds instead of saying more people were shooting is because they wanted one conclusion, and that was Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and they didn't think he'd be able to shoot more than three times in that short amount of time that the president's car was going through there.
Do you think it's kind of this principle where there's a thread on the sweater?
If you pull the thread, the sweater unravels.
Do you think that America as a country wouldn't be able to take the reveal of whatever happened.
Because it would then go on to undermine people's faith in the nation too much.
Because if an organised agency like the CIA can go and kill the President of the United States, cover it up for however many years, then what else is possible?
And what does that mean in people who believe in this country?
And then how much scrutiny would the intelligence agencies of today have to encounter now?
Just from things that we know, right?
We know that they put agents in crowds at protests.
We know that for a fact.
Okay, but what do those agents do?
Are those agents there in case things go sideways or are those agents making sure things go sideways?
Because those are two very different things.
So we know both of those things have happened.
So we know that they definitely put agents in place to make sure that if something happens, there's a law enforcement presence and they can arrest people.
We also know that there are rogue agents that will get into these situations and whether it's their job or whether it's they just act on their own or they want to cause someone to do a crime so they can bust them.
Agent provocateurs, false flags, all those things are real.
The Northwoods report, which Kennedy vetoed.
Operation Northwoods, they were going to blow up a fucking drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans.
They were going to...
Arm Cuban friendlies and fuck up Guantanamo Bay.
They were just going to try to get us to war with Cuba by bullshit.
And this was the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They signed off on it.
They're like, sounds good.
I like it.
Good plan.
Solid plan.
And the argument against it is, well, they draft a lot of different plans and that one got vetoed obviously.
Like what?
But no.
No.
You can't lie.
You can't say, one of our plans is to lie.
Don't lie.
Like, that shouldn't be on the table.
You shouldn't be able to lie to people.
Not just lie, but set up fake attacks, especially after you just did it in Vietnam.
They did it and got away with it.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident.
They got us into Vietnam.
So they've always been doing that.
And so if they came out and gave us all the information on the Kennedy assassination, it would cause an erosion in our faith in government that has never been seen before.
And I don't know how we would survive it.
I mean, maybe they're right.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe keep it quiet.
unidentified
Maybe don't do it anymore, but maybe keep it quiet.
Apparently, they were hiding the Chinese weather balloons.
They were hiding the spy balloons from him because they were afraid he was gonna shoot him down Find out if that's true I might have seen that on Reddit.
I talked to Trump at the White House officials over the weekend that the Pentagon deliberately did it because they thought Trump would be too provocative and too aggressive.
One thing if you really want to blow your own mind with this is if you think about where the large language models are getting their information from, where the AI is gathering its opinions about what human beings are, we all know that everything that happens online is not representative of the real world.
But that is where the AI models are gathering the information.
That's what they're reading, what people are writing online.
So we are training these systems to think of us as the online shit that we all know is fake.
We all know people don't talk online the way they talk like in person, right?
We all know that everything that happens there is a warped perception of reality.
Yet that is exactly what AI is learning about who we are.
His current tour is called We Who Wrestle With God.
And he's really...
I mean, what he's really doing is telling people stories from the Bible and illustrating and breaking down how they apply to your life.
And it's amazing.
I mean, I'm not a believer.
Well, yeah, I'm not, I guess.
But seeing the difference that makes to people, just him telling them how to live a good life...
Thousands of people every night.
And they aren't there for his, like, culture war takes.
They aren't there to see him take down Justin Trudeau or whatever.
They're there because he's...
Like, we were in a cigar bar in Tulsa with the guy who does the music, David Cotter.
And we were just sitting there, and the guy came up, he was at the show, started talking, and before we knew it, there was like three guys there, and I remember one of them especially, Devin, a black guy, he was saying, like, I don't know about his politics, people say all this crazy shit, like, when my sister died, Jordan Peterson's 30 second clip on the internet is the only reason I didn't kill myself.
And I've been hearing those stories every night, man.
And it's full of well-dressed people who are there with their partner that they met because of the advice he gave them or they're there to meet him because he's changed their life or they didn't kill themselves or they got a job or whatever.
You know what you have to do if you want to create content online when it comes to podcasts that will get people talking.
We all know it.
But actually it's far, far, far more difficult to be authentic and to actually say, you know what?
I'm going to do something because it's the right thing to do.
Not because it's going to benefit me in the short term.
Not because it's going to lead to certain deals.
Not because it's going to lead me to this particular place where my ego demands that I should be.
I'm actually going to take the long route.
I'm going to do what's right.
And we live in a society where we're constantly being offered the shortcut all the time.
And we know that if we take the shortcut, we're going to get a little bit of a response from our brain.
We'll go, well done on taking the shortcut.
It takes a hell of a lot of discipline, hard work, and sometimes...
Real frustration to go, I'm not going to take the shortcut.
I'm not going to be inflammatory.
I'm not going to say the thing that I know will guarantee clicks and more money and more revenue.
I'm going to go this path and I just have to have the courage of my own convictions that where this path will lead me will be somewhere where I want to be as opposed to somewhere that I know definitely in the long term will take me on the route to hell because that's where some people are.
It's so interesting you say hell because I never really understood when people ask Jordan about heaven and hell He always brings it back to heaven and hell on earth And what he's really saying is like every decision you make when you know it's the wrong decision You're gonna pay for that not in some fucking magic world afterwards when you're dead You're gonna pay for that in this life.
Yeah, and when you make good decisions That's not to say that good things don't happen to bad people and bad things that happen to good people but over the course of a lifetime Every bad decision you make will come back.
And we all know this is true.
What you're talking about is the opposite of the marshmallow test, right?
Like the ability to suspend gratification is the best predictor of long-term success, right?
And so if you're able to just wait and not jump on this dopamine hit right now, over the course of your life, that will be rewarded.
And that's basically the model he's giving people.
Just be good.
And his argument is you do need God.
His definition of God is different to most people's.
But fundamentally, he's just going around telling people how to live their lives in a positive way.
He doesn't like being asked if he believes in God because his thing is like, well, what you're doing is you're saying, like, there's a garden gnome in the sky.
Do you believe in that?
And it's a way of trivializing His belief about it.
You'd have to ask him directly, but I think, you know, him and I have gone back and forth.
He really brought me over to argue with him and try and challenge his ideas from just an outsider perspective, really.
So we've gone back and forth.
I think his idea is that the way he talks about it is like God is the opposite of evil.
God is how you know what is right and what is wrong and it's something that leads you up instead of leading you down.
That's what he thinks of as God.
It's like the fundamental question is where does morality come from?
And his argument is the evolutionary theory may well be true but it's insufficient, particularly insufficient to give us meaning and for the West to survive.
How do you survive?
How does a civilization of people who don't know what they believe in Survive in the battle of civilization with people who do know what they believe in, who have a strong idea.
You mentioned Islam, for example, right?
How do you navigate that when you don't know what you believe, when you don't know what you stand for, when you can't even say not believing in free speech is un-American?
That's such a profound thing because when people say to be inspired by the divine, they automatically think of God.
But the reality is you can find God in anywhere.
And if you're to be inspired by the divine, for me, it's to be...
The thing that I love the most is to be creative, is to write, is to be in that moment where you are writing and you're like, oh, this idea and this idea and this idea.
And you feel...
Disregard the end product, but that moment is to be divine because you are truly at one with what you are, who you are, and what you love and you are passionate about the most.
That is the divine.
Now, for somebody else, it can be another type of thing.
When you are in love and you're truly present with the person you love, it kind of feels infinite.
It kind of feels like that moment is...
It can't exactly be measured in time.
You can't go, oh, that was 63 seconds where we stared into each other's eyes and said nothing or whatever that was, right?
And I think part of it's exactly what you're saying is there's these states that we go into in relation to ourselves or to other people that transcend the reality in which we exist.
And I think that may well be a part of his, you know, you have to ask him because his views are complicated, but it's kind of part of his definition, I think, of what God is.
Yeah, because, and I think, deep down, that's what we're all looking for, really, is to be in this state where we're not thinking about ourselves.
Because thinking about yourselves is why we're so miserable.
Because we're being trained continually, going on social media, doing this.
What am I doing?
Myself, myself, myself.
That's the way to end up perpetually, thoroughly miserable and a version of hell.
But to be in a state where you are creating, where you are doing something that you love, where you are with people that you love, where you are with your children, your wife, your partner, whoever it is, and you have that connection, that really is, that's life.
It's the connection.
And the opposite of life, for me, is disconnection.
To me, there is nothing more tragic than when I sit down at a table and I look over at a restaurant and I see a beautiful young couple.
They're in the bloom of life.
They're youthful.
They're in that moment where potential seems limitless and they're both staring down at their phones and they're not looking into each other's eyes.
And you want to say to them, what are you doing?
And I know we all do it, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone.
I'm not saying that I'm not.
But that moment when you have that connection with love, I think that's what we're all seeking deep down.
And his argument is that what we saw in the 20th century is, as Nietzsche predicted, the death of God causing death.
The breakdown of our belief and therefore World War II and everything that happened there, Mao, the Soviet Union, etc.
About the 21st century, though, I think there's maybe something else going on as well, which is we've mentioned the sexual revolution and people having fewer kids.
And also people being crammed into cities, the urbanization that we've seen over the last 150 years changes everything.
Like I remember reading a book by a guy called – he was a zoologist, Desmond Morris – And the book was called The Human Zoo.
He wrote a book called The Naked Eye, but The Human Zoo is the one I'm thinking of.
And his central argument was when you put animals in the conditions that human beings live in big cities, you get the same pathologies, mental health, violence, atomization, depression, all the same shit happens.
You've got urbanization.
You've got the pill, which changes testosterone levels in men.
Women are attracted to men with lower testosterone.
That would be one driver.
Another driver would be it's getting in the water supply.
The Alex Jones making the frog gay point turns out it's kind of true.
And then you put all that together and then you add the death of belief and you've got a very powerful mix to explain what's going on.
And so the whole idea is that we all agree this is supposed to be a place where you have the First Amendment.
It's freedom of speech.
It's a very important part of what it means to be an American.
It's a big part of the whole setup, the whole way it runs.
Is people had to have very controversial ideas, be willing to risk their lives and come here for another country to try to set up shop, try to set up this new way of living.
And it's the best way.
It's not perfect, but it's the best way currently available.
And if you're trying to fight that in any way, specifically if you're trying to fight the very First Amendment, you're un-American.
And to your point, if you think about what you're just talking about, which is the history of your country, 1776 and all the rest of it, If you had these people trying to shut down freedom of expression as they are now, that would never happen.
The pamphlets go out.
Oh, this is hate speech.
Ban it.
They're disrupting the fabric of whatever the argument is.
Do you ever take like an overview approach to like society and just stop and think like where is this all going and why is it so contentious and chaotic?
Is this just the only way that human beings are able to progress is they have to be constantly at battle and then they kind of both have to kind of improve their positions as time goes on?
I mean, it's kind of weird discussing any of these conflicts around the world because you have to be able to hold two things in your head at the same time.
On the one hand, war is horrific.
It's fucking horrific.
It's one of the worst things that humans being do to each other.
And on the other hand, it's completely normal.
Look around.
You go to London.
Where?
You go to Trafalgar Square, named after the Battle of Trafalgar.
What do you see there?
Nelson's Column, named after Admiral Nelson.
You go to Paris.
What do you see?
The Ark de Trump, right?
Every society defines itself by the conflicts it's for and won.
So it just seems like this isn't...
I mean, we're bands of chimps, and chimps go to war, and so do we.
It just seems like...
I don't think we're ever going to get out of that paradigm until we're those fat motherfuckers with milkshakes floating around on pods.
But it's also, we had a guy on the show way back when we started, a guy that I grew up with called Dr. Mike Martin.
And he's a professor of war studies, former military guy, really smart guy.
And he was talking about oxytocin.
And he wrote a book called Why We Fight, which is the evolutionary biological analysis of warfare, why it is that human beings fight.
And he talked about oxytocin.
And oxytocin is the hormone that you feel.
You feel it.
It's a tingly hormone when you go to a concert and the band comes on and does their big hit, which is massive and anthemic, and everybody sings along and you get the little tingle in the back of the neck.
And that hormone has two functions.
Number one, it creates an in-group to say, we are the group.
This is who we are, right?
And that was very, very necessary for evolutionary reasons, obviously.
The second part of its function, it creates suspicion of the out-group.
So you go, it's kind of hardwired into us.
We're this group and we're a little team.
And then we don't like them.
And then when you kind of see society, people going, I'm liberal, I don't like conservatives, and vice versa, and all the other nonsense, you go, how much of this is actually conscious?
And how much of this is actually...
Biologically programmed.
And is there another factor?
Because I go a bit smug and I go, yeah, I don't even try it, but whatever else.
And I get on my little high horse and start lecturing.
You go, well...
That ain't true either.
But also, maybe I don't feel the hormonal, maybe it doesn't have as profound impact on me as it does on somebody else.
When the moment they're in a tribe, they feel this overwhelming sense of acceptance and joy.
Well, I think that she's very charismatic and very talented as a broadcaster, but I thought her branching out beyond the core issues that she initially focused on was a bit of a disaster.
Someone said that, one of the controversies online, is that she had wrote, Christ is King, and put that, and someone had said that that was anti-Semitic.
It's the problem that if you create an organization whose slogan is free speech, you're never going to be able to have an editorial policy, which is what they're now trying to have.
They're trying to say, well, if you work at this organization, it's like Fox News or CNN or anywhere.
As you get bigger, you start to be faced with the fact that people have different opinions and some people's opinions are going to be outside of the scope of what the people who run it believe.
So if you want to be independent, you're going to have to stay independent.
I don't necessarily know if Macron's wife is a man, but the story is hilarious that there's actual journalists that are working on this and she's reporting their work The true story about her meeting him when he was 15 is crazy enough.
I mean, I think the issue, like, again, it comes down to the fact that you get this huge platform, you do very well, you build up this massive audience, and then you start going, well, I'm a public figure, I need to have opinions on whatever is going on.
And the problem comes, like, take Israel-Palestine, like...
I've never spoken about it publicly as to what I think because the reality is I don't I don't know.
I know I've got enough to formulate some kind of opinion, but do I want it challenged?
Do I want to go up against an expert?
Do I want someone to push back on my ideas?
No, because I don't really know.
I read about it and I'm just formulating my opinion.
But I think the danger comes when you have that type of audience and that type of platform and you are a political commentator, so you feel compelled to have an opinion about everything.
And it's a hard thing to navigate because what happens is, and you see this with stand-up comics too, it's like you're on stage in front of 100 people or 1,000 people or 5,000 people and suddenly your opinion is important.
Suddenly you know what you're talking about because lots of people listen to you.
And there are some things on which you do know what you're talking about.
But there's also a shit ton of things that you don't know and you've got a show tomorrow and you've got to have an hour's worth of content.
So here's my opinion on Ukraine.
Here's my opinion on Israel.
Here's my opinion about Macron's wife.
Here's my opinion on this shit.
And before you know it, unconsciously, I suspect, you're in over your head and you're saying things that you are not qualified to comment on.
You haven't done the research.
You haven't understood that issue.
But here you are giving your opinion.
And that's a trap for a lot of people in our space.
On the other hand, and when you become a parent, you'll maybe see this differently as well, is you only have a certain amount of influence in a society where you send your kids to school, you send them to college.
That's what they're taught, the things that they're taught.
They naturally will want to rebel against their parents.
It's what all kids want to do.
And if they're fed this very simplistic narrative about, you know, life is about there's some people who control everything and they're oppressing everyone.
And there's lots of people who are oppressed and the way you know who's oppressing who is by who's successful, right?
So what you've built in then is if you're successful, you're a bad guy.
And if you're struggling, you're a good guy.
And then you look at all the different ethnic groups and suddenly, you know, Asian Americans, Jews and whatever, these groups that are quote unquote over perform, they're overrepresented.
Once you create the idea that some people are over-represented and some people are under-represented, you inevitably come to this point.
Inevitably.
People will inevitably start hating successful minorities and they will stop and they will look at everyone else as the oppressed underdog.
I mean, Thomas Sow's latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, he talks about how every single brewery, major brewery in the world, was founded by Germans, including Tsingtao, the Chinese brewery.
Because those people have perfected the art of brewing over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.
And every group is going to have its own advantages and disadvantages.
Some people are better at hockey.
Some people are better at basketball.
Some people are better at making money by being lawyers.
Some people are better at making money by being podcasters or something else, right?
You can't just look at people as members of groups and go, we know everything about this group.
If this group is doing well in society, that means they're oppressors.
Not only that, it's a person in a position of authority that has control over an entire group of people, which we already know how that dynamic goes with cults and with presidents, with everything else.
And then you have this group of people that are filled with anxiety that want to make it in life.
And if there's a very clear path that you have to follow, they're just going to be influenced to follow it.
It's real simple to do to young people.
You take them away from their parents.
Their parents are probably overbearing.
They finally get to be themselves and free Palestine.
Extinction Rebellion is a group that's fairly small in this country but very big in the UK. And they basically want us to stop using oil and gas and producing energy through fossil fuels.
Yeah, all Palestinians in general, you know, because we know that what's going on, all of them are being oppressed, so for them to be free, you know, it's nothing, you know, it's clear as day, you know.
How long would you say this issue has been going on?
unidentified
As far as I know, obviously I'm not as educated on this topic, for example, with other people, but for roughly around 75 years, since I think the mandate from 1945, just after World War, I think is when the issues, you know, when the British came and started cutting up lands and taking the...
The lands of the Palestinians, I think that's when the issue started, you know.
Well, yeah, before that you had the Ottoman Empire there, which had very strong control over the area.
Yeah, that makes sense.
unidentified
Any attack on civilians is not justified, you know, regardless of whatever happened, you know, but I think the issue really, what is the origin of this problem, you know?
History has not started October 7, you know?
We have to see the real origin of this was, as I said, 75 years ago.
Obviously I'm not as educated on this topic, but what I see now is this whole issue is being portrayed as if Civilization and history started from October 7th and onwards.
But no, that's not the real, that's the only aspect.
The whole issue is obviously, as we said, from, you know, 70, 80 years ago.
And I think that contributes to what is going on today from both sides, you know, from the Palestinian side as well as the Israeli side.
So does that mean that all of Israel should be, what is now Israel, should be Palestine, in your opinion?
unidentified
No, I personally don't think that.
I think there's, I mean, I'm definitely not the person to talk to about this, but I know that there's multiple strategies that people have come up with, like a two-state solution or one-state solution.
I think, ideally, I would like to see one multi-faith state that is neither Israel nor Palestine.
So, most of the people I spoke to were somewhere along that.
So, pretty decent people and not hateful, most of them, there is a minority, but most of them, they're not hateful, they're not bad people, but what they are is very ill-informed.
And the other thing is, I'm starting to kind of see the distinction, there are some people who have an activist mindset, and there are some people who have a pragmatist mindset.
And that's the activist mindset, which is if we complain enough, if we make enough noise, if we draw enough attention, Then someone else will fix things.
The pragmatist mindset is like, how do we move forward from here?
And that's the question I was putting to them.
You say we need from the river to the sea.
That means there shouldn't be any Israel.
Because that's what that means.
From the River Jordan to the Mediterranean, that means there would be no Israel.
And then when you say to them, well, is that what you're asking for?
No.
I want everyone to live in peace and harmony.
Well, have you been to the fucking Middle East?
Good luck with that.
So these things are very, very complicated.
Very complicated.
And that's why they haven't been resolved for 75 years.
So the way to try and resolve them is to think about how do we move forward.
We can get stuck in 75 years of history.
That's not going to take you anywhere.
You think bickering about what happened in 1945 is going to solve anything?
Is that what you think?
1960, that's going to solve something?
No, man.
The way forward is to find a way for both sides to live A, ideally separately from each other and B, for economic growth and development to be happening there and for security to be available to the Palestinians and to the Israelis, right?
And I'm not saying that from any deep place of expertise.
It's just like the obvious thing, right?
People don't fight when they're happy and comfortable and safe.
To the point that it makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about it without people going, oh, you've been like this, you've been like this.
Everybody's invested in it.
You know, there's a very famous story during Northern Ireland when they had the peace talks in Northern Ireland.
Where I think it was Clinton came in and sat down with both sides.
And these were people who had been at war.
Literal war.
I mean, Northern Ireland was in a state of civil war.
They call it the Troubles, but that's essentially what it was.
And Clinton went, you know what?
Before we get started, before you say anything, can we agree it's Wednesday?
They're like, yeah.
And they were like, can we agree it's 11.30?
Yeah.
And can we agree that I'm drinking a cup of black coffee?
They were like, yeah.
Okay, okay.
So we started from a point of agreement with that.
Now let's see if we can navigate the rest and try and find a place where we can find some common ground.
And I think the challenges that we're facing right now, we can't even agree what words mean.
And if we can't even agree with what words mean, how are we going to agree on something as difficult to solve as the Middle East and find a solution that not everybody is happy with, that everybody's prepared to accept?
Because the reality is when you strike any deal, There needs to be a large dollop of pragmatism involved where you have to accept, I'm not going to get everything I want, and I've got to accept what I am happy with, what I can accept at that moment.
And if you're not prepared to do that, and if you can't even agree on what words mean, and if you're in this kind of oppressor-oppressed mindset, How are you going to come to any kind of agreement or solution?
The way we have the conversation about it is not intended to find a solution.
People aren't looking for a solution.
People are looking to say, you know, what's happening is horrible.
And it is horrible.
I mean, like, this is the thing with social media is, you know, you spend two minutes on your phone looking at what's going on and you're like, fuck, you know, someone's got to do something.
But the fact that there is this newfound avenue to be able to express things and just really just talk about whatever the fuck you want and not be confined by some organization that's telling you what to talk about and what you can't talk about and censoring you if you disagree, firing you.
And we need to start seeing people, not as avatars who need to be destroyed, but actually as somebody else over the other side who has their own way of looking at things, has arrived at this point.
Now, you may think it's wrong.
You may think it's stupid.
You may think all of these things.
But it's still a human being.
They've still got this point.
And sit them down and go, why?
Why is it?
Here's the thing.
Maybe by reaching your hand out, you might be able not only to understand them a little bit better, you might actually be able to understand yourself a little bit better.
And by seeing the blind spots in them, you go, what about my blind spots?
What about the thing where I have, I don't actually, I have an unconscious bias.
I actually have a bias because of the way I was raised, because of the way I was brought up, because of what I've seen growing up.
And maybe, actually, even though they might be wrong about this thing, I kind of get why they're saying this.
And not only that, they might have a point about something else that I haven't thought about.
I think the economics of podcasting and new media is going to make more daily wire style organizations.
I think it's inevitable.
People are going to come together under one umbrella or in partnership or somehow.
Because it's like no one wants to give no one wants to subscribe to their favorite 50 sub stacks You know no one wants to listen to their favor give five dollars a month to their favorite 30 podcasts, right?
It's just not gonna happen You're gonna want to come to one place where you've got you know Barry's doing it with the free press for example She's bringing people together under her umbrella That's a very good point because if you have like ten podcasts you like and it's ten bucks a month Okay, now it's getting a little pricey And the admin alone is going to kill you.
But there's a whole group of people that are connected that are essentially on the equivalent of the podcast version of NBC. You know, that transition was so good for us but also so hard because coming from the UK comedy circuit, which is where we started, it's the exact opposite of that.
Yeah, and that's one of the best things that came out of the whole internet revolution for comics, is that we realized that we are not in competition, but that we can benefit from all the things that benefit you from being in competition with someone.
You can be inspired, you can be forced to work harder and really raise your levels.
But more importantly, we're in collaboration, and that we're a tribe.
And that we all benefit from each other being around, and it's beautiful when your friends do well.
And that philosophy was possible because of the internet.
Because before that, we were all competing for the same amount of jobs on television and late-night talk shows, whatever it was.
And once that went away, then comedians became an asset.
Because, like, if I could get Tom Segura on my podcast, we're gonna have a lot of fun.
And then his podcast will grow and my podcast will grow and everybody will be happy.
And that helped us a lot.
But it's also this mentality that we had at the Comedy Store that was different.
We were a tribe and we were supportive of each other, even before the podcast thing.
The only way you get good at Jiu Jitsu is you have to roll with other people that are really good.
You have to do it.
You have to train together.
You have to realize high levels, the high levels around you.
And if you have a gym that has a specifically, especially rather high level of jujitsu, you're going to get a lot of high level people that come out of that gym.
And you'll see the difference when they go to a lower level gym.
They're just way better.
Just like you see a comic that works, you know, at the cellar in New York, they go somewhere else.
Like that's a high level comic.
They're in a high-pressure, high-talent situation, and it benefits everybody.
So my feelings from martial arts, I just transferred over to comedy.
I was like, this is the best way to do it.
I know it seems counterproductive.
You think we're all, fuck him, I'm the man.
Get rid of that.
Get rid of that.
Everybody can be good together, and when someone's good, it actually feels good to tell people that person's good and blow them up and help them.
If you can help, you know, get some shine on, get some light on someone who's really talented, it's good for the art form, which is the whole reason why we got into it in the first place.
And the more people that do it, the higher the level's gonna get.
You're gonna get more people that rise to the top.
It's more competition, more creativity, more influence, more excitement, more inspiration.
And it's just a positivity, which is why I love coming here.
I love coming here because there's a positivity here, that there's a can-do attitude of we can go out and we can do this, and we're going to work together, and we're going to collaborate, and we're going to change things, and we're going to improve.
I come here, and I just feel so much more creatively energized.
Yeah.
All of these past 10 days I've been in Austin, most of the time, apart from going out and meeting people, I just spend all my day writing.
I spend all my day writing because I'm going, oh, I've got all these gigs that I can test it out on, and I feel energized, and I feel creative, and I know that I can do this.
And yet I know if I fail, like I did at one particular gig...
For Hans Kim, bless him, I did too much new.
It didn't go well.
I came out going, oh, I know that I'm not going to get limited because I didn't do well at that gig.
But I came away knowing that I've got so much to improve and I know how to improve it.
And then I went and did another gig and it was great.
So what we do is we do usually about 20 minutes to half an hour bonus content with questions from our audience for the guests and that goes behind a paywall.