Chris Williamson recounts a $35K Antarctica expedition where three Flat Earthers abandoned their beliefs after witnessing 24-hour daylight, while one held firm amid accusations of faking the Vegas Sphere test. They debate Egypt’s Zawi Hawass dismissing LIDAR findings under the Great Pyramid—later befriending Graham Hancock despite past controversies—and academia’s shift toward equity over truth, with Rogan citing China’s university influence and Williamson exposing performative empathy in extremist movements. Exploring healthcare, Williamson critiques FDA restrictions during shortages and Ozempic’s side effects, mocking body positivity’s hypocrisy while Rogan shares personal anecdotes on drug impacts. The conversation spirals into speculative cosmology—Boltzmann brains, black hole universes—and fertility crises, linking sperm decline to microplastics and pesticides, before dissecting societal obsession with status over fulfillment. Williamson’s stories of meth-fueled Finnish soldiers and WWII drug use contrast with modern polarization, where algorithms trap people in echo chambers, stifling growth. Rogan and Williamson ultimately agree: real change demands courage, not just viral trends or performative outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I was going to send this to you as well, Jamie.
I'll send you one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of it on X because it's quite stunning.
So apparently through the use of LIDAR, they have discovered that there are enormous structures underneath the Great Pyramid that go kilometers deep into the earth with coils.
So enormous pillars and then these coils, they don't understand what it is because they're just looking at LIDAR images.
But whatever this is, is a uniform structure.
There's several pillars and all of this is like very, very, very weird.
Yeah, so click on that and go full screen, please.
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What has just been announced in relation to the pyramids at the Giza Plateau and the plateau itself is so incredible, so awe-inspiring and narrative.
shattering that I have been sitting here for the last hour trying to wrap my head around the implications of what we were just told.
So this is pretty much breaking news because the new findings were announced on the 16th of March at a press conference held by the team who were studying the Great Pyramid of Giza with a non-invasive technology that was first developed by Filippo Bionde and Corrado Malanga
called Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography.
Fuck that's a mouthful.
unidentified
the internal structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
And this method leverages the analysis of micro-movements typically generated by background seismic activity to achieve a high-resolution, full 3D tomographic imagery of the pyramid's interior and subsurface
components. The recent findings from deploying this technology
are nothing short of mind-blowing because what's been discovered is that there are huge structures coming down from the base of the pyramid deep into the bedrock in fact over 600 meters deep which then connects to structures that extend up to two kilometers below the surface of the ground two kilometers massive internal structures connected to the base of the pyramid and extending deep Deep down.
Because some people in the past, some people in the past who have theorized about Atlantis had white supremacist ideas.
But also, most people didn't.
Like, Plato didn't.
Like, the people that talked about...
This place, it's in sub-Saharan Africa.
I mean, it's like the least white supremacist discovery of all time, as are the pyramids.
This is Africa.
It's the least white supremacist notion of all time that this incredibly advanced ancient civilization had reached some sort of proficiency that's above and beyond what we attribute to them.
I think Graham is right, and I think there's a lot of other people that are right, too, that are chasing this down.
Christopher Dunn had long ago theorized and wrote a book that he believes that the Great Pyramid of Giza is a gigantic power plant.
He thinks it generates power and he has a very like a working theory of why it's built the way it's built.
That totally coincides with the ability to produce hydrogen, the ability to utilize the rays of space and try to find some way to generate electricity through this.
Yeah. The association of other people that we don't like talked about this thing, therefore anybody else that talks about this thing is immediately attached to them, just seems like a very lazy way to sort of smear people.
And it's also from academia, which is so disappointing.
You know, I mean, academia has been so captured by this mind virus of leftism that it's just it's so bizarre to watch the brightest minds and the people that we lean on for rational, reasonable thinking and an objective understanding of the world.
We lean on the experts.
And when they're calling someone a white supremacist for talking about an advanced society that lived in Africa.
There's a lot of ways that you can put your foot in it.
There's this woman, Corey Clark, who sent a survey to every psychology professor in the U.S. and asked them questions like, what is more important, the truth?
Or ensuring that equity is promoted.
And a lot of professors basically said, I self-censor.
I would prioritize making people feel good over necessarily telling them the truth.
There are certain opinions that people should be reported for.
There are certain topics that basically shouldn't be discussed.
The usual suspects stuff like behavioral genetics, so heritability, evolutionary psychology, as in anything that kind of relates to sex differences.
And yeah, it really is retarding the progress of everything.
And you think, well, trickling down from this, what sort of educated society are you going to have in future?
Well, I think it's going to encourage independent education.
I think you're going to encourage people like University of Austin, which is they're aiming to do just that and to kind of bypass all this nonsense and just teach people reality.
And I also think that it's most likely...
I mean, I don't even want to say most likely.
It's most certainly influenced by other countries that want to degrade our ability to develop meaningful minds that come out of universities, like intelligent, useful people.
There's that question about, there's two options about life in the universe, that either we're alone or that we're not, and both are equally terrifying.
Right. I feel like it's the same when it comes to Western anti-Westernism.
And you say, either we're doing it to ourselves.
Or we're not.
And both are equally terrifying.
You're being puppeted by this nefarious foreign power.
Or you're just turning around and kicking the ball into your own goal over and over again.
Well, I think people will turn around and kick the ball into their own goal.
But I also think they're being helped.
I think there's a substantial amount of this that just works automatically.
It preys upon...
Really weak minds and particularly bullies and mean people who want to find other people that they can hate to justify whatever virtue they believe they have above those people.
And they'll use it to hate.
And John Cleese made a great video about this, why extremism is so interesting.
It's on my Instagram.
I reposted it the other day.
Someone posted it.
We'll give them credit for it.
But it's a great clip from John Cleese.
From 30 years ago.
From 30 years ago.
Prophetic. Pre-social media.
There's no social media at this time.
And he essentially nails what's going on with both the right-wing extremists and the left-wing extremists.
We've heard a lot about extremism recently, a nastier, harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother-boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents.
All right, but what we never hear about extremism is its advantages.
Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies.
Let me explain.
The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.
Attractive, isn't it?
So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time.
So, if you want to feel good, become an extremist.
Okay. Now you have a choice.
If you join the hard left, they'll give you their list of authorized enemies.
Almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class traitors, and,
Now, once you're armed with one of these super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behaviors morally justified.
So you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.
So many people's morality stands on the shoulders of somebody that's fallen behind, right?
It's look at how bad that person is.
You don't need to look at me.
And I think that if people start pointing at outgroups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup, that's usually an indication.
I'm like, I should look a little bit closer at you.
Like, it might be a good example.
Lizzo. Didn't think I was going to go there.
Lizzo, talking about how she was in support of these bigger girls and she was going to help their careers and give them a platform, presumably a structurally reinforced platform.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, she's body shaming them.
She's starving them.
She's not letting them have water.
Apart from when she makes them eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers.
Douglas Murray said that she thought that she could outsource eating fruit to somebody else.
And he was saying, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it.
Yes. And he's discussing performative empathy in this way.
This sort of sense that what's most important is to protect people's feelings.
And I think that this really is a point, it doesn't matter whether you're on left or right, this is a point that you should care about because you want people to have some sense of transparency, legitimacy.
They want to be telling the truth.
You want to trust that what someone is saying to you is actually what they believe.
Yes. And he said...
What I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it.
There are lots of people who are doing evil while proclaiming that they're doing good.
And, you know, that's the same that you're talking about there with John Cleese.
You're saying these people's morality will stand on the shoulders of others who have fallen behind.
It's the same reason why if somebody's in the middle of a scandal, look at who comes out and twists the knife a lot.
Do you go, huh?
I wonder what's in your...
It's the classic congressman that's got the anti-gay bill.
You know what I don't like about that sort of level of aggressive criticism?
I think I'm a...
You could describe me as a criticism hyper-responder.
I'm someone for whom it probably impacted me more than it should do, certainly more than it should do for someone who gets the level of attention that I've managed to get myself to now.
And what I don't like about it is it causes people like me...
To be way less confident in their own positions because you think, oh, well, most people, if it was me, I would only give feedback if I was really certain and if I had this person's best interests at heart and if I wanted them to do better and if I actually knew what I was talking about, then I would tell this person what I think about them and what I think about what they're saying.
And if you apply that rubric to everybody else that gives you criticism, you give undue, unfair expertise and legitimacy to people who don't have your best interests at heart.
They don't understand what you're trying to do.
They don't care about you.
They don't get it.
And it causes a lot of people...
Basically, I think that criticism killed more
dreams than a lack of competence ever did because people are just, I'm worried about pushing these boundaries too much.
This person, all of my friends tell me the truth.
Why isn't this person on the internet?
There's this idea from Ethan Cross called criticism capture.
So you'll have heard of audience capture, right?
Where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience, becomes very predictable.
Criticism capture basically says it's not the compliments, but the criticisms that are more warping.
That over time, what you end up doing is changing the way that you speak.
You become...
Flaming sword-wielding, card-carrying member that's as aggressive as possible to push back against it.
Or you go the other way and you begin to caveat very aggressively.
You start to dampen down all of your opinions so that nobody can take offense to them.
You have these unnecessarily long sort of diatribes, sort of weird land acknowledgement.
Well, we must remember that women are struggling with the thing and we have to do the memories.
But now we've got that out of the way.
Let's talk about men's problems or whatever it might be.
And yeah, I think...
I just wish that the internet was a little bit more positive sum as opposed to negative sum.
And I understand that people bind together over mutual hatreds of outgroups.
But the oldest story in human history is that group of people are different to us.
I think it's at the inauguration, and they both stood next to each other, and Elon's sort of fist-pumping and loving it, and Trump's son's just, like, staring off.
There was a video from Forbes recently that got a million plays in a day.
Talking about Trump getting, like, bopped on the nose by a boom mic.
Yeah, by a little boom mic.
He just did a little boop on the nose.
Yeah. I have to say, I have such fucking news politics fatigue already.
We're, what, two months into the sort of presidency?
And it is the velocity of bullshit.
If you can get a million plays in a day because Trump got bopped on the nose by a fucking boom mic, it just...
Appetite is, it seems, endless for it.
It just feels, it's very, it's exhausting.
I'm kind of having to check out.
And I know that people say, oh, well, it's a luxurious position.
You don't need to pay attention to politics.
It's a luxurious position for you to be in.
People at the bottom, they do need to pay attention to politics.
It's an interesting stat, because actually the most educated, wealthiest people are the ones that spend the most time consuming news and talking about politics.
It's the people at the bottom rung of the ladder that don't.
Newsweek wrote an article about how one of the names of one of our podcast guests, who's a good friend of mine, Michael Costa, his name was misspelled accidentally.
Well, the big one is having some sort of a social safety net.
I was on welfare when I was a kid.
My family was on food stamps.
We were fucking poor as shit.
And I remember that helping us a lot.
We had food.
Where I don't know what we would be doing.
I mean, we were in a bad place.
And there's social safety nets for people.
My family got out of that.
And my stepfather and my mother wound up doing well.
They did really great.
And they got out of debt and bought a house.
Great job and the whole deal.
But when I was a little boy, we were fucked.
And I think social safety nets are very important for people.
It's very important for society.
If you care about people, you care about the whole society, you don't want people starving when there's ways to develop government programs to make sure people have food.
And I think this idea of pulling them up by their bootstraps is horseshit.
Some people don't have boots.
They don't have straps.
They don't have nothing.
They're fucked from the moment they were born.
They were born into a bad family environment, in a bad neighborhood, and crime, and gangs, and drugs, and it's not even playing field.
I think healthcare, 100%, should be socially funded.
I think that Medicare and Medicaid, having programs where people who are hurt can get An operation and it's not going to bankrupt them for the rest of their life is another thing that I think society should be a part of our agreement to take care of each other as a community.
That we chip in money for what people would think of as socialist positions.
And I always bring up the fire department because the fire department is one of the best examples that everybody sort of agrees.
It's a socialist sort of thing.
Give your tax dollars.
The tax dollar supports the fire department.
The fire department fairly puts out fires for everybody.
They don't not put out your fire if you don't have any money.
I want my doctor to be a bad motherfucker who drives a Mercedes.
I want my doctor to be really good.
I want him to be an artist.
I want him to go to the guy who fixes the Lakers knees.
That's the guy you want.
You want that guy who has a nice watch, and he lives in a nice house, and he kicks ass, and he knows how to fucking fix people really well.
He's the best at it.
And you go to him, and you get an operation, and you're fucking golden.
That's what you want.
Competition, because competition inspires excellence.
You know, being rewarded for your hard work is a giant incentive for people to get amazing at things.
And you need that.
You need that too.
But there's also a lot of very good doctors who would be very happy to do something that helps the overall greater good of the community.
Just like you have really good criminal defense attorneys that are...
You know, assigned to you if you're getting unjustly tried and you want a really good one that can help you.
You know, there's state-appointed attorneys that are just good people that want to help people.
You know, Bill Murray was talking about his daughter.
His daughter does that.
You know, there's room for that with the amount of money that we spend on so many things that we all agree are fucked.
And maybe some of that could be freed up with some of this USAID money that they're pulling.
There's nothing wrong with giving people health care.
Like, if you know anybody that's been injured and was bankrupt because they didn't have insurance and then they had to get some crazy operation and now they have this enormous debt and they wind up going bankrupt or they're getting chased down for the money for the rest of their life, it's horrible.
I don't know if that was true, but the tale was lovely.
Anyway, he was telling me I've got a chipped wisdom tooth.
And my girlfriend got into a car wreck the other day.
And he basically said, he was explaining to me about how you can get bankrupted by this stuff.
He was like, if you get hit by a car and you don't have insurance, you better fucking walk it off.
Because if you don't...
That could be essentially the beginning of the end of your life.
And that really, I mean, that was six, seven years ago now, and it's still like, that was the most haunting thing about the fucking ghost tour, was him telling me about the medical debt.
And then I think the reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO killing as well, for me, somebody who didn't fully understand how many of the claims are denied.
I think that there was an increase by about 30% in denial of claims over only the most recent period.
And I just thought, guy shoots person.
Typically, the guy that shoots them is in the wrong, and the reaction on the internet just—I wasn't ready for it, and it really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has with the healthcare system.
But then you see the fucking revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug corporations where these people leave and then all of a sudden they have these amazing jobs at pharmaceutical drug companies and they're making millions of dollars.
How is that legal?
How is this whole thing legal?
Like when you realize that doctors are incentivized to medicate people, they're financially incentivized to give people certain medications, whether it's vaccines, they get bonuses if they vaccinate more than 60% of their clients and they lose those bonuses if people don't get vaccinated.
There's like a lot of creepy shit that's involved in medicine.
Well, we need to think, you know, all of the people that are using these drugs, that are losing weight with them, whatever, we need to think about who the real sort of...
People suffering from this situation are who are the stock owners of telehealth companies.
If you own HIMSS or whatever, the stock's declined by a lot.
But, dude, I've been thinking so much about Ozempic recently, and I think the introduction of Ozempic...
Proves how much of a scam the body positivity movement was all along.
You look at the Golden Globes and all of the women that were supporting their bigger sisters, as soon as there was an easy route to being able to become a skeleton, they look like this.
It just shows how flimsy your principles are that it was easier for you to say, I can't win this particular game, therefore the game is rigged.
If you can't get what you want, you have to teach yourself to want what you can get and then proclaim to everybody else that they should get it too.
The Golden Globes, you've just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking around.
Women of Hollywood are now facing the same dilemma that Dudes who go to the gym have had for decades.
Because it's pointless losing weight naturally.
Why would you lose weight naturally?
Because everybody's going to accuse you of having used Ozempic in any case.
Same thing as a dude.
If you gain weight as a guy and you get jacked, really jacked, if you really discipline yourself, you know, multiple years, progressive overload, time under tension, hitting your protein goals, getting enough sleep, what your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take trend alone.
And it's the exact same.
What is the incentive for anybody to lose weight naturally?
Apart from I have some concerns about the drugs and the side effects and so on and so forth.
Socially, there is no incentive for you to lose weight naturally.
She came out and she had all of her hair done like this.
Yeah. But, yeah, there's this odd, like, Pascal's wager that you have to make where you think, I can either lose weight normally or without assistance.
It's going to be more difficult and people are going to accuse me of using Ozempic in any case.
Or I can just take it and it'll be easier and they'll accuse me of it.
Yeah. I'm in favor of Ozempic for people that are morbidly obese.
I think anything that can get you on the path.
And I think if you can combine that, if you can say, okay, this is what I'm doing, so I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to start an exercise program.
And then you wind up losing 30, 40 pounds.
You feel better.
You look better.
If you can continue this exercise program, you've at least put a healthy thing in your life along with Ozempic.
I think that's critical.
Because also that can mitigate some of the negative effects of...
One of the things that we're seeing is that people are losing a lot of muscle mass and a lot of bone mass.
As much as 30% of the weight that people are losing is muscle and bone.
And that, I think, could probably be mitigated with regular strength training.
You know, you're only hearing about this from people that aren't strength training.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a strange – I think another thing with Ozempic, I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudiced against people that use Ozempic than fat people are.
Some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, you know, that you're losing your bigger brothers and sisters, I don't know.
But they're not actually threatened in the same way as in weight people are.
So I'm aware that losing weight through a Zempick is not the same as getting in shape, especially if you don't do the health and fitness regime, if you don't do the resistance exercise, you end up gone skinny fat, jowls, big cheeks, all that stuff.
But the signal of being in shape…
Right. Disciplined, reliable.
Able to do hard things, self-motivated, consistent, stick to a routine, conscientious, industrious, all of these things.
So you look at somebody who's in shape and you think, I can infer from your body a lot of things about who you are beyond just your body.
I actually think that this is one of the huge benefits that most people don't realize about getting in shape if they want to attract a partner or whatever.
Sure, the body looks great when you take the clothes off, but what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values?
Right. What you do.
Now, the problem with the introduction of easier routes to being in shape is that it's completely derogated the signal.
The signal is now no longer reliable.
Right. Because previously the signal said, I've had to jump through all of these different hoops.
Well, now, how do you know if they've jumped through all of those hoops or if they're just shooting a Zempick once a week?
Right. And I think that this explains why a lot of people who are in shape have a real visceral reaction.
Now, sure.
Lots of people are concerned about the drugs.
Fen-Fen was this thing in the 90s that fucked people up.
I mean, if shapeshifters were real, if there really are evil reptilian aliens and they've infiltrated our society and they've been pulling the strings forever and only a couple of people knew.
How ridiculous would that idea be?
How ridiculous?
It would be so ridiculous.
But is an alien, shapeshifter, reptile person, is that any weirder than the most recent theory that our entire universe is taking place inside of a black hole that's in another universe?
Yeah, there's recent calculations that are leading these...
I guess it would be astrophysicists.
Who would be studying this?
See if you can find it, Jamie.
It's the most bizarre headline.
Because you're like, what the fuck are you saying?
The whole universe is inside of a black hole?
New NASA data hints we could be living inside a black hole.
Great! Now, isn't that weirder than reptile people?
Inside that space, there's only so many ways that you can put matter together so that it creates anything.
There's a limited number of ways that matter can come together with different elements, different structures, different everything like that.
So Boltzmann brain suggests that across an infinite universe, there will be a brain the exact same as yours, the exact structure as yours, Comes into existence for a moment and then goes away.
And the reason that you could be experiencing the world that you are now, all of your memories, your past, your history, the person that you think you are, is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just comes into existence and then goes.
You could exist somewhere else, but this brain appears just spontaneously because in an infinite universe, there are only so many different ways that you can piece matter together.
Right. And it's the monkey's typewriter thing.
It's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is constructed.
It's basically like a brain in a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain it.
The way it was explained to me is that if the universe is truly infinite, not only is there another version of you.
But there is another version of you that did the exact same thing you have done every step of the way.
Every time you sneezed, every hesitation before you spoke your mind, every time you almost went into traffic when you didn't realize their light was still red, all of those things have happened in the exact same order an infinite number of times.
That you live in a totalitarian environment, that you live in a utopia, that the Germans won the war.
Yeah, all that.
Everything. Everything that could possibly be different would be different in every possible scenario.
That's what infinite means.
It means it's so vast.
Like the craziest one to me was the concept that inside every galaxy, in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole.
And that supermassive black hole is approximately one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
If you go into that supermassive black hole, so there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, right?
Inside that supermassive black hole is an entirely another universe, filled with all sorts of different galaxies that have supermassive black holes in them.
You go into one of those, another universe, filled.
Supermassive black holes, another universe, filled.
All supermassive black holes, each one, another universe.
Why is that weirder than the universe is infinite?
Why is that weirder?
I mean, just the weirdness of what it is is so fucking insane.
The idea that it's infinite or that there's an infinite multiverses and infinite versions of these things inside black holes and in all sorts of ways that we haven't even really figured out yet.
That's not that much weirder than what's real.
What's real is insane.
What's real is that the whole thing was smaller than the head of a pen.
And for no understandable reason, it expanded instantaneously and became the universe that you see in the sky today.
Okay. Okay.
What the fuck are you saying?
McKenna had a great line about that, that science requires of you but one miracle.
The Big Bang.
It's a miracle.
What is it if it's not that?
I mean, it's a thing of science, yes.
Okay, so if you can study all of the matter and you study all of the forces and all the energy and all the reasons why matter coalesces or matter expands, yes, you could probably, given enough time and enough quantum computing power,
figure out what's causing everything to compress down smaller than the head of a pin and then explode.
It's still crazy.
Even if you had some scientific explanation for it, it's fucking insane.
But yeah, I decided to go and get a sperm count thing done.
You know what a varica seal is?
No. Okay.
Dude, this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about.
When you go through puberty, the way that the veins sort of form that blow heat off from your balls, they can form in a way where they just don't get rid of the heat that efficiently.
Not enough.
And it's in 15% of men, so it's super, super common, but 50% of men that go to urologists have got this.
And I go in and I've had these balls my entire life.
I've had these balls.
Thank you.
They're not transplants.
I've had these balls.
Since puberty, and I found out at the age of 36, oh, you've got a medium varicocele.
So the mad thing about this is, you'll know this, if you take testosterone, it plummets your sperm count.
So typically testosterone and sperm kind of work against each other in that kind of a direction.
This is the one thing where if you get it fixed, both go up.
So the mean change in testosterone is 180 points.
How do they fix it?
It's surgery.
It's a small surgery where they do an incision in your groin and they just fix the vasculature.
It's like, because I had a gay couple that were friends that lived down the street from me, and they had a kid with a surrogate, and they shot their jizz into a cup and mixed it up.
So they didn't know who's going to be the one who has the kid.
Well, maybe she didn't want to carry babies anymore.
She had a couple of them the normal way.
But it's like so much of what the child experiences in the womb, it leads to this, I would imagine, this bonding thing with the woman.
The baby's inside of you.
You remember feeling the baby inside of you.
It grows inside of you.
Then it comes out of you and you raise it and it breastfeeds.
It's like...
This bond is, I understand surrogacy if someone can't get pregnant, if this is the only way you could have kids.
I'm not saying don't do it.
But I'm saying it's fucking strange.
Because this other person is, whatever anxiety they have, fear, their cortisol levels, if they have domestic abuse in their house, all that information is being transferred to the child.
Pregnancy doesn't just make a kid, it also makes a mother.
Yeah. And it's dangerous.
I'm so confused.
I mean, test you babies.
What happens if we can just create artificial wombs?
You know something that's weird?
I know that people don't get, they don't choose to be born, but somebody chooses whether or not these two sets of DNA are going to come together.
If you've just got sperm donor after sperm donor and egg donor after egg donor and artificial wombs, it gets to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing who's coming into reality that much anymore.
Look at the problems that people are having with microplastics and the disruption of the endocrine system and pesticides and herbicides and all these different ubiquitous chemicals that are affecting people's sperm counts and fertility.
It's a real factor, and it's plummeting.
If you look at human beings from the last 60, 70 years, and you look at males in America, where their sperm count used to be and where it is now, it's rapidly decreasing.
There's a lot of factors, sedentary lifestyle, processed foods, but there's also environmental factors that seem to be altering the actual way a child develops in the womb.
And this is Dr. Shanna Swan's work.
Countdown. Yeah, which is an incredible, just...
It's an incredible book, but it's just an incredible fact that the plastics that we use from microwave foods and water bottles and all that stuff is literally changing the development of children.
It's changing the size of their testicles, the size of their penises, the...
It's the food is so calorie-rich and filled with shit, you know, that you just get so fat so quick.
Like, if you're eating nothing but junk food and drinking nothing but soda, as I sit here with a large Diet Coke.
Which I usually don't drink, but I do occasionally.
That is, like a Diet Coke at least doesn't have the calories, but if you're having a large Coke like that, like if you have a Coke like this, what is this, a liter?
And then there was that other thing about you talking about kids, that some huge percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds couldn't join the military.
Yeah. Like 70% because of mental health or obesity or drug use or something.
And half of them had two or more of these excuses for why you couldn't do it.
And I think if you track over time...
The amount of military service that people have had, so much less.
It's so much less.
And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing, even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal...
Again, the same as going to the gym.
Reliable, orderly, conscientious.
I can be on time.
I can do hard things.
This is one of the proposed explanations for the baby boom, was that a lot of men that did come back from war were signaling their eligibility, signaling how reliable they could be, and it made it easier for women to be attracted in that way.
I mean, imagine a woman, you're going to get pregnant, and so you're going to be, you could work for a little while, but towards the end you're not going to be able to work.
And then after the child, it's going to be very difficult to work.
So you're reliant on this other person.
How well do you know this person?
Did you do that 10-day vacation in Jamaica with that guy?
Going to the gym is right wing and liking fast cars is right wing and all the rest of it.
The number of liberal women that are struggling, I think, to find an eligible partner is going up because they just can't find a guy that will hold the door open for them, that will treat them like a lady, that will try and be the protector-provider-procreator thing.
You go, you're talking about a conservative.
You're talking about somebody who's more traditional in that way.
And I get worried.
I sort of talk a lot about this stuff on the show, and I get worried about not helping men.
To improve in this sort of zero-sum view of empathy that if you give some attention to men and the way that they're struggling, that it takes it away from some other more deserving group.
So a lot of the time, if someone's falling behind, 50 years ago, Title IX gets introduced, right, for women.
It's not enough women in higher education.
It's not enough women expediting them through socioeconomic status.
50 years later, they've...
Oh, yeah.
up, you look across and there are fewer and fewer men over there.
And what you think is, okay, well, typically...
If a group is falling behind in society, we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
We spend billions of money in taxpayer-funded charities and think tanks to try and work out what's going on and to try and bring them along for the ride.
That's not happening with men.
Because vestigially, for so long, men had it so good.
And now it feels like twisting the knife in some sort of karmic retribution, in a way.
Like, this is penance.
That you're paying.
But a lot of guys, you can look at the number of CEOs, and sure, guys that outperform on the top end, yep.
But that's not necessarily due to privilege.
It's because putting yourself in that position to do what you need to do to get yourself to the position of being a founder, being a CEO, running a successful company is so fucking insane that most women would just choose to not go and do that.
You're talking about outliers.
Evolutionary psychology says that men are nature's playthings, that there's more variability.
There's more male geniuses, but there's also more male retards.
And it's all well and good pointing to the number of CEOs and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and all the rest of it.
I think the education system...
For young boys, it's really, really tough.
Getting them to sit in a classroom still for six hours a day, it seems like females are just better at doing that.
Young girls are more effective at a sort of brain-based economy, highlighting and planning ahead of the homework that they've got to do and the assignments and stuff like that.
And you just roll that forward.
Two women for every one man completing a four-year U.S. college degree.
And I'm not saying, oh, let's rip women out of the classroom and out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen.
Obviously not.
Obviously that's not what either of us are saying.
Like, what do you think is the reason why more men aren't succeeding and getting college degrees and more men aren't going out and making as much money in their 20s?
I think that the current environment does not necessarily lend itself to the disposition that men have got.
So they're less conscientious than women from a personality standpoint on average.
That means that it's really difficult, comparatively, on average, for you to be able to remind yourself that you need to do this sort of homework.
Men are more predisposed to addiction.
They're more predisposed to using recreational drugs.
They're more predisposed to being in jail, to all of the sort of gang stuff that people get drawn into.
It's just more likely for guys.
There are more routes that men can be pulled away in that sort of a manner.
And on top of it, I don't think that there is a particularly inspiring vision for what...
You said earlier on about fitness right wing, fast cars right wing.
There was this thread on Reddit, I think, in a left-leaning forum that said, people of the left, can you give me a good example of who you think a positive male role model would be?
The top voted one was Aragon from Lord of the Rings.
You've had to go to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure.
You know, this is one of the issues that we see on the left, which is there is no level of purity or the level of purity you need to be able to get to is so high.
Why? Because if you have got a slightly fettered past, if you maybe said things in the past that didn't agree with where we are now, the right will welcome you with open arms.
I think that there is a level of puritanism on the left where they are unprepared to accept people who have had positions that they don't agree with.
There seems to be this odd purity spiral where they're constantly trying to point out people who are no longer agreeing with the ideology du jour of the modern world.
Like, that type of environment, a work office environment, it's not compatible.
Nobody wants to do that.
What you want is the rewards of that.
You want the money.
You want success.
You want status.
You want all those things.
You want the corner office.
But what you don't want is to work in that environment.
If you could choose to make the same kind of money doing things that you love to do, having fun, like if all these corporate CEOs could make as much money playing golf, I bet they would play golf.
I don't think they really want to be doing that.
They're doing that because it's the way in order.
It's the way to succeed and the way to make money.
And it feels like hell.
It feels like hell.
You're stuck in traffic every day.
You're stuck in the office.
You're not working eight hours a day if you want to really make it.
And this is why the wage gap between men and women was such an insidious lie.
Because they were always saying, women make 75 cents to every dollar a man makes.
And people repeat that without understanding what it actually means.
It's job choices and hours worked.
Those are the primary factors that lead to men earning more money than women.
It's not a man and a woman are doing the same job and someone rips off the woman by only giving her 75 cents to what the man works.
If that was the case, and the woman does just – Everybody would employ women.
Yeah, you would only employ women because women, you'd pay them less.
They do a better job anyway, right, ladies?
So there you go.
It's nonsense.
But that thing that Obama repeated on television, I remember watching him say that, going,"He knows better than this.
This is bullshit.
This is a bullshit statistic." But it's a heart-strength statistic.
Good headline.
Plays on what you want to believe rather than what's true.
And women have to take time off for maternity leave.
If they get pregnant, it's going to significantly impact the amount of hours they're willing to work.
They might not want to do the job anymore once they're raising their children.
If their husband's making enough money, they probably want to quit.
They want to be at home with their kids.
It's a normal thing.
And then a lot of women who are career corporate women are shamed for wanting to stay home with their children.
To derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation.
Yeah. That's another point, actually, about sort of men falling behind.
I think it seems like young boys are more negatively impacted by fatherless homes than young girls are so any boy that grows up in an in intact and non intact household is more
likely to
To end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college.
Yeah. In the US.
Yeah. Any non-intact that's adopted, step-parent, single parent, any non-intact home, they're more likely to end up in jail or in prison than they are to complete college.
Yeah. And the same statistic is not true for girls.
And this, again, the zero-sumness of the, so what do you say?
Are you saying that we need to hold girls?
It's like, no.
You do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up.
We spent 50 years really pedestalizing and helping take the reins off of young girls so that socioeconomically they can look after themselves.
They're no longer financial prisoners of their partner, which is a big deal.
You look at the divorce statistics from the past and proclaim it as some amazing cultural outgrowth.
And you go, how many women stayed in those relationships because they fucking couldn't afford to leave?
Like, I can tell you the size of the house that I live in.
I can tell you how much money I earn.
I can tell you what the car is like that I drive.
I can't tell you how much peace I have when my head hits the pillow at night.
I can't tell you what the quality of the relationship between me and my wife or me and my kids is.
I can't tell you how much time I got to spend in a hammock last week.
These are the things I think that if you were able to metricate, if you were able to make it a game, people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it.
But the money is the best game in the world.
It's literally currency.
Exchange. You can exchange it.
I know what your wealth is compared with that guy in Japan, compared with that dude in Russia, compared with this person that's Australian.
And it's the game that so many people use to show their value.
I mean, it's not just the richness of your life, the happiness that you have, the fulfilled feeling that you have when you do whatever it is that you do, where you feel like you have a sense of purpose.
No, that's not...
Can't quantify that.
Can't measure it.
Can't put it on a scale.
It's useless.
Meanwhile, it's the most important thing.
The most important thing is satisfaction.
Satisfaction in your life, community, love, friendship, happiness, a sense of purpose.
Like you enjoy what you do.
That's so important for life.
If you are just doing something you don't want to do just for money, you live in hell.
And that's most people.
Most people live in this, like, dull hell.
And they try to have fun while they're at work.
They try to, you know, have people that they talk to at work, hopefully make some good friends at work, and you can enjoy your chitter-chatter at the water cooler.
There's a lot of problems, I think, that people that are driven face that don't get that much sympathy.
So I had this idea that type A people have type B problems.
And Type B people have Type A problems.
So insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and lazy people need to learn how to work hard and be more disciplined.
And, you know, most people that listen to shows like yours or mine are probably some version of Type A, like a kind of walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.
Type A people realize is that if you're type A, you get very little sympathy because an outwardly successful but miserable person is way less, always appears to be in a much more preferential position than a content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy one.
You know what I mean?
So problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity.
One feels like a choice and the other feels like a limitation.
One is like a bourgeois luxury and the other is like a systemic imposition.
You know, I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax.
Feels dopaminergic and opulent and addicted and privileged.
I need someone to teach me how to work harder.
Feels noble and upward aiming and like you're supporting the downtrodden.
Like every underdog movie.
In history has a training montage of some guy down on his luck that gets saved by the right woman or a Japanese dude that teaches him to wash cars or whatever it is and through grit and spit and sawdust, he sorts himself out and he fixes his life.
No movie explains how to log out of Slack at 6pm or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty.
So yeah, I think in that sense, type A people.
They may objectively have better lives.
But subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.
They wake up every single morning feeling as if they're already trying to repay some productivity debt.
And only if they dance through the day completely perfectly, nail every single task, can they go to bed not feeling like a waste man.
So on that, I think that's a very common pattern, especially for young people who feel a little bit helpless in their life.
I find a vector that makes me feel worthy.
You know, the most common story of high performers, I think, is that I needed to do something to get the world to recognize me.
One of the problems, I think, as people grow up is that they internalize this belief that the only way that the world will value me is if I can continue to perform at this high level.
And I think that there comes some people can imbibe a type of insecurity in that if I stop doing these things, if I stop being as impressive to the world.
Yes. It's going to deny me its love, that I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy.
And I think that this, talking about the high performer thing, talking about the pity of the CEO, go, how much are you running towards something that you want and how much are you running away from something that you fear?
And the way I looked at it and the way I was taught was that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.
Through the incredible struggle of training and competing, you will learn more about your ability to excel at anything.
This is the Miyamoto Musashi path.
And I think that the problem with anything extreme but also fleeting, and athletic performance is fleeting, if you're...
At the very best, you have a couple of decades.
At the very best.
If you're really lucky, you have a couple of decades to define you as a competitor.
But then your body will give out.
Your age will win.
The beating that your body takes from all the training and all the competing, eventually you're not going to be able to perform at that level anymore and you're going to fall off.
And you see it with fighters.
It's really hard with professional fighters where their whole identity is wrapped up in being a champion.
Their whole identity is being the king of the hill, and then they're no longer the king of the hill, and sometimes it happens very rapidly.
Sometimes it happens over the course of just one or two fights.
You go from being the pound-for-pound best in the world to a guy who nobody thinks is going to win the title again.
Like that.
So six months later, you're in a totally different reality.
You're in a depressed reality.
And then maybe you are physically depressed because maybe you got really hurt in your last fight.
So you're probably suffering from some brain damage.
So you've got endocrine disruption.
Your pituitary glands probably fucked.
Your cortisol levels are through the roof.
Your hormone levels are all fucked up.
You might have a hard time losing weight.
You know, you're tired and depressed because your levels are all fucked up and your hormones because you basically got your brains beat in six months ago.
Tony Ferguson is my favorite example, who was the boogeyman of the lightweight division of the UFC for years.
For years.
He was the guy who was like this unstoppable force that had bottomless cardio, never stopped coming after you, and was just hell-bent on destruction and beat the fuck out of everybody.
Beat the fuck out of everybody for years until he fought Justin Gaethje.
And Justin Gaethje...
He beat him so bad, he was never the same again.
He was never the same guy again.
He went from being a favorite in the Justin Gagey fight, I think he was a slight favorite going into that fight, to after the fight was over, he got stopped in the later rounds and never recovered.
But at a certain point in time, particularly when you're being tested, right?
So you're doing the USADA protocol at the time, and now it's a drug-free sport.
So there's no peptides.
There's nothing that can aid you in recovery.
There's, you know, you can't supplement your hormones.
Recharge your hormone development.
There's so many things that you can't do because they are in fact performance enhancers that would help you recover.
You know, if a guy like Tony Ferguson after that fight got on hormone replacement, got on testosterone, got his levels up pretty high, got to a point where he could train as hard, he probably wouldn't have had the slide that he had.
I think part of the slide is that everybody has to be natural.
And when you're natural and you get beat up a few times, you're...
We're not the same person anymore.
And I've seen it many, many times.
One bad beating and the guy's done.
It's a big thing in boxing.
In boxing, everybody points to Meldrick Taylor is one of the best examples.
Fought Julio Cesar Chavez.
Chavez broke him down in the fight and then stopped him with like a couple seconds to go in the last round.
Dropped him and the referee called the fight with a couple seconds to go in the last round.
And Meldrick Taylor was never the same again.
And he did interviews after the fight and the interviews after the fight, like a couple years later, pronounced slurring in his words.
A very clear deterioration of his reflexes and his speed.
Very clear deterioration in his ability to take a punch and even avoid punches.
No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out these things for ourselves, for some reason, we insist.
On disregarding the mountains of warnings that we have from our elders, historical catastrophes and public scandals and film and TV and we think some version of...
Yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.
It's the like, watch me do this mom mentality.
And yeah, we decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again.
And unfortunately, it always seems to be the big things.
You know, it's never about how to charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party or put up a level set of shelves.
It's never that.
It's always, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand.
The warnings that previous generations gave us over and over again.
Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it.
Over and over again, you should see your parents more.
All your worries are a waste of time.
It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life.
These are so trite.
They're such basic bitch insights because everybody has heard them before.
But if they're so basic, why does everyone who ends up arriving at them talk about them as if they've just had religious revelation?
You know what I mean?
They have this fervor to them about why it is so important for you to listen, that we couldn't have seen this coming.
How could we have seen this coming?
It is in every single fable and story from the rest of time.
And I think that one of the reasons this happens is, If you don't have a thing, looking at somebody who has that thing, they have the solution to your problem.
If you don't have money, you believe that by having money, all of your problems would be fixed.
If you don't have fame, you believe that fame is the thing that's going to get.
If you don't have the goal, you think that getting the goal is going to do those things.
And it is only by getting that and looking back and going, the issue that I thought would be fixed by getting the thing wasn't fixed.
Fuck, I need to look deeper.
Not only do we refuse to sort of learn the lessons, if you talk about this on the internet, if you have a rich person on who says, you know what, man, I earned a couple of billion dollars and I'm still pretty miserable.
You bring some actress on, she says, you know, all of the fame and stuff like that, it really didn't fix my self-worth.
The internet hates that.
It's a very contentious point to bring up.
And I think that we believe our particular mental makeup.
Would allow us to dance through this minefield, right?
No, no, no.
My unique inner landscape would be solved by this problem.
I was thinking about why I'm attracted to some of my friends, like why I like to spend time with some over others.
And I sort of realized this interesting dynamic that I hadn't really heard get talked about much, which is we think that we want to be charismatic.
Like we think we want to step into a room.
Our stories are electric.
Our energy, the aura, everyone's super impressed by us.
I didn't actually notice that that was the sort of people that I was choosing to hang around with.
There's this story about Jenny Jerome, who was Winston Churchill's mother, and she gets to dine with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister and the opponent, one night after the other.
And she says, after I left the dinner with Gladstone, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in England.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Some people feel interesting and
some people we feel interesting.
Yeah. And that's my favorite sort of person.
I think charisma, charisma, being charismatic, being energizing, it's the sort of thing lots of people are seduced by.
They love the sound of it, but it's kind of like developing
Developing real charisma.
Like Matthew McConaughey, sit opposite this guy and he's fucking oozing charisma.
But it's way easier to be interested than it is to be interesting.
And it gets you probably 80%, 90% of the way there just by caring and asking questions.
Thinking, huh, I want to know what you think about this.
That's cool, Joe.
Tell me more about that.
And why do you think that you're built that way?
And it helps.
I mean, people just love to talk about themselves.
And the other thing is, you know everything that you know.
I think the best conversations, whether they're around a table or a podcast or whatever, it feels like watching a sports match and the two teams are kind of working together to get the ball in the goal.
And you get all excited and you're like, oh, he's going to do this.
If I'm talking to a theoretical physicist and there's some very difficult thing to grasp and you hear Carl snoring, it becomes a little bit of an issue.
So he goes straight through again, second night, finds a hut.
He finds a wooden cabin in the middle of the snow, decides to set a fire, but he doesn't set it in the fireplace.
He sets it in the middle of the wooden hut.
And throughout the night, he sort of shuffles himself further and further away.
For some reason, his back's getting a little bit warm, and he keeps on sort of shuffling himself further and further away.
He wakes up the next morning on the outside of the hut, and it's completely burned down.
So he's burned the only bit, the only structure that was going to give him any safety.
He's managed to burn it to the ground.
And as he wakes up, again, sort of may have noticed that this is a recurring theme, a wolverine attacks him.
65-pound wolverine.
Fucking fangs, yellow eyes, attacks him.
So Amo uses his knife, kills this wolverine, fight to the death, kills it.
But then he realizes, I don't have a knife.
Because my soldiers took it from me.
It was his compass, which was the only thing he could use to navigate himself.
He'd smashed his compass to bits, and then he looks down, and it wasn't a wolverine.
It was a tree log.
So he smashed his compass on a tree log, thinking it was a 65-pound wolverine.
He's still just deep, deep in the hole.
Continues to ski around.
He's trying to find someone, trying to find any way marker that he can.
Now, with no way to navigate, he's got no compass, he's got no weapon.
I mean, the rifle that's got no ammunition in it.
He finds a Soviet forward operating base.
But you'll know this.
A lot of the time when armies left these behind, they booby-trapped the fuck out of them.
They booby-trapped everything.
So he walks onto the middle of the forward operating base, immediately gets exploded by a landmine, foot gets blown.
So he's laid there in the snow, kind of waiting to die.
And one day later, he's not dead.
So he's like, well, fuck it.
I might as well try and get into the forward operating base.
Gets up, continues to go forward, opens the door.
He has no foot?
It's damaged.
It's severely damaged.
Gets toward the front of the operating base, opens the door.
There's another booby trap there that explodes him and the door like 20 yards backward.
He just lays there in the snow waiting to die.
He lays there for about five or six days waiting to die.
He's melting snow in a little tin can thing, like melting it so that he can drink a little bit of water.
He's got this door on him.
He thinks, well, someone's going to find me.
It's going to be the Soviets.
They're going to kill me or I'm just going to die.
So he waits.
Death doesn't come.
Three Finnish soldiers come upon him of all of the different nationalities, of all of the different people.
Three Finnish soldiers come upon him and he thinks, finally, for all of this time, after being confused, after getting lost, I'm going to be saved.
They say, it's okay, we can take you back.
We can save you and take you back.
And the front guy of the three fins steps on a landmine.
Blows himself up.
And the other two are like, hey man, there's kind of a priority list here.
And you're at the bottom and he's at the top.
So we're going to take him back.
But just hold on for another couple of days.
We'll come back and we'll save you.
They go away and he just thinks, they're not going to find me again.
They're going to forget.
They're not going to be able to come back.
Someone's going to kill me before they do or I'm going to die or whatever.
But they do.
They manage to come back.
They manage to get him and they take him back to the medical bay.
14 days.
Was how long he'd been traveling around.
He'd moved 250 miles in this time.
His resting heart rate was 200 beats per minute.
And he weighed 98 pounds.
He'd survived this entire time on meth, water that he'd melted down into a tin cup, a couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to, and a single Siberian jay that he beat to death.
With his ski pole and just ate raw.
And he lived until he was in his 70s, died in like 1989, and just lived a great life.
I fucking love that story, dude.
This meth-fueled Finnish maniac, just like skiing through everything, setting shit on fire, hallucinating, getting blown up twice.
I wonder, you know, it's kind of a debate around how much of Hitler's behavior was because of Hitler and how much was amplified, worsened by the drugs that he was on.
That Theodore Morrell, that crazy kooky doctor that he had, he's injecting him with bull semen.
You said before about sort of that self-authoring thing, like taking control of my own life.
My friend George has got this great question where he says, you're stuck in a third world prison and you get one phone call to ring somebody to get you out.
Who'd you ring?
And that idea I love because it helps you to identify who the highest agency person is in your life.
Who is it that can think on their feet?
That doesn't need permission to go and do anything.
That'll overcome obstacles.
That is this sort of permissionless reality bender.
Maybe there's an artist who happens to be an illegal or maybe they're someone who's working on a construction site and they get rounded up and they get shipped over there.
That's a legitimate question.
When you're arresting people and prosecuting people and your goal is to arrest people and prosecute people, you do your best at that.
And the question is, how many people get arrested and prosecuted that are innocent?
Well, in the real world, what we know is quite a few.
I mean, I do a lot of podcasts with my good friend Josh Dubin, who's spent a considerable amount of his life helping innocent people get out of jail.
That's his main thing that he does, is work with unjustly prosecuted people.
And you find the levels of corruption to be horrific.
The prosecutors, DAs, the amount of corrupt judges, it's shocking.
It's shocking when you lay the facts of these cases out, like the Ohio Four, these people that were in jail, proven that one of them could not have possibly been there when the crime was committed and still was in there for 30 years.
The actual guy who was the informant came out and said that he was told to say all these things.
It's all lies.
Then was told when they were going to bring it to trial again, you will be arrested for telling lies now.
You will either be arrested because you're lying now, or you'll be arrested for telling lies previously.
Yeah, and it's also a thing that the political establishment will use as a tool to align you with them.
You know, people will say it, like Kamala Harris in 2019 was saying, I mean defund the police, we should defund the police, which is just crazy to say.
You need to fund them more, train them better.
You know, they need training the way military groups need training, constantly, consistently.
And, you know, they're encountering horrific things.
I mean, my friends who have been cops and, you know, and have served overseas, they'll tell you...
Most of them will tell you that they suffered more PTSD as cops than they had even in the military.
Yeah. Depending upon your service, depending on what you had to do.
But a lot of them, it's just like every day you're seeing some nightmarish situation.
I wouldn't even ever guess that I could pull it off.
I wouldn't even guess.
I don't think anybody even understands what that even means unless you've shown up and seen some guy's brains blown out all over the curb for nothing, for some stupid argument about nothing.
When you've seen some woman get shot in front of her kid by the husband, you have no idea.
No one has any idea.
You don't know unless you experience it.
And then you have to go home to your own children, go home to your own wife, and you're just, your brain is on fire.
You know, your soul is just in agony.
We were watching a video the other day of this guy who had to shoot this guy, this cop.
This guy was, something was wrong.
It was clearly mentally unstable, was yelling, was, you know...
Telling everybody what he was gonna do they tased him that didn't work then he's charging at this cop and the cop shoots him and then the cops sobbing and Shaking and his partners telling him to breathe how to breathe and he's just Probably the first person you ever had to kill It's horrible.
It's horrible and that's that's He succeeded he's he stopped a threat and he You know, it was justified.
This person was trying to kill him.
What about pulling people over and the windows are all tinted and they won't roll down the windows.
You're standing there vulnerable.
It could be a shotgun inches away from your face and you have no idea.
And they've all seen all these videos where people get gunned down.
You pull people over, all of a sudden the back window explodes with machine gun fire.
I mean, they live with that every day.
They live with that fear every day.
And then they have to hear this rhetoric everywhere of defund the police and calling cops pigs.
And it's crazy.
It's crazy.
And it ultimately destroys the fabric of our society.
And, you know, there's plenty of evidence that cops have done bad things.
It's not excusing the bad cops.
There's bad plumbers.
There's bad car mechanics.
There's bad everything.
And there's people that shouldn't be cops.
Shouldn't be a cop and is, you know, on their last nerve and snaps at someone or overreacts at someone or brutalizes someone totally unnecessarily.
It gives you a very distorted perception of the average encounter that a person has with police officers.
Because most of the interactions that people have with police officers are fine.
Most of them.
The vast majority.
No one gets hurt.
No one goes to jail.
Most of them.
You know, but you see the ones that go sideways and then you think, This is what cops are doing.
That's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way the algorithms work, that edge cases that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire.
Right. And what it creates is it moves the fringe to the middle because most of what you see by design is the stuff that's the most outlandish.
Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count.
One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, almost certainly sparked by a research mishap.
Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Yet in 2020, when people...
Started speculating that a lab accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic.
They were treated like kooks and cranks.
In this newspaper!
Many public health officials and prominent...
By the way, not by this person.
I'm not blaming this person.
Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory.
I wonder why they did that.
I wonder if there's an email paper trail that's already been established.
There is.
Insisting that a virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a great grant, lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research that if conducted with lax safety standards, could have
resulted in a dangerous pathogenization.
No fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
Yeah, they defend themselves.
I mean, it's appeal to authority.
And they fucked us.
And you guys were a part of it, by the way.
That newspaper was a big part of it.
Big part of calling the lab leak theory racist, which was really kooky.
How is it that so many U-turns, regardless of what it is, regardless of which side it is, the sort of permanent state of amnesia that everybody's in?
There was this WhatsApp message.
You ever have one of those WhatsApp messages where it says forwarded many times at the top?
And you're like, oh, this is going to be good.
It's just an advert.
It's just a banner.
Forwarded many times.
And it was a single squaddy, a guy in...
We're fatigued walking down a street in London and a screenshot, I think, of a text saying that someone had said that the army was going to be deployed on the streets of London to keep everybody in the house through martial law, that this was how intense that the lockdowns were going to get.
And it was going to happen on this particular day.
It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp.
Never happened.
And, like, all of the people that shared that, that were adamant, that created all of these stories and theories around it, like, no one ever actually...
Went to go and call those people out about what it was that they'd pushed.
All of the people that were adamant, global health passports, the vaccine passport, that's going to come, that's going to happen.
I mean, the unfalsifiable version of it is because we knew that it was going to happen, they weren't able to do it.
So actually, we were the righteous resistance in doing the thing.
And the same with whether it's lab leak theory, whether it's Joe Biden's mental decline, no matter what it is, you can put this position out there.
It's fucking...
Fortified on the internet for the rest of time.
And after long enough, you're like, I don't remember that.
You're like fucking the most gaslighty partner that you've ever been with.
Well, I think in this case, you have an individual journalist who wrote this story.
I do not know the history of this individual journalist, but what they said is accurate and important.
So it's good that the New York Times has this come-to-Jesus moment where they lay out, The conspiracy theories were all true.
That's what the title should be.
The conspiracy theories were all true.
Yeah, the shot wasn't effective.
Yeah, there were therapeutics that were available that were dismissed and that bad studies were created in order to make sure that people weren't taking these drugs because we needed the emergency use authorization.
And the only way you can get that is if you have no treatment.
So you had to rely on one thing, and that one thing was the vaccine.
How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this sort of balance thing that he's got going on at the Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent sort of pivot with regards to fact-checking on meta platforms, how many of those do you think would have happened if there hadn't been a Trump victory in November?
How much of this is blowing with the wind, do you think?
And it's all because what Elon is doing with USAID and what he's doing with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency is finding a lot of inefficiency, waste, and fraud.
Most of it, he believes, is waste.
Some of it is fraud.
And it's a lot of...
There's a lot of money that's going in directions it shouldn't be going.
And then there's stuff that's legal that probably shouldn't be legal, like non-government organizations doing the bidding of the government because they're funded by the government.
There's certain things the government is not allowed to do, but a non-government organization, an NGO, can do.
Going to it goes to foreign countries where we have an interest in having the people that are running that country on our side or We don't like them and we want to fund the rebels And so you can fund the people, you can fund them through all sorts of organizations where you hide and mask the money and you move it around and you have essentially blank checks.
And you can just funnel billions of dollars all over the world with no accounting.
It must be an odd situation to be in, because most of the time, the level of scrutiny that you're under and the level of security threat that's likely is kind of, it goes in line with status, fame, and that also goes in line with maybe some resources too.
So as people get more likely to be a target...
They're also more able to perhaps be able to protect themselves with living in a nicer house, gated community.
Yeah, we reached out, but he doesn't really want to talk to anybody right now, which is totally understandable.
He's got an open invitation.
If he ever just says, okay, I'd like to talk.
Whenever. Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk to him.
You know, I'd love to find the real story because the narrative and the documentary, the docudrama that was made about the Silk Road and what he did, you know, I'd like to know how much of that is bullshit.
Because I think a lot of it probably was.
You know, I think they were trying to set him up, for sure.
And I think there's probably some things that he was accused of that aren't accurate.
The way, the variable schedule reward that tempts you, that keeps you there, you don't know what's going to happen.
This is so interesting.
I had the guy who wrote, Stuart Russell, he wrote the original AI textbook.
It's translated into 70 languages around the world.
He taught me this really interesting thing about how the algorithms work.
So we know...
Mm-hmm.
The first one is to be better at providing you with things that you'll select.
The second one is nudging your preferences so that you are more easy to predict.
Because if you just give something the optimizing function of cause Joe to click on a thing and
Stick about click-through and watch time.
If you get it to do that, it'll just find any route.
It's not bounded by...
And you must make sure that it's his existing preferences.
You can't change his preferences.
But this is one of the reasons, I think, why polarization has increased.
Not just that edge cases get used, it pushes people further apart, they get put off into their silos, echo chambers, recursive stuff, blah, blah, blah.
I think a big part of it is just the algorithms find it easier.
To be able to predict you, which gives them an incentive.
Now, it's not like a conscious incentive, but it gives you this incentive to be pushed out to the sides.
And there's this worry about – I learned about this idea called knowingness.
So polarization, everyone thinks it's a big deal, and I think it is.
It's a big problem.
But knowingness is like an uncurious intellectual insulation.
So people believe that they know the answer to the question.
Before the question has even been asked.
I know what the outcome is.
I know what the answer is before you've even asked me the question.
And what's interesting about this epidemic of knowingness we have at the moment is if the problem is poor information, you can fix it typically with better information.
I will give you a better quality of information, but if the problem is knowingness...
You are insulated from ever updating your beliefs because no amount of existing new information is going to actually help you.
There's this really cool quote that said, most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.
And I think that explains why the culture war is so boring.
Culture war is largely super boring because both sides act as if the facts are already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's, their prejudices just get moved around until they can come up with the outcome that they already wanted before you even ask the question about the thing that you're talking about?
That's the situation we end up with, and I think it explains why, I think it explains why the culture wars feel so samey, and nothing really ever seems to move.
Like, it's not moved forward.
It goes at such a snail's pace.
News is operating at light speed, and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at a snail's pace.
And it needs that to sort of throw the absurdity into it.
But then on the flip side, if you don't live with your parents, you're in a different city, you work a job that you're not that enamored by, maybe your health's good, maybe it's not so good, you're a little bit worried about stuff, you're kind of bored a lot of the time, You need to be sedated.
And, you know, people were using it to promote things, and then they started using it to elevate their profile, and then people became influencers.
And once people became influencers, and once people, like a regular person, get a couple of million followers, then all of a sudden you get sponsors, and that's your job now?
It's literally the difference between going camping or being homeless, right?
One is an imposition, and the other one is a choice.
And I think that more young kids need to realize what the reality of being an influencer is like.
It's not just going to the Seychelles and uploading a selfie or getting...
I don't know what they do, like Play-Doh, fucking jelly, new video games.
That's not what it's like.
Look at the Twitch streamers.
Look at most of the Twitch streamers.
They are like the fucking grunts of the content creation.
Factories of content, eight hours a day, five days a week, just fucking stream of consciousness.
Someone puts something in the chat and you go, oh, well, let's watch this thing.
Let's watch that thing.
It's like, it is, it's not, if you do not want the life that you need to get in order to get the outcome that you're looking for, you need to be very, very careful about.
Because the reality is war.
It's not Call of Duty.
It's the same thing with being in a band.
It's like, I love the idea of traveling the world and playing to these big crowds and doing all the rest of it.
It's like, okay, you're going to have to live in a van with four other sweaty dudes for like half a decade first.
You're going to have to spend so long, a decade learning to play guitar.
You're going to have to write songs that never see the day of light.
You're going to have to do all of this stuff.
And you have no idea if it's going to work.
I think about the gap from where people are in a place that they don't want to be until they get to a place that they do.
And I think of it like a lonely chapter.
So everybody that has got from a place where they don't want to be to one where they are, there's a point where they're so different that they can't resonate with their old set of friends.
Right. But they're not yet sufficiently developed that they've created their new set of friends.
And there's this temptation to go back to the old patterns, the old ways of thinking.
And I did this live show in London last year, my first big headline show at the Eventim Apollo in London.
It was pretty cool.
And this idea, I think, was one that really resonated with a lot of people because everybody's trying to grow and there is an incentive for you to stay in the same place because not that many people grow.
Most people don't change.
They make little changes.
You know, they'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or, you know, they'll switch from one company to another.
But how many people do you know that have lost 50 pounds or moved to a different country or have genuinely changed the way that they see the world?
We're so shaped by the people around us that we can't help.
But be tempted.
You know, you're going to have to do something.
If you want to go from where you are to where you want to be, you're going to have to do something that makes you more different, more weird, more easy to be mocked, especially if you come from a country like the UK where I'm from.
Being different is not particularly celebrated in that way.
It's the sort of thing that's quite easily mocked.
There's a big culture of piss-taking.
And if you start, what are you talking to people on the internet for?
It's fucking weird.
That's stupid.
That's not going to work.
Why are you going to do that?
So if you don't have that level of enthusiasm, there is no support around you.
To tell you that the thing that you're trying to do, taking up the martial art, why are you training this Taekwondo bullshit, like, you know, fucking six nights a week?
Why are you coaching all of these mums and all of these, like, old guys on how to do Tai Chi or whatever?
Why are you doing that?
Well, because maybe I'm sort of pulled to it, and there is this temptation to go back to your old ways of thinking.
Go back to the road that you already know how it's going to end.
And I...
Get the sense that this is not a bug.
It is a feature.
It's a part of moving from a place that you do not want to be to one that you do.
And for the most part, you actually need to live through this lonely chapter.
And you look at it and you go, well, the fucking Rocky montage was 3.5 minutes.
For me, it's been five years.
Where's the championship ring?
You know what I mean?
I haven't won the fight.
Where's Apollo Creed?
None of this stuff's happened.
The thing that I wish more stories talked about, If you watch it in the movies, yeah, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey of the athlete that's going to change his life around and get the goal.
But his self-belief never wavers, right?
He makes the decision, and it's one straight shot, typically.
And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there.
His self-belief never wavers.
I don't think that that's what the experience of doing personal growth is like at all.
In my experience, you're just swimming in...
Uncertainty and fear and a lack of belief that it's even going to happen.
You don't even have the promise of glory on the other side of it.
I don't even know if this is going to be worth it.
And I'm fucking doing Sam Harris's waking up meditation app and I'm journaling on the morning.
I'm going to the gym.
Why am I eating meat and fruit?
Does this even work?
Like, you know, you're doing all of this stuff, trying, scrabbling like a guy in a fucking well trying to find a handhold.
And this is most people, I think, most people's experience because if most people don't change, you are going to be an outlier if you're somebody who does change.
I think about personal growth kind of like a rocket ship taking off.
And as you take off, you've got a particular velocity that you're moving at.
And what you want is to find other people moving at the same velocity as you.
But the quicker that you move, the fewer people are going to be like you.
So some people will be ahead of you.
And you're in this lonely chapter and then you catch up to them.
And then, oh no.
And this isn't, you know, some comment on people that work on themselves or like morally better or worse than anybody else.
But it's just a stark sort of fact about you talk to people and you resonate with people that are at the same level of life as you are.
And that kind of makes sense.
You have things to discuss.
You're encountering the same sorts of challenges, whether it's in terms of your self-worth or your wealth or your relationship status or all of these things.
Birds of a feather, right?
And one of the, I guess, difficult realizations of people who want to change their life is that if you do it well, you might have to go through a period where you let go of all of your friends.
But the really bad realization is if you do it really well, you might have to do that multiple times throughout your life.
You find a group of people.
Finally, I've landed.
Oh, that period where I was on my own and I didn't really understand.
Oh, fuck.
I'm still going.
You mean I've got to do it again?
I've got to do it again.
I just thought that I'd found my group and I've got to do it again.
This lonely chapter thing is a big deal and I think that it explains why so few people make big changes.
Because the temptation is always going to be to just go back to what's normal, go back to what I know.
And it's why, you know, America, for all that it's a horrible, cis, hetero, patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everybody down, it's an enthusiastic and sort of excitable country.
And you guys have kind of got permanent first-line cocaine energy about everything.
And for me...
It seems to be a real enthusing environment.
It encourages me to do things.
Helps me to take risks.
Either that or get kicked in the head a lot.
And I just love it.
I love the fact that it makes me feel confident in doing difficult things.
And, yeah, I wish that...
More people had that community around them.
I think largely Reddit is just a website filled with people who couldn't find other people to talk about their niche in their hometown.
Like this particular Warhammer 40k version or whatever.
But yeah, it's difficult.
And when you get to the stage where you're faced with some personal growth decision, you're always going to have to make this value exchange of, do I want to move forward on my own?