31 Oct 2026 · 2h 38m · Joe Rogan, Konstantin Kisin, Francis Foster · 19 quoted facts
Joe Rogan talks with the TRIGGERnometry hosts about how a media environment built on engagement rewards outrage, fake stories and hot takes over truth. The three argue that long-form conversation, a sense of responsibility to audiences, and contact with nature, religion-like community and meaningful work are the best counterweights to a polarized, anxious culture.
The conversation moves from online misinformation and climate politics to history, the Iran war, immigration and the coming disruption from AI. The tension is between pessimism (propaganda, paid protests, wars started on thin planning, jobs automated away) and a hopeful claim that people adapt. They argue that purpose, struggle and fairness matter more than money, and that societies need to keep people feeling included.
The speakers argue that monetizing posts rewards negative engagement, and that bots make fringe narratives look popular. Rogan says some actors simply want to muddy the waters, so nobody knows what is real.
Rogan says a Twitter clip can badly distort someone's image until people hear them speak for hours. Kisin and Foster say that once an audience is large, hosts have a duty to prepare and challenge guests.
Relaying analyst Robert Pape, Kisin argues the US trapped itself over the Strait of Hormuz and strengthened Iran's leverage. Foster says an ex-special forces contact told him regime change has never been achieved by airstrikes alone.
Foster's student who asked to sharpen pencils, the Danny Drinkwater story and Rogan's jiu-jitsu example all show people seeking achievement through effort. They use this to argue that universal income alone would not give people purpose.
Kisin argues that younger people without assets feel they have no stake in society, which makes revolutionary ideas appealing. He says Andrew Yang was right that AI wealth must be shared so people feel included.
Rogan, Kisin and Foster say platforms pay for engagement, and angry reactions are an easy way to get it. Bots and foreign actors can also make a narrative look more popular than it is.
Rogan read out that Europe had an estimated 61,672 heat-related deaths in one summer, more than the roughly 48,000 US firearm deaths in a year. He then read a study estimating about 364,000 cold deaths a year across thirty European countries.
Kisin says analyst Robert Pape calls it a "de-escalation trap" in which Iran's ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz oil route gives it leverage, and that this is driving up fuel prices. Foster adds that airstrikes alone have never produced regime change.
Rogan describes Elon Musk's idea that every citizen would share in the wealth AI creates, like Alaska's yearly oil dividend. Kisin and Rogan worry that money alone will not give people purpose, and that the change will be disruptive along the way.
Kisin cites Desmond Morris's book The Human Zoo, which argues cities produce more violence, mental illness and depression. Rogan and Foster add that constant noise, crowding and light pollution leave people stimulated but unsettled.
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Rogan read out that Europe had an estimated 61,672 heat-related deaths in one summer, compared with more than 48,000 firearm deaths in the United States in a full year according to the CDC.
“Europe had an estimated 61,672 heat related deaths during the summer. That's fucking crazy. United States recorded more than 48,000 firearm deaths over the entire year, according to CDC.”
A 2024 study, as read by Rogan, estimated that about 364,000 people a year die from cold across thirty European countries, averaged over 1991 to 2020.
“364,000 people a year die from cold across thirty European countries, according to a 2024 study.”
Kisin relayed that psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is not religious, describes religion as a social technology for group cohesion.
“It's a social technology for achieving cohesion within a group and for giving people, and, you know, on a personal level as well.”
Rogan read survey figures saying about 78% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify with a religion, compared with about 60% of Democrats.
“78% of Republicans, Republican-leaning independents identify with a religion. So with Democrats, it's about 60%.”
Jamie estimated that a pre-rolled joint in California costs roughly fifteen to twenty dollars.
“in California, where you can legally buy them, probably in the range of fifteen to $20.”
Kisin said primatologist Desmond Morris wrote The Human Zoo, arguing that cities produce in humans responses like those zoos produce in animals.
“He was a primatologist, he studied great apes, and he wrote a book called, Uh, The Human Zoo, which was all about how the city creates in human beings the kind of responses that a zoo creates in animals.”
Rogan said a 2010 DNA study concluded that Tutankhamun's parents were probably brother and sister.
“2010 D N A study concluded that his parents were probably brother and sister.”
Rogan said Tutankhamun became king around age 9 and died around age 18 or 19.
“He became king around age 9, died around 18 or 19.”
Foster said that at a certain time of day a beam of light enters the Abu Simbel temple and illuminates its interior, which he took as evidence of deliberate design.
“there is a beam of light that comes into the temple and, uh, lights”
Rogan characterized Genghis Khan's approach as indifference to subjects' religion, requiring only that they join the empire and pay taxes.
“Genghis Khan said, I don't give a fuck what your religion is, come on board.”
Kisin said Timur's empire stretched from Constantinople on one side to China, Russia and India.
“his empire stretched as far as Constantinople on the one side, to China, to Russia, to India”
Kisin recounted a legend that Soviet archaeologists opened Timur's tomb in Samarkand despite local warnings, shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
“Soviet archaeologists were opening about to open this tomb, and all the locals were like, Don't, don't, don't touch it, don't touch it.”
Kisin said Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, and called the Battle of Stalingrad the turning point of the war.
“June 22nd, 1941. Operation Barbarossa. Here's the interesting bit as well. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war.”
Rogan said Alan Watts's book The Age of Insecurity, written around 1952, describes anxiety about rapid technological and cultural change that still applies today.
“This Alan Watts book called The Age of Insecurity, uh, and it's about the 1950s”
Kisin said Saudi Arabia has a pipeline to the Red Sea that could bypass the Strait of Hormuz, but that the Houthis were attacking it.
“The problem is the Saudis have this pipeline that goes to the Red Sea, so the idea is you don't need the Strait of Hormuz, you can go around it, but the Houthis are bombing the shit out of that pipeline right now.”
Kisin said most countries hold about a year of diesel supply while the United Kingdom holds about two months.
“most countries have a lot of supply for, like, a year's worth, the U K has two months worth of diesel supply.”
Rogan read a report that surface-to-air missile systems were deployed at Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump International Airport at the request of the US Secret Service.
“Surface-to-air missile systems have been deployed at Morro Lago and Donald Trump International Airport at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.”
Rogan read that Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend for 2026 is $1,200 per eligible person.
“Alaska pays eligible residents an annual dividend called the Permanent Fund Dividend. For 2026, it's $1,200 per eligible person”
Foster said former footballer Danny Drinkwater won the Premier League with Leicester City, later worked on a building site and trained to become an electrician.
“He won the Premier League with Leicester City, which is a very, very small team.”
The talk begins with Brazil's election and moves to propaganda and bot-driven misinformation online. It frames the episode's concern with trust.
“What we wanna do is fuck up the waters, we wanna muddy up the water so nobody knows what the fuck is real.”
A tangent on heat and cold deaths leads to a Kisin argument that climate policy has raised energy prices in the UK.
“pensioners freezing to death in winter cause they can't afford to heat their home”
Rogan argues that secular people turn causes into religion-like movements, and the group discusses religious affiliation data and gratitude.
“find a thing that becomes your religion.”
The group contrasts crowded cities with quiet countryside and the effects each has on stress and behavior.
“accustomed to the buzz of the city is like being accustomed to social media”
Foster and Kisin explain why they avoid outrage content and why a large audience brings a duty to challenge guests.
“you realize what you're putting out into the world, it, it matters”
Rogan argues that early fame skips the normal process of earning affection and learning boundaries.
“You get adored for no reason, right?”
A run through Tutankhamun, Egyptian engineering, Genghis Khan and Timur, including a legend about Timur's tomb and the 1941 German invasion.
“Whoever opens this tomb will unleash a conqueror greater than I.”
Kisin and Foster lay out why they think the war was badly planned and how it affects oil, prices and the midterms.
“he calls it a de-escalation trap, and he talks about how effectively America trapped itself”
The hosts argue that people locked out of the economy turn radical, and discuss how AI wealth might be shared.
“The American Revolution is really a war of independence.”
The closing section argues that people need useful work and struggle to flourish, and ends on shared humanity.
“Can I come back tomorrow and do more?”
Joe Rogan podcast check it out. The Joe Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day.
Oh, it's good to see you guys. Um, I haven't talked to anybody about this, so I'd like to talk to you guys about it. Do you know what the fuck is going on in Brazil?
No, not not not intimately, Not specifically, not specifically. But the the f uh, Flavio Bolsonaro, who is the son of the guy Jair Bolsonaro. He was one of the candidates in the election. And then the moment that the election finished, they took his passport away. And he, I think he's ended up fleeing to the US. Now, is that right?
I don't know. I've heard that he fled, but I don't know if there's a any evidence. I mean, that's just like Twitter talk, but that's CR. But first of all, just taking his passport right away is kind of crazy.
And I think they did warn him as well. They said, uh, the hi, the Lula said, W, if I'm elected, you know, it was kind of like, uh, you're gonna be in jail. When Trump said it to Hillary, but they followed through.
But what was the what are the charges? Like, what are they? Um,
I don't know the details of it, Joe.
but the whole thing was so it was someone that was his, uh, Lula's former defense attorney. He elected to the Supreme Court of Brazil. And then that person opened up the polls for an additional 2 hours, and that allowed Lula to win. Is that accurate?
I think, so, yeah, that bit, I think, is tr is that's what I saw. But this is the thing is like, you have to really do a lot of research now to even know the basic facts of anything. So if you just see something on X or Facebook or whatever, y I start I. I am hesitant to believe it now off the top. Do you know what I mean?
The the I. I read stories all day that I know are fake immediately, and it's like breaking, and then you read the thing and all caps, and you read, and you're like, Oh, that's a fake story. And there's a lot of them, they're all, they're all over the place. And I think they've done something where you don't get monetized for those, so you can't make money off of them, so there's less of an incentive. But if the goal is just propaganda, then they don't care about the money.
Like, if these are, if this is a country or a government that's involved in doing this, or someone you know with a vested interest in fucking up American politics or Brazilian politics or whatever. You just who cares if we were making money? What we wanna do is fuck up the waters, we wanna muddy up the water so nobody knows what the fuck is real. Um, if there's, you know, people that are voting, we want them to be completely confused or lied to, or they have a totally incorrect narrative of what's going on.
And you see so much of it, and you know, like, I feel like maybe when there's a fact check, like, like a grok fact check, and it proves to be absolutely incorrect. Maybe they should just, like, just take it down so that you don't have to go into the thread, cause I'll go into the thread. I'll read some, I'm like, that's fake, and I'll go into the thread. I'm like, where was? Where? Does someone ask Grok?
And someone asked Grok, and it says, No, this is not correct, and then grok lays it out. Maybe then they should take it down because you just there's it's just your timeline. It's just flooded by straight horseshit, completely made-up stories about, you know, people being arrested, and you'll have AI photos of someone handcuffed. It's crazy, it's really crazy.
And then amplified by bots or foreign foreign actors as well. I mean, that's wh. That's one of the interesting areas where I think there's probably a solution, which is kind of like digital border enforcement, where you actually know that people are commenting on this and where they're commenting from. Because I think most people get their political opinions from other people, they don't necessarily have a they. They don't sit down for 3 hours and think about this stuff.
They just go, this seems to be what everyone thinks. And that's where this kind of manipulation is so powerful, because you're creating the idea that a narrative is popular. And a lot of people then go, Well, maybe that's what I should believe.
especially with the bots, cause you'll have a story that's clearly either biased or full of shit, totally. And then you'll have a bunch of bots agreeing with it and s, you know, saying what should be done to these people? And this is a this is an outrage, and then you find out it's completely fabricated and you're like, Well, what are they doing? Like, what's happening here? Like, why are there so many of these, you know, Bob six, seven, four, three, two people that are commenting on this?
And what are they trying to prove, or what are they trying to push?
And it's not just that, it's also you get certain influences, and you see them come up on your timeline time and time and time again. With these takes that are just straight out ridiculous, but they and then you look underneath and you look at the amount of retweets, you look at the engagement, you go to you think to yourself, that that that just can't be real, cause that is such a ridiculous take that they've just given you.
But the engagement is unreal. And then you see it time and time again from the same influences.
Yeah, well, I think just, uh, becoming outrageous is profitable, right? That's the problem. So, like, you could just have a take, like, So y- let's take out fake stories. So you could just have a contrarian take that's preposterous and just gets you angry the moment you read it. And then you see, ah, fuck you, and then but that's that's engagement, and that's what these people want. And some people on Twitter are they just didn't get exist for engagement.
They're not good faith actors, they're just weird people that, you know, are probably on s all sorts of weird drugs. And and they're somewhere just fucking tweet up a storm.
Yeah, and it's also as well, because, uh, now you can monetize your X. That means that that's incentivized people to create posts that are gonna get more engagement. And what's, uh, what's one really easy way of guaranteeing engagement? It's negative engagement. If you piss people off, if you say something that's outrageous, that's far easier to then get people engaging with you than to do something funny. Or to, alright, man, take Yeah,
it easy. That's been our business model for eight and a half years. You're fucking ruining it. But actually, I'm, I mean, we're joking, obviously. I'm actually really happy. We, uh, this, in the last few episodes that we've put out on TRIGGERnometry, you've got, um, we've got David Pakman, who's a left wing guy, Dave Smith, who's like a libertarian guy, and we've got Steven Crowder coming out, uh, soon. So we like, we actually got to the point where we always wanted to be, where we're talking to everybody.
It's what I always really enjoyed about you and the way you do it, you've always been able. I actually kinda marvel at how you were able to do it. Because when we started, we had a very hard time getting more of the left-leaning guests on. You never seem to have that problem, you just get everybody on and they're happy to come on and talk. Um, and I, that's what actually you need more of in the world.
I think the outrage stuff you're talking about, it really pushes people apart. We were really interested in, how do you bring people together to have one conversation based on an agreed set of facts?
I think as long as you're getting people that are honest, that are good faith conversationalists, you know, and I think that's that is an issue. And I that's what I don't wanna do anymore. I don't wanna have on, uh, these people that I think are full of shit, that are propagandists, that are, uh, uh, that that are loyal to a party. To the point. Where they'll just distort facts or obfuscate, or talk over you when you're trying to make points.
Like the Piers Morgan model, where you see, like, someone will be saying something, and the other person just chime in and just t b talk over them to try to disrupt their pattern of thinking. It's very annoying and stupid, and I'm I'm not interested in that at all, and I I'm not interested in talking to people that I think are just outright liars. Unless, like, I have some fucking obligation to expose them, but I don't, I don't want to, I don't, I don't want that to be a thing that I wanna do all the time.
Where it's just bring on people that I know you're full of shit and like, say, I've got the facts. Like, I like to talk to people that I'm interested in talking to, and that's my business model. I mean, it's not a business model, it's just like it's what I started doing and it's what I kinda wanna keep doing. And if that, you know, like, I was very interested in talking to Bernie again, you know, I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I don't think he's a bad person, you know, and I think he, you know, he's an older guy with some ideals that just didn't pan out.
And I think he still believes that there's like, a way to do this that's different and better for the people and for the working people. But I think after a while, you say these words like, you know what it's like when you have an act and you've been doing a bit for a long time, and then the bit stops losing meaning. You just say it the way you've always said it, but it doesn't have any meaning to you anymore.
And the bit starts to get stale and it starts to die off. And if you're smart, you pull it out of the act, you put it on the shelf, and you go, I gotta rework that thing or something. It's like, I don't, I'm not attached to it anymore. It doesn't feel real. I'm just saying it to go through the motions. That's how I feel like when he starts talking about climate change and stuff like that, and I go, Okay, what are we talking about?
How much have you looked into it? Because if you really look into climate change, it's very fucking confusing. Like it's not as simple as like there was just an article today that someone sent me that they think that global warming may have stopped, uh, an imminent ice age that was coming, which was one of the things that they were talking about, like during the 1970s. That was a big thing, it was a big narrative about climate change.
That was the big fear was that a new ice age was coming. In fact, uh, an episode of that Leonard Nimoy show, did you ever watch that? In search of great fucking show. It was great, cause it was a mix of, like, horseshit, doom and gloom, bigfoot, ufos, all kinds of stuff. But it was Leonard Nimoy, d, you know, Spock from Star Trek, and, uh, he had a whole article about imminent ice age. And that, like, that's the thing that we really should be afraid of.
It's a fucking terrifying proposition that the world freezes over again, cause if it gets hot, you just move to the places that used to be cold.
and get air conditioning, right? get air conditioning
we don't have air conditioning, Joe.
in England at all. No, no, no, well, Well, that's why the the you guys die over here. Like, more people die in England from I think this is a fact. I think more people die in Eng- not in England, but in Europe, in all of Europe, from heat stroke during summer than gun violence in the United States. I might have made that up.
Yeah, I, you know, but see, actually, so there is a serious point. I I think it know you'll say
l- I think it's a high number, though. because
which is I was just gonna be because say, that uh, I was just gonna say, like, that just sounds real. that sounds real. After the summer we've had,
must be true. well, It sounds real, so it I don't understand must be.
why people haven't, uh, adopted air conditioning. Is it a f- a money thing?
Well, it's the same green, uh, nonsense that you're talking about. Because air conditioning consumes a a lot of energy, and it it therefore causes more climate change. Quo, unquote. Uh, actually, more people die in in England from cold in winter than they die from heat. here we go. Europe Yeah,
had an es- okay, yes, if you mean deaths attributed to heat rather than specifically heat stroke, European heat death estimates can exceed the total number of U S firearm deaths. But the compara- comparison needs a few qualifications, same year comparison. Europe had an estimated 61,672 heat related deaths during the summer. That's fucking crazy. United States recorded more than 48,000 firearm deaths over the entire year, according to CDC.
That includes suicides, homicides, and other firearm deaths, not just murders, including also cops shooting bad guys. So in that year, yes, uh, even Europe's summer heat death estimate exceeded America's full firearm death count. I w- Well, heat stroke, we don't have to say heat stroke. That was a maybe a bad terminology, but just from heat. What about from cold? How many look, look up? How many Europeans die from cold every year? What do you guess? Think it's more?
I don't know about Europeans. In Britain, I know more people die from cold than heat in Britain specifically. Wow, that's crazy, I can I imagine in Italy less so,
that is crazy.
like in the So in the south,
It's confused cause you spelled year wrong, Jamie.
there you go, Joe. Look at that
364,000 people a year die from cold across thirty European countries, according to a 2024 study. Wow, that is an estimated annual average based on 1991 to 2020, not a count for the la latest year. That is really crazy, though.
Well, this is what people don't understand about the the climate change agenda is it's it's pushed electricity prices up, and so and gas prices, and so energy's much more expensive. So you literally have pensioners freezing to death in winter cause they can't afford to heat their home properly, cause we're saving the planet. That's so Anyway, your point, I think, is nuts. we need the Second Amendment and air conditioning in the UK.
That would help a lot. Yeah, that would help you guys a lot. A lot of things would change.
yeah, yeah. I mean, the fact that that we don't, the majority of places don't have aircon. Like if you're if you're dating Joe and you wanna bring a lady back to your flat, what Oh my we need to say is you've god, got aircon.
so it is available to some. So, uh, like, imagine if you move into a place and it doesn't have air conditioning, how much hoops and ladders do you have to go through to get air conditioning into your into your place?
well, so now I I'm having air conditioning installed in my house right now.
You don't have it right now?
Uh, I just bought a house that doesn't have it. Um, but it, you know, the the climate is not like here in Austin, like it is survivable. Uh, you know, It's just hot, it's, it's hot, right? right? Like, Um,
what is a what is a hot Fahrenheit day in England?
I don't know what, I I don't know Fahrenheit.
Give me Celsius.
Uh, thirty. We've had like thirty seven, thirty eight, maybe up to forty this year.
Okay, so that's like in the 90s, That's high, right?
yeah, it's high.
What is that, Jamie? What is let's, uh, let's let's say 40. What is 40 Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius rather? Forty What is that in Fahrenheit?
is probably about a hundred degrees, cause forty is when you're having a if you have, if your body temperature is forty, you've got a very bad fever.
that it's one of four. One oh, four, One oh four? Okay,
so you guy, you guys have one oh four days,
Like one or two over the course of a year. But y- you gotta remember, though, Joe, is like the infrastructure and the houses and the trains and all the public transport, they're not built for that kind of climate. So if you go to on holiday in Italy and it's forty, that's one thing. If it's forty in the UK, in houses that are built to keep the heat in during winter, it's a di different conversation, you know?
So the average daytime high in, uh, July and August is seventy degrees.
But we have had very hot days the last couple of summers, very hot, yeah,
And that's when people start freaking out about climate change, but that's just so narrow-minded. And it's not that we shouldn't be concerned if the earth gets warmer. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying it's never been static. So this idea that, Oh my god, this is we're doing this, like, are we? Do you know? Do you know about the entire history of the world's temperature? Because it varies insanely. Not only that, there's been many times in Earth's history where there was way more carbon in the air and it was way cooler.
Doesn't make any sense. And if you don't understand differential equations, if you don't understand, like the way the wind blows and solar activity, and all these different variables that come into play along with greenhouse gases, along with carbon, there's so many different variables that come into play like this. These narratives are so unscientific for the people that wanna say, trust the science. Well, the science on climate change is fucking incredibly complex, or the just climate period, forget about the word climate change.
and you. It's so interesting you use the word unscientific, because I often think about this. Uh, most of my family are scientists, but physic physicists, biochemical engineers. The thing with like, when a normal person hears the word science, what they think is if I pick up this phone and drop it, is gonna fall at a predictable speed. Because we understand the rules of gravity, we can calculate it, we can calculate the speed, the acceleration, all that stuff.
Climate science is modeling, modeling. That's not the s it. I'm not saying it's not science exactly, but that's not what we think about as normal, just ordinary people. When we think about science, we think of about something that's 100% predictable, measurable, calculable. You can go if we change this, then this is gonna happen. Climate modeling, i it's not like that, it's it's an approximation, an estimate based on a lot of assumptions, and we don't know how accurate those assumptions are.
But even if you accept all that, what's interesting i in Britain is, do you know what percentage of global carbon emissions Britain produces?
Oh God, it's gotta be minuscule.
1%? So if we reduced it to zero, we'd not have any impact on the climate at all, while just just destroying our economy, killing people. And that's what we've done. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. That's why you can't, you can't build anything in the UK, you can't run a business, an industrial business, you can't make anything. Um, you know, it's funny, you guys are having this big battle of of, uh, data centers here.
We don't have that, cause we're not fucking building anything here.
the other super inconvenient thing when it comes to carbon is that there's more vegetation, more leaf coverage in, um, in the world now than there has been in a long fucking time. Global warming, Yeah, it's because of carbon, because plants actually consume carbon dioxide. It's like, like, what are we doing? Like, what are we? What are we freaking out about? Well, we're freaking out about a bunch of people that have engineered a narrative to get us to freak out about it.
So that they can profit off of it, and that's the reality of it. Is that all of these green deals and all of this green energy, these people get contracts and these, uh, and then there's mandates for what you can and can't use, and what you should and shouldn't do. And then people profit off of these directions that we go in, and that's the real problem. It's not like we're looking out for the world. Shut the fuck up.
When people say that we need to look out for the world, like none of these people pushing this are looking out for the world. Just so, you know, you might be you liberal lady in East Austin with the fucking science is science bumper sticker on your fucking Prius. Maybe maybe you really are a genuinely good person looking after the the people that are pushing that are not. They're trying to profit. They're sitting in boardrooms and they're showing spreadsheets of how much money they'll make if a certain bill goes through.
Because if a certain bill restricts one type of energy and promotes their type of energy, even if their type of energy, like windmills, is terrible for the environment and radically inefficient, they're gonna profit. And that's what they're thinking about. And so then they're gonna pay politicians to push certain narratives, they're gonna fund these people, they're gonna put out advertisements for a greener Texas, you know, paid for by a greener Texas. Who's paying that? Corporations, people making large amounts of money, and they don't give a fuck about your environment.
They want to make money. They're vampires, they're vampire people,
and it's always been that way, like oil companies funded anti-nuclear. It's just that's how it works that's how i in in it works, Britain now. I, so I'm actually gonna get an electric car soon, right? And the reason is they've created the incentive structures whereby if you get an electric car, especially through your business, you can basically get a car that's twice as good for the same money. Because you get so much tax write off. Because, like you said, people have created a structure whereby if you encourage people to do this, they save money.
And who benefits from that? Well, it's it's it's the it's the people who who are producing that type of vehicle, 100. In you know?
Texas, we have an issue right now where they're trying to ban marijuana, and why they're trying to do that. Because alcohol sales are way down, like, way down, like, disturbingly down. And, uh, one factor that a lot of people aren't taking into consideration is G L P ones. It's Ozempic. There are fucking millions of people on G L P, and millions more that are lying about being on it. Cause it's so I have a guy that I know is on them.
I said, Dude, you're looking great, what are you doing? He's like, Oh, calorie restriction. Well, technically, you're not lying, but you're lying. You're on Ozempic, motherfucker, you know what you're doing? yeah, it's I, Embarrassing,
you know, I always feel like when you talk about any issue, a a lot of it just comes down to education. You know, people don't have a good grasp of actually what's happening. So what it is that people have inside them is a vacuum, and eventually something has to fill that vacuum. Because you can't operate, particularly now with the guy. When someone asks you about whatever it is, climate change, the Middle East, the war, and whatever, w- whatever subject you wanna talk about.
Most people simply don't have the education, the answers, they don't have their own opinions, so they simply reach for something. And you know what you're gonna reach for? You're gonna reach for a slogan, and it's gonna come from the most prominent person there is.
W- I have a theory about why the left is so much more loony in my opinion currently. I mean, it's not like the right isn't loony. The left is very fucking loony, but the left is loony in some like things that don't make any sense. And, um, I think it's because the left is secular, like almost universally. Like, when you think about the left, you generally don't think about, like, Christianity or any any religion, really. It's more of like a science-based, like, we're too smart for that thing.
And I think they're just lost. There's no there's no moral scaffolding to hold onto, there's no not, and I'm not saying, you know, religion is 100 great. But what I am saying is there's something about having a structure like ten commandments or what, you know, whatever they have in th- whatever religion we're talking about. Where there's rules to abide by because there's a higher power. And then you worship, and in worshiping, there's there's a humility to that and a humbleness to that.
And then there's this community where everyone's drawn together and we're all agreeing on certain rules. Like I always talk about, like the church parking lot, is proof that Christianity works, cause everybody's so nice. They all let you go like you go, you go, like, it's all so orderly, like nowhere on earth. I'm like, just that alone proves that Christianity can work, and there's something to that. I guarantee fucking to you. If you went to, like, some trans rights rally and you parked your car and tried to leave, it would not be so kind.
It would not be the same, it would not, especially if you were like, in a pickup truck or something with an American flag on it. Th- th- you're right, they'd be rude as fuck to you. Whereas I think a part of what's wrong with, uh, this, this side of, uh, our politics, when you look at the two sides, the left and the right, is that the left is almost like, I would, I would. I w- I wanted to know, like, what percentage of people who identify as progressive have any religion?
We could probably find that out, Joe.
Yeah, let's find out, because
That actually would be interesting.
it's what you were talking about w- with a vacuum. So I think this is my belief that at 59 years of age, that there's a part of people that almost like, is designed a part of the the human psyche that's designed for religion. And we have had it for so long, we have had it for so many thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I just think it's the way the human mind works. And I think in the absence of religion, we find something that stop that for a second.
We find something that does the job of religion, and that thing that does the job of religion is being progressive or being whatever you're being. You know, like, w- find, find a cause, find a thing, climate change, whatever it is, find a thing that becomes your religion. And anybody that is confronting that with, uh, an alternative perspective is a heretic. That's a bad person, that's evil, that's an infidel, and that's how they behave. They behave like religious zealots.
Regard like, I'm sure you've seen these conversations, and you've had them with people. You just conf- confront people in the street and start asking them questions of if you don't agree with them. Even if, like you, you're great at it, cause you're so calm and rational, you see them just fucking they just don't wanna be confronted by alternative perspectives. It very much like a religion.
No, it's totally. And, uh, it's interesting. We just had Jonathan Heidt, uh, on back on the show, uh, we haven't released it yet, but it's one of the things we talked about. We we talked about religion, and he's not a religious person. But he was like, I used to be very snooty about it, and now I just go, whatever you believe. It's a social technology for achieving cohesion within a group and for giving people, and, you know, on a personal level as well.
I think one of the things that Christianity, in particular, is very, very good at is gratitude, which is just a practice that forget about God and all the rest of it. The practice of acknowledging how fortunate you are at any point in your life is something that changes how you experience life. And if you do that every day, I think it's much, much harder to be a deranged lunatic who th- who who thinks that their polit- like there's political causes I feel very strongly about.
But I'm not gonna go on a march and scream at people who don't agree with me, cause I just that's not. It's not coherent to my w- worldview of what it is to be human, it's also right?
radically ineffective. And completely ineffective, Never changes anybody's opinion ever, ever. No one screams in your face, you go, Wow, I see your point. What are the what are the stats you were trying to pull up earlier, Jamie? So here we go. Affiliated with a religion, 78% of Republicans, Republican-leaning independents identify with a religion. So with Democrats, it's about 60%. Interesting. It's a lot more than I thought. Religiously unaffiliated about 39% did not answer about 1%.
Like, what is that? Fuck off 1% across the board? That I'm the the libertarian in, I'm in that show. group, that is the most intelligent group on earth, on earth. The about 1%, the 1% that one hundred will not answer pro percent, polls. That was my take on polls always. I was like, here's the problem with polls. Most people don't answer polls. If somebody calls you up and said, I'd like a few moments of your time to ask you a few questions.
Fuck you, hang up. Anybody with a life, anybody that has, like, a family and stuff to do and hobbies they enjoy and friends they wanna hang out with, they don't sit around l- answering some fucking poll. So you're literally getting the opinion of people so fucking stupid, they answer polls. So add it up. Those people, like, if you f- th- there's an issue, like 49% agree. That means less than half of the people that are so fucking stupid, they're answering polls, agree with you.
That's not good.
You know, this is the same with, uh, studies that they do at colleges, cause they always use college students. So, like, you're getting a very skewed perspective on humanity, because that's how you're measuring what human beings respond to in the Another thing world.
that's interesting with the religious thing when it comes to the left is there's been this, uh, larger than normal presence of, uh, these, like, LBGT pastors and these people that are promoting a very different Christianity, you know? And they're they're talking about things that, you know, biblical scholars are like, Hey, wait, what page is this on? What? Where? where does it say abortion's okay? Like, how are you getting to that? Where does it say God's non-binary?
You know, there's a lot of this weirdness, that this woke weirdness that's sort of entered into religion in some some pastors are doing it. And you go, Okay, is that good? I don't know if that's good. I mean, is it because you're not following the original stuff? So if we're gonna not follow the original stuff, shouldn't we go and take out the slavery part first? Like, shouldn't we go and take out the slaughtering of women and children first?
Cause that's in there. There's a lot of stuff that's in there we should probably concentrate on first before we start saying God's non-binary. but I You know what I mean,
yeah, it's true, it's true. It's like, cause I was raised Catholic, and and I go to a church. I went once to a couple of times to a Church of England mass. And it's like, look, if you're going to mass, you want the product, you want the, you know, you want The real the real deal, one. you want the marlboro reds.
You wanna hear the Latin?
Yeah, you you w- you want the good Show 'em how stuff.
strong is your. Yeah, you wanna Yeah,
sit there and and think to yourself, fuck, I'm going to hell and it's gonna be awful.
we really should get the original, the original version. When they would come down the aisle with incense, it was cannabis. They would have these big fucking like things where they had handle, you know, those things that you would use We with these in Austin, to incense. folks, I mean, uh, Yeah, it was cannabis.
it was cannabis. What church are you going they're high as fuck, to?
they're getting everybody high so they get along with everybody.
no wonder they're trying to ban it in Texas, man.
The Texas thing is all about the alcohol, it's all about alcohol. It's like traceable money to Dan Patrick and some other people, it's traceable. Like you could see how these people support him, and you could see that they want this. Because it's like it's hurting their business. And if people can just get high, and, you know, like, here's the thing about marijuana, even if they do what, like Colorado did. So Colorado was the first shout out to Colorado, the first to legalize cannabis.
And one of the things they did is say, we're gonna put a crazy tax on it and just use that tax for fucking schools and all kinds of other stuff. Everybody be happy, cause you got all this new tax revenue. I think it was like 39%, which is really and everybody's like, great, fine, because marijuana is relatively inexpensive for what, like, if you go out drinking with some buddies, fuck, man, you bring five buddies, you're picking up a tab, they're picking up a tab.
You guys are having fun, you're drinking, you're ordering. But you might have five, $600 at the end of the night. Easy, easy, right? Easy marijuana, $600, you're dead. I'm like, Jesus, you know, if you, if you smoke $600 of the weed, will fuck you up for a month. You'll be just lying in your bed going, Why did I do that? It's n- that's not gonna happen. It's a different thing. It's like one joint, like, what is a joint these days?
Jamie, you're a young fella.
Uh, in California, where you can legally buy them, probably in the range of fifteen to $20. I yeah, fifteen, bet.
twenty bucks. You're barbecued for the whole night, especially California cannabis. The they've got scientists that have been working on this shit for a long time, man. They are not normal joints. Every now and then, Ron White will bring one by the Mothership and you're like, Get that out of here before everybody dies, because you're like, No one can handle this. They all dust them with kief, they, they, they have THC crystals all over them. It's like they're going too hard.
They sell they sell some joints that are, like, guaranteed to fuck you up. They're like a hundred bucks.
And it's also as well. It's like young people don't have the money to go out boozing like we did when we were young, when when everything was much cheaper.
Well, there's also, I think, and this is a positive aspect of the internet, um, and a all these, uh, health and wellness influencers, is that a lot of people are realizing like, Hey, alcohol is actually bad for you. I like it. I took a long time off of it, took like eight months, which is a long time for me. And, um, I noticed a big difference the moment I moment I stopped drinking. I just felt way better, felt better throughout the day, felt like my energy levels were much more consistent.
I felt better waking up. It's better. It's not good to poison yourself all the time, but it's also fun. So, Well, right, it's like, I, it's like other, it's like,
like all drugs, it's got good and bad. I would say f alcohol is kind of a shit drug in terms of the good versus the bad. I'd like a glass a glass of wine with dinner or something, but beyond that, the trade-offs go way down. Like the second, third, like, you're not, it's not improving your enjoyment of the evening, it's it's sh- sh- it's very expensive, and you and at our age, you wake up the next day Oh man, after I, I'm like, I after one glass of wine, I wake up the next day.
I'm like, Oh, you know what, even one? one glass of wine Yeah, yeah,
will do.
yeah, that that that'll do Wow, you I, I, uh,
know what it'll help you? Glutathione. Yeah, yeah, um, especially liposomal, glu- glutathione, it's more, um, bioavailable. But, uh, glutathione's really good you take for it's
it the night when you're drinking,
take it while you're drinking, take it before you're drinking, take it after you're drinking. alright, I'm back Yeah,
on the sauce. Thanks, Joe.
yeah. But also there's an a the one of the issues with alcohol is dehydration, and it's an amino depressant, so you should be taking amino acids, uh, you should be taking, um, definitely some electrolytes, but, uh, also glutathione. it's a bit. It's
it does.
a kind of mixed sales pitch. Imagine you were like a rep for an alcohol company, you can you can have a glass of wine, but you need to take about five supplements in the same time.
Well, listen, I think everybody should take supplements anyway. I, I really do. I think, uh, there's a lot of, uh, misleading doctors out there that you shouldn't listen to that'll tell. I got a doctor with a pot belly once tell me that you get everything you need from a balanced diet. I'm like, shut the fuck up, you, you shut the fuck up. I didn't say that to him, but I really wanted to. I was kind of gentle about it.
I said, Sir, uh, I have been taking vitamins for a long time, and I notice a market difference between the t when I take them and when I don't take them. There's a lot of benefits, and there's a lot of peer-reviewed studies that show benefits of vitamins. So let's just stop talking about this before I get fucking angry at you, you fat fuck, fat fuck, giving out health advice.
yeah, thanks for looking at me when you said that, Joe. I appreciate and the I had to it. the process is known look at you, I'm for glt being polite, I'm one, though, I a polite host, know, and then you looked at me while you said but I had it.
to look at you. I'm being polite, No, I'm joking, I'm a polite host.
but um, uh, like, uh, you know, one of my, uh, one of my cousins, he. This is a true story. Uh, he was a cardiologist. He used to smoke like forty a day.
Great, perfect. He's probably stressed out, he's probably got bills to pay and fucking. I don't know what you guys have over there because you have, uh, uh, your, your education isn't free.
right? To what level?
Up to like, so for to get a d a doctor's degree, No, no, not, not you're for free, saying, Yeah, it's free up until college, but then m'kay,
then you have to pay.
um, and then what about liability insurance? Do you guys have outrageous liability insurance for doctors? Cause that's a giant issue with doctors I don't in America.
think it's as outrageous as it is here because we our laws are different and we're also not such a litigious culture. Like a British person who's had a bad experience, unless it's really, really bad, will not be like, I'm suing the fucking like, we don't tend Wouldn't to be
that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it's that be nice?
i yeah, but you. There's a trade-off to that, which is like, our service culture in the UK is objectively disgusting.
It's a lot closer to the Soviet Union than it is to America, like in the Soviet Union. When basically, if you went to a shop, they would treat you like they were doing you a favor. And Britain is much closer to that than it is to America, wherever. Yeah, when people are like, happy to see you, like, I walk into a restaurant in in Texas, they're happy to see you. I'm like, What the fuck? You want?
And it takes me like a week to adjust to the fact that people are nice. Basically,
Well, people are nice here in general, like, much nicer than California, and I think one of the reasons is there's less people. I really believe that there's an effect that it has on humans, no matter who you are, when there's an enormous number of people surrounding you all the time. I think it's just,
I totally agree, man.
I think it's this place is only a million people.
Well, you know, there was a guy I talk about this all the time when we talk about, you know, everyone's concerned about plummeting birth rates and all of that. And a lot of people Everybody have, but Elon, well, yeah, right, he's come for them now, man. Um, uh, he's actually,
but he is concerned. That's why he's, he's he's doing it. Yeah,
doing something about it. Uh, I'm I. I am at, uh, replacement rate with my family now, congratulations, with two,
good job.
uh, but I, but I think, uh, my my sense has always been. I read this great book by a guy called Desmond Morris. He was a primatologist, he studied great apes, and he wrote a book called, Uh, The Human Zoo, which was all about how the city creates in human beings the kind of responses that a zoo creates in animals. Higher rates of interpersonal violence, higher rates of mental illness, lower reproductiveness, higher rates of depression, all of this stuff.
Totally makes sense, And I I've moved out of the the small town that I lived in outside, and I already noticed the difference. Like we went in on a Saturday to do some shopping, and I was like, get me the fuck out of here. Like, after ten minutes, there was just, like, too many people. Yeah, I only go into London now for work, do the work, come out and just hide in my house now.
Yeah, so you become accustomed to that buzz of the city, but it's not necessarily good for it's not you.
good for you. I I don't think it's good for you,
I don't think it's good either.
no, I. Being accustomed to the buzz of the city is like being accustomed to social media. It's constant dopamine, it's constant, constant, constant. New. You're always looking for the next thing, you're always looking for something to stimulate you. It's why a lot of people in the city, when things go quiet, they can't handle it.
right, yeah. I have a good friend who's lived in Manhattan for, boy, more than thirty years. And he recently got a place on Fire Island, not recently, like within the last ten, fifteen years. And he said, without that place in Fire Island, he wouldn't even be able to keep his place in Manhattan. He said he can't deal with it anymore. But Fire Island's like a s a small island. I don't think they even have cars. I think you get there on a ferry and everybody rides bikes.
And it's like, and so he goes there, and then he comes back, beep, beep, fuck you. But he just you. The contrast of the two of them makes it livable. Whereas when I first met him, he was like, I fucking love it. I love the energy of this city. And I was there, like, I've got my own energy, I gotta get the fuck out of here. I don't like this. I I like woods, I like peace, I like to be able to sit on top of a hill and see birds fly overhead.
That's what I like, I like nature. I do not like being in a like a cramped fucking group of all kinds of people stacked, feeling each other's energy. It's fun occasionally. New York's fun to visit, but living there, sleeping there, it pays it, you pay a toll,
you, you do pay a toll, because that city, like, we've got a friend who lets us use his apartment, and it's a beautiful apartment in Manhattan. But you can never really sleep, cause the what you said is like, Nah, nah, fuck oh, especially if you, fuck you're low, you in the ass, yeah. whoa, And it's like, you go, what's going on? And it's like, it's three fifteen. Do you know what I mean? Are you going? The the people are insane,
are you saying?
they're driven insane by this.
Well, it's also a twenty four hour city, a legitimate twenty four hour city, you know? And when I was single, it was great, cause, uh, pool halls are open in New York City twenty four hours a day. So, you know, Chelsea Billiards, w- which is where we would go, was like this crazy place that was like a a playground that was open twenty four hours a day. Like, this is nuts, and then you'd go to a diner, you can go to you.
You could get a real meal. Apparently, a lot of this died during Covid, but you can get a, like, a steak dinner at four am. Like at a nice restaurant, you could sit down. Like, this is crazy, this place is nuts. It was fun when I was it's fun, twenty three.
it's fun, it's fun. New York is a lot of fun. We we have a good time. We're there for a week, we go to our favorite cigar bars, fun, you know, you know, all of that. It's fun, fun, it's fun. But I think it's also once you get married and you have kids, then the calculus changes completely. Like, I would rather spend half an hour with my son walking in the woods over, you know, whatever, the best New York has to offer.
You know what I mean, it's just,
for sure. Well, it's for me too. A lot changed, um, was I? When I'm, when I got, uh, on, moved to Los Angeles, I started moving further and further away from the city. And as I moved further and further away from the city, I became more and more relaxed. I was like, I think there's something to this. And so where I lived most of the time, when I was living in, um, L. A. was not even in L.
A. County. I was living in the neighborhood county, neighboring county. I had plenty of acres, I had mountain lions and bobcats and all kinds of shit in my neighborhood, deer in my neighborhood. It's way more relaxed. It was just I could go outside and just hear birds, and, you know, and see, you know, a hawk circling over a canyon looking for a rabbit. It was awesome, I loved it. It was just so much better than just being inundated with sounds, sounds and movement and activity.
It's just like, woo,
you know, when I, when I was teaching, I remember every year, cause when I was teaching a really rough part of East London. We used to take the kids away for a one-week residential in out in the countryside, and they would do activities and whatever else. And you would literally see a different side to these kids.
100%.
You would, uh, uh, when you saw them on the playground, they were surrounded by concrete and just sc- skyscrapers and tower blocks. They everybody, even when you started the day, everybody, and these some these were ten, eleven-year-old kids, everybody just felt amped. Like they were ready to conf- for confrontation, they were ready to go. After a week in the countryside, you saw a different side to these kids. yeah, cause that's how Completely.
people are supposed to live. That's how we evolved, just like, uh, we evolved with religion, we also evolved in nature. And I think we're struggling with the absence of both of those things in our society. And the the big one, to me, the biggest one, is not just nature, but it's also light pollution. And, you know, we were talking about the other day, uh, Colin Tiro, hilarious standup comedian, was on, and, uh, he was talking about how he goes to, uh, Big Bend, and, uh, goes down to, uh.
There's an area of Texas in South Texas that is like one of the best places to see the sky, the night sky, and how fucking insane it is. And you just just you're just confronted by the Milky Way and all these stars. I think that chills people out, too. That puts that puts your place in the universe in perspective. And in the cities, that's the most absent. You can't see any stars, so in the cities, everything's bright, you just see a black sky.
Who gives a fuck what's up there? Let's go eat, let's go do this, let's go do that. Fuck these people, you fucking fascists, are you? Like, whatever it is, it's like, you're, you're living in this, uh, this very m m tiny, blinded world.
I think for people like us as well, who who, by virtue of what we do, are digitally plugged in. Like, we have to kind of pay attention a little bit to what's going on. So I certainly spend a lot of time on my phone. When, you know, I remember a c a month or two ago, there was some shit going on, people talking shit about, as always, about us on social media or in the papers. Whatever.
And then I just sit in my garden and I see these two giant trees that are like 300 years old. I'm like, who gives a fuck? You know, when you're there, you just go, who gives a fuck? It? It's, you know, we're it's also just,
the cost of what we do, the cost of what we do is people are going to have opinions, you want them to have opinions. Some of the opinions are gonna suck, and some of them are gonna be completely outrageous, and some are are gonna be just outright lies where they just wanna take you down. That's okay,
yeah, the the lies piss me off. I I'll be honest, the lies piss me off. Because I'm like, I am happy to be criticized for mistakes I make. I'm happy to be criticized for things that I said inarticulately. I'm happy to be criticized by people who don't like my worldview. But don't fucking lie about it, don't make a bullshit about me and p- and tell other people that that's what I am. That pisses me off.
that we should reject that from everyone, from both sides. And the problem is, if it aligns with your ideology, you won't call it out, and you accept it, and it's fine. It's just like, you know, I always say that these parties that w- you know, un- unfortunately, we only have two, are defined by the craziest members of those parties. Like, when you think about the left, what do you think about people that want trans women in sports and communism and an open border?
And then when you think about the right, what do you think about, like, Patriot Front and fucking, r- r- r- you know, religious fundamentalists that want the Bible in every school? And, you know, uh, xenophobic people that think this is a white Christian nation, and that's it. It's just so exhausting. And if you spend enough time absorbing all of this online, it it completely warp your worldview instead of just basing your worldview on how you interact with people in real life, you know, and most people now are tainted by this.
So even interacting with them in real life is a problem, especially if you don't catch them one on one. You know, it was three of them and one of you, then it's a problem. Like, why are you talking to me like this? Like, you, you would never talk to me like this. It was you and me, and we were alone. This is crazy. This is a crazy way to talk to people. If you have an opinion about something and we both have the t the time, which is another thing, to actually discuss this, like, this is a time consuming, nuanced discussion.
Like, let's if, which is a beautiful thing, w- what we're allowed to do, we can sit down and have those discussions. And I think it's super beneficial for other people to be able to listen. Because if someone sees some Twitter hot take on you, they can get a very distorted perception of who you are. And then they hear you on a podcast, they go, Wait a minute, this guy is pretty reasonable, he's f- f- seems like a nice guy.
Like, what the fuck is going on in the world, right? But if you're only a clips person, and you're only a Twitter person, and you're only a hot take person, you just y- and you're tired, you're you're working all day, you have a fucking whole bunch of obligations. You're gonna, like, lock into a fake version of the world, and that version of the world is gonna give you anxiety.
But it's also about incentives, because if you are a hot takes person, if you are a clips person, you actually don't care about the truth, cause that's not what you're aiming for. What you're actually aiming for is engagement, it's views, it's all the rest of it, it's money. So unfortunately, as we all know, uh, there's the truth is important, but it doesn't generate, it doesn't engage people as much as a hot take, as much as something that is potentially divisive.
Here's how I'd push back on that, the success of podcasts like yours and mine. Like, this is the difference, right? It's like, it's clear that there's a thirst for this. There's a hunger for people having discussions, and for people that say, Oh, well, the I see this point of view, I see why you would think that way, this is what I think, and let's talk. There's a hunger for that, obviously. It's not just that the only interaction that humans are having is these bullshit artists that are making these fake posts or these these very biased posts just to get engagement.
Because that's how they make their money, which are that's a it's a sizable population online, but there's also plenty of people that are having real conversations,
yeah, uh, and it's like you said, I think politics is what what changes all of it. And and maybe that's where I acknowledge that we like. When we started the show, we had a rule that we would never have sitting politicians on the show. And then, you know, we got interested in more politics, and we had access to more politicians, and suddenly we're talking to a few of them. And then people go, Oh, okay, so this is like, you're on a team, and you're on the other team.
And now the gloves are off, man. It is crazy. Like we were sitting in Airbnb, uh, yesterday, preparing for one of our interviews, watching something on YouTube, but because we weren't logged in with our own account, you get YouTube ads. And we right now, as we're recording this, it's the midterms coming up and the political attack ads. Have you seen this shit,
Oh, I've seen a lot of them in America,
bro? It is. Uh, if you show that to a person who's not used to it, like, it is shocking to me. It's like Ken Paxton loves pedophiles. I was like, whoa, th- that's and and and the other way too, right? James Talarico wants to take your daughter and rape her and then trans her. It's like, whoa, i it since, like, it's nuts, imagine, imagine talking about people like that. right, right. And Imagine you came on here and you were just like, the Republicans wanna trans your kids, and the demo- or the Democrats w- No, that would be crazy.
The Democrats wanna trans
mate, well, listen, give it another thirty years and it it could completely
it could, it could flip. swing. Like, Yeah, when Yeah, who
the Republicans are transing your kids, that's when you know you really are fucked,
well? That's when we know that the world has a changed place when there's secretly straight people. So, like, there's someone living a gay lifestyle because it's super popular, but he's secretly straight. And we have to, like, find him at TMZ, catch him making out with a woman. Ugh, like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
somebody gets outed for watching straight porn. Yeah, one day, one One day,
day, one day, if the the Democrats have their way, that's out.
but then but then, like you said, I mean, the stakes, I also see it the other way, though, cause the stakes are high. Like, if you if you take illegal immigration, like that was a real problem in this country under the Democrats. Like gigantic, right? So so gigantic. Not a lot of people
according to the view, by the way. The view ch- fact-checked me on that. In fact, the border was closed, that was one of the yeah,
is that what happened?
oh my god. They did a fact check of me saying why I voted Republican, and I said, there's. There was so many things that were going the wrong way with the past administration. One of em, you knew that it wasn't Biden running it, it was who whoever was in his cabinet, they were running the country, wasn't Biden. He was out of his fucking mind. We all know that we accept it. There's a bunch of people have come out and said that that were working there now.
So that was one. The other one was the border was wide open, and that people were fucking coming through, and a fucking sunny host. In fact, checked me and actually was saying that Biden told people not to come, like, come, but they did. And yeah, look, uh, Greg Abbott, our governor, did bus people to New York City. Because, like, look, look, you guys have passed these policies, you want this border wide open, you fucking handle these people.
And that is true, but it was also true that the Red Cross had stations that were set up where peop- give people maps, tell them how to get in. That once people did get in, they were given plane tickets, they were given EBT cards, they were given cell phones, they were put up in luxury hotels. All this is true. Not not just that, but a disproportionate amount of people who moved in who came here illegally moved to swing states.
Kinda crazy. Seems a little odd, seems a little odd that you get a l- a large portion of them set up in Ohio and set up in a bunch of these different places, like the Haitians in Ohio. It's a famous part, but it's like, there's clearly an incentive, you know what the incentive is. The census counts humans, it doesn't count legal citizens. So if there's 10 million humans and half of them are illegal, doesn't matter. That's that indicates how many congressional seats you get.
That's real. So if you just flood a place that you're already in control with illegal immigrants that you're paying for, this isn't rocket science. That's gonna help you stay in power, and that's what was going on. And I felt like that is crazy. So Kamala Harris was recently talking about how they need to add more people to the Supreme Court, and then then they they need to turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into states. And why do you wanna do that?
Because if you do that, then you have control forever, right? And that's that's the reality that I was confronted with with the choices between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It's not that, like, I looked at this, the Trump administration, and say, Well, this is perfect, this is exactly what we want. I I love it when he has a a picture of himself as Jesus and he posted up on Truth Social. This is great. I mean, I think some of the things he's done are good, for sure, and I think some of the things the FBI has done.
This is one of the things that the the left does not wanna confront. There's been a significant drop in crime, significant, significant drop in crime, measurable drop in crime because of the S FBI under Kash Patel in this new administration. Now I don't know why, I don't know what it means. Some people say it's because of underreporting, which is an issue, because especially places like Los Angeles. No one gives a fuck if you get robbed, no one gives a fuck if your car gets broken into, they're not gonna do anything.
So it's underreported crime, and so they say crime is down, but is it? No, not if not if you talk to people. They everybody that I know that lives in Los Angeles says it's fucking Gotham City now, it's fucking nuts, whereas it wasn't fifteen years ago. So what happened? What happened was the same policies that you fucking people keep voting for, keep going further and further and further and further down the line. And the further they go, the more things get shitty.
And no one wants to change because you're in a cult
yeah, it. It's also worth it. W- You know, people say these policies are kind, that they're, they're. It's the right thing to do morally. As you know, as somebody who talks to whenever I see a Venezuelan person, I always wanna talk to them, cause I wanna see how they, how they're doing, how they feel the country is doing, how Venezuela is because you're from Venezuela, doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, always tell people that yeah. And one thing that I remember this conversation I had with an Uber driver, and he was talking to me and he said to me, Look, when you go on the pods, cause I follow your pod and I listen to Joe, and I follow these p pods.
Please tell people that Venezuelan people we're not criminals, we're not people coming here to cause trouble. The vast majority of us only wanna come here to work. And he goes, But those are the people who do it legally, the other people who come in. Now, I'm sure that some of them just wanna come in, a lot of them wanna come in just for a better life. But you're also allowing a portion of people to come in who are criminals who are gonna cause trouble.
And that's gonna give a bad reputation to every single Venezuelan person who is here. Because the moment you hear Venezuelan, you think, Oh, Tren de Aragua, which is the very famous gang which is causing huge, which was causing huge amounts of problem in America, drug runnings, killings, gang activity. So immediately, when you think of a Venezuelan, you got, oh, Tren de Aragua. You don't think of the guy who's coming along, who's gonna work for you, who's gonna drive your Uber, who's just doing what he can to make ends meet.
now, let me ask you this. Do you think that l- allowing the illegals in and the criminals in, not just the illegal, let's say illeg- cause everyone who comes in that doesn't do it the right way is an illegal. So a allowing criminals to come through as well, knowing that this will increase violent crime. Do you think that that is just an unintended side effect of the goal they're trying to achieve, which is get more congressional seats, control districts, make it so that the other party can't win?
Or do you think that they have calculated this and said that this would probably be a way that we can institute much more control, like flock cameras and have the ability to tap into people's phones, find out if they're doing illegal activity, and that people will actually allow us to do this because we'll do it under the premise that we're making the streets safe again.
And it's probably quite hard to separate the criminals from the non-criminals as well if the border is open, then they're just coming
It's impossible.
through, right?
How would you know?
Um, the other thing we we had Andrew Yang on recently, and this is where it gets even worse. Because one of the reasons he left the sort of conventional Republican Democratic Party model was, he said, actually, neither party wants to solve the problem. And he was saying, some Republicans will deliberately avoid allowing Democrats to close the border, cause it gives them something to run on. Of course, yeah, And that's fucking crazy. That is fucking crazy.
yeah, a an Anna Polina Luna explained that to me. She was like, there's a a bunch of issues that they don't want resolved, cause that's how they they can that's how they raise
run on it. finances. They can run on it.
They run on them, it's campaign talking point. It's like, you gotta have it, you gotta have it in your bag.
See, this is where I think the left has a lot of very good points, actually, which is the accumulation of power within big corporations and government. That's why, uh, when I was younger, I always thought of myself, and I haven't really changed my opinions very much. I thought of myself as being on the left. Because the more actually we do our show and and the more people we speak to who are in positions to know, the more I'm just confronted by how much behavior in that part of the the our society is driven by greed and not morality.
These people are not moral. I'm not even saying they're immoral, I think they're worse, they're amoral. They don't give a fuck. As long as they win the election, they make money, they increase their bonus. That's that is so scary to me. It's much scarier, actually, than people i intentionally doing bad things, uh, in a way, uh, and that accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of people. Uh, that's a real thing, man.
it's a real thing, and it's also a part of the culture of those groups of people, right? Like, there's a diffusion of responsibility aspect of being a part of a corporation that's doing things that are fucked up. Like, say, if you're working for a corporation and they manufacture something and you find out that these people are dumping some sort of toxic waste in the third world. Like, uh, not me, I'm in Dallas, I'm working on, I'm at at my desk, I'm doing spreadsheets, you know, I don't.
But you're a part of this corporation, right? But you don't think, oh my god, I'm a part of an evil movement that's killing fish in a river somewhere in Cambodia or whatever. That's not how you think. You're you, you are a part of this culture, and you, if you're a lawyer, hey, I know he's guilty, I gotta get him off, this is the job. If you're working in a corporation, hey, we're here to make money. Like, this is what we do.
We have shareho- shareholders, we're working 16 hours a day, we're on fucking, out of our own time, you know, we don't have time for morals. Okay, maybe one day I'll be moral, but right now I want a house in the Hamptons. I want a I want a yacht. I want to want a fucking jet, and I think I can get there. Because I know that the guy who used to be the C E O, he left, he got $600 million.
And th- this is what the culture is. The culture is all about making the most money. Pop, po- uh, as possible. And when you're around a bunch of other people that are doing that, it seems fine. The responsibility of being morals completely removed. You're a part of a giant machine that you can't stop. And so, listen, you know, we are, you know, Xerox or Raytheon, or whatever it is. You don't think, you know, oh, I can, I can have an effect on the world with my decisions, and I should probably do the right thing.
Like, there's none of that going on.
no, and and also as well, the people that do think like that, they're gonna self-select out of that system because they're gonna be there going, Oh, I I dude, we're doing this. I can't live with this.
they'll leave, they'll write an article for The Atlantic, nobody will read it, that's it, that's the end of it. Well, it's Yeah,
how I think about what we do, though. It's like, I think of of what of TRIGGERnometry as like a s uh, as a family owned restaurant, right? We're feeding people information, right? Or conversation, or whatever it is, but we are providing something that people ingest. There's a responsibility that comes with that, right? You shouldn't put, you know, lead and mercury and all kinds of shit in there to make it taste better or make more money or whatever.
And we, we know there's people we could have on our show that would get ten times the views, but it's just not, it's not what we do, you know? no, and I respect Um,
that. I think it's clear in your conversations that that's not what you're trying to do. You're not gonna play gotcha. Where's no disrespect to Piers Morgan? That's his business model, his business models have a bunch of people on, have them fucking yell at each other. Wee that's great at it.
I, it's a it. It's also a time thing. I think when people have a very short period of time, it inevitably becomes that. If you ever see p uh, Piers, uh, e- doing long-form interviews, some of them are incredible.
oh, sure, I'm not talk even talking about him, I'm talking about his
Yeah, the model, yeah, yeah, show. yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah, I can slag off Piers, that's no problem. I, I, you do, spag. Uh, no. Um, yeah, the model, I agree. That model is is what it does is it attracts attention. But I think once you've watched it, yeah, I think it was actually our, our mutual friend Chris Williamson told me about this. He said, there's a thing, you know, that a post-nut clarity, there's post-content clarity.
And when you watch something that's outrage porn, you get that post-content, ugh, like, why have I spent 15 minutes watching that? You know?
yeah. I try not to. I t when I see people like, you know, destroyed this guy on this, like, I don't want that in my life. I'm not interested. If some if something's particularly interesting, someone will send it to me. So this is my filtration system now for online content. If so, a friend doesn't send it to me that I think is a cool and interesting friend, I don't read it. So most of what I get, unless I'm on the toilet, I'm getting from my from the toilet, I will just The toilet give it.
is where bad things happen, And then I will give in and go, what are you on about? But it's made my life infinitely better. yeah, and Infinitely.
but the the put the the. The issue is the incentives are baked all the way through. Like when I I wrote my book, Uneducated, I remember people saying to me, Oh, are you gonna write about the culture wars in education? Talking about, you know, what, the how the culture wars affected you in your classroom? I was like, Mate, I was teaching in a sh in a fucking ghetto in East London. We didn't have time to talk about decolonization.
The Because you can't do it, you can't do it. How are you gonna talk about decolonization when a kid's throwing a chair at your head? You know what I mean? But it would have been. And then when you go and promote the book, people like, Well, did you talk about trans in the classroom? I'm like, No, mate, I was trying just to have a lesson. You know, we didn't have that. But the moment you know that by doing that, you're gonna forsake a large part of what of outrage, you know, interest in you, in what you do, because you're not playing that game and you're forsaking the clicks for that.
yeah, but who cares? It's like that's not what you're into anyway. It's like, if you run a vegetarian restaurant and you're, that's what your thing is, I have the look you don't get of a man who upset,
who runs a vegetarian restaurant.
but you don't get upset. If someone else is, you know, making money selling steak, like, that's what they do. If you wanna sell steak, you sell steak. Not a. That's a bad comparison, cause what you guys do is better. It's like you're the steak.
we're the steak.
Yeah, it's like someone's out there buying vegan burgers and getting really sick.
no, it's, and that's what we try to do. It's, you know, y- you realize, I know it sounds kinda hacky, but you when your platform goes to a size, like we're about to hit 2 million subscribers now. And you do an interview, you think, oh, fuck, like, we've got a real responsibility. If somebody says something that is actually, you know, that you think isn't right, it's your duty to challenge them. It's also your duty to, you know, to make sure that the interview is prepped properly.
So that when they have their arguments, you can go, well, actually, what about this? what about that? All of these things, because you realize what you're putting out into the world, it, it matters. People are gonna consume it and they're gonna take it as fact.
yeah, it does matter, and if you abandon that feeling of responsibility just because you want the outrage clicks, it's like, you're just a part of the problem. Yeah, I mean, you gotta be able to have conversations with people, and that's this is why I push back against the idea that people have a shorter attention span than ever. It's like, do they, though? I feel like they're, they're just people. I feel like people are just people. I don't think I'm unique.
I think I like l- listening to audiobooks because I think they're interesting, and I think I'm not alone. I think they're very popular, a lot. These sell a lot of audiobooks. It's one of the big reasons why Spotify got into podcasting is because their audiobook, uh, sales, or, or streams, rather, they were a lot of people were streaming audiobooks. And I'm like, Wow, a lot of people just they, they don't just want music, let's get into other things.
People like to be informed and, eh, and have their brain excited. It's good, and you can have it excited in a negative way, like, get outraged, and that's a problem. It can hijack your concentration in that way, it can hijack your attention. But also, what's more fulfilling is getting your brain stimulated in a positive way, or at least an intriguing way, something that, like, really makes you think about things. I love when I listen to a podcast, I listen to a conversation, and I carry that thought with me.
Like, I'll shut the the radio off and I'm driving, I'm like, Wow, okay, and I'll just contemplate and think about things, you know, and I think there's I'm not alone. This is not a unique thing that I have. I think there's millions of people out there like that. They're just that desire is not being fulfilled, so it gets their attention, gets hijacked by horseshit.
Well, and and I think the direction of travel is clear. I mean, a a lot of people in our space like to be, oh, T V's dead. Well, if you look at the absolute numbers, the they're way up here, right? Than collectively, than than than YouTube and podcast. But the direction of travel is only one way from here. They're gonna go down, we're gonna go up. I think
Do you think that the the views on television are higher than the views on, like, say, YouTube? I don't even think that that's they're close. interesting. I I YouTube think, is infinitely more popular than any television show.
yeah, but it's not all like, m uh. Most of the views on YouTube are like guys, uh, kids on un unboxing toys and, you know, guys going camp. There's I. I discovered this channel the other day called Outdoor Studios. Are you familiar? or Outdoor Boys? Outdoor
guys. I think he stopped He stopped doing it.
doing it. I was like, this guy, he 20 million subscribers, every video is like 90 million views, and he just was like, Yeah, I don't wanna do this anymore.
well, I think the popularity thing is overwhelming, and it the like fame, it freaks you out. And I think he probably reads the comments, unfortunately. And, uh, he was just a regular guy that's really into survival, you know, stuff and going It's amazing out there. And he seems like content. a really nice guy,
Seems like a lovely guy. I think maybe the one thing that that pushed him in that direction, just as just watching it is he kind of got his family involved. So a lot of it would be like him with the kids going to places. And I imagine if you never fully signed up for 20 million subscriber fame and you're a five-year-old or a ten-year-old, or even now you're an 18-year-old, that's a whole different ballgame, and that's probably extremely disconcerting and unpleasant.
well, I don't think that's wise. I don't think that's wise at all to do that. But yeah, I mean, when I see people getting their children involved in their television shows, I'm like, please don't do that. There's so, like, you're, you're, you're, you didn't ask them, and they're gonna have to go to school and then deal with the consequences of it and all the bullshit that come. I mean, it's pretty straightforward show. The guy's just like, you know, camping in a fucking igloo.
No big deal. But even then, you're still exposing yourself to schizophrenics and crazy people and the the world, the whole world out there.
yeah. And also as well, the number 1, they can't consent cause they're too young, so they don't understand actually what it means to consent to something like that, and what are gonna be the long-term implications? But also, it's just weird. It does get. It takes you a while when people come up to you and they go, Oh, I feel I know you. And you go, they obviously don't, but I, I, as an adult, I can rationalize that.
Imagine what it must be like as a kid.
well, that's the real problem with child stars, right? The they they all get fucked up. Like, I've become friends with Zach Efron lately, uh, he's been coming to the club, very nice guy, but talks openly about it. Like, just like becoming famous when you're young, when, like, you're really young, you're a kid, is just so fucked up for you. I can I liken it to when you make cement and you don't put all the ingredients in, and then it kind of forms, but you can never fix it, so it's never fully formed.
And I think this is an issue with. I've met a lot of child actors that became adults and every one of them was fucked up. Um, Macaulay Culkin was probably the least fucked up, oddly, but he'll, he talks openly about the struggles that he's had.
and what is it that makes somebody really struggle with life having been famous as a kid? Like
You get adored for no reason, right? You're, you're six, and everybody loves you. You're supposed to earn that, right? You're supposed to have it from your family, and then the way you behave is supposed to dictate how people treat you in the real world and th- what you're good at. So, like, maybe if you're good at art or you're good at music, people are like, Jimmy, I love how you play guitar. And then so then people like you for that, and then you're like, you want more of that?
So you work really hard and then you go through this whole process of becoming an adult and dating. And girls don't like you just cause you're on the cover of Teen Beat. They like you because hopefully they think you're attractive looking, and then they think you're funny, or you're smart, or you're nice to them. And then you go on a date and you guys jive, and it's a learning process. And you don't go through that at all when you're a nine-year-old and you're on the set of a television show that's in your name, and then everyone around you is catering to you.
Everyone's kissing your ass. Tommy, can we get you anything? Would you like a juice? Would you like anything? Like everybody loves you, nobody is telling you you have to do something, you have to do this, you have to do that. Nobody's punishing you, nobody's nobody is like bullying you at school. It's like your world is weird.
and people tolerate your shitty behavior, I imagine
100%. You could throw temper tantrums and fucking smash windows, and they, I mean, that's why rock stars fucking tear apart ho hotel rooms. Why do they do that? Cause they can. They go into that hotel room, just fucking throw a T V through the window. Woo! Rock and roll! I mean, it's in, it's in all these movies, right? Why do they do that? Because they're out of their fucking minds, and because they there's no guardrails.
And to to have no guardrails as you're growing up, and to also be completely wealthy by the time you're ten, you know? And then usually the parents are involved in some sort of a shitty scenario. Like, I have a friend who's a who was a child actor, and his parents stole money from him, and he didn't find out until he's an adult, like millions of dollars from him. And he's had, like, this fucked up relationship with them and that's gotta anyway.
And then
be horrible.
he found out that they were they were mishandling his money and That's gotta stealing from him.
be so horrible.
He suspected it, though. He's like, Huh, It's one what? I don't know. of those things Something's afoot.
that happens when people see you being successful and you have money, or they think you have money. Suddenly, like, all these people emerge out of everywhere who've got, like, these amazing ideas for how to convert your money into their money. And they have the brilliant ideas for that, right? And oh boy, there's a lot of them.
I, yeah, I. I get confronted all the time with stupid ideas and I just, I don't invest in anything. I'm like, that's the best way for me to just diffuse it all, like, I'm not interested, I'm not buying that,
And also with the child star thing is you have all of this success, which is more success than the vast majority of people will ever encounter in their life. And you're done by the time you're 16, because you've fundamentally changed the way you look. So you, you've now become an adolescent with all, you know, the awkwardness and the horrificness that goes through all of our teenage years. Yet you look back at a time when everybody loved you and now no one does.
yeah, you peak at 15. But imagine being like Tutankhamun, became the pharaoh of Egypt at 9. Ooh, What? You're running Egypt? What? Huh?
Yeah, well, he wasn't really running. He was like Joe Biden.
Well, he was, he seemed compromised, There was a team, too. Joe, there was a team. It seemed like he might be inbred.
Or Tutankhamun.
Yeah, there was something wrong with him. He was very odd. Sorry, I'm choking on something. Yeah, I think, um, analysis of his, uh, bones. I think they said that he, he might have, he might have suffered. I think that's some speculation. People try not to be offensive when they talk about that, but L obviously, inbreeding amongst royal families is not a unique thing. It's not like, what? Wait a minute, you know, like, and so the possibility that he was inbred here.
One of the most striking things about Tutankhamun was his parentage. 2010 D N A study concluded that his parents were probably brother and sister. The researchers identify his father as most likely Pharaoh Akhenaten, and his mother as an unnamed money, as an unnamed mummy known as the younger lady, and that was probably his sister. The body, uh, differed from the idealized royal image. Researchers reported a club foot and damage to bones in his foot, suggesting that he had difficulty walking.
Walking sticks found in his tomb support that interpretation. Uh, these are medical interpretations of ancient remains, rather than a complete, certain picture of his health. He became king around age 9, died around 18 or 19. Exact cause of death remains uncertain. Researchers detected malaria parasite D N A and proposed that malaria, bone problems, and a fractured leg may have contributed to not any single cause was conclusively established. Hm, apparently, um, the reason why they found his tomb versus, uh, all the other pharaoh tombs that had long been looted was that he was, uh, very disrespected.
And that once they, uh, buried him and they put him in his tomb, they covered it with rubble so that no one could visit it. They were like, fuck this guy, like, yeah, we did what we had to do, but let's just cover the whole thing with rubble. That's one of the one of the one of the pieces of speculation.
That's so funny. There's so many guys in history who are like, I'm gonna build an empire, I'm gonna con. No one knows their name. And his dude was a shit king.
I know, is it shit? King nine years old, and that's the one that everybody thinks about. When you think about an Egyptian pharaoh, you think about King Tut, because they found his tomb intact. So the real question is, what happened to all of those other tombs? And is where is all that gold, where, where are all those? I mean, if if that guy had such an elaborate burial and he was a shit king, like, what, you know, what did, what did Ramses, what did his pharaoh, what, what did, what did that guy's l- burial look like?
I mean,
Well, it's been like 6,000 years, right? So, or, eh, the the ancient Egypt is 6,000 years ago, At least there's at least.
a lot of real weird stuff when it comes to that, real weird, you know? Um, there's also the the actual king's list, or the the Zep Tepi King's list in in Egypt, that it's super weird, cause it goes back 30 plus thousand years, and they wanna talk about that as if it's myth. Then it gets to a certain age where it's agreed upon that this is the the time in which these dynasties existed, that people accept, and so it is very, it's very weird stuff.
And you, I think you have to really understand hieroglyphs to be able to even comment on it, so I'm not going to. But one of the weird things about it is the ages of the older people, the people from 30 plus thousand years ago. They're like living t 200,000 years, 50,000 years. It's very odd. They reign for a long time, and that aligns with the Sumerian King's list too, which is also super fucking strange.
The Sumerian King's list has the same sort of properties where you have accepted historical figures that are later that live a normal lifespan. But then when you go way, way back, you have kings that are ruling for 35,000 years.
Isn't it the same in the Bible, where it's all, like, way extended? And so so is, is that maybe just a, like, a language thing, or, like, a cal sure, it's probably calculation?
a bunch of things, right? The the real problem is, well, you have, uh, cuneiform, right? So you have the ancient Sumerian writing, so there's not like a language issue. Then, because you have them detailing the ages of the people that are historically accurate, where we know that they existed. The real problem is like, what were they talking like in the Bible? Like when Noah was 600 years old? Well, okay, what is a year to you? Like, what does that mean?
Like, is it every? is every season a year? is it an actual calendar year? Do you have a Gregorian calendar? Like, what do you? What do you use then? Cause they used to use a different calendar entirely in ancient history, they used to use a 13 lunar cycle calendar, so it was a 13 month calendar. It was a 28 day calendar, which is 364 days, so they would have to have a leap year every now and then.
But th- when you think about that, that actually kinda makes more sense, cause that really does align with the cycles. But somewhere along the line, they decided to make it 12 months, and some months are 31 days, and some months are 28 days. Like, what? Like, what? What happened here? Like, what? So it's like, what do you mean when you say he's 600 years old? You know, did you just mean he's old as fuck? You see Noah?
Like, that dude's like a fucking 1,000, 000 years old, like, you're like, how old's my dad? My dad's 100,000 years old. And and he fucking hates this, you know, like, you know what? I mean? Like, people talk in a certain, it's like the whole 72 virgins thing, right? You know, when they say you get 72 virgins when you make yourself a martyr, they don't mean the number 72. It's like saying, you know, oh, I got a million friends, it's just a lot, they're just saying a lot.
It's like a substitute for a lot.
you know, one of the interesting things is when when you actually go to Egypt, is, uh, genuinely, how much we don't know about that, about, eh, about their civilization, the engineering, how they constructed the pyramids. Y- I remember I went to the temple of Abu Simbel, I don't know if you've ever seen this temple. It's huge, it's absolutely massive. And, ah, there there's a certain point in time during the day where there is a beam of light that comes into the temple and, uh, lights.
I think it's at the altar. They so they did that specifically, that was a choice that they made, and they designed the temple for that to happen. And you go, well, how did they do that?
yeah, it's super sophisticated engineering, and, um, it's
That's it.
also at a scale. When when you're dealing with how far they moved the stone, how they quarried the stone, what tools they use, there's also real clear evidence of ancient tool use, um, and not just tool use, but high-speed drills, um, some sort of, uh, unknown technology that seems to be able to scoop sections out of rock. Um, it, it, it looks like it was moving far quicker than what they would achieve with copper and sand and friction, and all the different theories that people have proposed to how they did it.
It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense, and I think it's way older than they think it is. I think it's way, way, way older. And I think, um, one of the first, uh, people to propose that was Dr. Robert Schoch from Boston University. He's a geologist. And he looked at the weathering of the s, the s, the temple where the Sphinx is carved out of. And he said, Th- this is w water erosion, like thousands of years of water erosion, has led to these deep fissures on the sides of these walls.
And then the furthest back you get, where you have rainfall, like heavy rainfall in the Nile Valley, you gotta go like 9,000 years. So that's 9,000 years, and then you have to deal with thousands of years of rainfall to achieve that. So when was it actually built? It might be 10,000 years old, it might be 12,000 years old. It also might be newer than some of the other stuff that's there, which is even crazier.
And then you have the stuff that's underground, and you go, Hey, like, what? Like the the the things that they know about, like the labyrinth that they they've discovered, that there's these that Herodotus wrote about, that there's enormous labyrinth, that he said was greater than the spectacle of Giza, like greater than the pyramids, he said. Underground was even more preposterous.
You know, and going back to our religious conversation, I never knew this. So I went to an exhibition at the British Museum where they were talking about the ancient Greek Empire took over the ancient Egyptian Empire. And there was a fusion of the two. And what they had at one point was the Greeks who were living in Egypt, worshipping their gods, and the Egyptians worshipping their gods. And the elites then s turned around and went, you know what, we've got a major problem here.
If we don't actually do something to help bind society together, we're gonna have a civil war. So they artificially created gods that both sections could worship.
Which gods?
I can't remember the name of the gods, but, um,
They've made up some gods they made, yeah, and everybody's they, the like, Oh, phew, yeah, they, thank God, he found they, the bridge.
you know. And it's a kind of a genius like solution, cause you could still worship your Greek gods, they could still worship their Egyptian gods, but there was a gods in the middle that everyone could worship.
Well, that's an age-old tactic, right? I mean, this is sort of how Constantine pushed Christianity through Rome, you know, it's like, gotta bring everybody on the same page. So this is people have always done this, whereas the Mongols had a totally different approach. Genghis Khan said, I don't give a fuck what your religion is, come on board. just pay taxes and Yeah,
don't fuck around.
pay taxes, don't fuck around, let's kill folks. He didn't care what you believed in, he didn't give a Very tolerant fuck. Yes,
Genghis Khan. very tolerant. It's
w. It's really interesting. Dan Dan Carlin had this great take on him where he was. He was saying that if you historians today talk about Genghis Khan as like, the Genghis Khan, there's a lot of positive aspects to his empire. And one of the things that he opened up trade to the East. Like, right, also killed 10 of the population. Like, it's kind of crazy that one of the b- biggest mass murderers in the history of the human race, documented, is also thought about in the positive impacts that he had on civilization.
Well, it's funny. I took my dad to Uzbekistan, cause my dad would grew up in Uzbekistan, and I lived in Uzbekistan for four years, so we did, like, a father and son trip there. When you get to Uzbekistan, you get to Tash, uh, Tashkent, right in the heart of the city, there's this giant statue of Tamerlane, Timur the Lame. He see, most people don't even know who the guy was. He was basically like a mini Genghis Khan, and they celebrate.
They're not de-colonizing that shit. They're like, This is what this is our boy, you know? Uh, and, uh, by the way, that dude, he was as vicious, and his empire stretched as far as Constantinople on the one side, to China, to Russia, to India. At one point, it just didn't last as long because he was a badass and most of his descendants were not, but he controlled this giant swathe of the of the of the Central Asia, in particular.
And, uh, in Samarkand, they still have his tomb. The, uh, the tomb is there, and there's a story. I, I don't know if I told you this before. Do you remember about the the Soviet in the German invasion of, uh, the Soviet Union? Did I tell you this before? maybe Basically, uh, Soviet archaeologists were opening about to open this tomb, and all the locals were like, Don't, don't, don't touch it, don't touch it. Cause on the tomb, it said, Whoever opens this tomb will unleash a conqueror greater than I.
They opened it, and the next day, Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. whoa, the next day, The next day.
I think you did tell me this.
Yeah, I probably did.
Well, that's crazy.
June 22nd, 1941. Operation Barbarossa. Here's the interesting bit as well. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war. So Soviet Union, I don't know if you remember this, but the Soviet Union was basically getting its ass kicked for the first f uh year and a half of the war. Uh, absolutely steamrolled million man army surrendering on mass, the Germans were kicking ass. They got as far as the gates of Moscow. If you go to Moscow, there's these three giant tank traps outside.
That's how close the Germans came. And a lot of historians actually argue that if Hitler had taken Moscow, which he was very capable of doing if he wa- if he didn't make mistakes, that would have been it. Because Stalin stayed in Moscow, and so Stalin would have been captured, probably killed, and the Soviet Union would have lost the war. Anyway, fast forward to the Battle of Stalingrad. The archaeologists eventually thought, you know what, we've dug this up, we should have opened it.
And they gave him a proper Islamic burial, put him back in the tomb, covered everything up. And the next day, that was the pivotal day in the Battle of Stalingrad, and from then on, the Soviet Union basically pushed forward and won the war. Simulation theory, in Right? It's effect. insane, man, but I, I, you know what? Uzbekistan? Uh, you, you talk about spreading trade and stuff. It was that part of the world at that time. If you go there today, I loved going there as a tourist because it's kind of like the Muslim Rome.
It's just this, like, incredibly beautiful testament to the greatness of their civilization. At one point, um, these beautiful madrassas, beautiful mosques, gigantic, absolutely gigantic. People are really friendly, food is amazing. It was a really cool place to go. I really liked going back there.
Well, I think one of the things that set back the Islamic world a huge in a huge way was Genghis Khan invading Iraq. How? So? I didn't When he invaded, know about this well, I don't even think it was Iraq back then. W What was it? Mesopotamia, Mesopot? Yeah, Mesopotamia, I think, so Baghdad, they they took the Mongols took Baghdad, and the the river f- flowed red with blood, the the way they describe it, they just slaughtered everybody.
They, they, they knocked civilizations back to the Stone Age. It was a famous story, this Dan Carlin talks about. It's one of the scariest ones of the, uh, Shah of Khorezma sent, uh, an envoy to go to visit Jin China. And as he's making his way to Jin China, they see what they think is a a snow-capped mountain in the distance. That as they get closer, it turns out to be a pile of bones. And that Genghis Khan had arrived before they got there and killed everyone in the town, everyone in J in the city, and stacked their bones on over a million people, stacked their bones on top of each other.
whoa, And then they had abandoned their carts along the way, cause the re the roads had become so degraded from rotting human flesh, so rotting human flesh had turned everything into mud. So there were so many r- dead, rotting bodies in the road that they couldn't get their carts through, they couldn't get the wheels to turn through the sludge of dead humans.
maybe not that tolerant, then.
Yeah, that'd be a bit of a change in the West.
you know, that's why we love in interviewing historians so much on our show. Because when you talk to historians, you go, Oh, number 1, what we're going through, like, people have been going through this since year dot. And you just get to understand so much more, not only about your society, but also about yourself and human nature and who we are as people. Like, you know, y- we always talk, Oh, these are unprecedented times, nothing like this has happened before.
But you go through history and you talk to a historian, and they're like, Well, it's kinda similar to 1823 when you look about it, because A, B, C, D, E and F, or whatever it may be, you're going, oh, right, and that that gives. There's a calmness that comes from that.
yeah, people have always been fucked up, like, always, and it's, you know, I've talked about this a bunch of times, so I apologize if you guys have heard it. Um, but I've been reading this, I finished it. This Alan Watts book called The Age of Insecurity, uh, and it's about the 1950s, and it it's, ex essentially, he's talking about how society is changing so quickly because of technology and culture shifting radically, and people are so anxious.
And he's talking about this in 1952, I believe it was, and you read it, and it applies totally today, and you realize, like, oh, there's never been a time where everybody's like, life is great. And then we have this nostalgic view back to those days. Going, Oh, back in those days, when I was a boy, the milkman came and he delivered your milk, and everything was beautiful, and everybody believed in God, and there was no problems.
No, there's always been problems, people have always been people, people are messy and sloppy and crazy, and they're always going to cause chaos. And as long as there have been people, there have been problems. And this is just a much more aware version of society than ever before. Bec- and maybe propagandized and maybe confused because of the internet.
But also a lot better. I mean, if you look at, uh, we we can talk about, you know, Gen Z are not as resilient and all of that shit, which is true. But also the way we're raising children now, like when I think about the way my parents and grandparents were raised in the Soviet Oh, like Union, animals, right, right, right, you know, oh, like you, you. A five-year-old did something they didn't know not to do, get a fucking beating for just for that, right?
And that that was normal, completely normal. And think how we understand a lot more about the impact of shit like that now. And that's why we we don't do it. Um, so in the world has improved in so many ways, but th- we are in the age of e- e- anxiety and insecurity. Because, I mean, you say, Francis, you know, all of this has happened before. I think A I is a different level,
honor them. is a different level of challenge That's
to humanity.
that's going to hypercharge everything. It's it's going to be very very weird really soon, and maybe sooner than we'd like. I'm a little concerned, um, about what might happen post midterm. And one of the rumblings that I'm hearing post is after the midterms, the United States might start attacking Iran again. I don't know if this is true or if this is just speculation, but good Lord, I hope it's not true. So I don't know what it is, but I'm really concerned because this whole I Iran thing is like, we're at war, but no one talks about it anymore.
It's been this like stagnated thing in the media. And what is going on with the Strait of Hormuz? Like boats are getting through, but they have to be, uh, ushered, you know, they have to be guided by battleships and shit. And like, are they fighting off people all the time? I I hear they are, I hear people are trying to attack these battleships all the time. It's like, what? What happens after the midterms? Cause, right now, if they did it right now, they'd get crushed in the midterms.
And there's a lot of speculation they're already gonna lose the midterms. So if that, ha- if they're waiting until after that's over before they do this, things could get real ugly. well, you you know,
got, sorry, go ahead.
I, I was gonna say, well, you s you say that. I take that and I raise what's happened in the U. K. Uh, w- our defense minister came out and when he was, uh, J, uh, speech, I can't remember what the exact context, or where the speech was being, uh, held. But he was talking about how we need to start, how British people need to start stockpiling.
He did say, Th- let's, he said, three days worth of whatever, but it, it kinda makes sense because our infrastructure's very vulnerable. Uh, and we haven't built a lot of the shit that we should be should have been building, cause we're very green and all of this other stuff.
But isn't three days the modern version of two weeks to stop the spread? You know what I mean?
And, uh, Joe, before we do, can I have a piss? Yeah,
let's, we'll pause, we'll pause we'll be right here.
back, ladies and gentlemen.
Um, so where were we? We were on We were talking
a ride. about Iran. Nah, Yeah, are we back on air now or not?
yeah, we're back on.
Okay, cool, cool, cool, let me just do this.
There you go, Matt, do you wanna do that?
Uh, I've already, I'm doing the triangle, I think,
Nothing like three white guys talking about geopolitics. Apparently,
why'd you have to racialize it? What's wrong? This That's one is out gonna be one of. because you,
of the comments. you have Yeah,
to today, you have to today, today. It's very is that working?
No, it's, uh, I think it's,
No, it's dead.
uh, it's dead. Yeah, I'm Yeah, yeah,
filling the sucker up.
thanks, brother.
I'll give you two, two seconds. Um, geopolitics is actually that's not really correct. When I read the original term of geopolitics, sort of widely used to talk about different countries, but it's really about, like, resources and geology, which makes sense. Like, what is the actual pull that up? What is the actual original term of geopolitics? I'm pretty sure it wasn't originally about, like, how countries get along with each other. I think it was about resources and about, like, uh, you know, geo
I mean, you can argue that the resources is how about how countries interact with each other, right, study of how geography, right?
such as a country's location, borders, natural resources, and accesses to ocean, influences political power. See, we don't think about it that way, we think about it as, like, the relations between countries. Yeah,
and actually, I think we we're living in a time when people totally forget that geography very much affects the geography I've got it, of Africa, thanks, brother, geography very much affects how countries behave. And
it's the real thing.
it's the real thing.
Like, why we love Ukraine so much? There's nothing to do with the fact they're on trillions of dollars in minerals. Nothing.
well, and for Russia, the reason they feel so passionately about it is, I think we've talked about this before. 80 of all the shit that matters in Russia is in the west, and most 20 of the country. So Russia always tries to expand westwards to expand its buffer zone. Uh, and that's basically what has historically happened every time they've been strong. So invading Ukraine is a kind of expected thing for them to do as well. But coming back to Iran, I mean, the geography of Iran is what this is all about.
Uh, because it seems like from the conversations we've had with people, um, the administration got a little carried away here. Uh, they, The American administration, yeah,
dare you come to my country and tell us we're doing things wrong? What?
I'm not sure about wrong, but um, uh, the
Yeah, I think they thought it was gonna be like Venezuela.
that's exactly what they thought.
This is the same mistake they made from Operation Desert Storm, you know, to when when we went in in the 1990s in Iraq, it was quick and easy. Bang, bang, got it done, kick some ass. So when the 2000s came around after 9/11 and we went back into Iraq, I don't think anybody expected it was gonna be this prolonged shit show that it became. I think the people supported it because they thought, Yeah, well, they're doing it, they, that's how 9/11 happened.
What's going there? Kick some ass. And then it's like, Oh my god, we're there 20 years later. What the fuck is this?
but it's also this idea that you could bring democracy to Iraq, you know, a country that has never had democracy, that doesn't understand it. And even in our own countries, like the U. K. It took a long time for us to get democracy. What, you think we're so special that we're gonna go over there and go, Hey guys, we got this magic system, everyone's gonna go, Yeah, that's great, and then what? We're gonna, they're all gonna live in paradise.
and definitely there won't be any corruption. That's really important. When, when a country comes in and fucking hangs your leader on television, you know, and then afterwards, everybody's cool.
Well, this is interesting thing with with the with the with the Iran, right? Because there were people. So, right, eh? I, well, last time we were here, it was right around the time that the war started. And then we had this guy called Robert Pape on the show. I don't know if you've seen his stuff. He's a, he's a, uh, military air power analyst, and he basically said, exactly how it wu- gonna, how it was gonna go.
this is before the invasion Yeah, yeah, and or the we, we, we just bombing, I should
had we, we. We just say, had him on just now to talk about it. And, uh, he, he calls it a de-escalation trap, and he talks about how effectively America trapped itself in this situation, particularly with the Strait of Hormuz. And actually, his argument is, now, look, I'm not. I can't judge whether it's true or false, but so far, everything he said to us worked out is this is put Iran on the path to become a regional hegemon.
They are now going to be in a position where they're way more powerful than they were before this conflict started. how? So, Because they are, they have been given the legitimacy to block the Strait of Hormuz, and they are now becoming more powerful against Saudi Arabia, the U A E, who are their primary opponents, and also Israel. Uh, they control a lot of the oil, uh, and where that goes, and the Houthis as well. The problem is the Saudis have this pipeline that goes to the Red Sea, so the idea is you don't need the Strait of Hormuz, you can go around it, but the Houthis are bombing the shit out of that pipeline right now.
Uh, so it's, um, it's a trap. It it was a trap, according to his analysis. And that's why, coming back to your point, the war isn't over, and you have to find a way to resolve it. And his argument was, you gotta get out of this as quickly as possible, or it's gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse. And you see that now, where Iran is in a position. We they've basically got a like, they've got, uh, the global economy in a rear naked choke.
That's that's what. That's why gas prices are what they are, that's what diesel prices are, what they are. It's why, you know, Trump talks about, oh, you know, Zelensky is, it's not Zelensky bombing Russian, uh, refineries, it's causing the the diesel price to get to this point. The war in the in Ukraine's been going on for four years, but it the price started really going up when the war in Iran started. And this is where all these problems are coming from.
And Iran can do this as long as they want. It hurts them too, but his argument is they can carry on doing this because for them, it's about survival. It's like Russia in 1941. You're taking casualties, millions of people being captured, but you're for you, this is about survival. You know, Trump's got the midterms to worry about, you know, after the midterms, he's not gonna have the house, may not have the Senate. He's gonna be up to his eyeballs in investigations, congressional committees, impeachment, proceed, all of that shit.
So this war is now put America in a weaker position, or its leaders, maybe not America, but its leaders in a weaker position. That means you've got more leverage. And you can see in the rhetoric now, with, like I said, the Zelensky thing and all the rest of it, there's a lot of flailing about. There's a lot of flailing about trying desperately to get gas prices down. And Iran knows this. They're not dumb. They're watching this and going, every day that this goes on, we've got more leverage.
And it's in their interest to carry on that until they get the deal they want, which is get American bases out of the Middle East entirely.
well, they've already fucked up the American bases in the Middle East to point where it's gonna take decades to fix them, right?
is that right?
So we were reading, I don't know, what do I know? But they have bombed bases where American troops have. It's more than 20 of them. We we pulled it up, the number the other day. It was a it's a large number, and you gotta think, like, how much destruction? Like, we're we're not seeing videos where they're detailing all the different things that happened, and from what I hear, it's pretty extensive. And the problem with this, the these asymmetrical warfare, the problem with drone bombing, the problem with all this stuff is that it's like regular countermeasures don't seem to work.
You know, like what they figured out in Ukraine, where they're using the monofilament line to control these drones, so you can't even use anti-drone weapons. It's like you're almost exposed. And so if you have an air base, and like the attack that the Ukrainians did on the Russians, where they blew up all those planes, like, that's kinda wild that you can go in there and do billions of dollars worth of damage in one night. And it's like, this is a different world we're living in.
We're not living in a world where just you have to launch missiles. They see the missiles coming, they shoot them out of the sky with the iron dome. That's not the s. It's not the same thing anymore. Drone technology has changed everything.
One of the things that I love about our job is that we get to meet so many interesting people, either cause they've been on the show or just because they're friends of friends. I was talking to an ex-special forces guy, and I said to him, Could we put? I said, I don't agree with this, but could we put boots on the ground in Iran? And he just laughed. He went, Let's take all the politics out of it.
He goes, Nobody would agree to that because the terrain is so mountainous. How are you going to achieve that? It's it's impossible, you're not gonna do that. And he and he also said to me, I think Robert Pape echoed this. There has never been a regime change achieved solely through airstrikes. It doesn't happen. So you go, well, what? How is this going to evolve? How is this going to actually evolve? Does does anybody know? Is this just vibes?
Is there a bigger plan? What's gonna happen? Because
What do you mean by? It's just vibes?
is it by vibes? It's like, did they actually think this through? Did they think if this actually happened, A could happen, B could happen, C could happen, and if A could happen, what's our strategy for a? If B could happen, what's our strategy for B? If C could happen, what's? Or? Or were they just, like, basically high off Venezuela, and they were like, Hey, we smash Maduro, let's go in?
Well, it's also how much does Trump know about how this all could possibly play out if they started bombing Iran, and what was he told?
And what did he? How did he manage the information that he got, or how did the people get access to him or not get access to him? Because that's also part of this conversation. It's the same with this is why Vladimir Putin is four years deep into a three-day mil- special military operation in Ukraine. Cause he was told, you're gonna go in there, we're gonna get Zelensky out, we're gonna land paratroopers in Hostomel, uh, land all our shit, everybody's, and the people are gonna rise up and and support us, which is exactly what they said about Iran, by the way, right?
Take out the leader, the people will rise up, take over and whatever. Um, and it seems to be that that's not how it works. And quite often you get these situations from what we are told, where not all of the information is presented equally. There is not the process of deliberation that I think we'd all hope there is for decisions of this magnitude. It's more like Francis said, Venezuela event went very well, we're on a roll, what's next?
You know? And that sounds shocking and simplistic and whatever, but that is literally what people we have spoken to, who who are close to to the decision-making process, have told us.
Well, it's also very enticing if you're a guy who wants to leave his mark on history, to be the guy who took down the evil Iranian regime, you know, we took down Venezuela, you know, and then you, you can go in there and have that, too, as your list of accomplishments. And if someone's blown enough smoke up your ass and if you believe it. And we all know that Israel tried to get a bunch of different presidents to try to do the same thing.
I mean, they tried to do it with the Obama administration, they tried to do it with a lot of administrations, like, why don't we do this? And they were like, Eh, I don't like it.
Which which is for me, that's why the ultimate responsibility rests with the people who p- p- who pull the trigger, right? Cause everyone's gonna present you with all kinds of information.
Yeah, and it's within, you know, Israel's interest to to do it. I mean, they they would like us to do that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I think that's true, and I think that's where there's a divergence between the foreign policy interest of Israel and the foreign policy interest of the United States and the world, right? And everybody. I understand why different countries pursue their own interest, but it's the job of the American presidential administration to do what's right for America.
Yeah, how, how crazy, what a wild thought,
Yeah, um, so it, it's complicated, but it, it's having a massive, uh, impact economically across the world. Uh, and as bad as it is in the U S, you are actually w- way more insulated from the consequences of this war than we are in the rest of the world. In Europe, uh, I have friends who are like farmers in Australia. Th- th- they are really struggling to get diesel, you know? And the same with, uh, you know, the the European situation.
Uh, most countries have a lot of supply for, like, a year's worth, the U K has two months worth of diesel supply. oh God, Yeah, so it's it's been a a big problem. And the reason you say they might strike again is cause what else do you do? What are
do you do? do you just let it keep stagnating, well, like, what do you do?
well, I, you or you have to. I mean, I thought the best way out here was for Trump to do what Trump does, which is to sell to sell a deal that he did with Iran. And that deal probably would have been worse than what was in place before, cause you just bombed the shit out of their country. They're angry, a little bit unhappy about that. But you do a deal with them, and then you've got this is the greatest deal ever, you know?
Yeah,
that would be nice. Trump if you're listening, that's the move, just say you won. We'll, we'll all go with you. We just don't want this to escalate, you know? And then the the narrative is always they can't, we can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, which is okay. I agree with that. Doesn't seem like it'd be a good idea to have, uh, a regime that kills their own citizens if they protest. It doesn't seem like they would be the kind of people that you would want to be able to just kill enormous groups of people with one missile.
Yeah,
And that's really the question, because I understand that logic, which is why I understand the Israeli position, which is like, these guys wanna kill us, we can't have them have a nuclear weapon. And I understand a lot of Americans would also agree with that. of course, The question is, though, was this the right strategy to achieve that outcome?
also, was the question. The question is, were they really capable of doing that? And were they a? They definitely were, um, enriching uranium past the point they needed for energy, right? But they weren't at the point where they needed it for nuclear weapons. And then converting it into nuclear weapons is a completely different ballgame. And Scott Horton laid that out on my podcast, and I'll butcher it if I try to repeat it. But it was pretty complex and pretty, and and he was pretty clear that they were nowhere near doing that.
Also, hadn't the Ayatollah issued like a fatwa against the construction of nuclear weapons? yeah, but the question What was that is, like?
y- well, right, how much do you trust the Ayatollah? I mean, s s stereotypically speaking, they don't seem to be entirely consistent. What they say. My understanding is different on the nuclear weapon I mean, with some thing. things, they are,
Yeah, beheading you for dancing, you know,
They're very consistent on that. Uh, but, uh, my understanding on on h- uh, how easy it is to get. I remember talking to my granddad, who was an astrophysicist about this. Like, it's not that hard to get from you've got enriched material to you've got a nuclear weapon. It doesn't take that long in today's world. The first one that took a lot of effort was the Manhattan Project, but now that everybody knows how to do it,
well, this is why India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons, right? It wasn't they. We thought that you'd have nuclear power. Great, and they're like, look what we figured out, Yeah, miraculously,
so I totally understand the concern. I haven't heard a great explanation of how this conflict was supposed to achieve that. This is why the 12 Day War made perfect sense to me. Like, you bomb their nuclear facilities, you see if you get it, that's the percentage play, right? But this just I, it doesn't seem I I. No one ever explained how one would lead to the other, how doing this conflict this way would achieve non-nuclear Iran.
In fact, it seems to me now, inevitably, if you're Iran, you s you do everything you can to survive, and then you do everything you possibly can to get a nuke as quickly as possible, so that this can never happen again, right? If you were Iran, that's what you would do. So there's been a miscalculation, it feels like to me here. And I'm not sure that when people say, well, you gotta deal with Iran's nuclear threat, th- I agree with them.
I'm just not sure this was the right way to do it. And it became very quickly apparent to us early on in this conflict that that was gonna What do be the case.
you think could have been the right way to do it?
If you ask Robert Pape, he says something like, you've gotta have regional balancing, so you gotta strengthen Saudi Arabia and the U A E. So there's some kind of balance in the region and no one wants to escalate the whole region to nuclear level. I don't know enough to say whether that's right or wrong, and I think that's the real big question here, is how how are you supposed to get Iran to not have nuclear weapons?
And maybe the truth here is Joe, once this thing has been invented, eventually people are gonna get it. You know, Iran is not they're not some shitty little country in the middle of nowhere, it's a giant country which has control over a huge amount of its own natural resources. But also then the the one of the biggest arteries in the world for energy and fertilizer and gas and plastic and all of that stuff. You know, maybe the reality here is that you there's no way that you can maybe extend it, you can do deals, but ultimately they they are gonna get them, and that that's a terrible outcome.
I but I haven't heard anyone convincingly explain how you avoid that.
Yeah, and and one of the things that's interesting as well is that you look at countries that have had an empire, you know, they still have this sense of pride and honor in themselves. Like, look at the Russians, you know, the Russians have had a great empire. You look at the Persians, I mean, you don't need to be a s a historian to look. And you know, the the Persian Empire was once very, very, very powerful.
So there is still something in their psyche where if they feel that they're being pushed around, it's not like a smaller country. They they're still, how how dare you? This is the Persian Empire, this is where we came from, this is who we are, and we are gonna fight you.
Yeah, it's 90 million people, it's a bigger country than Britain.
That's crazy.
Our empire was bigger, though.
That it was. That it was.
Yeah, it's it's disturbing to think that this could pop off after the midterms. It really is. It's it's been bothering me a lot the last few days.
Why does it bother you so much, Joe?
Cause I have a feeling that this, uh, preparing for, uh, you know, having food and water is there's a real concern. I have a feeling there's a real concern. And um, if the power grid does get attacked, and if we, if cities do get bombed, it could get really fucking crazy in this country.
I don't think Iran is in a position to do to bomb America, though, I think that's probably. Well, cyber attacks, Yeah.
it with the the grid, but um, sleeper cells, like we, we really have no idea how many people came in over the last four years and how many of them are are in a terror cell. And it's this is not right wing speculation. You're just dealing with a number that is it's so massive, right? So the low end number is 10 million, that's the low end.
In four years, right?
In four years, and so some Republicans think the high end is over twenty. We don't know, it's just pure speculation. You know, there's the ones that they've counted Secret Service sites, heightened threat environment as air defense systems deployed at Morro Lago and Airport this today. Surface-to-air missile systems have been deployed at Morro Lago and Donald Trump International Airport at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. I didn't even know there was a Donald Trump International Airport.
The spokesperson said the agency is operating in a heightened threat environment, right? So I think something's about to go down. And um, I mean, all the the when you go super kooky, tighten up, that tinfoil hat. People think that it's a false flag and that we, you know, this is so we will support this and that, and I don't know. But, uh, I do know that if you keep fucking around, one day you find out. And it seems like we've been fucking around, and it seems like they're telling us, Hey, you might have might want to store some food in case we have to find out.
What's fascinating to me is how because we we don't live in the U.S. So we come here a couple of times a year, we see you, we do a bunch of interviews. I remember being here two years ago on the eve of the presidential election, and everybody in Austin was like, you you guys are going to L A next. Fuck. No, no, there's gonna be riots, it's gonna be crazy. What are you doing? And we get there, the election happens, and he was so overwhelming, cause it was the presidency, the house, the Senate, the college, the electoral college, the popular vote.
There was nothing in L A. Everybody was chill because, like, America voted for this, like, that's what that's what America did.
Well, people were very upset, but I think one of the real issues in America when it comes to protests is they're organized and paid for.
Yeah, no question.
And there there was nothing to be gained by tearing up Los Angeles after the presidential election.
That's a good point.
But they're like, listen, where's the protests about us bombing Iran? Where are those? If if protests are organic, most people are very unhappy with us going into Iran. But where are the protests? Well, th- there's no one organizing and paying for those protests, so they don't exist.
That's interesting. That that's I hadn't thought about. That is actually legitimately a very good point.
It's so hard for people on the left to accept this, and and I have friends that are very left, and I I talk to them about paid protesters, and they push back and I'm like, Listen, man, you just gotta understand. When you see those vans pull up and you see those signs come out, and those signs are already printed out in advance. And this is about an event that just happened twenty four hours ago, what's the odds that someone's not paying for all this?
And then when you talk to people that actually say they are paid to protest, and there's people that show up at every protest, and those people make a living protesting.
It's a career now.
This is a career, this is a real job. If you're a ne'er-do-well, and you're also, like, you know, sort of peripherally political, like, Yeah, man, fuck the fascists. Like, you can, you don't have to work, you can just go to protest and scream and yell, and they give you a sign, and now you have a job.
And it's a great place to meet girls, which I imagine I'll bet, yeah, yeah.
yeah, yeah, yeah. Not not for the long term.
I actually saw a lady. I saw
There's gonna be there's gonna be a little unstable, If you're into you know what I mean? mental instability,
who isn't? But I what is this, Jamie?
I just Google protests about it, and there was a article in Reuters about
About the bombing in Iran?
Yeah, lots of protests, lots of people died in other countries about it. Right, but in America, Yeah, 145 different cities.
right? What kind of demonstrations did they have? I didn't see any of them. I and certainly didn't see them on the news. Were they small demonstrations? Like, how many people were in these demonstrations?
Oh, look, look, you had a map there, Jamie. Would you mind scrolling back up?
Well, there's there's maps on this about a bunch of stuff. I don't know, some stuff I didn't know this map's about.
But it's interesting, okay? So here's one with big signs that were printed out in advance, clearly. Like, look at all the signs, all uniform. Like, who got who made the signs? How'd you get them? United States flag upside down? That's interesting. So I was wrong. Um, it just hasn't been in the news. But I I haven't seen think you've brought it like the No
a point. Kings protests were huge Well, th- this is your
as well. point. It's about scale, Propulsive.
right? Like, you're not seeing it overwhelm the country in the same way like you had in 2020, for example, right? That's but coming back to my point about going to L. A. two years ago, I remember the mood. We had Rob Schneider on the show, like the day after the election, he was like, really happy, the the mood was different. And I just wonder, in an alternative reality, if Trump does Venezuela, and then doesn't do this, or does Cuba next, and it's like Venezuela.
And it's just like you lock down your your hemisphere, you you get the easy wins. It's a whole different legacy, you know? it's it's basically
Blair without Iraq.
Yeah Yeah. I don't know how much sense that'll make to Americans, but it's it's like you came in, you closed the border cause you gotta give credit where it's due. He's closed the border.
right. It was the Iran decision that fucked everything. Yeah, cause even the ice stuff, look, most people in this country don't like the idea of a militarized police force with no identification just pulling people over. It opens up a world of problems. It op it sets terrible precedents, and this is what people that are pro ice don't seem to understand. They could use that in another way. Now we've set a precedent. You're allowed to have a militarized police force with masks on and they don't have any identification and they're snatching up people, and some of them happen to be American citizens.
Like, if you're supporting this, you're like, you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Okay, well, you just opened up the fucking hen house, and now the chickens are running all over the place. Like, you could do whatever you want now, if if you're allowing that and that's normalized in society, that's not good. But on the at the same point, you do have a bunch of very dangerous criminals that trend to erogua people. There's a lot of different gangs that have gotten in and they're setting up illegal activities and kidnappings and all kinds of shit, cartel violence inside American borders, that's real, too.
So, like, support of ice to go after that is pretty strong,
But it's also as well what it does to your democratic process. Because one of people part of Trump's appeal, as we all know, is that he marketed it himself as the outsider. I'm not part of the political system. You're gonna get a radically different presidency with me. I'm not gonna be the other ones. And one of the promises was here you go, Joe.
No, I got one more, I got one.
They, uh, one of the promises was like, no forever wars. We're not gonna go around, we're not gonna do these wars. I'm gonna put America first. It's gonna prioritize American people because we've got real issues in this country that we need to sort out. And the problem is when you do Iran, what you say to people is it's just more of the same. It doesn't matter who you vote for, you're still gonna get these types of wars.
And so what happens is that people then feel more and more disenfranchised, that they're not connected, that it doesn't matter who they vote for. You're undermining democracy. And that's a really dangerous place to be. Because once people feel that democracy doesn't resem re doesn't represent them, then they start disengaging. And again, it goes back to that argument about vacuums. That power vacuum still needs to be filled. And then you have people going, well, what we actually need is a king, or what we really need is to do our own thing.
And that's how the fractures appear within society.
you got those weird kids today that think we should burn it all down, start from scratch. It's like, Okay, show me your plan. What's what's your fucking plan? What's your burn it all down like long-range strategy?
well, that's why I always, uh, look, I'm not a historian, but it's it's something I've always thought about. I think calling the American Revolution a revolution is, uh, in inaccurate, and that leads to a lot of confusion. Cause it wasn't a revolution. To me, a revolution is when you overthrow the existing regime in your country, right? The Russian Revolution, you have the Czar, and then the Bolsheviks come in, they overthrow the Czar, they install a new government, right?
In the French Revolution, you have a monarchy, the revolutionaries come in, they execute the aristocracy and the king, they institute a new government. The American Revolution is really a war of independence. It's you guys saying we're gonna separate away, and in our part of the world, we're gonna have our own government. You guys do whatever you want. Uh, so America was not actually created in a revolution. It's just people seeking independence. It's like if Scotland broke off from the United Kingdom, right?
Uh, and that, I think, changes the mentality, because revolutions actually usually end very badly. It's a very bad thing that happens, they're very violent, lots of people get killed. Uh, the people who did the revolution usually get killed off, uh, first, then they kill off the people who came. This is what Stalin did. I mean, his purges were just about, you know, you've you've the revolution has happened, and now you've got all of these psychotic revolutionaries who don't know how to build anything.
They just wanna tear everything down, cause that's what revolutionaries do, and now we gotta get rid of them. Cause revolutions are generally not the sort of thing you wanna be around for when they happen. Um, and so, yeah, the terry terror down thing that doesn't appeal to me at all.
Well, it's just young kids that are saying this. It's like, this is, these are the young Democrat Socialists and Marxists. They wanna tear it all down. It's a great message. It resonates without actually having thought it through. It's like, you see that guy's pissing you off, go punch him in the face. Okay, what if he punches you back? What if his friends show up? You know what if, what if there's a guy in a car across the street who sees it and he grabs you and throws you into traffic?
Like, there's a lot that can happen. Let's play this out. Let's think this through. If you fucking destroy America, what what takes its place? Where does the money go? Where does your money go? Where? Who takes care of the streets? Like,
You know, and I I always say to these people who are like, you know, I'm a socialist, I'm going, you ever talk to a Cuban? Talk to a Cuban. Talk to a Venezuelan. If
talk to a Russian.
they talk to a Russian, if they or talk to anybody from Eastern Europe.
anybody who's really experienced actual communism, they're not fond of it.
No, no, they're not. I remember I used to go to the coffee shop, uh, when, uh, when I was doing, when I was writing for standup, and I I got a um, I had a, I got to know a guy who ran the coffee shop. He was a Cuban guy, and we used to talk about communism all the time, it, you know, it's it's one way to pass the day. And he actually said something to me.
He goes, and I, cause I was getting very frustrated at this point that around about 2018, 2019, this, the talk of socialism came back. And and it was very triggering to me on a personal level. And and I was very upset, and I was saying to him, he was getting really frustrated.
Pretty good.
Yeah, and it was, and I said to him, like, how how do I, how do how do you fight this? And he goes, you can't. And I go, what do you mean? He goes, look, Francis, you know, when you argue with somebody from the West who has grown up surrounded by this, and you're saying, uh, about communism, they can't understand it, they can't comprehend it. It's like saying to a really rich kid, look, don't walk down that alley, don't walk down it at night cause something's bad gonna happen to you.
He goes, the only way they will ever truly understand is if they walk down the alley, they get hit on the back of the head, they feel the taste of blood in their mouth, that's when they get it. Until then, I hate to break it to you, but you're fighting a losing battle. And I'm talking as someone who grew up in Cuba, whose most of their family is Cuban and have tried this time and time again.
There is a part of me that is slightly fatalistic that goes sometimes people need to see the mistakes for themselves.
You have to fall down, you have to hurt your knees to realize like, oh, don't do that.
I also think we have to be honest and say that there is a thing going on in a lot of Western societies where if you had assets in twotwo 1,006 before the great financial crash, you've done very well for the last twenty years. But if you didn't, your ability to buy a house, to pay off your student loans, all of that, it's become more difficult. And it's it's why that portion of society who feel that they've been locked out, uh, are feeling like they don't have a stake because they don't have a stake in society.
And that's when this kind of thing happens. And I think that's something people people on the right and people like us who who, I mean, I I think communism is the most evil ideology that's ever been tried, just numerically speaking. It's a fact, right? But you have to make sure that it's not looking after people, cause what we do in Britain, we just go, here's a handout, you know, you don't need to work, just here's some money, shut the fuck up, right?
That doesn't work. But what you have to do is make sure that society feels fair to everybody, or to as as great a number of people as possible, and that there's opportunity to advance. And for our generation, we're in our early forties now. I for our generation, I'll be like Joe, if if we hadn't started TRIGGERnometry and haven't had the amazing success that we've had that we're so grateful for, we'd be in that same boat. We'd be in the exactly same boat, and we'd be struggling now, going like, this thing, it doesn't work anymore.
And I think that's where a lot of this stuff is coming from. So yes, for it's it's one. It's one of the things that I think people in the A I world don't really think about enough. What happens when, even if we don't, if even if we accept that actually in the long run, jobs aren't gonna all disappear? And like all technology, you create new jobs with it and all. But in the interim, it's gonna get very disruptive.
And in that time, I really think Andrew Yang was onto something when he talked about the need to find a way. Yes, you're creating all this beautiful wealth, these five companies are creating all the wealth, but you've gotta find a way that the rest of society feels like they they've got a shot as well, they've got an opportunity. Um, and unless we do that, I think this path down to where a lot of people feel really locked out and angry and and frustrated and betrayed.
I think that that it's understandable that they It's totally feel like
understandable. That's why the movie The Joker resonated so well.
it was, it was. And I always say this, it's like society is basically a game, and you know, you follow the rules, you do what you have to do, and you will get the rewards at the end of it. The problem is is if for young people, which is very, very true, they feel they're not getting the rewards and everybody else is, and they're working just as hard, if not harder than everyone else. Eventually, they're gonna go, you know what?
Fuck your game. And the board goes up in the air. And that's, I think, what we're seeing with young people.
sure. That's why they cheered when Luigi shot that United Healthcare guy.
and that's crazy to me, but that's where it's coming from, you know, that's crazy.
it makes sense, and it's also that's the narrative that's being promoted in universities, you know, that kind of thinking, that revolutionary thinking, making it sexy. Yeah, yeah. And Yeah,
so when you when you combine that, and also the other thing that they've been taught for generations now is to hate their own society, its history, its culture. You put all that together, it's a dangerous mix.
fun times.
So so, but but. But I really think that there is a way to address it, which is that we have to think this is coming. People are locked out. How do we make sure they are included again?
yeah, well, the if you ask the A I people, it's gonna get super weird, um, because the universal high income thing that you that you hear Elon talk about, that would be that every citizen of the United States would have a stake in artificial intelligence. And that you would get just like if you live in Alaska, you get money from the oil companies. You get a check. People, maybe people don't know this, but if you live in Alaska, you just you get a check.
And, uh,
When when you're born, or no, you get, like, just every every month?
yeah, you get a you get an income. Let's find out how many people in Alaska get it and what's the parameters. Um, you know, if you live on Native American reservations, like they get checks. If you're Native American, you know, you can get a check if you're a part of a tribe that has a casino. You know, you get a piece of the casino. And this is kind of what's going on with the United States when it comes to the consequences of A I.
And taking over automation, taking over jobs, taking over shipping, cape, taking over commercial truck driving. Uh, you already see it all over to Austin, you see these, uh, waymos and cybercabs. It's kind of nuts. I mean, I see as many of them sometimes as I do regular cars. They're it's really nuts how many waymos you see. Um, so those jobs are gone, they're they're taking jobs, and this is just the beginning of the storm. These are the first raindrops of the storm that is the consequences of A I completely taking over every aspect of society, which it'll probably do and do much better than what humans do.
Then then it becomes a problem of your identity, like, how who do you think of yourself as a person who works? And you are you proud of that? Is that that who you are? You know, you're you're proud to be useful, and you're, you know, you get great satisfaction out of your occupation. If all of a sudden your occupation is automated and you don't exist anymore, massive amounts of depression, massive amounts of drug addiction, and then you just give them a check.
I don't know if that's gonna be enough.
well, to your point about Native American reservations, from what I understand, the kind of social outcomes of that are not great.
So here it is. Uh, no, not well, the Native American one's particularly bleak, but we can get into that. Alaska pays eligible residents an annual dividend called the Permanent Fund Dividend. For 2026, it's $1,200 per eligible person, including $200, el, uh, energy relief payment. So it's 1,400 bucks a year. That's not much,
not much.
um, but it's a little something per what's that? J. Oh, per eligible person. Oh, oh, sorry, includes 200, including 200 dollar energy relief payment, so it's just 1,200 bucks. Um, so if there's two people in your household that are eligible, like, two, well, how many? Uh, how old do you have to be to be eligible? Who receives it? Um, do you have to is it a certain age? Is there an age requirement, or is it all citizens, or is it like voting citizens?
Either way, um, it's not enough. Um, now the the real question is, when you're dealing with A I and this infinite amount of wealth it's gonna generate, how much is enough? You know, when when Elon says universal high income, what are we talking about here? Like, what do? What does that mean? Are you? Are you saying you're gonna give everybody $500,000 a year? I'm not, I'm on board. Okay, so then what happens?
Are you Joe? This cause this is the flip side of this conversation, which is you mentioned the Native American situation. It's like, you know yourself, you take a lot of meaning from the things that you do. So just getting money,
It's a dire straits song. Money for nothing. Yeah, And the chicks for free.
I'm not sure there. Well, that with A I girlfriends, maybe you're gonna get the chicks They were for free as well. talking about,
they were talking about guys complaining about people on M T V. Um, it wasn't really the what the song was about.
I know. But I guess I think what I'm saying is there's a difference from saying, Hey, I'm, um, you know, Mark, or I'm Elon, or I'm Sam, and I've taken your job, and I'm Elon, I'm Mark, I'm Sam, I've taken your job. Here's $10,000 a month. Like, there's a big difference there. Um, and unless that problem, unless we as a society work out a way to do that, uh, you don't have to be a genius to work out.
That's not a recipe for a stable, healthy society. I. So I'll it's
I'll give you an I'll give you an example of something, I'll. So when I was teaching, I taught a kid he was very low ability, he really struggled academically, so we I gave him work which was, you know, which was less challenging than other kids. Sometimes he would be okay, sometimes he would play up cause he understandably had s self-esteem issues. One day he was playing up really, really badly and I said, Chris, look, you're gonna be in detention.
And I wanted to, I, I never believed in just detention, getting kids to be bored. I wanted him to be useful, and I was giving him what I thought was a punishment. I said, Chris, you see all the pencils in the classroom, every single pencil, I'm talking about colored pencils, I'm talking about ordering. I want them sharpened, and I want them perfect, cause we've got an art lesson after lunch. He went and did it, and when he brought the pencils back to me, he was so happy, he was so proud of himself
cause he felt useful.
cause he felt useful. And he said, and I saw a side of him that I'd never seen before, because finally he got given a job that he could do, he could do to a very high standard, and he was useful and part of something. And he said something to me that actually it kind of teared me up. He went, Can I come back tomorrow and do more?
Hm, so he felt good, he felt good that he was useful, and I think most people do. The real question is, is it possible to teach people differently in school? So instead of teaching people facts that they need to memorize and having to sit in a chair and making sure that you're doing everything that you're told, cause someday you're gonna have to have a job and that's you're gonna have to learn how to behave this way.
Is it possible that you could teach people? Listen, money is not the problem anymore. Resources, in terms of like your ability to feed yourself and put a roof over your head, that's not an issue anymore. Now your life is about pursuing your interests. But we have to teach people that from the jump. We have to teach people that from the time they're very young. The older people that are set in their ways, they're gonna have a very difficult time changing and adapting.
But and then also, people are gonna have a very hard time having the same kind of motivation that people have when they grow up poor. That's a superpower. Growing up poor is a superpower because it gives you a motivation like a drive that I don't think you get if you're a trust fund kid and your parents are worth a lot of money. So we're gonna have to teach people to have internal motivation instead of external motivation.
And we're gonna have to teach people that there is a great benefit to to doing things that you don't want to do and then seeing the result. To, uh, you know, just putting off any sort of enjoyment that you might possibly have in the present time so that you can have more enjoyment in the future. Because you did that, you sacrificed, and you figured something out. But we have to teach them how to that that way of thinking.
And if you could teach them that, listen, man, you don't have to worry about money anymore, but that doesn't mean you don't have to worry about life. Like, there's a lot of cool things that you can find that you can do with your life. But now do those things and get a sense of purpose from you learning about yourself while you're pursuing whatever it is, whether it's becoming an author, or whether it's, you know, whatever making things, whatever it is.
Find a thing that you like and then teach people how to find a thing that interests them, rather than finding just some menial bullshit job that's gonna keep them depressed and just barely pay their bills.
I noticed this with my son. The thing he loves to do with me the most is like paint the fence. To him, that's like the happiest time that we have together.
See progress.
We we we go and do something together that he feels is valuable. He's learning he's doing it with me. Obviously, it's, you know, father and son time as well. But but he would much rather paint a fence with me than he would play a game. Much rather. It's more it's more meaningful for him.
right? He's accomplishing something. Yeah,
And learning a skill. And like you said, you know,
yeah, there's stuff that people can do. We have only been doing this thing, this show up at a job and and doing working in an office and going to a city. This is super fucking recent in human history. It's one of the reasons why subsistence tribes are so much happier than us, because we've been doing that forever. And the human reward systems are structured in a way that, like, if you hunt and fish and grow your own food, that's normal.
Like, you're you've, you've very little anxiety. That's that the great Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People, you know, that documentary about the I haven't people who live
seen it.
in Siberia.
Tell me about it.
Oh, it's called Happy People Life in the Taiga, and it's all about these, uh, fishermen and trappers and hunters that live in Siberia that have, like, no mental illness. They're all just happy, and they live a completely subsistence lifestyle in one of the most brutal climates on Earth, fucking Siberia. And, you know, and they they're fine, like they're having a good time. We're fucked up and we think, oh my god, I could never live like that.
But you're not happy, but they are happy. What is our goal? Is our goal to be happy? Because this thing that we've created, these jobs in in c in corporations and in cubicles, and this thing that is normal for us is not really normal for us. And we've kind of decided somewhere along the way that this is the only way that you have to have a job, and without a job, what do we do? What about the idea that something that the human race has created no longer makes it necessary for you to do a job anymore?
Now, instead of worrying about hunter hunting and gathering food, the next stage of being a human is pursuing interests. I mean, it could be a gigantic explosion of creativity and of innovation and art, and who knows what people can do, especially with the access to technology that we have today and all the different things that people can. We can, we're just assuming that this way that we live that sucks, that everybody hates, is the only way to live, and I just don't buy that.
I mean, clearly I'm biased, because clearly I went through all those process of being poor and struggling and figuring out a way in life, and then trying a bunch of very difficult things that other people avoided and finding a path. But I don't know if that's the only way to live, and I don't think it is. I think there's a a a competitive drive in people that exists no matter what. And if we're not competing over finances anymore, maybe we'll compete over art or accomplishments or creativity, or fill in the blank, like whatever you decide to pursue.
And of course, you're probably going to make more money doing that on top of the money you already get. It's not like we're gonna go into a full communist state where the entire population only get $500,000 a year. We take from the billionaires, we distribute evenly. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying, like, you start out with 500,000, whatever it is, I don't know what the number's gonna be. Start out with that, and then you can still make money on top of that if you want.
But do you have the drive to, uh, live a special life, to live a fulfilled and interesting life?
Well, there's there's a soccer player, former soccer player called Danny Drinkwater, and he, uh,
That's a great name.
he, it is a great name. He won the Premier League with Leicester City, which is a very, very small team. It was one of the biggest surprises in football that no one ever predicted that this team would win. And he went on to have an amazing career. And towards the end of his career, he was struggling. He became he was struggling with alcohol. And then all these pictures started to emerge of him after he finished his career on a building site.
And people were taking the piss out of him going, uh, look how far Danny's fallen. He was a Premier League champion, now he's working on a building site. And he there was an interview where he was like, I love my life. I'm training to be an electrician. I love doing this. I get a sense of achievement out of it. I get the same camaraderie that I got in the dressing room with the boys on the on the building site.
I'm actually happy. This is what I wanna do. Because he realized that he still needed something. He still needed to achieve something. But because in our own kind of fucked up way, we see playing a an elite sport as somehow less than building something that it's lesser than. But he's actually found a purpose by doing that.
Well, it's interesting that you would never go up to someone who's working as an electrician and go, Look at you fucking loser working as an electrician. But if that person had been a movie star and then, you know, stopped doing movies and said, I think I'd rather be an electrician, then you're allowed to talk shit about them. But it's just shitty humans. Are one of the biggest problems we have is we're not teaching people how to think, or not, I don't wanna say teaching people how to think, but informing them on the more beneficial ways to construct your life through thoughts.
And instead, we're allowing these stupid kind of be like that kind of like, tear them all down behavior to go unchecked. Like, you re, you know how transparently, pathetically jealous that is to wanna go up to a guy who's like an elite soccer player, and you're upset cause he has a job that's like yours. You know how fucking nuts that is? That's nuts.
It's a status thing, I think. We had this great guy on called Will Storck. He wrote a book called The Status Game. Are you familiar with it? Yeah, I this is the this is the reason people do this, I think, is it's a status thing. So Premier League footballer, high status, electrician, low status. And also, let's be honest, if you haven't got to where you've got to, you where you wanted to in life and you haven't got the status that you want, it's kinda satisfying for some people to see someone else fall down.
And then you go, Oh, I'm not the only one. It's actually one of the things I do really like about America. You have a kind of failure is just the step to the next success attitude here. A lot of people have that here, so it's very normal for people to start a business. Business doesn't work, they start the next one, doesn't work, start the next one, it pops. And actually, I was seeing stats, I can't remember where I got it, so I hope this isn't B S.
Maybe Jamie can check, but I think, uh, with every business you start and fail, it increases your chance of succeeding. Well, not it increases, but if you start by the time you start the third business, your your chance of that business being successful is significantly higher than the first one.
I think this is Elizabeth Holmes strategy when she gets out of jail. By the way, her, uh, husband lives in town, lives in Austin. So
Really?
we we might be seeing her at the mothership one day.
But I I think it's a really important thing that, and I think we should all do it. We should all talk about our failures more because it's part of the journey. You know, if success isn't as sweet when you get it first time round because you don't appreciate it. But if you fail and fail and fail again and finally something works, you j number one, what that teaches you is gratitude. Number two is it shows other people, oh shit, if he's failed and failed and failed and then made it, maybe I can do that.
Maybe not in the same field, but maybe my journey is going to be like that in a different way.
it's one of the main things that I think a lot of people can get out of jujitsu, other than self-defense, is that everybody starts out terrible. You, you, you, I mean, you have a little bit of an advantage if you're strong, you know, you have a little bit of an advantage if you've maybe done some other martial art before, but not much. I mean, even me, I'd I'd started out, I had years of taekwondo and kickboxing and all.
I got mauled, just mauled. I mean, I was, it was so humiliating, but humbling in a great way, where I was like, Wow, I had no idea. I was that vulnerable. I was walking around all delusional, thinking that shit's not gonna work on me. He might work great. But everybody who you train with, if they stick it out, you see them growing and getting better, and we all you, you all go on this path together. Where then, all of a sudden, I've seen guys that they started out, they were terrible.
And and a couple years later, I see them rolling with the new guys and manhandling them. Like, this is amazing. Like, look at this guy, like, now he's like tapping people out that are new. And then you see the look in in his face, like, Wow, I I can. This is real. I learned, I got better at something that I thought was impossible. In the beginning, you're so the mountain is so high, you're like, fuck, you take one step, you fall down, you're like, this is terrible.
And for a lot of people, their self-esteem can't handle it, and they never go through that process. But if you can force yourself to go through that process, it's one of the very best processes of a failure, and then learning from failure, and then you get a little bit better, and then more failure, and then learning, and then you a little bit, and you keep going. And you realize, like, Oh, this is a journey. And along this journey, I can apply these same principles to essentially anything in my life and get better.
Just even about just being a human, just better at being a human, realizing the dumb shit that you do that sabotages your life, or fucks up your diet, or gets you drinking again, whatever it is. You can apply the same strategy that you learn to get good at jujitsu to anything in life.
You know, I remember when, um, I was, it was nearly ten years ago, I was, uh, opening for Eddie Izzard on his European tour. And I remember people go to me like, who's, like, one of your biggest influences? And Eddie was that person. Because when Eddie started out doing comedy in London way back when, like late 80s, early nineties, you know what his nickname was on the circuit?
What?
No laughs, Eddie. That's what it was like. He would come on and everyone's like, Oh my god, it's this guy. Oh, fuck, really?
Was that before or after he started dressing like a chick?
That was before.
So did the dressing like the chick turn it all around?
No, no, I think what actually turned it around is that he was just. And when I spoke to him, he was like, Look, I was relentlessly driven and focused. I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I knew that this is what I wanted to achieve. And what was happening is that at the beginning it wasn't working for me, so I needed to change in order to get to where I wanted to go.
But I know he likes dressing like a woman, so maybe that legitimately
Joe's not letting that one go, helps. No, bro, right?
no, no, I love that guy, but I th it's weird cause he is a guy. Like, he's, I think now, maybe he's changed, but he told me he likes women, and I'm like, cool, you know? Like, he came on the podcast, he was great. I've I've done a couple podcasts with him. But the point is like, that is what he enjoys doing. And to stop him from doing that in the past maybe allowed him to be freer on stage, which allowed him to be better on stage.
Cause it is a journey of self-discovery when you try to figure out what is it about your act that doesn't work? What is it about this that the people are not buying? Like, and maybe that was a part of it for him.
Maybe it was a part, but it was he was also trying to do something radically different at the time that nobody else was doing. But once he nailed it, he kind of he just exploded for him. But I I always remember that lesson that I took from him, which was you've got to go through the shit. You have to. That's just part of the process. And you've also, as much as possible, not gonna take it personally, because you've got to accept that this is what life is teaching you.
If you wanna do that, you've gotta take the hits and you've gotta accept failure. Most of life is failure. Most of the time you do things, it's not gonna work out in quite the way you want. But then you take the lessons from it and then you move on. And it's gradual. It's not like it is, we all wanna be the guy who steps on stage, gets on a soccer field, touches the ball, everyone goes, Wow, what a genius.
Ninety nine point, nine nine, 9% of us ain't like that.
yeah, and even the 1% of the the point, whatever it is, 1%, they're not either. It's all bullshit. It's 100%. It's like some people have a better start than others, but everybody has to learn and grow along the way. And it's interesting with Eddie, like, he applied that same sort of grinding strategy to a lot of the crazy physical feats that he did, like when he ran around the entire U K and he didn't train for it.
Have you seen that documentary? no, no, I remember Fucking the story, insane. It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen, cause literally the skin on his feet were falling off. Like, he had to take a couple of days off. He's running a marathon a day with no training, and, uh, he had to take some days off because his feet were so destroyed, he couldn't stand on them. Never the forget about running twenty six miles.
I mean, you're seeing the raw, open skin. It's horrible, and he's got a doctor or a nurse tending to his wounds. It's terrible. I mean, just like raw, torn apart feet next day, twenty six miles, took a day off, maybe two, maybe two days off in the entire time he did. It was nuts. And it's like that same thing, like, just keep going, you can do it. And in this TikTok generation, where everybody wants everything to happen really quickly, you wanna be an influencer, you wanna get famous, you wanna get this, you wanna get that.
I don't wanna get fat. Oh, take a pill, bang, you know, whatever it is, or Ozempic. There's there's desire to have something happen to you very quickly versus the satisfaction that you get from knowing, like the jujitsu mountain, like, look, I started down there, I started down there, now I'm all the way the fuck up here.
right? And, uh, that process is just makes you into the person you're actually supposed to be. It's it's the process that makes you into the person you're supposed to be. yeah, and anything difficult, We often, we often talk about this, you know, with our show, cause sometimes we we're doing interviews with people where, like, this is a serious thing that we're doing here. Serious person, this is gonna be big, it's important we get it right. If you had catapulted us when we started the show into the position of interviewing that person, we wouldn't know what the fuck to do, and we would screw it up very badly.
oh, for sure, It's the process that gets you to the point where you're actually able to have a conversation on a high level. And it's different thing. Sometimes it's about being prepared to challenge people, call out certain facts, sometimes it's just about like, the conversation's dying out a little bit. Where do we go to? All of that stuff you learn along the way. And if you haven't got the miles on the clock up till that point, being parachuted into that position.
This is why it's actually probably very, very hard to, like, start a TV show and get the right talent or whatever, cause they haven't got the miles on the clock to actually be able to do the job. And it's that process that gives you the ability to actually perform at a high level. Because you've been there, you fucked up, you've made mistakes, you've learned from them, you've grown as a person, you've become more humble. The process of doing stuff humbles you, like you said, cause No doubt, you go, Oh, wait, I had this idea and it totally didn't work.
Maybe I need to revise how I think about this. And I think life is just this one long lesson in, uh, what you talked about, which is deferred gratification. I'm gonna give up pleasure or comfort, and comfort's a big one, Joe. It's not even pleasure, is it? It's comfort.
It's comfort.
That's what kills you. You get comfortable, and it's a lot more comfortable to sit at home on the sofa. It's terrible for you, but it's comfortable. And it's overcoming that and learning to get out of your comfort zone, like all the good stuff, it it's on the other side of that,
That's gonna be the real problem with giving people universal high income is that, like people don't like to just leave comfort, and they're not gonna wanna do anything other than just take the money that they get. And then, I don't know, party.
I think so, but I also think we've all been there. I, I don't know, we've never talked about it, but I imagine there's been times when your life, in your life, when you've gone down that route. You've taken some time to just veg, you know? And you do it for a bit, and it, you know, you play a video game for a week nonstop, and you're just immersed in that and whatever. And then you realize it sucks.
Like, the first day you do it, it's kinda fun, the second day it's fun, but eventually you get to the point where you realize this sucks. And I think with having this universal high income or universal basic income or whatever, people will get to the point where they go, actually, this has been fun. It's like partying. A lot of people spend their, you know, twenties doing that. Eventually, you grow out of it. 99% of people do.
Hopefully. Yeah, You've met a lot of people who haven't grown out of it.
oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, especially me, because I know a lot of comedians that are basically like forty five year old boys. Because, uh, especially if you don't have any responsibility other than getting on stage at night, you know, comics have the most open-ended schedules, and a lot of them have zero discipline and they don't have to. They can play video games all day. They they work at a comedy club for a weekend, they make enough money to pay their bills for a month.
They don't have to worry, and so they just they're childlike, and they just drink at night and fucking eat terrible food and play video games.
do they eventually, though, get married and have kids and settle Some of them do, down? Yeah,
yeah, some of them don't, and cause I then it's a weird, like, sort of frozen adolescence.
I think once you get to the kids thing, and we see it with, you know, people that work with us, you start, you get a serious girlfriend, suddenly the attitude shifts, they get a little bit more serious. Children's And more distant. the big one. Yeah, Yeah, yeah,
it just lets you go, Oh, oh, boy, I have to take care of a tiny little person. Like, this is not the same fun and games anymore.
and set an example. Cause they don't learn from what you tell them, they learn from what they see. And so if Daddy's sitting on the sofa, what are they learning?
Well, hopefully the world will learn, right, in that w regard. Like, so if universal income becomes a thing, well, I think there's a lot of pros that come out of it. And here's the pros. Starvation ends, goes away, the lack of food ends, goes away, the, uh, struggling to pay your bills ends, so all that stress ends. So how much crime do we lose because of that? I bet we lose a lot. I bet there's a long transitional period because people have been ingrained to certain types of behaviors and actions, and they have, uh, personality flaws they've developed over the years.
But once society settles into the concept, I bet crime radically gets reduced. You mean, like, acquisitive Crime is a nee-
crime, stealing? necessity. Yeah, Yeah, yeah,
because they're, I mean, like, you know, the the silly one was the A O C one where they're, you know, stealing stuff from stores. They just need bread for their family, like, right,
that's why they've got the Lacoste trainers.
no, they're, that's not necessarily what's going on, right? Um, but once society settles, and then there's not a haves and have-nots situation at the same extreme that we have today. Because the extreme that we have today, not as much in this country because it's kind of thought of as the land of opportunity. But there's a lot of countries where, like, if you don't have, you will never have, and this is just how it goes. If that becomes something that's adopted and employed by all nations, is that the the amount of wealth it generates is so fucking extreme that, and jobs are gone, and that people now have money, but you never have to worry about working.
So the fear and the anger at least gets significantly mitigated.
I mean, oh, that's the hope, that's the real hope.
and if they just wanna play Call of Duty all day, like, who fucking cares? As long as they like their life, it's like, but you know, it's like we need to train people to enjoy their life and not think that your life is just a thing you do that sucks. So you can make money so that you can buy stuff, so it makes you feel good about doing the thing that you do that sucks, and then one day you die.
Like, that's
The encouraging thing about human beings is I think we are very adaptable. We are very adaptable. And I think the things that matter to us are the things that have always mattered to us. Uh, it's family, it's human connection, it's meaningful work, uh, or meaningful activity, at least. It might not be work, it might just be activity. You know, I I love chopping wood to to I like, I could buy wood, but I don't. I buy wood that I have to chop, cause I like chopping the wood.
You know what I mean? I like, and I like doing it with my son, and I like teaching him how to do it. I could pay a guy to paint the fence, I could pay a guy to paint the wall. But if there's little things that I can do with him, ah, or I can do myself, I actually prefer to do that. And I think it's a it's actually some so we will, I think we will find a way to adapt, uh, because it's what we've always done.
That's that's, I think, the big hope. But I do think the transition is gonna be a big challenge. And I think I really hope the people who are doing this A I stuff think about this a lot. I I think it's gonna be them who's gonna have to think about this a lot. And if I were them, I'd be thinking, how do I give as much of this away as I can so that everybody feels included in this thing?
Otherwise, there's not enough robot defenders in the world who are gonna guard your mansion. Is is what, how I think about it. And, um, yeah, I I think we'll get to that. I think people will realize that's a reality of this.
I hope so.
do you know? What always gives me hope is that when every time I taught Greek mythology to the kids and we did the Odyssey, everybody got locked in. And I taught in a place where most kids were first or second generation immigrants. They didn't have shared culture, vastly different experiences. K Some of whom were incredibly poor, but you taught, like, the Odyssey, boom, they were all locked in. And why is that so special? It's so special because it talks about the human condition, it talks about struggle, it talks about overcoming.
And I think one of the things, particularly nowadays, is we we all think we're so incredibly different. Yeah, when Christopher Nolan does a re a retread of the Odyssey and puts it on the big screen, people flock. And I and people talk about, oh, it's an anti-woke movie, or it's this, or it's that. No, because it's a story about a man confronting his own demons and overcoming them and the importance of family. And I think we sh that's a really important bit, that's a really important bit.
The things that, as Constance says, that matters have always mattered. And this idea that we're more divided than ever and that we hate each other and we've gotta believe that we can overcome that. We really do, because if we just see each other as an enemy or as an avatar, we're never going to be able to transcend. But if we see the humanity in each other and actually left right, mo most people just want a fairer, better world.
We've just got different ways of approaching it.
Hear, hear. And on that note,
We solved everything, Joe.
solved it all. Francis Foster for president.
no, you don't want that truck.
No, did Joe? We were ending on such a nice thought, and you had to ruin it.
Listen to me getting executed.
It's always fun talking to you guys. I really appreciate it. Love your show. You guys are cool as fuck. It's always fun.
Great to see you, brother.
Thank you, great to see Thanks for having It's always you. me. Take
a pleasure, mate.
care bye everybody.