#2293 - Chris Williamson

26:15Right. 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.

26:49They 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 where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience. It becomes very predictable. Yes. 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.

27:30You become a flame sword, flaming sword wielding card carrying member that is 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 dire tribes, sort of we land acknowledgement. Well, we must remember that women are struggling with the thing and we have to do 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 some as opposed to negative some.

28:05And I understand that people bind together over mutual hatreds of out groups. But the oldest story in human history is that group of people are different to us. Yeah. Let's get them. The oldest story in history. I mean, it's it's tribal genetics. It's like baked into our DNA literally and it can be manipulated. And when people are doing it and they're doing it with a very obvious distortion of your actual position, just to label you as the worst possible, least charitable version of you. That could ever be remotely considered. You see that all the time where people are just trying to distort a narrative.

28:47You're seeing that right now at Elon, right? You're seeing people justify violence and extreme vandalism. And you're seeing people cheer it on and it's very strange. There was a thing on the daily show where the host was talking about the attacks on Tesla. And people keying people and the audience starts clapping and cheering. It's so strange. It's so fucking strange. And it's also just shows you how positions just completely flip flop. Like the Tesla used to be the car that you drove to let everybody know that you were environmentally conscious and you were good leftist. That's a good question.

29:27Do we care about the environment or not? Because those fumes that are being kicked out and not good. A thousand jet airplanes flying overhead for a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's lighting batteries on fire. They're so toxic. Lithium and also it's a shit getting pissed into the environment. Oh, it's all going to come down and rain. It's going to pollute the water. The fish are going to be polluted. You're not going to be able to eat them. But we're doing good. This is for a righteous cause. It's all funded too. It's funded by NGOs. That's where it gets really creative. The Tesla. The fire is funded by NGOs.

29:58Yeah, people are uncovering exactly what's going on. And this is where it gets fascinating because all the stuff is operated pretty much with impunity in the past before doge. Before Elon and his crew of hyperspectrum psychopaths started to fucking teenage mutant ninja to hell. Super wizards started diving into all this data. And this is something that Ted Cruz talked about. He said we had always known that there was these problems. But until Elon came along with these algorithms, we couldn't expose them. We didn't understand what was going on. And now they've used AI to create this understanding of the net of NGOs that is all funded by USAID and by similar type programs where you kind of have these open -ended checks that get written to the other side.

30:51Other side, that's the top. Yeah, right there. How often do you smoke cigarettes fellow? A couple of times. Well, I fucking turned this around the wrong way. No worries. Keep going. But this is the essentially the way Mike Benz describes it. He's the very best at it. I know you've ever seen his breakdowns of USAID. I love his episodes on here. Incredible. That's so interesting. They're so interesting because you realize like this has been going on forever and ever and ever. And this is the arm of the government that is about regime change. A lot of the money gets funneled into these other countries and it's under the guise of air quotes aid, but it's not aid.

31:31It's agency for international development. And it's all about influence and power all throughout the world and also at home. And one of the things that it doesn't home is they organize these protests. They organize protests, different NGOs do, all funded by the government, all funded by taxpayer money in this weird way. And when they do it, they pay people to show up at these places. I've got pamphlets of people have given me that they've taken from these locations or gotten from email lists where... Is that purposefully no digital record? I think probably, but I don't think they care. I mean, I think as long as they're saying they're going to pay you to protest.

32:11I think that's legal. I think it's legal to pay someone to protest. So they're paying people a thousand dollars and they're giving them food and snacks and you can get a lot of people to just show up for a thousand bucks. And then some of them are going to get a little vendoli. Some of them bring enough people together and they get vendoli. How crazy is it that the left are the ones who are painting swastikas on cars? Just understand how crazy positions can flip and flop. The left is upset that we're not continuing an endless war in Ukraine. The left is upset that this guy is uncovering fraud and waste.

32:50And so in order to stop that, you must light cars on fire and put swastikas on them. Because he's a Nazi. Because he said my heart goes out to you. Even though there's countless videos of AOC doing that gesture, Tim Walsh doing that gesture enthusiastically, many, many people. I do think if you're in that position, if you've got this heritage coming in, just be careful with where you put your hands. Don't you know what I mean? Don't do that. Just fucking think about where you put your hands. He's, you know, he's on the spectrum. Man, he's not normal. You've seen that video comparing him and Trump's son.

33:26There's two different types of autism. You see this? No, I haven't. Oh my god. It's so good. I think it's at the inauguration. And they're 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. Apparently, and Trump's son went up to Biden at the inauguration and said it's on now. What is this? A fucking UFC fight? I mean, that's literally apparently lip readers of like red what he said when he went up to, because there's a moment where he goes up to Biden and Biden looks confused. And he doesn't smile. He's like, eh, eh, but he walks up to him.

34:03It's on now. Well, they need to do, you know, football coaches have got, they put the play thing over the front of their mouth like this. And they're talking to it. That's how it needs to be done now for politics with lip readers, everyone. I've that kid knew there was lip readers. I don't think he gave a fuck. I think they tried to put his dad in jail. And he wants to kill that guy. That's what I think. He's like, fuck you. Yeah. Because imagine your dad's getting that close to putting jail for bullshit for the rest of his life. Like if he got put in jail for 25 to life, he's dead. He's dead.

34:32He dies in jail. He's going to get no food. He's going to be known nutrition, no sunlight, depression, intense fucking anxiety. You're in jail. You're dead. He's 80 years old. He's not going to last 105 in jail. 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 boomer. Yeah, by a little boomer. He just did a little boop on the nose. Yeah. I have to say I have such fucking news politics fatigue already. Well, 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, the appetite is, it seems endless for it.

35:23It 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, wrong of the ladder, that don't. So that's not true. I'm just fucking exhausted. I'm so, you're allowed to be exhausted.

35:50It's, Reddit Newsweek wrote an article about how one of the names of one of our podcasts, who's a good friend of mine, Michael Costa, his name was misspelled accidentally on the feet. And so Newsweek, is that you, Jamie? It wasn't even misspelled. I don't know, it was misscapitalized. It's a, it's a different matter. It's a different matter. The defense rests its case here. It wasn't even misspelled, right? It was m capital I, Michael Costa. Like, me, Kau Costa, or something. It's a headline. It's a, fucking article in Newsweek. I ever think the new Korea was resulting you having typos for a headline, Jamie?

36:36I only know one of the most. I'm sure there's been other ones. That's the first one. 100%. What's happened? Pins, it happens. People make mistakes. You're typing things in. But the fact that it's an article that we're being called out for a typo. Must be funny. But it's just anything for clicks, man. Anything. When it comes to college basketball and March, Mania, one thing is for sure. Nothing's for sure. Upsets, buzzer beaters, Cinderella's advancing. Top seeds going home early. It's all going to happen. Bet the unexpected every upset every day with Draft King Sportsbook. With live betting, exclusive content, promos and parlays, Draft Kings is the ultimate college basketball destination for March.

37:22First time, here's something special for you. New Draft King's customers bet five bucks to get $200 in bonus bets instantly. Bet the unexpected with Draft King Sportsbook. Download the Draft King Sportsbook app and use the code Rogan. That's code Rogan for new customers to get $200 in bonus bets when you bet just five bucks. Only on Draft Kings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem called 1 -800 -GAMBLER. In New York, call 877 -8 -HOPEN -WIRE. Text hopein -Y -467 -369. In Connecticut, help us available for problem gambling called 888 -878 -7777 or visit ccpg .org. Please play responsibly. On behalf of boothulkicinoin resorting Kansas, 21 and over, agent eligibility varies by jurisdiction.

38:09Void an Ontario. New customers only. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. Four additional terms and responsible gaming resources, cdkng .co slash audio. Anything for clicks. That was something that I noticed. A trend that I've noticed over the last couple of years. Legacy media is really struggling to go on or attention itself. It seems like fewer and fewer people are listening to it. We saw that over the last election. It seems to me like the best way that legacy media can gain traffic is to talk about independent media. How many times are we seeing headlines about Andrew Cubeman or about the right -wing manosphere pipeline and how it's getting people to do this?

38:51Or the other side, why is there not a Joe Rogan of the... Whatever the headline is, more and more, the way that legacy media is able to achieve traffic is only in reference to independent media. Yes. So that I was opposed to us being downstream from them that now downstream from us. Anything masculine is right -wing. Anything. You cannot be masculine. You cannot be interested in physical fitness. Anything. It's a pipeline to being right -wing. Yes. You can't like fast cars. No. You're not allowed to. You don't even allow to like testles anymore. Massage. Massage. Massage. You're probably racist.

39:30Maybe a Nazi. I'm going to put a swastika in your car just to let everybody know.

39:37It's... There was some really fucking stupid graph that someone put up of how right -wing social media and new media people... That was the media matters. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting. I was at the top of the list. I was at the top of the list and I was like, I feel like the way Caitlin Jenner must have felt like what she won woman in the year. Like... It's so quick. I got the top of the list. I'm not even right -wing. Just because I was a board -trump, I supported him over the rest of the fucking nonsense that was going on when you're trying to push through someone without even a primary. There it is.

40:12This is it. I'm number one bitch. It's kind of funny. Like they're putting Theo Vaughn in there. Lex Friedman. Yeah. That's Lex Friedman. That's hilarious to put him in there. Who else they have in there that's... He is Morgan. Well, Pierce Morgan is kind of like right -leaning, I think. Like right. But I think he's pretty reasonable. I think he's far more of a centrist. Kill Tony 3 .5. I'm still going to understand how that's a political show. It's not. But Tony, you know, was at the White House or the... Flagrant 2 .8. Yeah. Flagrant is not a right -wing show. You fucking idiots. You have a bunch of red dots, two with no names on them, which is an emblem.

40:53You're allowed to. Shut up, Jamie. It's just that things. I managed to thread the needle of avoiding this. You're going to get on there now. They're going to put you on now. Jamie, those red ones are real. Just shut up. No, they're real. They're all real. There's a couple blue ones that are real, too. They're the name, I don't know. They're the fuck the name. They're two little... Two small, no one cares. No one gets to see it. Yeah. It's hilarious. It's very funny. What do you think of the... If you got a proposed reason for why this... Is it just a judgment criteria that the judging shows that aren't right -wing as right -wing?

41:28Or is it genuinely that, for some reason, the left is struggling to make progress in independent media? Well, they're struggling to make progress in independent media, for sure. They're trying to figure out why. They're trying to figure out why these... What they are calling right -wing... I think if you looked at all my positions, I think way more of them are left -wing than right -wing. What are the left -wing positions that you still hold? 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.

42:00And I remember that helping us a lot. We had food where I don't know what we would be doing. If we did, 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. They got out of dad and bought a house and a great job in 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.

42:44And I think that's 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. 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. Why are you out with healthcare? 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.

43:24I 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. You give your tax dollars. The tax dollars 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. It's not like the fires don't. It's such a good example. But when you compare that to the way that medical access is done at least in this country.

44:00But I also believe in competition. I've said this before. I'll say it again. I want my doctor to be a bad mother fucker who drives her Mercedes. I want my doctor to be really good. I want it to be an artist. I want 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. 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. You want competition because competition inspires excellence. Being rewarded for your hard work is a giant incentive for people to get amazing at things.

44:40And 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 assigned to you if you're getting unjustly tried and you want a really good one that can help you. There's state appointed attorneys that are just good people that want to help people. Bill Murray was talking about his daughter. His daughter does that. There's room for that with the amount of money that we spend on so many things that we all agree are fucked.

45:24And maybe some of that could be freed up with some of this USAID money that they're pulling. I mean, 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. So the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, medical debt. I mean, coming from the UK where we've got the NHS, it feels fucking barbaric. It is.

45:53It really does feel barbaric. I remember I went to New Orleans and I was getting this great ghost tour on an evening tire. It's like fun to rest shit to do in New Orleans. I did those. And the guy, the guy who was so good, my mother was a wickin and I don't know if that was true, but the tail was lovely anyway. And he was telling me I've got a chipped wisdom tooth and my girlfriend got into a car rack the other day and he basically said he was explaining to me about how you can get bankrupted by this stuff. He's like, if you get hit by a car and you don't have insurance, you better fucking walk it off.

46:25Because if you don't, that could be the end of 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. He's telling me about the medical debt and then I think the reaction to the United Health 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.

47:05It really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has with the health care system. Yeah, I think it's a quiet epidemic. I think there's been a lot of people massively affected by it and they're just steaming. Just sitting there, seething, just angry. Waiting for some righteous person to come in and do. But then you see the fucking revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug corporations where these people leave. And then also they have these amazing jobs at pharmaceutical drug companies and they're making millions of dollars. Like, how is that legal?

47:42How 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. The FDA ban on compounded ozempics started yesterday. Oh, so ban. So you have to get it from the big companies. Correct. I bring him taught me about this. I didn't understand how it works. If there's a shortage of a drug compounding pharmacies are kind of allowed to just bypass patents in some way, it's like you can produce it and you can make it cheaper and more widely available because the supply chains fucked or something like that.

48:31And yesterday. It was a good thing for society. Well, to make more drugs more widely available for cheaper. If it's good, if it's a very important pharmaceutical drug, they can save people's lives. Imagine. Imagine not letting compound pharmacies make it for people that can't get it. Yeah, I can't afford it. I don't have the insurance for it. So yeah, I mean, that came into effect. I think to Zepatide got popped yesterday and then partway through April, Semiglutide is going to go as well. Yeah, that's all just eliminating competition, right? 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.

49:14If he won't hymns or whatever, the stocks 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, to being able to become a skeleton, they look like this. Look like this guy here. They all get those sucked in cheeks and the eye socket suck in. Yeah, it looks really creepy. It was, it just shows how flimsy your principles are that it was easier for you to say, I can't win this particular game.

49:59Therefore, the game is rigged. Like 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 to. Yes. And yeah, the golden globes, you just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking. Yeah, I mean, they, 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 multiple years, progressive overload, time and attention, hitting your protein girls, getting enough sleep, what your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take trend alone.

50:45And it's the exact same. So what is the incentive for anybody to lose weight naturally? And 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, remember when Adele lost all that weight in the matter, in the before, she did it in the before times, dude. Right. She did it hard. Yeah, she did it the fucking yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly extreme difficulty. Yeah. But yeah, now she's hot. Do you remember when she did that Jamaica thing? She came out and she had all of her hair like done like this.

51:17But 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. It nothing changes. Yeah. I'm in favor of ozempic for people that are more of a 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.

51:51And 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's can 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 strengthening.

52:23Do you try to have a fitness regime, right? But which is the majority of these people that need this? That's how they got fat in the first place. So Yohan Hari did a really great buck on this. You had Yohan on a budget. He wrote this book called Magic Pill and he's got just a really nice takeaway. He says, if you're under BMI of 30 and you're trying to lose weight, go fuck yourself. If you're between 30 and 35, there's probably a value judgment you need to make. And if you're over 35 BMI, the cost benefit analysis seems to sort of work in your favor. Yeah. People are losing more muscle and bone mass from using ozempic than you would typically.

53:00If you were not using that, but I think that that's just largely a selection criteria for the sort of people that are using ozempic to help them lose weight, that they're not having that they're so heavily calorie restricted, that they don't need to have a fitness program. They don't have to really change their diet. I learned this. Yohan taught me this thing is super interesting. Gastric band surgery after people have that. The suicide risk is pretty high. And sometimes it's because of these surgeons that leave the gauze in or, you know, like leave a scalpel or like a fucking cigar end in these complications that can happen physically.

53:34But the other thing that happens is these people used food as their coping mechanism for how they would feel better. Right. And their ability to eat and their appetite has gone away, but their psychological issues have not and they don't have a coping mechanism. They've no longer got this outlet. And then there's the issue also, you're not going to feel as good because your body's not absorbing nutrients correctly. You're missing some of your stomach. You know, it's like your stomach fills up quicker because they removed part of it. Like that can't be good just for overall metabolic health. Like you're, you've diminished your body's ability to break down food.

54:12They just can't be good. And there's other ways to do it. There's other ways to do it. It's like there's a gambling term that you got to get better the same way you got sick. So like say if you and I were playing pool and we're playing for a hundred dollars of game. Okay. And you're up five games. You're up 500 bucks. And I say next game for 500 bucks. And you go, no, you got to get better the same way you got sick. Oh, that's interesting. You can't just win one game. And now you're even and come on. What do you push? Are you scared? Like, no, that's not how this works. You lost one at the time.

54:47You're not getting it all back. You went down a dark road and you missed a lot of shots. And now you're fucked. And I'm not going to let you off the hook with one easy thing. I might do that if it's like, okay, you put up a thousand and I'll put up 300. We'll see that. You stack it in my, yeah, if you reflect in the odds, where we're financially at the moment. You got to jack it in my favor while I'm willing to make a risk. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Tax season is always stressful. You have to worry about filing on time, making sure you have all the right documents. And getting all the deductions you possibly can.

55:23It's overwhelming. And by now, I know we're all sick of looking at numbers, but here's an important one that you should hear. 16 .5 billion dollars. That's how much money and refunds the IRS flag for possible identity fraud last year. Here's another 20%. That's the overall increase in identity theft related tax fraud in 2020, 24 alone. So luckily, it isn't all bad news. Here's the good number 100 million. That's how many data points, Life Lock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, Life Lock's US based restoration specialists will fix it. That's backed by another good number, the million dollar protection package.

56:08In fact, restoration is guaranteed or your money back. Don't face identity theft and financial losses alone. There's strength in numbers with Life Lock identity theft protection for tax season and beyond. Join now and save up to 40 % your first year. Call 1 -800 -LIFLOCK and use the promo code JRE or go to lifelock .com slash JRE for 40 % off terms apply. This episode is brought to you by visible. Are you tired of wireless slowing you down? Do you wish there was a plan that offered a fast network plus fast hotspot? Plus savings on top of it all? Well, there is. And it's visible plus. It's everything that makes visible and affordable, reliable wireless service plus plus what?

56:54Plus, visible's fastest network and up to two times faster hotspot. Plus, smartwatch service included saving you 10 bucks a month. Plus, it's all powered by Verizon. Yes, unlimited talk, text, data, and hotspot all powered by Verizon's 5G network. The best part is all on one line. Right now, you can save $15 a month on visible plus for 25 months for just listening to me. That's $30 a month for visible's best plan. This is an exclusive offer for Joe Rogan experience listeners. So switch by March 31st at visible .com slash Rogan. Terms apply, see visible .com for planned features and network management details.

57:43It's a strange. I think another thing with those, I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudice against people that use those and pick than fat people are. So typically you would say, hold, say with me. I think you're right. So you would have imagined, and this did happen, some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, 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 Zem Pick 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 going skinny fat, you know, jowls, big cheeks, all that stuff.

58:31But the signal of being in shape, let's just take that as being in shape, right? Like a normal BMI, the signal of being in shape is usually a reliable indicator of what you've done to have to get that. Right. Disciplined, reliable, able to do hard things, self -motivated, consistent, secure 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, it's, you should, the body looks great when you take the clothes off.

59:10But what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values and what you do? Now, the problem with the introduction of easier routes to being in shape is that it's completely derigated 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 Zempic 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 concerned about the drugs.

59:44Fan -Fen was this thing in the 90s that fucked people up. It was speed. Yeah, I mean, it's a good way to lose weight. I knew a girl who was on it. She was a very pretty girl that was a little heavy. And then I got on the fan -fan and just wanted to talk to everybody. Could just stop talking and got real thin. I was like, this is crazy. And then she developed a heart problem. Yeah. She kept for the rest of her life, I believe. I don't know her anymore, but I ran into her a couple years later and she was telling me she has a heart problem. There's been no free lunch in weight loss ever yet. No. And I think that people are looking at the GLP ones and thinking, where's the side effect, when's it coming, what's it going to do?

1:00:24Well, there's tons of side effects. It depends upon the person because obviously people are very different biologically. Everyone has a different tolerance to alcohol. People have different tolerances to foods. And you're going to have different tolerances to medications. And I have good friends that have had horrible side effects from OzonePek. They tried it. They got on it at terrible. With pancreatitis? Yeah. I got a buddy of mine who was in bed for two weeks. He was really sick. I know several other people that just feel terrible when they take it. And they had to get off of it. It was really fucking with them.

1:00:57And then I know other people that have taken it. A buddy of mine that works at UFC, we ran into him the other day. I'm like, dude, you look fucking great. And he's like, yeah, gone on the nose and back, fuck it. I just went for it. I said, hey man, he had a whole plan. He's going to get down to certain weight and then he's going to taper on. Transition. And he, you know, but he looked great. He looked great. You see Nilek's Jones? Yeah, but Alex is not on anything. I know. So this is... He works with my friend Sean. On it. I've been watching him train. Been watching him train on a Tuesday, not watching him train.

1:01:27He trains when I train. I'm not following Alex Jones around. And he's... Likely story. Getting after it, I know that's exactly what someone from the deep state would say. Do you know him? Did you just see him there? I've spied him over the far side. You never had a conversation with him? I once saw him when I did Tim Pools show in the RV outside of the info wars car park. Oh, yeah, I did that. Yeah, it was the same week. That was the first week I was ever in Austin. It was three and a bit years ago. I remember that live stream. That was fun. Alex is a lovely person. He really is. He's working really hard in the gym.

1:02:01He just had that one thing that he didn't talk about. That's it. That one thing. Everything else has been mostly right about. You know what I should have said? Alex Jones is like the fucking patient zero for if you lose weight by going to the gym and working out and changing your diet. People are just going to say it was a Zem pick. No, people think he's a totally different person. They think they've replaced Alex Jones with someone else. Is this what? Did David Ike have a pop at Alex Jones recently? Did he? Who did David Ike get in trouble with? Jamie, was that? I feel like there was some... It was somebody else in that sort of a world.

1:02:34But yeah, I mean, if the reptile people, like, it gets a bit reptile when you get down to the lower body fat percentage. David Ike, I saw something he got upset that I've never had him on the show. And it's just the reptile stuff. It's just the shape, shifter stuff. I would still have him on. I think fascinating just to try to pick some of those ideas. Or listen to them. Even if you don't believe in the ideas, what's interesting is how does somebody arrive at them? That's what's fascinating to me. When I do my show, I speak to someone and I'm like, I want to understand the psychology of how you have arrived at this particular position.

1:03:07Well, imagine if it's real. I mean, if shape shifters 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 know how ridiculous would that idea be? How ridiculous. It would be so ridiculous. But is an alien shape shifter 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, like who would be studying this?

1:03:53To believe, see if you can find it, Jamie. It's the most bizarre headline. Because you're like, what the fuck are you saying? Like the whole universe is inside of a black hole. A new NASA data hints we could be living inside a black hole. Great. That was that. Isn't that weirder than reptile people? Because reptile people... Those are the two choices. Reptile people's not that weird, right? Like, octopi have the ability to completely transform their appearance and instantaneously adapt to an environment. Why wouldn't we assume to some super advanced species from another planet that would be, we would be horrified if we saw their real face?

1:04:33They'd just transform and look like the Queen of England. Yeah, and go sideways like that. Do you know what a Boltzmann brain is? Have you ever heard of this? No. Okay, so in an infinite universe, infinite, there is only, let's say, the size of your brain, it's like whatever, 20 centimeters cubed or something, maybe 30 centimeters cubed. 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, that comes into existence for a moment and then goes away.

1:05:17And 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. Why do you come into existence and then go away? Why don't you just exist somewhere else? 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 means that if you, it's the monkey's typewriter thing, it's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is constructed.

1:05:51It's basically like a brain and a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain. The way I was explaining to me is that if the universe is truly infinite, not only is there another version of you somewhere, 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, and every possible conceivable variation in red instead of blue that you turned left instead of right.

1:06:37Went trans instead of straight. All of it, all of it, that you live in a totalitarian environment, that you live in a utopia, that you know, the Germans won the war, that 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 one percent of the mass the entire galaxy. If you go into that supermassive black hole, so there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, inside that supermassive black hole is an entirely another universe filled with all sorts of different galaxies that have supermassive black holes in them.

1:07:31You go into one of those, another universe filled, supermassive black holes, another universe filled, all supermassive black holes, each one another universe. It's just a windsip file all the way. 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.

1:08:22Okay. Okay. What the fuck are you saying? Like, they kind of had a great line about that. That science requires of you but one miracle. The big thing. It's a miracle. What is it? 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 give it enough time and enough quantum computing power, figure out what's causing everything to compress down smaller than the head of a pen and then explode. But it's still crazy.

1:09:06It's even if you can, you had some scientific explanation for it. It's fucking insane. I got into supervoids. So there's the Buetters supervoid. So areas of the universe that have big absences of matter way more than there should be. And the Buetters supervoid is the biggest one. I think a ton 6118 or something is one of the biggest stars or one of the biggest black holes and then this Buetters supervoid is because you would expect homogeneity across the universe. Things would be distributed pretty evenly. So what's this big hole? Here, Jamie, can you try and find a boot, boot, boot is, Buetters supervoid.

1:09:48I love the videos that show you the size of earth and the size of our sun and the size of other suns. You realize just how fucking insignificant you are. You get the suns that are as big as our galaxy. What the fuck? Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if the sun's that big, but there's definitely suns as big as our solar system. Well, looking at the night sky gives you a really wonderful piece of perspective. It reminds you just how puny and insignificant you are. I think that's a giant problem with our society is that light pollution keeps us from seeing that all the time. The mysterious hole in the universe that's billions of times larger than the Milky Way.

1:10:26So go one left, a list of voids. Jamie, yeah, that one. Just big holes. So you should not have it should be more evenly distributed. Yeah. And yeah, the Buetters void, you know, this huge lack. Now in the middle of, it's so cool. Imagine you take a left turn, a spaceship and fuck off. Not here. Not the Buetters supervoid. Not again. God damn it. You can't land for 100 million years. Yeah. I had a Matthew McConaughey on the show toward the back end of last year when we talked about interstellars 10th year anniversary. That show is still, that movie is still my favorite movie of all time. It's an amazing movie.

1:11:08I just saw it again a couple weeks ago. Me too. It was incredible. It's so good. It's so weird. Such a weird movie. Nolan's a fucking king. He's a wizard. Everything that he does. Yeah. What's the new one? What's his new movie that he's in? The Odyssey. I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What is the Odyssey? Like the Homer. Oh, God, really. Oh. I don't know that story either. So I'm kind of. Yeah. I don't need it. Part of me knows that I should have read it and part of me is glad that I didn't. So I get to, I don't know how it finishes. I don't know how it ends. Yeah. I think I probably read it in high school.

1:11:41But I don't remember it all. I think. Oh, why? I think. Oh, he's going to kill it. They're already complaints that it's not a story. Yeah. I agree. Why? Because it's a Matt Damon. No, because that's not what the armor would have looked like apparently. What a, but he wouldn't have been able to see his face apparently. But oh, really? Yeah, but not for a shit movie. Yeah. Exactly. You know what I mean? That's their training already. I'm just a lighter. Thank you. Yeah, you can't always be historically accurate. I guess. But that's all I got so far. Cast and Tom Holland, Robert Patinson. Nice. Absolutely stacked.

1:12:13Did you see Matt Damon do Schultz's trailer? Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah. So fucking good. Yeah. I have to say, man, that Schultz's most recent special is one of the best things. I got a shower under a short like that was one of the best things that I've seen in so long. I thought it was fucking phenomenally made me cry when I saw it live here in Austin twice. I cried twice. Wow. And then I saw it again before I had him on the show the other week. In the back of an Uber and like trying to not let the taxi driver see that I'm welling up. He's talking about his wife says something to him where she says the thing is honey, you don't have problems.

1:12:52We have problems. I was like, it's just so lovely. And him talking about his experience trying to get pregnant and all of that stuff caused me to go and get a get sperm count done. I'm not trying to get anybody pregnant at the moment. But I'm all day 37.

1:13:15Do you have a little bit of a problem? Within the next few years, I want to start a family soon. But yeah, the moment. Yes, how long you've been with the scale six months? Do you ever go on a trip with her? Yeah. Yeah. You got to go on a long trip with them. Well, I think the six months might be a little bit early just yet. No. If you want to find out what's up, you got to go on a trip. Oh, you mean to work out compatibility? Yeah. You got to see how they deal with travel, how they deal with stress, how they deal with restaurant. What is it? Can they keep up their act when you're with them 24 hours a day for weeks at a time?

1:13:45It was when I actually did do a week -long trip in Jamaica. This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money. Let's talk about subscriptions. It seems like there's so much you can subscribe to these days. You got the obvious ones like streaming services and shopping, but you also got your coffee subscription, meal kit subscription, the beers from around the world subscription. If you can think of it, there's probably a subscription for it. But let's face it, you sign up for something, forget about it after the trial period ends, and then you're charged. Month after month after month. The subscriptions are there, but you're not using them.

1:14:20In fact, I just learned that 85 % of people have at least one paid subscription going unused each month. That's why you got to love Rocket Money. It's a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. See all your subscriptions in one place and know exactly where your money is going. For ones you don't want anymore, Rocket Money can help you cancel them. A great feature is Rocket Money's dashboard. It gives you a clear view of your expenses across all of your accounts. You can easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on tracks.

1:15:04See your monthly spending trends in each category to know exactly where your money is going. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features.

1:15:47This episode is brought to you by TikTok. 7 .5 million US businesses from restaurants to mechanic shops to real estate firms rely on TikTok to grow. Together they employ more than 28 million people because when small businesses thrive, communities do too. Small businesses thrive on TikTok. Learn more at TikTokeconomicimpact .com.

1:16:12And I had to go from Montego Bay to Kingston twice to get my visa renewed. Now traveling through Jamaican traffic with somebody will really tell you an awful lot. So yeah, you're talking about a Navy SEAL hell week of trying to throw a difficult shit in that. So that worked. Well, you just need to see what people like when they're with you all the time because people put on a show. They put on a show. You're a handsome guy. You're successful. They want to impress you. They want to pretend there's something that you would love. And then maybe they have ideas of morphing you and changing you over time.

1:16:44You get a car. I get pretty good. But I like to update the engine. I do some shit to the tires. Maybe change the way the interior looks. He starts changing it. And then all sudden Chris is wearing different clothes. What's going on, Chris? Go to be careful. I put these glasses on. That's why I have to. But yeah, I decided to go and get a sperm count thing done. You know what a varicoseal is? No. Okay, dude, this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about. So it's basically 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.

1:17:20That's not enough. And it's in 15 % of men's. It's super, super common. But 50 % of men that go to yourrologist have got this. And I go in and I've had these balls my entire life. I've had these balls. Thank you. I didn't 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 varicoseal. 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.

1:17:59So the mean change in testosterone is 180 points. How do they fix it? They just, it's surgery. It's a small surgery where they do an incision in your groin and they just fix the vasculature. Balls and surgery are two things that I don't like together. I like both of them. I don't think they should never the twain she'll meet. Yeah. Ball surgery is scary. Do you know that if you get your you can get a dick transplant if like you lose your dick, but you can't get ball transplants. You know why? No, because you will carry the DNA of the original person. So say if I die and you get my balls, okay, you will have my DNA.

1:18:37You will have my kids. So why can't I have your balls? Well, you could if I gave you permission maybe, but it's why don't we swap one ball each? It's like tossing your coin. See who's kids make it. I was like, do that. Let's see. Let's see. What the fuck? Come out speaking British. That'll be fun if we both like if you had elective surgery to swap balls with a good buddy. Like I love you so much. I want to swap a ball with you. Yeah. We both don't know which one it's going to be today. No, it's like because I had a gay couple that were friends that lived down the street for me and they had a kid with a surrogate and they shot their gizz into a cup and mixed it up.

1:19:14So they didn't know who's who's going to be the one has the kid. Yeah. Two men one cup. They had to do it twice too because the first time the lady kept the kid. They paid her. They did the whole thing in the end of it. She decided she wanted to keep the baby. Dude, the ethics of surrogacy are really interesting. It's weird. It's a weird thing. You're hiring someone to have your baby for you and then wealthy people are doing it so they don't get their coach stressed out. That was a Kardashian approach. Allegedly, that's why she did it. Well, maybe she didn't want to carry babies anymore. She had a couple of them the normal way and then but it's like so much of what the child experiences in the womb.

1:19:53It like leads to this. I would imagine this bonding thing with the woman. The babies inside of you, you remember feeling the baby inside of you, grows inside of you, then it comes out of you and you raise it and it breast feeds. 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, the 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.

1:20:33It also makes a mother. Yeah. And it's dangerous. I'm so conflict. I mean, test your babies. What happens if we can just create artificial wounds? 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 wounds, get to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing who's coming into reality that much anymore. Well, that is definitely the future. I mean, look at plummeting sperm counts.

1:21:09Look at rising miscarriage rates. 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 like human beings from the last 60, 70 years and you look at males in America where the sperm count used to be, where it is now, it's rapidly decreasing. There's a lot of factors sedentary lifestyle, processed foods, a lot but there's also environmental factors that seem to be altering the actual way a child develops in the womb and this is Dr.

1:21:55Shana 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 anal genital distance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the tank shrinks. It's really crazy stuff and it's it replicates what happens in mammals when they when they do these studies with rats and hamsters and same things happen. But if third of all children globally are going to be obese by 2050.

1:22:35Oh Jesus. That's the current trajectory and one billion people worldwide are obese. So the number one form of malnutrition globally is obesity, not starvation. There's twice as many people that are obese than are starving. That's crazy. If that's not a comment on problems of abundance as opposed to problems of scarcity. Yeah, it's not even abundance though. It's the food is so calorie rich and filled with shit. You know that you just you just you 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.

1:23:16That 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 a leader? This is probably a leader. 750 maybe or a leader? Yeah, it's a leader. So how much sugar is in one liter of Coca -Cola? Let's find that out. But there's nothing in that one right? Which is why it's a diet. Yeah. It's just brain cancer.

1:23:40Donald Rumsfeld approved brain cancer. Yeah. 4 .7 grams of sugar and that is so much sugar. 4 .7 grams and people polished these things off every day. Someone's polishing off a two liter of Mountain Dew listening to this as we speak. So that's probably double that so that's hundreds hundreds of grams of sugar. The big gulps. Yeah. The average American is fatter than the average American pig now. It's true. It's true. The average American man, 28 % body fat, average American woman, 40 % body fat, average American pig, 15 to 25 % body fat. Oh my god. I would have thought it would be higher than 28%.

1:24:23I think we're doing pretty good for guys. Yeah. Well, I guess it's offset by like Brian Johnson and all of the other people that are just shredded. Yeah, exactly. And then there was that other thing about you're talking about kids. It's 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. Yeah. It's so much less. And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing.

1:25:02Even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal the again, the same is going to the gym. Reliable, orderly, conscientious, 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 with signaling their eligibility, signaling how reliable they could be. And it made it easier for women to be attracted in that way. That makes sense. 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.

1:25:37And then after the child's going to be very difficult to work. So you were a lion on this other person that like how well do you know this person? Did you do that 10 day vacation? Did you make it with that guy? Did you go did you drive from Montego Bay to Kingston twice in bad traffic? Do you know what happens when he makes mistakes? Does he blame other people? Or does it does he apologize? Like what? Who is he? You know, because all that shit's going to come up when you get four hour sleep because the baby's crying and and then you know, maybe it doesn't like his job anymore. He wants to quit.

1:26:06And you're like, you can't quit mother fucker. You have to feed us. You have to take care of a family now. You're not going to just quit. What are you talking about? You don't like your job? Show up. And I can't imagine relying on another person like that. I mean, this is why women are so picky. Like when you see that 80 % of the women are attracted to 20 % of the men. And that's that's what that is. What did you expect? What did you expect? It's it's hard to have your shit together. It's hard to be kicking ass in this fucking complicated bizarre world that we live in. It's hard. So for a woman, of course, they're going to grab a wood about personality.

1:26:47Yeah, you're a fucking lazy bitch. That's part of your personality. Part of the reason why you're not successful at 40 years of age has to be you. Has to be. Some of it has to be. I mean, it could be a fucking avalanche of bad luck. One thing after the other, but I would like to see that you're making progress towards a better direction. But if you're stuck in this modale, if you're stuck in this mindset of, you know, the world fucks me over. It's like no, we're going to no one's going to want to be with you. No one's going to want to have children with you. No one's going to no one's going to be willing to rely on you to support a family.

1:27:25Like you have to get your shit together. And you have to also be attractive, which is just dumb luck. Like you have the dumb luck of genetics. You got a good face. Ooh, you know, you got a good body. A lot of that's genetics too. You know, like what they like and what they don't like is mostly about breeding. It's mostly about is this person reliable to breed with? It's interesting to think about the you mentioned earlier on about 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'll hold the door open for them, that'll treat them like a lady that'll try and be the protector provider pro creator thing.

1:28:10You go, you're talking about a conservative.

1:28:18You're talking 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 nine gets introduced right for women. It's not if women in higher education, it's not if women expediting them through socioeconomic status. 50 years later, they've blown the fucking roof off the glass ceiling. It doesn't exist. Two women for every one man completing a four year US college degree by 2030.

1:28:55Women earn way more than men do in their 20s. Way more. And now how are you? It's going to be difficult for you to find an eligible partner as you begin to climb up your own socioeconomic ladder as you get higher and higher 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.

1:29:36And now it feels like twisting the knife in some sort of comic 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, having 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 and natures play things.

1:30:11That 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. That doesn't help the guy who is really struggling and has had that run of bad luck and has been really struggling trying to work on himself. And yeah, if women have a problem a lot of the time, we say, what can we do to fix society? Any other group. But if men are struggling, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? Yeah. And in some ways, that's inspiring. Like guys want that sense of like, I can fucking do this.

1:30:44I can do this. But it denies that the structural problems, I think the education system for young boys is 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, completely a four -year was college degree. And I'm not saying, let's rip women out of the classroom and out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen.

1:31:17Like, obviously not. Obviously, that's not what either of us are saying. Well, what do you think is the cause of it? 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 the 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 this sort of gang stuff that people get drawn into.

1:32:01It's just more likely for guys. There are more roots 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 men is. But 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 arrogant from Lord of the Rings.

1:32:36What about Fabio? You've had to go to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure. And I think that, 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. How many people have gone from left to right? I left the left type thing like that. How many people have gone from right to left? Very few. Why? Because if you have got a slightly fetted 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.

1:33:14But the left one. Why do you think there is? 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 jizur of the modern world. What do you think? Why do you think it is? This episode is brought to you by policy genius. Let's be honest. We all procrastinate, especially when it comes to smaller tasks that don't seem all that important, like finding the perfect life insurance policy.

1:33:53Well, no more excuses. This is your wake -up call to finally get that life insurance because it actually is very important. 40 % of people with life insurance wish they had gotten it sooner. And luckily, I know exactly where you need to go to find a good policy policy genius. It'll help you find life insurance fast so that you can get on with the rest of your life plus. With the policy genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for one million dollars of coverage. Some options offer same -day approval and avoid unnecessary medical exams. They let you easily compare quotes from America's top insurers and its license support team is completely unbiased.

1:34:37They're working for you to find the best fit for your needs and budget. Even if you already have a life insurance plan, I still recommend checking it out. There might be a better deal. Or your current policy might not give you as much coverage as you want. It's always a good idea to double check. Don't put off life insurance, make it easy with policy genius. Head to policygenius .com slash JRE or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius .com slash JRE. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. Guys, it matters what razor you use and if you like to keep things smooth up top like me, it's even more important.

1:35:21Level up your grooming game with Manscaped. They have the tools you need for a great shave. Like their new dome shaver plus, it can give you the quickest, cleanest and most comfortable shave and it's all thanks to its design. It features four stainless steel rotary blades with skin safe technology to help reduce nicks and cuts. And the flex adjust technology helps the blades adapt to all the unique contours on your scalp. So you can easily achieve that shiny smooth look all over. Nothing's worse than making it halfway through the day and you realize you missed a spot. And even though it's electric, you can use the dome shaver plus wet or dry.

1:36:00You don't even need shaving cream. Use it during your morning shower routine or on the go while traveling. The blade pad is magnetic and it comes with a hair chamber to make clean up easier. Whether you're coming back from an elk hunt or getting ready for a big UFC night, this bad boy has you covered. So ditch your rusty razor and messy shaving routine and upgrade to the dome shaver plus. Visit Manscaped .com and use the code Rogan for 20 % off plus free shipping. That's 20 % off plus free shipping worldwide with the code Rogan at Manscaped .com. I think that's probably a factor. I also think that corporate America, the whole structure of it with human resources and people working together.

1:36:47It's just like it's not necessarily what men want. What men want if you want men to work in the best environment possible for men, they would work with mostly men. And they would probably be able to speak and communicate in a way that they did on madman. They'd act like men. Like men like to act like men. Most men that are involved in corporate life act like some strange character that is what a man is supposed to be. Especially if you're supposed to espouse all the latest social justice, whatever the mantra is, you have to repeat. If you have to rigidly adhere to an ideology in order to fit in with your corporate environment, you're going to do that and you're going to be trapped in that and you're going to just desperately want some escape.

1:37:42That's why CEOs wind up going to dominatrix and getting fucking ball gag and kicking the balls and shit. Like what do you think that is? It's like they need something, something wild to escape from the mundane existence that they have in the corporate world. That's a person that's in control all the time. So privately, I need to be out of control. It's just not compatible for most men. Like that type of environment, a work office environment is 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.

1:38:19You 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.

1:38:50And this is the, this is like the 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 of man makes. And people repeat that without understanding what it actually means. Now it's 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 doesn't play women. Yeah, you would only employ women because women you'd pay them less.

1:39:24They 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 it's a heart -strength statistic. It plays. It plays on your what you want to believe rather than what's true. And women have to take time off from maternity leave. They have to, you know, if they get pregnant, it's going to significantly significantly impact the amount of hours they're willing to work. They might not want to do the job anymore. What's the reason they're children?

1:39:58If their husbands are 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. Yeah. Oh, you've been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic prostitute. Oh, so I was talking to was it shorts that said this? I think it was. You're telling me on the show. He said that his wife used to work at Google. I think she's like super high -powered, real smart lady. And she used to bump into her old colleagues in the supermarket when they were together.

1:40:30And the classic question that somebody that's in the career trenches asks somebody else is, oh, so what are you doing now? You left work. What are you doing now? And short said this sentence that his wife replied with would fucking kill him. She says, oh, I'm just a mum.

1:40:51Oh, you feel like you're supposed to admit that you're just a mum. That fucking hurts, dude, to derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation. 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 intact, a non -intact household is more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college in the US. Any non -intact that's adopted, step parents, single parent, any non -intact home they're more likely to end up in jail or imprisoned than they are to complete college.

1:41:35Yeah. And the same statistic is not true for girls. And this again, the zero sumeness of the, so what do you say? You say that we need to, we need to hold girls, but it's like, no, you do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up. And 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?

1:42:11They had no other option to do that. That's scary. That's scary. That's why women are so picky. And they should be. Yeah. That's, yeah, it's, it's also crazy that we put value in our lives on money above everything, including above doing a good job raising your children. You put the money that you earn above that. And you just get daycare during the day. I'll be home at six. That's fine. That's plenty of time to be with my kid. And there's a lot of people that live their life by that. And their ledger when they look at the amount of money that they've earned, that's what, that's the reward. It's the greatest metric in the world, though.

1:42:52It's the most easy to optimize thing. Like, I can tell you the size of the house that I live in. I can tell you how much money I own. I can tell you what the car is like that I drive. I can't tell you how much peace I have with 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 get to spend in a hammock last week. You know, these are the things I think that if you were able to metric it, if you were able to make it a game, people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it.

1:43:18But the money's the best game in the world. It's literally transfer, it 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 whole world. It's the best game I've ever created. 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 fulfill feeling that you have when you do whatever it is that you do, we 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.

1:43:54It's useless. Meanwhile, it's the most important thing. The most important thing is satisfaction. Satisfaction in 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.

1:44:29But the reality of that life is just mostly suck. 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 a kind of walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity. That's a great definition. It is. It's really accurate.

1:45:10I think the thing that type A people realizes that if you're type A, you get very little sympathy because a 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 one's obscurity. Like 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 dopamine urge.

1:45:51I can opulent and addicted and privileged. I need someone how to teach me how to work harder feels noble and upward aiming. 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, grit and spit and sawdust he sorts himself out and he fixes his life. No movie explains how to log out of slack at 6 p .m. or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty. And so yeah, I think in that sense type A people may objectively have better lives but subjectively they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.

1:46:43Right. 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. Yeah. That's where they're at. Congratulations. You might be very successful. You also might be very miserable. You're most likely going to be miserable. That's the cold hard reality of most CEOs. Most really wealthy people when you see them pull up in the yacht, they're fucking living hell. I think when you look at people that are super outlier performance, you should probably your first emotion should not be envy, it should be pity.

1:47:27You should think what's that person, what's it like inside of that person to drive them to do what they did to themselves, to put them in that position? What's what's their background like? Well, haven't in their childhood? What do they think about their own sense of self worth in order to how much adder are they on? The old performance enhanced the test us room for the businessmen. It's not just performance enhance our I think it changes the way you approach things. I think. Have you ever taken it? No. No, I'm scared of I'm scared of speed. I'm scared of anything that I think I would really like.

1:48:02Yeah, you haven't done cocaine for the same reason, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was very lucky when I was in high school. I knew some people that had problems with it and big warning sign. Yeah. Well, and back then I was very driven. I didn't even party really. I only wanted to get good at martial arts. I was so driven that I didn't want to do anything that would interfere with anything else. What was it that drove you? Why? Why this drive for so long? It's probably a lot of factors. I mean, I got into it because I didn't want to get picked on because I didn't know how to fight and I would be nervous around bullies.

1:48:36I didn't know what to do. And I'm like, this I don't like this feeling at all. So I will become what everyone's afraid of. So I'll do that. And then when I got into it, I realized that first of all, I realized that I could get really good at things. I realized that whatever drive that I had and whatever thing about fighting, which was so scary to me, why was so appealing to me at the same time? And I realized that it was like a vision quest. I was on this quest to try to figure out how to harness my potential and what better way than to do something that's very difficult and very scary. And then if you could get really good at something very difficult and very scary, you could probably master life.

1:49:19So you had this gateway drug through martial arts that was a proof to you that you could self -author? Yes. A proof that I wasn't a loser. For me, it was like that I could be successful. Why did that? I've heard you say that before about the loser thing. Where did that fear come from? Did you feel powerless as a kid at some point? Yeah, I'm sure it comes from broken home, moving around a lot of factors. There's a lot of various factors. But it's also just the existential angst of being a young man. Like they're looking for purpose. Like, who am I? What do I do? Am I good at anything? Like, what gives me value?

1:49:55And for me, when I started doing martial arts, it was the first time that I was respected. And not just respected. Like, I remember the first time I realized that people would gather around when I fought. I was like, whoa, this is kind of crazy. Like, they specifically want to watch me fight. And that was a big deal to me. It's like that I was so good that people were gathering around. Really, it was they wanted to see something horrible. They wanted to see someone get headkicked. And they knew I did reliably. You could have a good one in the head. I was pretty good at it. And so that changed me, it changed my self -reflection, and changed who I was.

1:50:41I was an loser. Now I was an extreme winner and really good at it and super disciplined and driven beyond anything that I thought was possible before I'd done that. I never had that kind of focus before I got into martial arts. But martial arts demanded that kind of focus because you can't pretend. There's no pretending you're good. You have to be good. There's no pretending you're fast. You have to be fast. There's no pretending to be technical. You have to be perfect. Your technique has to be perfect because you're fighting against other trained killers. You're not fighting your weaknesses will be revealed.

1:51:21You're going to get hurt. And I saw so many people get hurt. It doesn't matter about what you tweeted. It doesn't matter about your beliefs. Stepping out of the mat. You're fucking rainbow flag that you have on your t -shirt. It gives a shit. 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. 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.

1:52:02I 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, it's going to deny me its love. I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy. I think that this talking about the high performer thing, talking about the thing that you want and how much you're running away from something that you fear. That there's not enoughness. The way I looked at it and the way I was taught was that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential and that through the incredible struggle of training and competing, you will learn more about your ability to excel at anything.

1:52:51This is the Mio 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.

1:53:39Their 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. 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. You've got endocrine disruption, your pituitary glands probably fucked.

1:54:13Your quarters all levels are through the roof. Your hormone levels are all fucked up. You might have a hard time losing weight. You're tired and depressed because your levels are all fucked up in your hormones because you basically got your brains beat in six months ago. Your capacity to fix the very problem has been taken away from you. You see it sometimes with one fight. With a fighter you see Tony Ferguson is my favorite example who was the boogeyman, the lightweight division of the UFC for years. He was the guy who was coming after you and was just hell bent on destruction and beat the fuck out of everybody.

1:54:56Beat the fuck out of everybody for years until he fought Justin Gachi. Justin Gachi 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 Gachi fight. I think he was a slight favorite going into that fight. After the fight he got stopped in the later rounds and never, never recovered. I think that was a physical thing or a mental thing. Both. More physical than mental. Because I think Tony's mental, his fortitude is unstoppable. He's just got this mindset but I don't think his body responded the way. I'm sorry I want a stem machine with David Guggins.

1:55:37Guggins is screaming at him to keep going. He gets off throws up in a bag and gets back on the stem. He's an animal. His mind is unstoppable. But at a certain point in time, particularly when you're being tested. You're doing the usada protocol at the time and now it's a drug free sport. There's no peptides. There's nothing that can aid you in recovery. You can't supplement your hormones. You can't 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. If a guy like Tony Ferguson after that fight got on hormone replacement, got into testosterone, got his levels up pretty high, got to a point we could train as hard.

1:56:21He probably wouldn't have had the slide that he had. I think part of the slide is that everybody has to be natural. When you're natural and you get beat up a few times, you're not the same person anymore. 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 Mel Jertelor's one of the best examples. Faud Julio Cesar Chavez, Chavez broke him down in the fight and then stopped him with a couple seconds to go in the last round. Dropped him in the referee called the fight with a couple seconds to go in the last round. Mel Jertelor was never the same again.

1:57:00He did interviews after the fight and the interviews after the fight a couple of years later, pronounced slurring in his words. A very clear deterioration of his reflexes and his speed, very clear deterioration and his ability to take a punch and even avoid punches. His reflexes were off. Have you ever felt any TBI stuff from your heritage of doing striking? No, not really. I'm sure it made me impulsive. I'm sure I probably got the right amount of brain damage to succeed in life. I think so because it made me not very risk averse. I like risks. I enjoy them. I get a thrill out of taking chances.

1:57:39I'm not afraid to fail. I don't mind because I know that failure produces some of the best results. Every time I've ever failed at anything, I've always the humiliation and the pain of it has always forced me to work so much harder. Failure and comedy is a gigantic blessing. If you have one good bombing, it sucks like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. But when it's over, you realize that that can happen. You fucking tighten up your battleship. Some of the biggest growth leaps that I've seen in comics and even in fighters is a humiliating loss. There's a special category of lessons that I've been thinking about.

1:58:18It's one that you can only learn by having gone through it. I think that bombing on stage or having a poor performance, I think that that's one of them. I think most of them you're only learning by going through them. You learn something from watching other people's mistakes, which is why I've never done cocaine. If I did do cocaine, I would have been sober a long time ago and I would have had a much better understanding of the abyss. Cocaine is a performance enhancer. It's strange, 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.

1:59:05We think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me. It's the like, watch me do this mum mentality. We decide to learn the hard lessons, the hard way over and over again. And unfortunately, you always seem to be the big things. 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. We spend most of our lives learning firsthand the warnings that previous generations gave us over and over again. And then one day, you're like, I'm going to throw all my money in crypto. And then you will know about that. That's one of them.

1:59:44Money won't make you happy. Fame isn't going to fix yourself worth. You don't love that pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. You will regret working too much. Worrying isn't aiding your performance. Nothing 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 tried. There's 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?

2:00:28You know what I mean? Like they have this further 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's like 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 girl, you think that getting the girl is going to do those things.

2:01:07And 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. So 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 really didn't fix myself worth. The internet hates that. Yeah. 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.

2:01:51Yeah. Right? No, no, no. My unique in a landscape would be salved by this problem. Especially man. Watch me dance through this minefield, avoid all of the trip wise, do a couple of pirouettes and I won't kick any of them. Yeah. And then you kick one and you realize, oh, fuck, this, this worry of mine was so much more deeply rooted than the thing that's from outside. But I genuinely believe that you kind of need to learn it yourself. I don't think you can. I've gotten a vowel on the show on Sunday. He's great. He's fucking phenomenal. I think that by the way, the one that you did with him in 2019 is the best podcast episode of all time.

2:02:28Really? That two hours. Yeah. It's just one I've gone back. Maybe it's just like personally meaningful to me, but I must have listened to that I think more than any other. He's very wise. He's a very wise person. Although he did tell me that if he could invest more money in clubhouse, he would have. And I was I was we were talking on the phone. Dude, I think this is just bad podcasting. I don't think I don't think there's but clubhouse took off during the pandemic because people found themselves at home and you know, it's kind of cool to be able to hop on to a call with a bunch of other people and you're basically sharing ideas of people you've never met before and intellectually sparring and people loved it.

2:03:07But I was like, bro, when the world reopens I did it with Tim Dylan. We did an episode once and he was like, yeah, it goes out there and then you know, no one ever has I go bullshit. People are recording this right now. I go, it's going to be online. And he was on immediately immediately. I go, this is not. Yeah, it's like a the mothership making people put their phones in the bag, but you can reopen the bag. It's like that if you could reopen the bag. Yeah, yeah, but you can reopen the bag. It's like, I'm allowed to do this and just take it. It's like, wait, everything's not. Yeah, it's a real interesting one, but he's got this quote where he says, it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.

2:03:44It's much easier for you to drive a beat up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari. Sure. Yeah. Because you've closed that loop. That would have. I wouldn't have wondered if it is the money. Right. If it is the fame, I wonder if it is the. But it depends on the circles you're keeping too. Because if you're keeping circles that are valuing those those items that show like you've achieved milestones, you know, there's a bunch of people that they, you know, you don't have a Maybach home. You don't have a this. Keeping up with the Jones is just how for fucking building your houses and not in the best neighborhood.

2:04:16I 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 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. Energy, the aura, everyone's super impressed by us. But 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 in Benjamin, Disraeli, the prime minister and the opponent one night after the other.

2:04:59And she says after I left the dinner with Gladstone, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in England. And after I left the dinner with Disraeli, I felt like I was the smartest woman in England. And I think this really helps to explain why we gravitate towards certain people. Some people feel interesting. And around some people we feel interesting. Yeah. And that's my favorite sort of person. I think charisma being charismatic, being energizing. It's a sort of thing lots of people are seduced by. They love the sound of it. But it's kind of like developing real charisma like Matthew McConaughey.

2:05:37It's said opposite this guy. I used to 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. That's my questions. Yeah. I want to know what you think about this. That's cool, Joe. Tell me more about that. 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. You know barely anything that the other person knows. And I mean, this is why our job is largely the most selfish one that we could do.

2:06:09Hey, smart person, come on here and tell me about your entire life's work. Tell the least educated person in the room about what it is that you've spent your time doing. Yeah. And it's also, it's very beneficial for the people that are listening, which is another service that is provides. Like you get to be you. Like the person listening to your podcast gets to be you as you interview these spectacular people. So they get to like, oh, yeah, why did you do that? And then you say, why did you do that? Like, yeah, that's a question. Good question. You know what it feels like? It feels like watching a sports game sometimes.

2:06:46I 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 go excited and you're like, oh, he's going to do this. Oh, yeah. Well, that's what I wanted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're ever listening to sometimes, sure that this maybe happened to people listening to this episode, they got fuck up. He asks him about the thing. Yeah. And yeah, there's this sense that there's a third participant, not just Jamie in the room. Where's Carl? I just realized there should be a false participant.

2:07:19Carl snores a lot. Okay. He's a sound risk. Sometimes he gets a little loud. And while the podcast is going on, you hear me like, nudge him. Roll him over, make him shut up. Yeah. I am. It depends on who I'm talking to. Like if I'm talking to like a theoretical physicist and there's like some very difficult thing to grasp. And you hear Carl snore and becomes a little bit of an issue. If it's coming through the headphones, he's loud. Sleep train. Sleep train that dog. No, you can't. He's got an order. You can handle it. And he's a CPAP. Doggy CPAP. Fuck. Have you seen what their faces look like when the skulls, when the dog skulls?

2:07:59No. Oh, it's horrible. What they've done to them. Through selective breeding. Yeah. Just slowly, slowly. Just shove their fucking skull. It's all twisted where their sinuses are like non -existent. They're their whole face is just mushed in. So we can't really complain about the snoring. Well, I mean, we did it to them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They used to be a wolf. Yeah. I told you about that man crush that I had last time, that unkillable soldier guy. Yeah, yeah. And it sort of sent me down a rabbit hole. I fell in love with stories of crazy bastards from history. So I found this other dude called Aimo Coivanan.

2:08:33I've heard of that guy. The Finnish soldier. Yeah. Yeah. So he is out on patrol with a bunch of Finnish soldiers, small group, and they come upon a Soviet force way bigger than they are. They can't fight them. So they have to flee as they're fleeing their skiing away through the snow. And the forces way bigger Aimo is at the front. He's trailblazing trying to break free from this group, but he can't go fast enough. If they get caught, they're going to be captured or killed or worse. So he needs to speed up. He doesn't know how he's carrying the entire patrols supply of perveteen. A perveteen was a German miracle drug that was used to keep soldiers awake during the war.

2:09:13Math. It's otherwise known. Yeah. As methamphetamine. And he decided, I mean, you might think this wasn't just any normal meth. This was pharmaceutical grade wartime human horsepower. It was the most intense. So you might think tolerating the dose could be a good idea. There's a rumor that apparently it had melted in his pocket, but whatever he did, he took 30 people's worth. He took 30 soldiers worth of meth. The entire packet, just ate the entire packet. Unsurprisingly, he manages to break away from the pursuing Soviets, and he leads his group away. So they chill out on the far side once they're finally free.

2:09:56And they notice that Amos behaving a little bit oddly. And he seems to be a danger to himself and to them. So they take his ammo out of his rifle, and they take his knife off him and they're putting stuff away in the pack. They turn around and he's gone. Like, fuck, where's Amo gun? He skis for 63 miles on his own. Just skis away. It doesn't really know what he's doing. He's in the next day. No idea where he is. Doesn't know where his group is. Doesn't know where the squadron is. Doesn't know where he is. Immediately, he sees a Soviet soldier over the far side, raises his rifle. Click. Fuck, they took my ammo.

2:10:31Holes the rifle at this Soviet soldier and he explodes in a cloud of white dust. Turns out that it wasn't a Soviet soldier. It was a tree branch with snow on it, and that he's actually hallucinating. So he's in a full on fever dream. Now, whoa. Imagine this Soviet soldier throws the gun at him. He explodes. He's like, fuck, okay, I need to find my squadron. How am I going to get back to them? So he decides to just try and navigate around for a couple of hours and he sees him over the far side. He sees a fire and he sees his group over the far side. It's way far away. So he skis for another two hours.

2:11:04Turns out that it wasn't his squadron. It was more Soviet soldiers. So he just skis straight through the middle of the camp. All of these guys immediately chase after him, but there's no chat. He's the fucking LeBron James of meth. You're not catching this guy. So he goes straight through again. Second night finds a hut, finds a wooden cabin in the middle of the snow, decides to set a fire, but he doesn't set it in the fireplace. Set it in the middle of the wooden hut. Throughout the night, he shuffles himself further and further. For some reason, his back is getting a little bit warm and he keeps on sort of shuffling himself further and further away.

2:11:43He 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 Aimo 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 stuck it from me. It was his compass, which was the only thing he could use to navigate himself.

2:12:19He'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 in the hole. Continues to ski around. He's trying to find someone, trying to find any way market that he can. Now with no weight and 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.

2:12:56So he walks onto the middle of the forward operating base immediately gets exploded by a land mine. Fuck 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 to the forward. 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.

2:13:27He lays there for about five or six days, waiting to die. These 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 finished soldiers come upon him of all of the different nationalities of all of the different people. Three finished soldiers come upon him and he thinks 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.

2:13:57We can save you and take you back. The front guy of the three fins steps on a land mine, blows himself up. 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 back. Someone's going to kill me before I before they do or I'm going to die or whatever, but they do. They managed to come back. They managed to get him and they taken back to the medical bay.

2:14:26Fourteen 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 survive this entire time on meth. Water that he'd melted down into a 10 cup. A couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to and a single Siberian J that he beat to death with his ski pole and just ate raw. He lived until he was in his 70s, died in like 1989 and just lived a great life. Fucking love that story. This meth -fueled Finnish maniac just like skiing through everything, setting shit on fire, hallucinating, getting blown up twice, survived it, meth to hell of a drug.

2:15:17Maybe you should have done it. Maybe we should try now. It's amazing what was accomplished on an infatumines. I mean, Norman Oer's book Blitz. I love those episodes that you did with it. Yeah, incredible. It's just an incredible story that they literally went through Poland in three days, just methed out of their fucking minds. And the most meth was given to the people at the very front, the people that drive in the tanks. They were the most cranked up. Because they'll drive the rest of the group forward. Yeah. And also they have to be the most psychotic because you're going to be the first people to encounter resistance.

2:15:53So you need to be the most risk of us, the least risk of us, the most maniacal and murderous. 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 cookie doctor that he had injecting him with bullsemen. He's getting fucking cocaine. Everything. Yeah. A lot of it had to do with that. It had to. I mean, it had to. It's a factor. It's a giant factor. Just how much of it? What would have been like? What would the wars have been like, where there are no meth?

2:16:32I mean, that's probably the first infatumine fjord war, right? Was World War One fueled by infatumines? Did they have infatumines back then? I mean, I don't know what you do to get people to go over the top to certain death. Like how do you, I mean, you motivate people by everybody else doing it. I get a supposed sort of crowd behavior in that way. Well, they know that meth was given to the kamikaze soldiers, which makes sense. I mean, what? It's a great way to just going to fly that plane right in that boat. You're like, what? I mean, great time. Sure. Yeah. No, I'm going to fly to a fucking island and hide during World War One.

2:17:09Military is used cocaine and other drugs for medicinal purposes and to enhance performance. So cocaine. British Army sold cocaine containing pills under the brand name forced march. That is the best branding in the world. Increased endurance suppress appetite. 1960 British Army Council banned the unauthorized sale of psychoactive drugs. Does one wonder where they did that? They didn't want to win. You don't have fun. What are you? The fucking fun, police? Wow. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Well, is it go pills? Is that where they give to fight pilots? Yeah, they give them something. British Army's pill number nine.

2:17:48What's that? Pill number nine was just a strong laxative. This is AI lies. What was in there? Specific medication used by British Army during World War One. Primary ingredient pill number nine was colamel. Mercurious chloride. Mercury based compound. You used to treat intestinal infections and other ailments. Oh, okay. Just massive diarrhea pills. I don't know how that's a performance in Hansa. Yeah, I don't think it is. If you're stomach, maybe just clear it out. Feel like on your feet. I don't know. It seems like the cocaine be more effective. I mean, cocaine will make you go to the bathroom as well.

2:18:26For a compressor, goals? Yeah. 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 yeah, permissionless reality bender. Who would you call? Oh, no, man.

2:19:06That's a good question. That's a really good question. I don't have to really think about it. Also, I don't know anybody's number. That's true. Yeah, I guess. Can I Instagram DM them? Is that all right? Can I log in? Actually, can you give me my phone because I've got two factor authentication on this is going to be really awkward. Is that all right? Can I need to do that? Yeah, I mean, I would be tempted to ring Tim Kennedy. I think he would probably be quite high up on my list. Yeah, he would help you a lot. If I had access to my phone. Yeah, dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Correct. Yeah, I mean, it might be a bit gratuitous.

2:19:39I get the sense that he would take more pleasure in getting me out than would be necessary. You know what I mean? Yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. That's got to be the worst place to be in the world foreign prison with no way to call somebody. You know, this is the criticism about these illegal aliens that have been shipped off to what is it? El Salvador? What is it El Salvador that they're they have the super prisons? Yes, I think that's we spoke about this last time. That was just as they'd been created. These football stadium sized monstrosity. They essentially got all the gang members off the streets and locked them up and dropped crime radically dropped violence radically.

2:20:21They essentially said enough of this. We're just going to go after all these gang members and lock them all up. And the criticism about these deportees that we're sending people over there. We're sending plane loads of people over there. Like what if you're in that group and you're not guilty of anything? What if you're just a guy who came over here from Mexico and you're a tattoo artist? US Deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights. Yeah, there's a court ruling to halt the flights. But here's the thing. If they are gang members, if they are trendy trendy aragua or those gang members that are cool.

2:21:02Yeah, if that's real, then this all makes sense. But the fear is that there's going to be certain people that are rounded up in this that are not killed. Collateral damage. Right. And then these poor people are going to be trapped in this El Salvador prison. And no one's going to believe them that they're innocent. It says it all that El Salvador has got a reputation for being so good at prison and law enforcement that they're fucking importing people over there. And it's like, oh, we need to, you said before, if I've got a bad knee, I want to go to the guy who looks after the Lakers. It's like, you're the Lakers PT doc of the rehabilitation, well, it's not even rehabilitation.

2:21:41It's about just incarceration world. Yeah, it's just incarceration. And this is probably a financial incentive. We probably pay them to house these prisoners. But the question is, are we sure? Like how many of these people are being accused of being gang members because maybe they tattoo gang members, you know, maybe they were caught up in a raid. And maybe they are friends of gang members. Maybe they're just an artist who happens to be an illegal or maybe there are someone who's working on a construction site and they get rounded up and they get shipped over there. That's a legitimate question.

2:22:15When you're arresting people and prosecuting people and your goals 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. Quite a few. I mean, I do a lot of podcasts with my good friend, Josh Dubin, who has spent a considerable amount of his life helping innocent people get out of jail. That's his, you know, 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.

2:22:57It'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 stills in there for 30 years. The actual guy who is 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. You will either be arrested because you're lying now or you'll be arrested for telling lies previously. So he then he won't. This is like that thing.

2:23:38You know, if she thinks she's not a witch and if she floats, she is. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. And then there's the game aspect of it. The game aspect of it is victory. If you're a prosecutor, your job is to arrest people and prosecute them and convict them. That's your job. That's what you're self -worth, who you are as a prosecutor, your reputation is based on success. Yeah, your record, your perfect record of this many convictions. Yeah. It's the same with cops. Unfortunately, a lot of cops are their whole thing is making arrest, making arrests. It's a shame, isn't it?

2:24:18You talked about the fire service earlier on. Three emergency services, fire police and ambulance. When the fire service turns up anywhere, I don't think that there's any issues. People, I don't know whether how often fire fighters find themselves up against a crowd that's unhappy. Maybe I guess if it was a riot and some kind of some perhaps. But for the most part, it's a hero that's coming to save the cats stuck in a tree, the house that's on fire, the baby that substairs, like, hooray, well done for you. Yeah. Medical service turns up. Somebody's really badly hurt or somebody's broken, has impeded some kids.

2:24:53Yeah, some kidded a sports match. He's broken their leg. Thank you, somebody, please. Look after them, look after them. And then the police turn up and the reaction could not be more different. Yeah. And I don't know. I understand that there's a particular type of control that cops have that sort of fire fighters and EMTs. Firefighters and EMTs are doing stuff exclusively sort of in service of others, whereas cops are doing something that sort of subtract away. But it must be tough. Like, if you're a good cop, especially now, especially after the last few years, there must be hugs. You want to feel proud about your job?

2:25:30It's unbelievably hard. It's also very hard to get people that are good people to sign up for it now because they don't want that abuse. I wonder if that's been reversed over the last few years. I mean, I bet it has in certain jurisdictions and certain areas where they've valued cops. And, you know, this whole defund the police thing was just so wild. It was so crazy to see that people would think that that would be a good idea. And even to spouse it publicly to erode public confidence and law enforcement just writ large. You notice that that's largely dropped off now. Yeah. No one's really talking about defund work.

2:26:07I mean, we had the opposite effect crime escalated and the people that lived in the communities wanted the cops back. In the areas that were the worst affected as well. It's a luxury belief. Yeah. It's something that's held by the upper classes that only impact the lower classes. 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 Kamal 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.

2:26:48And 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 have 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 nightmare situation. Horrific violence, domestic violence, child abuse, murdered kids, you're seeing so much horror. And then your version of reality is based on your experiences, your experiences are horrific every day.

2:27:26Do you think you'd be able to switch off if you had a job like that? I would be able to partition compartmentalize. 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 guys brains blown out all over the curb for nothing, for some stupid argument about nothing. You know, 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 your brain is on fire.

2:28:06Your soul is just an agony. We were watching a video the other day of this guy who had to shoot this guy. This guy was something was wrong. It was clearly mentally unstable, was yelling, was telling everybody what he was going to do. They tased him, that didn't work. Then he's charging at this cop and the cop shoots him and then the cop sobbing and shaking and his partner's telling him to breathe, how to breathe. And he's just probably the first person he ever had to kill. He's horrible. It's horrible. And that's he succeeded. He stopped a threat. And he, you know, it was justified. This person was trying to kill him.

2:28:53What 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. He pulled people over also in 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.

2:29:28And, 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. And when you see a video, someone who shouldn't be cop, 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. As most of the interactions that people have with police officers are fine.

2:30:04Most 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 these are what cops are doing. They're out there trying to kill people. That's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way that algorithms work, that edge cases, that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire. 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. Then it gets used as a political tool. Correct. You mentioned about Biden and flying high, having all of this fun.

2:30:49What are they doing? What do you do when you've lost two people have lost a campaign in the space of six months? Tim Wallace is out there talking again. You say you could fight any Trump supporters? Yeah, they kick their ass and they're scared of him because he could fix a truck. They're threatened by his masculinity. I know how to fix a truck. So he said, I'm like, do you? I bet you don't. The lady, Doth, protest too much. I bet you don't. I fear. I bet if I bring a broken truck to you in a bag of tools, you're fucked. That was the, that was kind of the redress, right? That was the attempt. It was like, we're going to, the symbol of masculinity on the left is going to be Tim Waltz.

2:31:26It was Arrigan, Arrigan, from Lord of the Rings and Tim Waltz. Yeah, it's so crazy. I just, I think they're lost. I mean, they're also lost in that they can't control the narrative anymore. I think when they had control of Twitter and they had control of all, essentially all of social media and pre -Trump, they had the reins like firmly held. They were in control of the public narrative. If you strayed from that, you will be kicked off social media. You'll be banned from YouTube. You were, I mean, and for things that were factually correct, like the lab leak theory is now finally being embraced by the New York Times.

2:32:02The New York Times, I don't know if you saw that article the other day, you said we were misled. Like, bro, you misled us. We were misled by ourselves. There was a big misled. We misled it. In the New York Times, it has people up in arms because they're like, fucking duh. You're fine. Do you know where it is? I could send it to you. I saved it because it's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. I was like, what are you saying? How are you saying that? It was you guys. It wasn't just some random people that did that.

2:32:36Do you find them anywhere, Jamie? I know I saved it. Which was it called? It was the New York Times saying that we were misled. There was a big op -ed in the New York Times. I saw people spreading. I never sold the link. Yeah, I read it. I read it for like the first couple chapters, but it's all duh. That the whole thing is just fucking duh. God, where did I save it? I saved too many things. I'm a hoarder. Digital hoarder. I'm a digital hoarder. Do you know why that happens? You know why people hoard stuff? The interesting way that their brains work. So, I'm looking around this table, you're able to discern between stuff that is useful and stuff that isn't there.

2:33:18There it is. We are badly misled about the event that changed our lives. Who you badly misled by? Do you think you guys had a factor in that?

2:33:31Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens and laboratories, the world's experience 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 cokes and cranks in this newspaper. Many public health officials and prominent, by the way, not by this person.

2:34:09I'm not blaming this person. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismiss the ideas, 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 Eco Health Alliance lost a great grant, because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Viralogy, research that if conducted with lack safety standards could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world.

2:34:46No fewer than 77 Nobel laureates in 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. It's strange that everything is concretized on the internet for the rest of time. You know, you, I mean, people can go back and try and like retrograde, remove stuff that happened, but there's always internet archive is fantastic for this. Yeah, for the most part, you could find it.

2:35:20Yeah, inspired. So, how, 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, 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. Right. And yeah, it's just, it's just an advert. It's just a banner. Forwarded many times. And it was a single squaddy, a guy in, um, fatigues 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.

2:36:04And it was going to happen on this particular day. It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp. Never happened. I'm 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. And you know, I mean, the unfulsifiable 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.

2:36:37And the same with whether it's lab league 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 a long enough, you like, I don't remember that. You know, you're like, fucking the most gaslighty partner that you've ever been with. I'm not, you sure? I don't think I didn't say that. I did, I did this like, fucking fougaisy like switcheroo, some lexical Brazilian jiu -jitsu. And I don't have to, I don't have to atone for my previous sins anymore. Well, I think in this case, you have an individual journalist who wrote this story.

2:37:12I 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, hey, 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 authorization. And the only way you can get that is if you have no treatment.

2:37:50So you had to rely on one thing and that one thing was the vaccine and they all participated in it. How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this balance thing that he's got going on at the Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent 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 most of it's blowing with the wind? It's the society. Society's decided, we're done. This was Trump getting elected.

2:38:23This was Elon buying Twitter. This was and this is the blowback that you're seeing. These organized protests and vandalism on Tesla dealerships and they're encouraging people. There's so many videos that people just smashing Teslas, carving swastikas into the side of Teslas because Sentry Mode, these cars all have Sentry Mode. So you can leave your Tesla parked and it has HD video of everything that's happening all around. And it uploads it so you can just see who did watch it. Yeah, you can watch it. That's why all these videos are out. All these videos are out as people extracted them from their cars.

2:38:57The video isn't published by the rioters, the videos published by the victims. Exactly. Fuck. Yeah. There's tons of people that have been arrested for this now. Tons of people. I don't know what I mean, I guess it's a way of trying to protest against some person that you don't like. Yeah, but it's funded. That's what's crazy. 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.

2:39:36It 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 NGO can do. What's an example of that? Well, regime change. Like a lot of what this money is 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.

2:40:22And you can just funnel billions of dollars all over the world with no accounting. Mike Benz is like the most prophetic person of all time. Oh my god. I mean, he talked about it on this podcast before Doge and before USAID and everyone is like, oh, conspiracy theorists and this and that and this guy. So he used to work for the State Department. What the fuck is he know? Apparently he knows everything. He knows all of it and he can spit it out. His recall is incredible. And you know, that guy's got to be fucking terrified because he's out there exposing. He's he's essentially the guy who led Elon to the coffin where the vampire sleeps.

2:40:59Like this is where it is. 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. Right. 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, getting community, yeah, having security and stuff like that. But this is one of those weird situations where your knowledge, your particular insight makes you so uniquely vulnerable or such such a heavy target.

2:41:41But it hasn't come with the Concordant increase in status and resources that would allow you to be able to actually protect yourself. Right. And this is I guess the crisis of a whistleblower. Yes. Yes. whistleblower and investigative journalists. Yeah. I mean, this is why Julian Assange spent so much time in jail. I was just about to bring up Russell Brecht. Yes. Have you guys must have tried to reach out? 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.

2:42:14Yeah. 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, you know, the documentary, the docu drama 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. You know, I'd like to know. Isn't it funny that we always think about conspiracy, conspiracy theories, all of this stuff is always being in the past.

2:42:51And that when something is unfolding right now, I wonder how much stuff is being ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians. I wonder. Wonder what that would be. That's one of my friends' favorite questions to ask. What is being ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians? I certainly think that smartphone use will be one of those. You know, there was that five deathbed regrets of the dying. I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I wish I hadn't worked so much. I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived the life I wanted and not the life that other people had for me.

2:43:23Blah blah. Yeah. I would bet everything that I'm worth that within the next couple of decades, I wish I'd spent less time on my phone. Yeah. Would be one of those. No doubt. 100%. Well, your time is so valuable. And how do you have five extra hours a day? We'll look at your screen time, and it'll save five hours. We were talking about this before we got started that you have the same number of hours that somebody did a hundred years ago. But the average amount of time that American spend on screens is eight hours at the moment. The average time that they eat, eight, on screen at all screens, the average time they spend to sleep is six point five.

2:43:58So people are sleeping for one and a half hours less than they spend their time on their phone. And what are you getting at? Well, nothing tangible. That's what's crazy. It's so hard. It's so addicting. It's designed to be addicting. I mean, you've had Tristan Harris on here, you know, 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. Yeah, I had the guy who wrote Stuart Russell. He wrote the original AI textbook. It's translated into 70 languages around the world. And he taught me this really interesting thing about how the algorithms work.

2:44:32So we know the job of the algorithm is to predict what you want to click on. Right. So what it wants to do is get better at working out what Joe likes on his YouTube feed or on his Instagram feed or whatever. But there's actually two ways that it can become more accurate at being able to predict what you're going to click on. 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 what like click through and watch time.

2:45:05If 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.

2:45:39And 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'll give you a better quality of information.

2:46:18But 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 they explain to why the culture was so boring. Culture is largely super boring because both sides act as if the factor already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's 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?

2:47:00That's the situation we end up with. And I think it explains why I think it explains why the culture was feels so samey and nothing really ever seems to move. Like it's not moved forward. It goes at such a snail's pace. The news is operating at light speed and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at snail's pace. How are these two things happening together? Well, it's technological advance. Right? Technological advance is so much greater and faster than biological advance. This is the scariest thing that leads us down the road to AI is that as we are so limited in our biological ability to evolve, biological evolution takes so long.

2:47:47Cultural evolution takes so long whereas technological evolution is almost instantaneous. And we are being overrun by this thing that's captivated our attention. I was talking about this the other day. I was like, imagine if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day, he'd be like, keep me the fuck away from that drug. But that's what your phone's doing. Mostly you're getting nothing. Occasionally you get a funny meme. If I looked at the amount of time that I spend online in a given day and how much of it is really fascinating to me, well, every now and then you get a story like that story about the whole universe might be inside of a black hole.

2:48:25Then I'm on a rabbit. So there's this interesting inside about that. There's a few things you'll get, but I kind of feel like you will get those if you're offline just by other people being online. They'll send it to you. You're almost better off. You don't need to be the one doing the first past scouring. Exactly. Your resources are better utilized by not doing that. Did you see that? It was a guy who removed people's phones from the hands. He's a photographer who went around. I think it was maybe New York City and he took photos of people and then CGI the phones out. You know you're talking about it.

2:48:59Imagine if there was this thing in it, made you stare at your hand. He actually did it. So it shows just how absurd it is. You know, you've got an entire train carriage on the subway on the underground. And everyone's staring at the hands. And it's just people staring down at the hands like this. 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.

2:49:26You need to be sedated. Oh, there we go. Oh, wow. All those people just sit in their staring. Oh, that's so crazy. Go back and Jamie, go back up to that one of the kids. Wow. It wasn't that long. This was 2015. In 2012, I started trying to take pictures of people in public looking at their phones. And it wasn't that common then. So it wasn't that well, that's like when social media kicked off. And the beginning, no one was on it. You'd see it. It's like most people weren't even on Twitter. They're like, why would I be on that? And you know, people were using it to promote things. And then they started using it to elevate their profile.

2:50:01And then people became influencers. And once people became influencers and once people like a regular person and get a couple of million followers, then also to get sponsors. And that's your job now. No, no variety. Respect. Yeah. And fame. I remember one. I was living in LA. It was right around the time that a lot of these, what was it back then? What was the thing that was like, it wasn't TikTok? Vine? Yes. Yeah. It was a vine. Vine influencers were the first. And they were so they'd go to restaurants and be like, that's blah, blah, blah. Like who's that? Like, he's got 35 million vine subscribers.

2:50:42Like, what? It was bizarre because you see just regular people that would do antics or cause scenes or do something to get attention. And they developed large followings. Wasn't it the number one job that primary school kids want is to be YouTuber and influencer? Well, they all watched them. They all watched people eat food and open up toys. And it's like very weird. It's very weird stuff because no one would have ever predicted that that would be something would captivate people's attention on a television. Right. There was no unboxing shows on television, but yet unboxing shows on the internet are huge.

2:51:19Like people get sucked into the most mundane things. I'm an opening up package. Oh, look at those. Here's the new phone. Yeah, I unboxing in some ways, I actually think is quite satisfying. I quite like watching the people that have got the new MacBook M4 thing and it's shot whole nice and MKBHD. Yeah. You know, like watching him do his stuff is really great, but he also does a comprehensive analysis of the tech. It's not just he's me playing with a new Mac. No, it's in it's an he's doing a review of state of the art, you know, where where is technology currently and what's what's the best version?

2:51:52I think when it comes to desiring a life, looking at, okay, what is it that I want? You need to be very, very careful about what the process is in order to get the outcome that you want, because if you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to live the life needed to get it, you're just asking for disappointment. Yeah. Well said. My friend talks about Call of Duty versus War and he talks, you know, you think about this is what going on holiday to a place is and this is what having to live there is like, you can go to somewhere and you go, it was lovely for a week. We were in the Congo. Yeah, it was so nice, but you go, what's it like if you can't leave?

2:52:28It's literally the difference between being camping, 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 seashells and uploading yourself, you're getting, I don't know what they do, like Play Doe, 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. They are factories of content eight hours a day, five days a week, just stream, just fucking stream of consciousness.

2:53:07Someone put something in the chat and you go, well, let's watch this thing. Let's watch that thing. It's like, yeah, 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. If you're lucky.

2:53:38And that's if you've managed to break through. 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. There's this, 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.

2:54:15But 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 this, I did this live show in London last year. My first big headline show at the event in Mapollo 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. They'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or they'll switch from one company to another.

2:54:57How 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? It's pretty rare. It's not that common. And we are such mimetic creatures were so shaped by the people around us that we can't help but be tempted. 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.

2:55:28It's the sort of thing that's quite easily marked. There's a big culture of piss taking. And if you start, are you talking to people on the internet for? 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, the 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 old guys and how to do Tai Chi or whatever? Why are you doing that?

2:55:57Well, 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, where's the championship ring? You know what I mean? I haven't won the fight.

2:56:33Where'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, yes, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey of the athlete that's going to change his life around and get the girl. But his self -believe never -wavers, right? He makes the decision and it's one straight shot typically. And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get that. His self -believe never -wavers. I don't think that that's what the experience of doing personal growth is like, at all. In my experience, it's, you're just swimming in uncertainty and fear and a lack of belief that it's even going to happen.

2:57:15You 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 is waking up meditation app and I'm journaling on a 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, scrambling like a guy in a fucking well, trying to find a handhold. And if you don't have a good community of people that are also doing that, you're on your own. Yeah. Yeah. 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.

2:57:47I think about personal growth kind of like a, 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 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, 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.

2:58:25And 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, all of these things, birds of a feather, right? And, you know, 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 after all that period where I was, I was on my own and I didn't really understand, oh, fuck, I'm still going.

2:59:04I've opened and I now need, 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, it's 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 -heteropatriacle 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.

2:59:47And for me, it seems to be a real, enthusing environment, encourages me to do things, helps me to take risks, either that I 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 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. In 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?

3:00:34Or do I want to go back with my friends? It's a good point, man. Chris, always great to talk to you brother. Really appreciate your insight. You're a very brilliant guy. And you're always, you're fun. Fun to talk to. I appreciate you too, man. Thanks for having the courage to put all your thoughts out there. And I love what you do. I love your show. And you're awesome, man. You're awesome too. Every time that you bring me on, every time that we get to speak, I really appreciate it. So thank you. Bye, brother. Bye, buddy.