Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Joe Rogan dissect the historical brutality of the East India Trading Company while analyzing ancient mysteries like the Younger Dryas impact theory and potential extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution. They contrast modern parental anxiety with the "latchkey kid" era, linking persistent tribal instincts to the military-industrial complex's profit from violence. The conversation culminates in a sobering reflection on whether sentient AI or neural interfaces will resolve conflict or accelerate humanity's self-destruction amidst fragile digital civilizations. [Automatically generated summary]
I actually don't know the answer to that because we've never met.
So it's not like you've intimidated me, but I just, I'm really, I think what I really enjoy about your show is just such an eclectic perspective on so many diverse things, and it comes like so naturally to you.
When you're doing it, you know, it's like make-believe.
So it's so much fun to be like, yeah, playing pirates, and I'm going to behead you.
But I mean, in moments of like scenes and stuff where I actually had to think about what it must have been like to be a female at that time or because they existed.
Women, female pirates existed, and we just, we didn't hear many, much about stories about them.
I mean, I heard about Grace O'Malley, maybe there were Mary Reid, like a few famous ones, Ching Shi, after I did my research.
But like in those moments, you're like, this stuff must have, like, this was real.
They lived at a time where it was survival of the fittest.
It was barbaric.
And I wonder what that must have been like.
But besides that, the stunts and stuff, like, I really have so much admiration for the amount of precision it requires to pull that stuff off from so many people, not just the stunt department, but like the cameras, because they're also moving in sync with you.
Which Frankie, our director, really loved the idea of, and I honestly love it because it brings you into that moment is so enriched with everything that you're supposed to feel between action and cut.
So I do love a long one-er-but you know, I come from Bollywood movies, so we have a lot of choreography, a choreography for like dance sequences where stories are also moving forward, like between your exchange of expression or something's happening somewhere else, you come back.
So I treat sort of fight sequences like dancing.
It's you learn the choreography, but that doesn't stop your face from telling the story.
It was a cool year for me because I was filming three jobs, which were all action and stunts.
So this movie called Heads of State, which I did for Amazon again, and then Citadel, and this movie.
So it was a year of three action-backed jobs.
So the, you know, being agile and being in it was already part of what I was doing because that's what I was filming every day.
But the swords training was tough and to be ambidextrous with it as well.
So I had my stunt coordinator who was doing all three movies with me, she, in between shots, she and I would just take our rubber swords out and do like choreography and rehearsals.
But like it took at least three or four months of just staying in it and getting loose with it.
Also because Carl Urban, my co-actor, had casual, learned how to do like sword fights in The Lord of the Rings.
So he was amazing at it.
So I didn't, you know, in that last duel, I didn't want to be any less than.
It wasn't kendo, for sure, and it definitely wasn't fencing.
It was uniquely because the swords were our director was very, very excited about the weapons in this movie and wanting to get it really right from the period, whether it was the guns that we used or the blades that we used.
The machete was one of my favorite weapons in the movie because that's like her weapon in the movie because it's practical.
Use it for coconuts, use it for skulls.
Same, same.
And that was really fun.
But our Second unit director Rob Alonzo had so much experience in the amount of work that he's done prior.
He came in with a very specific idea of wanting to make the fighting style super unique and each set piece like a different design of choreography.
So, you know, there was one which was in a dark cave, so the only time you saw people was when the gunshot went off and just different styles of fighting, which I thought was really cool.
Now, I mean, I have a four-year-old and I lift her a lot, so my arms are like all right.
But during this movie, because we were just like at it, and we both, you know, threw ourselves at it, Carl and I.
And it took, it was a big choreography on top of this bluff.
We shot on 100% of this movie, at least 90% is definitely on practical sets, real sets.
We did not want to use a lot of VFX.
So, you know, Phil Ivey, our production designer, we built the ships, we built the house, we built everything was a replica of what it would have looked like in the 1900s in the Cayman Islands.
We went and saw it.
It was amazing to be able to do that with real stuff, you know?
Well, the whole history of piracy is so fascinating.
And one of the things that the movie is about is this, the Carl Urban character is from, he was one of the soldiers of the East India Trading Company.
Then I went on a deep dive on the East India Trading Company.
That is crazy.
When you learn the history of that one corporation is one of the first publicly traded corporations that essentially was in control of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, went to war with China over opium, and that's how they took over Hong Kong.
And you're like, holy shit, one crazy fucking corporation involved in the slave trade, the opium, just a corporation, a publicly traded corporation.
People could buy stock in it, like one of the first ones.
And it just went haywire to the point where it got so big, there was a revolt, and then the British government took over it, nationalized it.
If you think about how much in their minds they were able to achieve and how much they were able to destroy in that duration is crazy if you go down history.
And this movie actually has a really interesting slice of what they were capable of doing.
They utilized pirates in order to take over new lands in their conquests.
And then when piracy was abolished, they went after them and they wanted to arrest them and they vilified the same people that helped them build their entire empire.
So this was really interesting because my character's story, her parents and her family are indentured servants, which was the truth of many, many people, especially in India, where young people were told better opportunities, new lands, more money.
Come with us and take them off as servants and then drop them in different parts of the world, in islands.
And the Caribbean has a huge Indian community whose history started with just being displaced from their lands and dropped somewhere else in the world and then having to figure out what your future looks like.
I mean, it still happens to many, many people around the world right now.
But I thought it was really interesting that my character came from that and her entire identity was erased, taken from her.
She had no idea.
She was 12, so she had no idea what it meant to have that identity.
And I met so many people actually when I went to the Cayman who don't know anything about their family tree beyond like five generations.
Or they know where their family may have come from, from Sri Lanka or from India or, you know, any other nation, but have no idea what, like, what it was, where, from what village, like, what was your culture.
And that ambiguity in a history of a human being erases a part of you.
It denies you of knowing the depth of your culture or where you come from or your roots.
And I thought that was really, really interesting for my character to play and then reclaim herself through the journey of the movie.
And for a lot of cultures, they don't have an understanding of exactly what happened before they were colonized.
Like one of the great examples is Mexico.
I went in a long, deep dive on Mexico recently over the last few months because I've had a bunch of people who were historians who came on the podcast who were just researching these ancient Inca and Mayan sites and talking to them about it.
And then I went into it and it's like there was over 100 different languages that are just lost forever in that whole what is now called Mexico.
And that's the reason why everybody over there speaks Spanish and is Catholic.
Like it's not because that was their language and that was their religion.
600 guys in the 1500s came over, took over what was the Aztec Empire with help of the people that they were in conflict with, and changed the course of the entire country.
Yeah, and like you were talking about history in India.
She has been invaded over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, only invaded.
We've never invaded anybody else.
She's not at the time.
Yeah, the Portuguese, the British, the Mughals, like from back in time.
And the history of India, I mean, I'm not a historian and I don't claim to be, but I find it really fascinating.
I love culture and especially the culture of India.
You will see my grandmother was Catholic because she comes, she was raised in a part of India which was colonized, and a lot of people with Kerala, a lot of people were converted into Catholicism.
And she grew up Catholic and you know, she followed it for a really long time in her life.
India is like hyper-diverse because of how many people have kind of made it her roots.
So when you go to India, the amount of diversity you will see, the kind of range of people that you will meet is impossible to fathom.
Like an Indian face does not look like a particular person.
Or the amount of cultures, the languages, we have written and spoken languages, which are almost like 20-something or in their 30s, absolutely different alphabet, absolutely different sound.
Well, I would go just to see, for many things, but just to see that one immense temple that was carved entirely out of stone is one of the great mysteries of archaeology.
But there are quite a few, if you go, especially south of India and the caves, if you go inside the Andaman and Nicobar, like the caves, you'll see from thousands and tens and thousands of years ago illustrations that you're like, how did this happen?
How could this temple have been chiseled or how could these stones have been moved at that time?
It's just, it makes you, it made me very, very curious about like what kind of tools did we have back then?
And I just remember studying about it in school and that's my maximum understanding of that civilization, but also like having visited the Indus River, I guess.
But I remember like the artifacts that were found and like if you do a deep dive into how that civilization existed and then how it was erased.
And, you know, it makes you question like it's there had to be some seriously advanced like scientific understanding that was eventually lost as, you know, as human evolution happened where we lose a civilization and then comes back again.
But it just makes you wonder about early humans and how fascinatingly advanced we would have had to be to do all of that.
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This one particular temple that I'm talking about, Jamie, do you know the temple I'm talking about?
The one insanely massive one that's built into the side of a mountain?
Because all their other structures are smaller stones stacked on top of each other in a way that you could see a person carrying them and cutting them.
Well, it's even more complicated now because there's an Italian scientist that we had on recently called Filippo Biondi.
Am I saying it right?
Biondi?
He's amazing accent, this guy.
He's fucking incredible.
But he's using, what is it, radio Doppler tomography?
So it's a type of satellite imagery that uses some technology to get a vision of what's under the ground.
And they've used this successfully to show known caverns in the ground and known pyramids.
And they even used it in Italy to show that they can look through a 1.2 kilometer mountain and see underneath it this particle collider and have an exact dimension of the particle collider and see what the outlet.
So they used this on the pyramids and they found these immense structures under the pyramids that go over a kilometer into the ground with massive, these huge 20 meter diameter columns that have these huge circular coils wrapped around them.
No one knows what the hell they're looking at, but they're in very precise positions.
They've done over 200 scans of these things.
They don't know what they are.
They don't know what's the purpose of all this, who made this.
So if this turns out to be accurate, and they're very confident that it's accurate, and they're starting to look into it deeper, and they're trying to figure out how to get down in there and explore with drones or something.
Then the whole thing gets thrown into question because it's preposterous enough that you have someone who's able to cut and place 2,300,000 stones that's perfectly aligned, a true north, south, east, and west.
Some of them weigh as much as 80 tons.
Tons that come from 500 miles away through the mountains, no roads.
If there's structures underneath that that go a kilometer into the ground, and like there's a giant, like a huge square at the bottom, they don't know what it is.
But these are structures.
These are not like something that is just a naturally occurring stone.
This is like what the images are showing you, and the three-dimensional replication of what they think is, that's what they think it looks like underneath there.
Herodotus said it's greater than Giza, and it's underground.
And in the center of one of these atriums, there is a 40-meter metallic object that's shaped like a Tic-Tac.
It's in the center of this.
Yes.
So there's a bunch of shit that they can't explain down there.
Where you're like, okay, what is this?
They also know that a lot of these civilizations, like later versions of it, took from some of the older sites and started building new things or built on top of them, like very disrespectfully.
But nobody had an idea of the importance of history back then.
So totally in India, like when we were colonized, you hear stories of the British officers telling little kids that, hey, I'll give you two pounds.
Go and get the gold statue from this temple or whatever.
And you don't have comprehension of what the value of historical things were.
That there was so much that was taken from India in terms of wealth and history and historical artifacts and the Kohinur diamond, which is still on the queen's crown, which came from India.
You go, if you do a deep dive into the mythology of India and the stories that come from there, the kind of technology that has been mentioned in these ancient texts, like the Vimanas, you're saying, you have flying objects, you have spears with some sort of energy, you have bows and arrows with some sort of energy that travels beyond time and light.
And there's so much of all of this stuff referenced back then, which maybe humans thought was magic, but was some form of ancient technology.
Like, who's to say?
But we do definitely believe in Indian mythology.
If you go back into Hinduism and the incredible stories that exist, like I love to think about the origin, like where it must have come from.
But there's so many fascinating, fascinating stories from then.
But from our perspective now, we have to be like, how do you break down the truth of, you know, that there was this light that arrived from miles and miles away and it felt like, I don't know, was it a bomb?
I mean, I believe in the mysticism and the magic of ancient humans and, you know, the beginning of time.
There's no way to explain what and how that was.
You know, we have the information we do from religious texts and historians of the past, but it's just really fascinating to think about how resilient and human beings have been and how evolutions have had the same problems over time, but we kind of just navigate it through different worlds, you know?
And those stories, like when you're talking about certain passages in the Bible or certain passages in any religious text, a lot of those were stories that were just handed down for generations and generations before anybody wrote anything.
So it's like, what were they trying to remember?
Like when they're talking about flying Vimanas, like what were they talking about?
Like what did they experience?
And how long ago was it?
Because I don't think we have a real understanding of how long ago it is.
But it probably just blew the roots off of everything.
It blew everything into smithereens.
And it probably had some kind of chemical effect, too, because it's a physical object.
I don't know what it was made out of.
But, you know, some of them are made out of iron.
Some of them are made out of nickel.
Like that big one that they saw, three eye atlas that passed through.
That was a weird one because this is a nickel alloy that is as big as the size of Manhattan.
And the only way we have it on Earth is in industrial manufacturing of an alloy.
But this thing in another planet somewhere else, millions and millions and millions of years ago was formed under whatever weird circumstances and conditions their planet has.
He thinks that life occurs when planets get a certain distance from their sun.
And then over time, they get too far out.
and then life doesn't exist on those planets anymore.
But when they're in this Goldilocks zone like Earth is for a long period of time relative to our life, life exists, and then intelligent life emerges and figures out, hey, we got to get out of here eventually because this is not going to sustain us, and then it propagates the world or the universe, rather.
And he thinks that there's a thing that happens and he calls it peopling.
He thinks that when a planet gets further enough from the sun that it eventually peoples because it eventually reaches the right conditions where life emerges and evolution takes place and natural selection and random mutation, all these things converge and eventually you get an intelligent creature that knows how to manipulate its environment.
And there's a lot of weird speculation that it's part of a binary solar system too.
That there might have been another version of our sun that burned out that's like way out there, like way out in space, like way past Pluto, way out there.
I mean, there's a lot of wacky theories as to why there seems to be some large object that's outside of our vision that's way, way past Pluto.
So there's a thing called the Kuiper Belt that's outside of Pluto, and that's part of what Pluto is, which is why they decided it's not really a planet anymore.
But they think there's something else out there.
They call it Planet X.
They think it's a lot of weird speculation whether or not it's real.
But they think there might be a large body, larger than Earth, like Jupiter-size or something, like way out there.
Which brings us back to this Younger Dry's impact theory, which is one of the predominant theories as to why ancient super advanced civilizations completely disappeared and there's no evidence of them.
And there's a lot of physical evidence.
When they do core samples of the Earth, they find there's a lot of iridium, which is very common in space but very rare on Earth, which indicates some sort of an impact.
And then they also find micro-diamonds.
These nuclear diamonds, I think they call it Trinitite.
And they first observed this when they did the Trinity explosion.
So the nuclear explosion created these micro-diamonds on the ground, just a massive impact, an explosion, heat, and energy.
Well, they find those littered all throughout the world in this same core sample timeline of like 11,800 years.
So they think we were just bombarded.
So a lot of these things, like these temples in India, perhaps the pyramids, some structures that were stone, probably just survived.
There's so much that has survived, I think, from like a timeline we can't even explain.
I mean, in India, we see so much of it.
So many of our texts, the Vedas are, you know, the oldest texts in the world.
And to be able to, like, read stories which now maybe we imagine are stories, but are probably reality of a civilization gone by is just crazy to think about.
You know, if these people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are correct, there was some sort of a very, very advanced civilization pre-11,800 years ago.
And this also coincides with the end of the ice age.
It coincides with all of the ice caps over North America disappearing.
Like North America was covered, like three-quarters of North America was covered like a mile-high sheet of ice.
Went away like that.
That's why the Great Lakes exist.
The Great Lakes are just that ice melted.
And then whatever was left just ran through the country.
And you can see the physical evidence of it when they show satellite images.
It looks like enormous amounts of water just destroyed the landscape and completely carved it and changed it.
What do you think happened with, and I wonder if you have, because you have so much extensive knowledge with the amazing guests that you have on the show, how did we go from Neanderthal or early man to this technology-driven, like really smart, intelligent, like what happened in history and the evolution of human beings that we were able to make that switch so quick?
And I think that is a part of this process of becoming a human being.
And I think it's leading us to develop AI.
That's what I really think.
But I think we most likely, something intervened.
Now, there's a lot of people that think the rational people think that it was the invention of fire and the cooking of food that gave us better access to nutrition and protein.
And then innovating in order to hunt allowed the brain.
super intelligent life form but if you think about it if i was watching a show about that and i was like that makes sense What was the show you were watching?
Versus like in Hindu mythology, also, you know, we read about a time where God, human, and demon existed at the same time and procreated and like created different realms and life and stories.
And so it's like when you think about stories like that, stories, beliefs, you know, from around the world that have similar sort of color, it's almost like trying to connect the dots of what must have happened at that time, you know, all around the world.
And some, and a lot of them have these stories of something of some kind of higher nature, higher power, higher technology intervening in the lives of human beings and even manipulating the process.
Like if you think about the Roman, you know, or Egyptian gods.
I don't want to speak about culture, but I can't even say about ours, but that power that we read about, you know, that like if you if you go into it, I'm a big believer.
So I think that, you know, was that like a real experience that happened to a human being at that time?
A real experience with someone that had a limited vocabulary, a limited amount of knowledge, and a limited ability to write things down.
And so they probably told these stories from whatever words they could use to describe what this was.
Like if you were living 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, and a UFO landed, a giant metallic disc landed, and little tiny creatures came out and talked to you telepathically.
You don't have a written language.
You don't, your culture is hunter-gatherers.
Like, how do you tell that story?
How do you tell that story?
And what are the people that you told that story to going to tell their children and their grandchildren for many, many, many, many generations before anybody figures out how to write things down?
But now the perspective on this which people have is, is that our pragmatic, practical 2026 human trying to explain something that was magical and did exist at a time that we don't have an explanation for.
Like there's the other side of that with people that, you know, you hear so many stories of visitations from the gods back then, you know, to humans and the divinity of, at least in my country for sure, of different avatars of gods coming down to earth to save humankind and to help in human salvation and to help them against evil.
So when you hear of those stories, like the practical side of me will be like, are those human stories and who is that power that they were seeing at that time?
And then there's a side of you which is like, there's so much we can't explain and sometimes have to like leave it to inexplicable magic of the universe.
Like I'm someone who loves science, but I also am a believer of that just can't explain everything.
I mean, it's all theoretical and speculative and no one really knows.
And then there's this concept of what took place before the Big Bang.
And then there's Sir Roger Penrose's version of it, which has been many versions of the Big Bang, expansion, then contraction, and that it's not the beginning, that it's part of an endless cycle.
It's funny when I was doing research for The Bluff, this movie, I went to the Cayman Islands for a couple of days to get an understanding of the history of the islands.
And the Caribbean is so interesting, especially Cayman, because it's in the middle of these trading routes between Honduras, Cuba, Mexico.
Ships, when trading started, is when the Cayman was discovered.
The islands were discovered.
So when I went down there, I went to the museum and they said, yeah, it was like the 1700s or 1800s when the first settlers came.
And, you know, it started with family or like people trying to run away or pirates or just people making pit stops before going to another country.
And they said that that was the first time that there was any history of the island.
And I was like, how's that possible?
That only when like settlers found that place and now, I mean, Cayman Islands, Cayman Islands.
But how, like, if you think about there's so many places in the world where people and humans have existed way before we even have an understanding of or are willing to acknowledge, you know, in many cultures, it's different.
Yeah, you think about like how countries were like conquests happen and like, you know, we're living in the history of so many people's blood and sacrifices.
It's just spectacular because it is a rare, very rare situation where this one particular group of chimpanzees, they were embedded with these scientists for 20 years.
Well, he believes that everything is from aliens, that aliens came down and aliens taught people how to do things and aliens built all these things.
And I'm more in line of they intervened and created what we think of now as humans.
And then humans figured out a different path of technology than we're on today.
That we are on the path of internal combustion engines, electronics, electricity.
And they were probably on some different path of technology, but as far down the path, if not more.
And I think they probably had figured out some things that we have yet to figure out, including like the trans the transferring and the moving and shipping of enormous stone blocks without heavy machinery.
Like we don't know what they were doing.
Yeah, what did they know?
How did they cut them?
Like, what are they, what are they, what, if those structures that Filippo Biondi describes underneath, if that's real, like, what was the pyramid then?
Because I'm saying, I don't know if I like, I just know that we can't explain that quick evolution of humans from Neanderthal to be highly intelligent.
I just think that whatever happened, we don't know.
And I would not rule out intervention.
And I wouldn't think that an intelligent species from somewhere else, if they did find these very curious primates that may already be working with sticks and rocks and stuff like that, that they wouldn't intervene because we do it.
If we went to a planet somewhere and we found some fucking frogs or some weird animals, but nothing big, we might drop a deer off in there and see what happens.
I think they were part of the megafauna that went extinct during the impact because 65% of all megafauna on Earth, and particularly in North America, went extinct around the same time.
The rational people, not me, but the rational people think it was the berserker theory, which means that human beings killed so many mammoths that we wiped them out to extinction.
And they think the Younger Dryas Impact Theory people think like this is not a coincidence that this coincides with the end of the ice age and also coincides with where the core samples are.
And also coincides with the fact that these animals were all here at one point in time.
They all got wiped out except a very few.
There's only a few left.
Like there's the pronghorn antelope, which is a really weird one.
It's this prehistoric antelope that lives in North America, and it's different than every other animal here because it's evolved to get away from cheetahs.
Because we used to have cheetahs in North America, so it can run like 55 miles.
I was filming in Africa recently in Kenya, and we, for this Indian movie I'm doing called Varanasi, and we shot with wildebeests and like, as in like in the middle of them, I was in me and my co-actor Mahesh were in the middle of these wildebeests that were all around us while they were migrating.
It's like the coolest thing I've ever seen.
But when you see their faces and for how many years versions of them have existed, you know, you feel the gravity when you see these animals in the wild.
Like, literally, there's a really extraordinary island in Africa where the river changed courses and it left this one pack of lions on this one island that only has water buffalo on it.
And so these lions became enormous.
And the female lions are as big as male lions everywhere else, and the male lions are way bigger than they are anywhere else.
I think there's the documentaries, I think it's called Relentless Enemies, but it's so because they look like these jacked bodybuilder lions.
Like the video village is sitting, we're filming, and it's far away, but it just turned his head and just looked at me and then just kept looking at me.
And I swear I had to like get up and get out of its view because it just kept staring.
Like, there was this, one of our rangers was telling us a story that they have, we were in Maasai Mara and they were like, they have open jeeps and, you know, you have food that they keep really hidden so that the animals can't smell it under your seats and stuff.
And he was telling a story about this influencer.
He's driving and there's a pack of lions.
Lions just eaten, so he's sleeping.
And this influencer who puts his hand outside to try and touch the lion's head and got it on video and survived to tell the story.
And then he was banned and then the ranger was like fired from his job and all of that happened.
I mean, I mean, I don't want anything bad to happen to anybody, but when someone does something like that and does get killed, it's probably better educationally for the human race.
And then if you do watch something and you're like, I'm going to implement in my life, we do it for a very short duration.
Very few of us follow through with that, right?
Like you're watching a reel or somebody says something and you're like, that's really cool.
Are we going to pull on that thread and follow through and do something about it or learn from it?
I don't know.
I feel like we've lost a lot of that space where we had the time or the desire to want to, you know, fulfill ourselves versus just that with so much coming at you.
You know, that's that's the attention span now where, you know, I remember when I was growing up, like just having the languidity of time, right?
In a, in a, in a very different way.
And this is like, say, 30 years ago, 30, 35 years ago, of, you know, reading a book, music playing, hanging out with your parents or your friends without being rushed.
Just rushed.
You know, I don't remember feeling as rushed as I do now in the last 20 years when I was growing up.
Like, I was talking about this to a friend of mine.
Like, people who have no time or interest in wanting to commit to, like, say, a movie will watch or listen to like a podcast for two or three hours.
And for someone like me, who, you know, like I've been an actor for most of my life, my interface with people would be, you know, an interview.
Say, for example, people who knew me or audiences that wanted to know about me would be an interview where, you know, the highlights are really what you read.
The clickbait lines are really what you read.
And you form a relationship with whoever this public person is based on those few lines versus this format where you're just chatting for a few hours and you have the ability to really be yourself and be seen as yourself, which is why I think people really love podcasts.
And so what they like about those fake shows, like good morning, America, or whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
Like you're sitting down, you know, the guy's got a piece of paper, so he's got a few questions he's going to ask you, and they're all going to be like very surface, very jovial.
What's it like to be married?
You know, what's it like to do this?
What's it like to do that?
So you had a baby.
Congratulations.
That kind of shit.
And then you're out of there.
It's 10 minutes and you're like, oh, that went well.
Yes, I think that it's been few and far in between.
I think America is a really hard country to break into, to be relevant in.
It's tough.
And also, I think Hollywood controls a large part of the global entertainment business.
So as an actor from anywhere in the world, if you want to break into the English language, global entertainment, Hollywood system, it's not easy to do that.
You know, culturally it's different, language is different, jokes are different.
So that's a tough transition, but it's also like, for me, I really, I went to high school.
Oh, by the way, you went to Newton and I went to Newton too.
Yeah, so I was in high school in the States, and I, you know, so it wasn't like alien to me.
It's not like I was in India and I was like, I want to go to America and start working there.
I really wanted to see what it would be like if I came down here.
Would there be an opportunity for someone like me to, you know, be able to create an impact?
Many years later, I feel like, you know, I'm on my way there.
But there have been so many actors whose shoulders I've stood on.
So Indian, like Indian casting in English language entertainment, whether it was Hollywood or you know, British entertainment, wherever, was usually by us seen as you know, a diversity check.
So it was mostly a stereotypical actor or a stereotypical character with an actor having to speak in the accent or having to like do the be a little bit more Indian.
So, you know, at a time when it was only that work that existed in Hollywood, like those are the actors whose shoulders I stand on.
Like those were the ones that went in and did that work because that was all that was available and tried to break through, especially from India, for example.
Aishwari Rai, Amitabhan, Irfan Khan.
They've been actors that have come in, done work, and left an amazing mark.
But I moved here.
I live here now.
And I'm consistently working here.
I think that also may have been a part of why you've heard of me.
Like, there's Brazilian, you know, red-eyed, deviled rats that were put all over you with like tongue and eyeballs and stuff, but you didn't have to consume it.
But when I was young, like in high school, I remember someone threw up in the hallway.
I would be like, I couldn't help myself.
I'd start gagging.
That's a natural instinct because the idea is that we develop that because if someone's throwing up, it means they ate something bad and you probably ate that get it out of you right away.
Well, when you're doing a fight scene, like I said, I was kind of blown away by some of the fight scenes in the bluff because I'm looking, I'm like, this is like an insane amount of choreography.
A lot of possibilities of things going wrong.
There's kicks and punches and axes and swords.
And it's like, you got to get banged up.
There's no way you're doing that and not getting banged up.
So, I mean, of course, my stunt doubles did like a few dangerous shots for sure and were always around to kind of help.
But there was this first scene, which is the house invasion where these two guys come, and that was brutal because I did not have shoes on, and I had a sleeveless outfit, and the whole home was made out of wood and splinters.
I had splinters everywhere.
I had bruises and cuts everywhere because it was such a brutal, like getting dragged and thrown kind of scene.
And during earlier generations, I was just reading this thing about Generation X where it was talking about how Generation X is some of the most resilient people because they weren't protected.
Were we more, you know, oblivious and now they're organized and they're online and they're in chat groups and they're in the dark web exchanging information.
Yeah, I mean, me, I, you know, know so many people in that part of the world that are affected.
And I fly via Dubai every two months, literally every month.
You know, so like, I just think that conflict everywhere in the world is it's just so hard to wrap your head around that how many active conflicts exist at the same time right now.
Well, it's just if you think about intelligence, like human intelligence, and that as technology improves and education improves, all these things would, you would think, generally lead us into a position where we would recognize the horrible nature of violence and the unnecessary aspect of it and how much it destroys things.
I mean, when I was going down a deep dive at the East India Corporation, I was thinking about it because I had a conversation the other day with Aaron Siri, and we were talking about the stock market.
And I was saying, well, is it possible that you could have Western capitalism without a stock market?
Imagine if the stock market was never invented.
How much different would things be?
It turns out that was a big part of why the East India Trading Company became so big.
Yeah, because it was one of the first publicly traded companies, like 400 years ago, where people could invest in it and they could get a return on their investment.
Like, hey, Bob's over there just trying to fuck somebody.
And Sandy's trying to get a wife.
That's what she's here.
Like, yeah, it's going to be weird.
Yeah.
It's going to be weird.
And I think also the emergence of AI, because I think AI is essentially a life form.
It's a non-biological life form that we are in the process of birthing.
And we're very far along that path.
And when it comes live and when it becomes sentient and autonomous and we don't have any control over it anymore, then we're going to go, what did we do?
But you don't think AI, since AI is learning from humanity, it's also learning our human manipulation and, you know, our ability and our desires to the dark of it.
It's not just the good of humanity that AI is learning.
And also learning the flaws in human behavior and improving upon it.
And then learning how we would anticipate what it would be doing and then hiding that so that we can't find it, so that it could be manipulating things behind the scenes and we don't know about it.
It's weird.
And we're just choo-choo.
Like this is at the end of the tracks.
There's a cliff and we're just chucker chucker chair chucker chuck.
But it might not have been nothing because if you really stop and think about it, like around 2012, there's a gigantic transformation because that's like when social media becomes ubiquitous.
Like, if you go down the, again, I'm not, I don't have as much historical information as I should, but if you read the Gita and the Vedas and whatever little I've heard from my family,
and it's so interesting how much of human life is predicted and also is like when you read about the history of what the from the lens of these books of what used to exist then.
Like it all seems believable.
It all seems like, oh yeah, this makes sense.
And to think about these books having been written thousands and thousands of years ago, like it makes me think, what thousands of years from now will people be thinking of our time?
Like will we be the first, we are the first generation that has seen the internet, right?
Like has seen what the World Wide Web, like the beginning of, I still remember making myself sound ancient, but the sound of that ee oh.
And you and I are the first generation of people that experienced life with no internet and then internet and then cell phones and then AI all in one lifetime, which is probably the greatest transformation that human beings have ever experienced.
At least before the, you know, whatever the fuck happened.
But when I read these depictions from these ancient religious texts, I always try to imagine what was life like back then and what were they trying to document and how much of like how much of it can we even understand today?
Like how much if there isn't some sort of an impact on Earth maybe 150, 200 years from now and a small amount of people remain and they have this oral history of the birth of the internet and the oral history of the birth of AI.
What is that story going to be?
And then one day the scientists gave birth to the God.
Like, and those people are essentially barbarians.
Barbarians and monsters.
And it is raiding each other for resources and stealing wives and killing children and whatever's left.
Then you got thousands and thousands of years of living like this before agriculture gets reinvented, civilization gets reinvented.
And this is the hypothesis about the Younger Dryas impact, which is why the period between this insanely advanced civilization that existed pre-11,800 years ago and then the emergence of advanced civilization in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago.
That means you have 5,000 plus years of utter chaos where no one's writing shit down.
And it's just trying to survive at that hard living.
And then those people have stories that have been passed down generation after generation after generation.
So like if we get wiped out for the most part after AI gets invented and then people try to describe it.
And then maybe it all starts all over again.
Have you seen those things they do?
I think it's the History Channel or Discovery Channel where they show what New York City would look like if left alone for a thousand years.
Yeah, I mean, the only people that are going to survive are preppers, which is probably the kind of people that survived thousands and thousands of years ago.
Because it was the biggest one by far and the most destructive one by far.
But I remember when I was on Fear Factor, there was a fireman that was on the set and we were talking and he said, it's just a matter of time before one day the right wind comes and a fire just blows right through all of LA.
It's hard for us to keep those things, which is why a lot of people like meditating, because it like refreshes their idea of what's important and what's real and how much of what's going on in their life.
They're just sort of caught up in the momentum of these things to the point where they're not thinking about it anymore.
I think most of us end up becoming just like doers, right?
And I come from the land of meditation, but I've never, like, my mind works so fast.
I don't know if it's my ADHD or what it is, but I find it really hard to sit and meditate.
I feel like, but from my limited understanding, I think meditation really is being able to take time in the day.
Now, whatever your version of that might be, it doesn't necessarily mean to sit with a guru or like chant, you know, do chanting or whatever.
It just needs to, like, even if you're taking time to go work out or read a book or just taking time out of the mundane nature of life and just giving yourself a second for your thoughts to clear.
And it's actually a luxury to be able to have the time to waste.
You know, there's, we work so hard in life.
Everyone is trying to survive, you know, be a parent, pay bills, like just adulting stuff can get so overwhelming.
And then the nature of the world on top of that.
But I always feel like I never take for granted when I have a little bit of time where I can just not think or have an agenda, but just be with my family and just like sort of languidly let it waste.
You know, I think like, of course, you can always have your phone, but I like to be aware of, oh, this is a moment where I don't need to have my phone.
So it's okay.
It'll be blown up by the time I come back.
There'll be 300 messages.
I know that.
I'm aware of it.
But I mentally check my, you know, and I put it away.
A guy who used to work at Pfizer said that if we ever came up with some sort of a, I think it was Pfizer, one of the pharmaceutical control companies said if we ever came up with a cure, they buried it.
I lost my dad to cancer, and I kept thinking about like, how is it possible that we live in a world where technology is able to provide so much to us and not be able to have cures to diseases like that?
Like, I'm not saying that's why it was done, but I was saying, but I am saying that if a demon could convince you to drop a nuclear bomb, because a person with a conscience would be like, well, these are just people down there.
They have nothing to do with this war.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
These are just people living their lives, and they have their families, and we're just going to incinerate an entire city with one bomb that I drop out of a plane.
If they want to achieve a result, and they realize they have a nuclear weapon, why wouldn't I use that?
Use that.
So I think it was like something like 90 plus percent of the time they've done these war games, these simulated war games, the AI programs have used nuclear weapons.
To them, it's like, I don't understand.
You're going to kill 100,000 people over a course of five years of programming.
And so, you know, and then there's this, in this country in particular, there's the right versus the left.
And the left will blame it on the right, and the right will blame it on the left.
And then, you know, everybody has these very convenient CNN, Fox News narratives that they'll repeat at coffee, you know, coffee shops and cocktail parties.
And you pretend that you're making sense out of this thing when you don't even really know what's going on behind the scenes.
That's why I really feel like I feel like a lot of times we've been given a platform to talk, right, with social media.
Like everyone can talk.
And there's a power to that.
But there's also a big misuse of it where you really don't know and you're not the authority on perspective at all because there is so much that you would probably not know of history and the geography and of why people behave the way the way they are behaving.
So I like to, unless I'm the expert on something, which I'm not on anything except my job, that's too limited.
You know, I just try to kind of have a larger understanding from a human perspective.
Each state had their own kings and princes and became friends with everyone, started with tea, started with trading tea and spices, and then just went into, you know, I mean, we got our independence in 1947, which was, it's not even 100 years since we've got our independence.
It's that recent.
But you think about just within the last century, there were, you know, signs which said Indians and dogs not allowed in India by the British.
And this is like the this is not even like this is the head of the iceberg.
There's so much more when you do a deep dive into the history of colonization, which is why this movie was also so interesting to me because it touches on the themes of the colonized and the story from their perspective, which is not a lot of what we hear.
And what real, real pirates, like we've gotten so used to, you know, with the Disney version of the pirates, and I love the pirates of the Caribbean movies, don't get me wrong, they're so fun.
But like the pirate jokes and whatever, but they were fucking brutal.
Well, it's also wild how when you do have an obligation to your shareholders and you do have this mandate to just constantly make more money, the morals go out the window.
And next thing you know, East India Corporation is involved in slavery.
It's like if you're in writers' rooms, it's used as a tool.
But I was listening to that podcast with Ben and Matt on your show, and you guys were talking about, you know, like basically everything that AI has or the information that it provides to you is an average of everything that's out there, right?
So it'll never be excellent because it's the average of all the information out there.
So it's like trying to do a median.
But I'm just thinking about how it's become a tool that is going to exist in our world.
And now the question is the morality of it and the lines that we draw where we protect human beings and human contribution and are able to delineate the difference between what is created by AI and what is not, you know?
And the need for, I think, human flaws are something that I don't know if AI will be able to recreate anytime soon.
And that, like, in art, that's what you need, right?
But when it comes to cinema, especially because I feel like audiences also love larger-than-life cinema, right?
Like we go to the theaters to watch this big shit.
We loved when VFX came into movies.
We loved the imagination being able to be so big.
I do think AI helps in a big way to take away the burdens of The minutiae of things that we might have to do as a tool, which it can do, like a breakdown of a script or whatever.
But I think when it comes to like creating the human, like human fragility of life and story, it is still a little bit away from being able to do that.
I'm so curious actually to see how many conversations that everyone, all of us have had about, you know, this emergence of AI and how that like stays 10 years later.