#2293 - Chris Williamson

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! I took the glasses off, I was hoping you were going to keep them on.
You want me to keep them on? You can pull them off. Some dudes can't pull off douchey glasses.
You think these are douchey? A little bit if I didn't know you, but I'll know you. I'm not douchey at all, so you can wear cool glasses.
Well, these are requests by you, so I can wear what I want. You've been wearing them a lot.
I like them. Yeah, yeah, I do.
They're kind of – it's like having an Instagram filter for the entire world. Right.
So everything feels – It's just a little rosy. I had a pair of rose-colored glasses before, and I got it.
I was like, oh, I get it. It is better this way.
It is nicer. Yeah, yeah.
It's like a full – dude, I need to show you this. Okay.
What is so what is this have a little open of that so you'll remember that i sent you a photo on iMessage a couple of months ago of a friend of mine who was in antarctica yeah and he flew a comedy mothership lighter out to antarctica i've been reliably told that that lighter was used to smoke weed in antarctica yeah and it's touched it was dropped a number of times so it's touched ancient permafrost. Fuck yeah.
What kind of laws do they have in Antarctica? I don't know apparently very liberal. Are there any laws? Fuck knows.
I don't know. There's nobody there.
Have they established laws? They were 400 miles in. Whoa.
So this was part of the final experiment, which was this attempt to try and disprove flat earth. Oh.
He went as a part of that. Did he bring flat earthers? Is that the deal? So four flat earthers, four globeeers, get flown to Antarctica.
It's $35,000 per person. Oh, my God.
This guy called Will Duffy put the project together, flew everybody down there. Did he pay for each person? Yep, yep.
Wow. I think maybe a couple of people chose to go self-funded, but they were trying to get the open offer to all of the biggest Flat Earth influencers, commentators on the planet.
I don't know what to call them. How many went? Four of each.
Four roundies, four flatties. Don't you want to see their search histories? Maybe the FBI do.
I don't know. The flat people, I want to see.
So they do this in the middle of our winter, their summer. They observe the sun above the horizon for 24 hours.
So there's no explanation, apparently, with most of the models of flat earth about how the sun could stay above the horizon for 24 hours so they flew down they had drones flying in the air they had um a 24-hour 360 cameras they had live stream of iphones all of this stuff and then they had the people that were on the ground and the guys that were were there observed the sun. Did the flat earthers switch stances? So three...
Three did and one didn't? This is just their drone footage. Oh, this is drone footage? Yeah, so the final experiment.
So those are apparently mountaintops. But they're submerged? It's just all ice.
That is so fucking hardcore. Because, you know, there's a bunch of things up there that look like pyramids and what it really is is just an unusual peak of an enormous mountain have you seen the Antarctic pyramids yeah you got to go all in on that okay we have hard launched hard launched this episode people that believe wild shit about Antarctica so you know about the direct energy weapon theory right yes I did see that on Sean Ryan show yes I did as well I was like that guy's fucking really interesting yeah it's like he sounds really interesting but if I want to sit him next to Eric Weinstein you know I'm saying like is that if is anything this guy saying make any sense because i've done that before with eric with one guy who's a fraudster i sent him a video and i said tell me if this is gobbledygook or if this is real physics eric to stress test some guy's ideas of course he loves it he loves any sort of intellectual stimulation and especially if it's like mathematics or physics or something where it's his wheelhouse and you know he's great because you can someone can sound really good to me you know they could start quoting thermal dynamics you through whatever that problem is like chiropractors do you know chiropractors use all these crazy weird terms for musculature and different insertion points is to let you know that they have a comprehensive understanding of the body that's far beyond yours, Chris.
And this is the same thing like a lot of fraudsters do. They'll use enormous language and very verbose phrases.
It's like they're just trying to get you to think that they're smarter than they are yeah i think people use sort of complex language and fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insight yes and especially when if you're dealing with a truly brilliant person they can't that's what the pyramid fuck yeah oh this is just on google maps yeah jamie you've just gone to google maps yeah i didn't want to go to any i went to the source any kooky websites but it does look like a pyramid. Well, it also looks like all three.
Yeah. Jamie, you've just gone to Google Maps.
Yeah, I didn't want to go to any. I went to the source.
Any kooky websites? But it does look like a pyramid. Well, it also looks like all three.
Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy.
But the reality is that's probably under a couple miles of ice. Yeah, so this final experiment thing sent the world into a spiral.
There's this dude, Jaron Campanella, who was one of the biggest influencers. And he said, I saw the sun above the horizon.

I think the Earth's round.

He's immediately been – the Flat Earth Society has just gone into a head spin.

They're saying they didn't really go to Antarctica.

They went to the sphere in Vegas was one of the accusations.

They did it at the sphere in Vegas, and they were tracking it around.

The sphere is not that big, kids.

It's not that big. I've been there.
know there's seats everywhere you would know you're there i don't know i don't know they had a bad time um but yeah it's it's that's been pretty wild talking of pyramids dude this new pyramid shit that's just come out oh this is insane yeah i was gonna send this to you as well jamie i'll send you one of the most comprehensive breakdowns of it on X because it's quite stunning. So apparently through the use of LiDAR, they have discovered that there are enormous structures underneath the Great Pyramid that go kilometers deep into the Earth with coils.
So enormous pillars and then these coils. they don't understand what it is because they're all looking they're just looking at lidar images but whatever this is is a uniform structure there's several pillars and all of this is like very very very weird yeah 600 meters descending down those cylinders and then there's more stuff below it and then there's additional structures inside of it yeah that was crazy it's really crazy there's a guy Jay Anderson and he did a breakdown of it maybe this would be good we could play this it makes a little more sense when someone's explaining it to you yeah I mean I mean, we need somebody that's an expert here, not me and you.

Zawi Hawass, by the way, has said it's nonsense.

Already?

Yes.

According to Graham Hancock.

This is the wonderful thing about having Graham Hancock. I texted Graham yesterday.

I was like, yeah, what's going on with this?

Yeah.

So click on that and go full screen, please.

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And geometry, so you know it's real. You've got to appreciate the dramatic intro.
Project Unity. What has just been announced in relation to the pyramids at the Giza plateau and the plateau itself is so incredible, so awe-inspiring and narrative shattering that I have been sitting here for the last hour trying to wrap my head around the implications of what we were just told.
So this is pretty much breaking news because the new findings were announced on the 16th of March at a press conference held by the team who were studying the Great Pyramid of Giza with a non-invasive technology that was first developed by Filippo Bionde and Corrado Malanga called Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography. Fuck, that's a mouthful.
This was used to explore the internal structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza. And this method leverages the analysis of micro-movements typically generated by background seismic activity to achieve a high-resolution, full 3D tomographic imagery of the pyramid's interior and subsurface components.
The recent findings from deploying this technology

are nothing short of mind-blowing because what's been discovered is that there are huge structures

coming down from the base of the pyramid deep into the bedrock. In fact, over

600 meters deep, which then connects to

structures that extend up to two kilometers below the surface of the ground. Two kilometers.
Massive internal structures connected to the base of the pyramid and extending deep, deep down. This is what we know so far.
What does your friend think about it? Which friend? The one that said it's bullshit. Oh, that's not my friend.
That's Zawi Hawass. Okay.
Zawi Hawass is the head of antiquities in Egypt. He's like the head guy that talks to the archaeologists and gives the official narrative.
In the past, he's been extremely hostile to Graham Hancock, but Graham Hancock and him have now become friends. Oh, yes.
I do know this guy.

And they're coordinating. Graham is a lovely guy.
People that are enemies with him just need to get to know him and hang out with him. He's a genuine, real human being who's trying to find the truth.
He doesn't have fake narratives. And he's so sensitive, too.
He's so upset. When people smeared him, like the atlantis thing they were trying to say it's a white supremacist idea to look for atlantis it's like what are you talking about like what are you talking about like we had this guy flint dibble on who in an article and he was talking about graham and he's connecting graham to white supremacy and all this crazy shit because of the atantis theory.
It's the way they dismiss it. It pedestalizes white heritage.
Because some people in the past, some people in the past who have theorized about Atlantis had white supremacist ideas. But also most people didn't.
Like Plato didn't. Like the people that talked about this place, it's in sub-Saharan Africa.
I mean, it's like the least white supremacist discovery of all time, as are the pyramids. This is Africa.
It's the least white supremacist notion of all time that this incredibly advanced ancient civilization had reached some sort of proficiency that's above and beyond what we

attribute to them. I think Graham is right.
And I think there's a lot of other people that are right too that are chasing this down. And Christopher Dunn had long ago theorized and wrote a book that he believes that the Great Pyramid of Giza is a gigantic power plant.
He thinks it generates power. And he has a very,

like a working theory of why it's built the way it's built, that totally coincides with

the ability to produce hydrogen, the ability to utilize the rays of space and try to find

some way to generate electricity through this. Yeah.
I, it's the association of other people that we don't like talked about this thing. Therefore, anybody else that talks about this thing is immediately attached to them.
Just seems like a very lazy way to sort of smear people. Uh, it's, it's, it's lazy thinking.
It's gross. It's, it's beyond lazy.
It's not lazy. It's really cheap.
It's like they're cheap insults. And it's also from academia, which is so disappointing.
You know, I mean, academia has been so captured by this mind virus of leftism that it's just it's so bizarre to watch the brightest minds and the people that we lean on for rational, reasonable thinking and an objective understanding of the world. We lean on the experts.
And when they're calling someone a white supremacist for talking about an advanced society that lived in Africa. There's a lot of ways that you can put your foot in it.
There's this woman, Corey Clark, who sent a survey to every psychology professor in the US and asked them questions like, what is more important, the truth or ensuring that equity is promoted? And a lot of professors basically said, I self-censor. I would prioritize making people feel good over necessarily telling them the truth.
There are certain opinions that people should be reported for. There are certain topics that basically shouldn't be discussed.
The usual suspects stuff like behavioral genetics, so heritability, evolutionary psychology, as in anything that kind of relates to sex differences. And yeah, it really is retarding the progress of everything.
And you think, well, trickling down from this, what sort of educated society are you going to have in future? That's not going to be particularly good. Well, I think it's going to encourage independent education.
I think you're going to encourage people like University of Austin, which is they're aiming to do just that and to kind of bypass all this nonsense and just teach people reality and I also think that it's most likely I mean I don't even say most likely it's most certainly influenced by other countries that want to degrade our ability to develop meaningful minds that come out of universities, like intelligent, useful people. Distract them with social justice.
Not just distract them, but destroy society with them. It's Yuri Besmanov's prediction from 1984.
It's like you could pass that off as a ridiculous conspiracy theory if it wasn't totally accurate. it's amazing how people don't want to believe that maybe there's been subversion and that maybe our universities have been overrun for years with both funding, which we know is true, particularly from China.
China funds a lot of American universities. They give a lot of grants.
They spend a lot of money. And this was a part of the whole thing with Joe Biden's bizarre job that he had where he was a professor that he never showed up for classes and he was teaching and he got a large salary.
Like a mob teaching job. He got a mob no-show job teaching.
As a professor. Yeah, as a professor.
And I think he got a million dollars a year to just do nothing. You know that question that people ask about...
I don't know how much he got. I don't want to get sued.
Allegedly. He doesn't know what's going on.
He doesn't know what's going on. Well, he might auto sign the legal papers.
There's that question about, there's two options about life in the universe

that either we're alone or that we're not

and both are equally terrifying.

Right.

I feel like it's the same

when it comes to Western anti-Westernism.

And you say,

either we're doing it to ourselves

or we're not.

Right.

And both are equally terrifying.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you're being puppeted

by this nefarious foreign power or you're just turning around and kicking the ball into your own goal over and over again.

Well, I think people will turn around and kick the ball into their own goal, but I also think they're being helped.

I think there's a substantial amount of this that just works automatically.

It preys upon really weak minds and particularly bullies and mean people who want to find other people that they can hate to justify whatever virtue they believe they have above those people. And they'll use it to hate.
And John Cleese made a great video about this, why extremism is so interesting. It's on my Instagram.
I reposted it the other day. Someone posted it.
We'll give them credit for it. But it's a great clip from John Cleese from 30 years ago.
From 30 years ago. Prophetic.
In pre-social media. There's no social media at this time.
And he essentially nails what's going on with both the right-wing extremists and the left-wing extremists. It's the same thing.
They're the same people. They're finding a thing.
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Get an expert now at TurboTax.com. We've heard a lot about extremism recently, a nastier, harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother boy behavior, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents.
All right, but what we never hear about extremism is its advantages. Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies.
Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.
Attractive, isn't it? So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time. So, if you want to feel good, become an extremist.
Okay, now you have a choice. If you join the hard left, they'll give you their list of authorized enemies.
Almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox hunters, generals, class tracers. I bet the moderates.
And upstart actors. Now, once you're armed with one of these super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behaviors morally justified.
So you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good. And not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.
Seriously. Brilliant.
Brilliant. That's so good.
Brilliant. Yeah, I remember.
Pre-social media. But the dynamic is still the same.
Right. It's just amplified now so much so that it's a part of everyone's life.
So many people's morality stands on the shoulders of somebody that's fallen behind. Right? It's look at how much, look at how bad that person is.
You don't need to look at me. And I think that if people start pointing at outgroup groups and they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an out group that's usually an indication i'm like i should look a little bit closer at you like it might be a good example lizzo didn't think i was gonna go there lizzo um talking about how she was in support of these bigger girls yes and she was going to help their careers and give them a platform presumably a structurally reinforced platform um meanwhile behind the scenes she's body shaming them she's starving them she's not letting them have water apart from when she makes them eat bananas out of the vaginas of amsterdam stri.
Douglas Murray said that she thought that she could outsource eating fruit to somebody else. And meanwhile, you think she's portraying nicey-nicey out front what's happening behind the scenes.
I remember this this was pre um yeah please uh this was pre thank you uh pre-trump elon uh really pre-trump elon and um he was saying thank you very much and uh he was saying what i care about is doing good not the appearance of. And he's discussing performative empathy in this way.
This sort of sense that what's most important is to protect people's feelings. And I think that this really is a point.
It doesn't matter whether you're on left or right. This is a point that you should care about because you want people to have some sense of transparency, legitimacy.
They want to be telling the truth. You want to trust that what someone is saying to you is actually what they believe.
And he said, what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. There are lots of people who are doing evil while proclaiming that they're doing good.
And that's the same that you're talking about there with John Cleese. You're saying these people's morality will stand on the shoulders of others who have fallen behind.
It's the same reason why if somebody is in the middle of a scandal, look at who comes out and twists the knife a lot. Do you go, huh? I wonder what's in your – it's the classic congressman that's got the anti-gay bill.
Oh, yeah. Who's just – Gay as fuck.
Yeah, yeah. Glory holes and, you know, check his hard drive.
That's the person whose hard drive. Check his hard hard drive yeah so um yeah it's it's just such an obvious warning sign to me that what's happening inside of someone is probably not that good yeah i mean if you're looking to destroy someone particularly like you're you're attacking someone online particularly Almost all of those people are deeply broken.

There's always some creepiness that lurks behind the scenes that you're trying to cover up for with your actions.

Almost always.

You're trying to put the light on this person.

You're going to put the eye of Sauron on this person to keep it off yourself.

I've seen that a lot of, you know, self-proclaimed male feminists sneaky fuckers yeah that i know to be creeps you know and i'm like ew and i'll see them attacking some other guy and i'm like oh god i don't dive in but i want to sometimes sometimes i want to just burn the boats and pull the fucking pins on the grenades you know what i don't like about that sort of level of aggressive criticism? I think I'm a – you could describe me as a criticism hyper-responder. I'm someone for whom it probably impacted me more than it should do, certainly more than it should do for someone who gets the level of attention that I've managed to get myself to now.
Right. And what I don't like about it is it causes people like me to be way less confident in their own positions because you think, oh, well, most people, if it was me, I would only give feedback if I was really certain.
And if I had this person's best interests at heart and if I wanted them to do better and if I actually knew what I was talking about, then I would tell this person what I think about them and what I think about what they're saying. And if you apply that rubric to everybody else that gives you criticism, you give undue, unfair expertise and legitimacy to people who don't have your best interests at heart.
They don't understand what you're trying to do. They don't care about you.
They don't get it. And it causes a lot of people, basically, I think that criticism killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did because people are just i'm worried about pushing these boundaries too much sure this person all of my friends tell me the truth why isn't this person on the internet uh there's this idea from ethan cross called criticism capture so you'll have heard of audience capture right where a creator starts feeding red meat to the audience becomes very predictable yes Criticism capture basically says it's not the

compliments, but the criticisms that are more warping, that over time, what you end up doing

is changing the way that you speak. You become a flaming sword-wielding, card-carrying member

that's as aggressive as possible to push back against it, or you go the other way and you begin

to caveat very aggressively. You start to dampen down all of your opinions so that nobody can take

Thank you. wielding, card-carrying member that's as aggressive as possible to push back against it, or you go the other way and you begin to caveat very aggressively.
You start to dampen down all of your opinions so that nobody can take offense to them. You have these unnecessarily long sort of diatribes, sort of weird land acknowledgement.
Well, we must remember that women are struggling with the thing and we have to remember. But now we've got that out of the way.
Let's talk about men's problems or whatever it might be. Yes.
And yeah, I think I just wish that the Internet was a little bit more positive some as opposed to negative some. And I understand that people bind together over mutual hatreds of outgroups.
But the oldest story in human history is that group of people are different to us. Yeah.
Let's get them. The oldest story in history.
I mean, it's it's tribal genetics. It's like baked into our DNA, literally, and it can be manipulated.
And when people are doing it and they're doing it with a very obvious distortion of your actual position, just to label you as the worst possible, least charitable version of you that could ever be remotely considered. Do you see that all the time where people are just trying to distort a narrative? You're seeing that right now with Elon, right? You're seeing people justify violence and extreme vandalism.
And you're seeing people cheer it on. And it's very strange.
there was a thing on the daily show where the host was talking about the attacks on tesla and people keying people's and the audience starts clapping and cheering it's so strange it's so fucking strange and it's also just shows you how positions just completely flip-flop like if the tesla used to be the car that you drove to let everybody know that you were environmentally conscious and you were a good leftist. That's a good question.
Do we care about the environment or not? Because those fumes that are being kicked out are not good. It's like a thousand jet airplanes flying overhead for a year.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's wild.
You're lighting batteries on fire. They're so toxic.
Lithium and all sorts of shit getting pissed into the environment. Oh, it's all going to come down in rain.
It's going to pollute the water. The fish are going to be polluted.
You're not going to be able to eat them. But we're doing good.
This is for a righteous cause. Yeah.
It's all funded, too. It's funded by NGOs.
That's where it gets really creepy. The Tesla fires are funded by NGOs.
Yeah. People are uncovering exactly what's going on.
And this is where it gets fascinating creepy tesla fires are funded by ngos yeah people are uncovering exactly what's going on and this is where um this is where it gets fascinating because all the stuff has operated pretty much with impunity in the past before doge before uh elon and his uh crew of hyper spectrum psychopaths started fucking teenage mutant ninja turtles Super wizards started diving into all this data.

And this is something that Ted Cruz talked about.

He said we had always known that there was these problems. But until Elon came along with these algorithms, we couldn't expose them.
We didn't understand what was going on. And now they've used AI to create this understanding of the net of NGOs that is all funded by USAID and by similar type programs where you know you kind of have these open-ended checks that get written to the other side other side that's the top yeah right there how often you smoke cigars fellow couple of times well I fucking turned this around the wrong way.
All right. No worries.
Keep going. But this is essentially the way Mike Benz describes it.
He's the very best at it. I don't know if you've ever seen his breakdowns of USAID.
I love his episodes on here. Incredible.
I think they're so interesting. They're so interesting because you realize this has been going on forever and ever and ever.
And this is the arm of the government that is about regime change. A lot of the money gets funneled into these other countries and it's under the guise of, you know, air quotes, aid, but it's not aid.
It's Agency for International Development. And it's all about influence and power all throughout the world and also at home.
And one of the things that it does at home is they organize these protests. They organize protests, different NGOs do, all funded by the government, all funded by taxpayer money in this weird way.
And when they do it, they pay people to show up at these places. I've got pamphlets that people have given me that they've taken from these locations or gotten from email lists.
Is that purposefully no digital record? I think probably, but I don't think they care. I mean, I think as long as they're saying they're going to pay you to protest, I think that's legal.
I think it's legal to pay someone to protest. So they're paying people $1,000 and they're giving them food and snacks.
And you can get a lot of people to just show up for a thousand bucks And then some of them are gonna get a little vandal II Some of them you bring enough people together and they get vandal II how crazy is it that the left? Are the ones who are painting swastikas on cars? Just understand how crazy Positions can flip and flop the left is upset that we're not continuing an endless war in Ukraine. The left is upset that this guy is uncovering fraud and waste.
And so in order to stop that, you must light cars on fire and put swastikas on them. Because he's a Nazi.
Because he said, my heart goes goes out to you even though there's countless videos of AOC doing that gesture Tim Walsh doing that gesture enthusiastically many many people I do think if you're in that position if you've got this heritage coming in just be careful with where you put your hands don't you know what I mean don't do that like just fucking think about where you put your hands he's you know he's on the spectrum man he's not normal you've seen that video comparing him and trump's son there's two different types of autism have you seen this no i haven't oh my god it's so good i think it's at the is it the inauguration and uh they're both stood next to each other and elon's sort of fist pumping and loving it and uh trump's son's just like staring off apparently trump's son went up to biden at the inauguration and said it's on now what is this a fucking ufc fight i mean that's literally apparently lip readers have like read what he said when he went up to because there's a moment where he goes up to biden and biden looks confused and he doesn't smile he's like but he walks up to him it's on now well they need to do you know how football coaches have got they put the the play thing over the front of their mouth like this and they talk into it that's how it needs to be done now for politics with lip readers everywhere that kid knew there was lip readers i don't think he gave a i think they tried to put his dad in jail and he wants to kill that guy that's what i think he's like fuck you because imagine your dad's getting that close to put in jail for bullshit for the rest of his life like if he got put in jail for 25 to life he's dead he's dead he dies in jail he's gonna get no food he's gonna be no nutrition no sunlight depression intense fucking anxiety you're in jail you dead. He's 80 years old.
He's not going to last to 105 in jail. There was a video from Forbes recently that got a million plays in a day talking about Trump getting like bopped on the nose by a boomer.
Yeah, by that lady. Yeah, by a little boomer.
He just did a little boop on the nose. Yeah.
I have to say i have such fucking news politics fatigue already well what two months into the the sort of presidency and it is the velocity of bullshit if you can get a million plays in a day because trump got bopped on the nose by a fucking boom mic it just the the appetite is is, it seems endless for it. It just feels, it's very, it's exhausting.
I'm kind of having to check out. And I know that people say, oh, well, it's a luxurious position.
You don't need to pay attention to politics. It's a luxurious position for you to be in.
People at the bottom, they do need to pay attention to politics. It's an interesting stat because actually the most educated, wealthiest people are the ones that spend the most time consuming news and talking about politics.

It's the people at the bottom rung of the ladder that don't.

So that's not true.

I'm just fucking exhausted.

I'm so –

You're allowed to be exhausted.

It's ridiculous.

Newsweek wrote an article about how one of the names of one of our podcast guests who who's a good friend of mine, Michael Costa,

his name was misspelled accidentally.

On the feed?

On the feed.

On the roading feed.

And so Newsweek...

Is that you, Jamie?

It wasn't even misspelled.

I don't know.

It was miscapitalized.

The second letter had a capitalization, too.

The defense rests its case here.

It wasn't even misspelled, right?

It was M, capital I, Michael Costa.

Let's go. The defense rests its case here.
It wasn't even misspelled, right? It was M, capital I, Michael Costa. Like me, Kyle Costa or something.
Okay. There's a headline.
It's a fucking article in Newsweek. You ever think that your career would result in you having typos for a headline, Jamie? Newsweek.
I don't even know which ones we've missed. I'm sure there's been other ones.
That's just the first one I've seen. 100%.
What happens, it happens. People make mistakes.
You're typing things in. Yeah.
But the fact that it's an article that we're being called out for a typo. Must be a fucking...
But it's just anything for clicks, man. Slow week for news.
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Anything for clicks. That was something that I noticed, a trend that I've noticed over the last couple of years.
Legacy media is really struggling to garner attention itself. It seems like fewer and fewer people are listening to it.
We saw that over the last election. It seems to me like the best way that legacy media can gain traffic is to talk about independent media yeah how many times are we seeing headlines about andrew huberman or about the right wing manosphere pipeline and how it's getting people to do this or the other side like why is there not a joe rogan of the like you know whatever whatever the headline is more and more the way that legacy media is able to achieve traffic is only in reference to independent media.
Yes. So as opposed to us being downstream from them, they're now downstream from us.
And anything masculine is right wing. Anything.
You cannot be masculine. You cannot be interested in physical fitness, anything.
It's a pipeline to being right wing. Yes.
You can't like fast cars.

Nope.

You're not allowed to.

You're not even allowed to like Teslas anymore.

Misogynist. Which are the fastest cars.
Yep. Yeah, you're a misogynist.
You're probably racist. Maybe a Nazi.
I'm going to put a swastika in your car just to let everybody know. it's there was some really fucking stupid graph that someone put up of how right-wing uh social

media and new media people. That was the media matters.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is interesting. I was at the top of the list.
I was at the top of the list and I was like, I feel like the way Caitlyn Jenner must have felt like when she won woman of the year. Like it's so quick.
I got to the top of the list. I'm not even right wing.
Just because I support Trump, I support him over the rest of the fucking nonsense that was going on when you're trying to push through someone without even a primary. Here it is.
This is it. I'm number one, bitch.
It's kind of funny. They're putting Theo Vaughn in there.
Lex Friedman? Yeah. Lex Friedman, that's hilarious to put him in there.
Who else do they have in there that's ridiculous? Piers Morgan? Well, Piers Morgan is kind of light right leaning, I think. Light right.
But I think he's pretty reasonable. I think he's far more of a centrist.
Kill Tony 3.5. I still don't understand how that's a political show.
It's not, but Tony was at the White House. Flagrant 2.8.
Flagrant is not a right-wing show, you fucking idiots. They have a bunch of red dots, too, with no names on them.
You're allowed to. Shut up, Jamie.
I managed to thread the needle of avoiding this. You're going to get on there now.
They're going to put you on now. Jamie, those red ones are real.
Just shut up. No, they're real.
They're all real. There's a couple of blue ones that are real too.
Fuck the name. They're too little to get a name.
Too small. No one cares.
No one gives a name. It's hilarious.
It's very funny. What do you think of the – have you got a proposed reason for why this – is it just a judgment criteria that they're judging shows that aren't right-wing as right-wing?

Or is it genuinely that for some reason the left is struggling to make progress in independent media?

Well, they're struggling to make progress in independent media for sure.

They're trying to figure out why.

They're trying to figure out why these – what they are calling right wing. I think if you looked at all my positions, I think way more of them are left wing than right wing.
What are the left wing positions that you still hold? Well, the big one is having some sort of a social safety net. I was on welfare when I was a kid.
My family was on food stamps. We were fucking poor as shit.

And I remember that helping us a lot.

We had food where I don't know what we would be doing if we did.

I mean, we were in a bad place.

And there's social safety nets for people. My family got out of that.

And my stepfather and my mother wound up doing well.

They did really great.

And they got out of debt and bought a house and great job and the whole deal. But when I was a little boy, we were fucked.
And I think social safety nets are very important for people. It's very important for society.
If you care about people, you care about the whole society. You don't want people starving when there's ways to develop government programs to make sure people have food.
And I think that's this idea of pull them up by their bootstraps is horseshit. Some people don't have boots.
They don't have straps. They don't have nothing.
They're fucked. They're fucked from the moment they were born.
They were born into a bad family environment in a bad neighborhood and crime and gangs and drugs. And it's not even playing field.
Where are you at with healthcare? I think healthcare 100% should be socially funded. I think that Medicare and Medicaid, having programs where people who are hurt can get an operation and it's not going to bankrupt them for the rest of their life is another thing that I think society should be a part of our agreement to take care of each other as a community, that we chip in money for what people would think of as socialist positions.
And I always bring up the fire department because the fire department is one of the best examples that everybody sort of agrees. It's a socialist sort of thing.
You give your tax dollars, the tax dollar supports the fire department, the fire department fairly puts out fires for everybody. They don't not put out your fire if you don't have any money.
It's not like the fires don't. It's such a good example.
But when you compare that to the way that medical access is done, at least this country but i also believe in competition i've said this before i'll say it again i want my doctor to be a bad motherfucker who drives a mercedes i want my doctor to like be really good i want him to be an artist you know i want to go to the guy who fixes the lakers knees you know that's the guy you want you want that guy who has a nice watch and he lives in a nice house and he kicks ass and he knows how to fucking fix people really well. He's the best at it.
And you go to him and you get an operation and you're fucking golden. That's what you want.
You want competition because competition inspires excellence. Being rewarded for your hard work is a giant incentive for people to get amazing at things.
And you need that. You

need that too. But there's also a lot of very good doctors who would be very happy to do something

that helps the overall greater good of the community. Just like you have really good

criminal defense attorneys that are assigned to you if you're getting unjustly tried and you want a really good one that can help you. There's state-appointed attorneys that are just good people that want to help people.
Bill Murray was talking about his daughter. His daughter does that.
There's room for that with the amount of money that we spend on so many things that we all agree are fucked. And maybe some of that could be freed up with some of this USAID money that they're pulling.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with giving people healthcare. Like, if you know anybody that's been injured and was bankrupt, because they didn't have insurance, and then they had to get some crazy operation, and now they have this enormous debt, and and they wind up going bankrupt or they're getting chased down for the money for the rest of their life it's horrible it's the number one cause of bankruptcy in america yeah medical debt i mean coming from the uk where we've got the nhs it feels fucking barbaric it really does feel barbaric i remember i went to new orleans and i was getting this great ghost tour on an evening time.
It's like fun tourist shit to do in New Orleans.

I do those.

And the guide was so good.

My mother was a Wiccan.

And I don't know if that was true, but the tale was lovely.

Anyway, and he was telling me I've got a chipped wisdom tooth.

And my girlfriend got into a car wreck the other day.

And he basically said, he was explaining to me about how you can get bankrupted by this stuff. He's like, if you get hit by a car and you don't have insurance, you better fucking walk it off.
Because if you don't, that could be the end of essentially the beginning of the end of your life. And that really, I mean, that was six, seven years ago now.
And it's still like, that was the most haunting thing about the fucking ghost tour, him telling me about the medical debt. And then I think the reaction to the UnitedHealth CEO killing as well, for me, somebody who didn't fully understand how many of the claims are denied.
I think that there was an increase by about 30% in denial of claims over only the most recent period. And I just thought guy shoots person, typically the guy that shoots them is in the wrong.

And the reaction on the internet just, I wasn't ready for it. And it really sort of taught me this undercurrent of dissatisfaction that almost everybody in America has with the healthcare system.
Yeah, I think it's a quiet epidemic. I think there's been a lot of people massively affected by it, and they're just steaming, just sitting there seething, just angry.
Waiting for some righteous person to come in and do retribution. But then you see the fucking revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical drug corporations where these people leave, and then all of a sudden they have these amazing jobs at pharmaceutical drug companies, and're making millions of dollars.
Like how is that legal? How is this whole thing legal? Like when you realize that doctors are incentivized to medicate people, they're financially incentivized to give people certain medications, whether it's vaccines. They get bonuses if they vaccinate more than 60 percent of their clients and they lose those bonuses if people don't get vaccinated.
There's like a lot of creepy shit that's involved in medicine. The FDA ban on compounded Ozempic started yesterday.
Oh, it's a ban. So you have to get it from the big companies.
Correct. Brigham taught me about this.
I didn't understand how it works. If there's a shortage of a drug, compounding pharmacies are kind of allowed to just bypass patents in some way.
It's like you can produce it and you can make it cheaper and more widely available because the supply chain is fucked or something like that. And yesterday – That would be a good thing for society.
Well, to make more drugs more widely available for cheaper. If it's good – if it's a very important pharmaceutical drug that can save people's lives.
Of course. Imagine not letting compound pharmacies make it for people that can't get it.
Yeah, or can't afford it or don't have the insurance for it. So yeah, I mean, that came into effect.
I think tizepatide got popped yesterday and then partway through April, semaglutide is going to go as well. Yeah, that's all just eliminating competition, right? Well, we need to think, you know, all of the people that are using these drugs, that are losing weight with them, whatever.
We need to think about who the real sort of people suffering from this situation are, who are the stock owners of telehealth companies. If you own HIMSS or whatever, the stock's declined by a lot.
But, dude, I've been thinking so much about Ozempic recently. And I think the introduction of Ozempic proves how much of a scam the body positivity movement was all along.
You look at the Golden Globes and all of the women that were supporting their bigger sisters. As soon as there was an easy route to being able to become a skeleton.
They look like this. Look like this guy here.
They all get those sucked in cheeks and the eye sockets suck in. It looks really creepy.
It just shows how flimsy your principles are, that it was easier for you to say, I can't win this particular game, therefore the game is rigged. If you can't't get what you want you have to teach yourself to want what you can get and then proclaim to everybody else that they should get it too yes and uh yeah the golden globes you just got these fucking skeleton motherfuckers walking around and um yeah i mean they women of hollywood are now facing the same dilemma that dudes who go to the gym have had for decades.
Because it's pointless losing weight naturally. Why would you lose weight naturally? Because everybody's going to accuse you of having used Ozempic in any case.
Same thing as a dude. If you gain weight as a guy and you get jacked, really jacked, if you really discipline yourself, you know, multiple years.
Progressive overload, time under tension, hitting your protein goals, getting enough sleep. What your friends and the people of the internet will say is, yeah, dude, easy if you take TrendBalone.
And it's the exact same. So what is the incentive for anybody to lose weight naturally? Now, apart from I have some concerns about the drugs and the side effects and so on and so forth.
Socially, there is no incentive for you to lose weight naturally. Remember when Adele lost all that weight? Uh-huh.
I think I'm mad at her. In the before times.
She did it in the before times, dude. Right.
She did it hard. Yeah.
She did it the fucking, yeah, exactly. The hard way.
Yeah, exactly. Extreme difficulty.
Yeah. But yeah, now.
Now she's hot. Do you remember when she did that Jamaica thing? She came out and she had all of her hair done like this.
Yeah. But yeah, there's this odd like Pascal's wager that you have to make where you think i can either lose weight normally or without assistance it's going to be more difficult and people are going to accuse me of using ozempic in any case or i can just take it and it'll be easier and they'll accuse me of it nothing changes yeah i'm in favor of ozempic for people that are morbidly obese I think anything that can get you on the path.
And I think if you can combine that, if you can say, okay, this is what I'm doing. So I'm going to do this.
And then I'm going to start an exercise program. And then you wind up losing 30, 40 pounds.
You feel better. You look better.
If you can continue this exercise program, you've at least put a healthy thing in your life along with Ozempic. I think that's critical.
Because also that can mitigate some of the negative effects of one of the things that we're seeing is that people are losing a lot of muscle mass and a lot of bone mass. As much as 30% of the weight that people are losing is muscle and bone.
And that, I think, could probably be mitigated with regular strength training. You know, you're only hearing about this from people that aren't strength training.
Do not have a fitness regime. Right, right.
But which is the majority of these people that need this drug in the first place. That's how they got fat in the first place.
Right, right. So Johan Hari did a really great book on this.
You had Johan on a bunch of times. He wrote this book called Magic Pill.
And he's got just a really nice takeaway. He says, if you're under BMI of 30 and you're trying to lose weight, go fuck yourself.
If you're between 30 and 35, there's probably a value judgment you need to make. And if you're over 35 BMI, the cost benefit analysis seems to sort of work in your favor.
Yeah, people are losing more muscle and bone mass from using Ozempic than you would typically if you were not using that. But I think that that's just largely a selection criteria for the sort of people that are using Ozempic to help them lose weight, that they're so heavily calorie restricted that they don't need to have a fitness program.
They don't have to really change their diet. I learned this.
Johan taught me this thing. It's super interesting.
Gastric band surgery, after people have that, the suicide risk is pretty high. And sometimes it's because of these surgeons that leave the gauze in or, you know, like leave a scalpel or like a fucking cigar end in.
There's complications that can happen physically. But the other thing that happens is these people used food as their coping mechanism

for how they would feel better.

Right.

And their ability to eat and their appetite has gone away,

but their psychological issues have not.

And they don't have a coping mechanism anymore.

They've no longer got this outlet.

Right.

And then there's the issue also,

you're not going to feel as good

because your body's not absorbing nutrients correctly.

You're missing some of your stomach.

It's like your stomach fills up quicker because they removed part of it. Like that can't be good just for overall metabolic health.
Like you've diminished your body's ability to break down food. That just can't be good.
And there's other ways to do it. There's other ways to do it.
It's like there's a gambling term that you got to get better the same way you got sick so like say if you and i were playing a pool and we're playing for a hundred dollars a game okay and you're up five games you're up 500 bucks and i say next game for 500 bucks and you go no you got to get better the same way you got sick oh that's interesting you can't just win one game and now you're even. And they're like, come on, what are you, pussy? Are you scared? Like, no, that's not how this works.
You lost one at a time. You're not getting it all back.
You went down a dark road and you missed a lot of shots and now you're fucked. And I'm not going to let you off the hook with one easy thing.
I might do that if it's like, okay, you put up 1,000 and I'll put up three hundred we'll see that you stack it in my yeah if you reflect in the odds well financially at the moment you got a jacket in my favor while I'm willing to make a risk yeah yeah this episode is brought to you by my friends at black rifle coffee that's all I drink folks if you see me drinking coffee in the studio, it's Black Rifle Coffee. It's because my friend Evan Hafer, who owns the company, I love them to death, and they make the best coffee in the world.
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It's a, it's a strange, I think another thing with Ozempic, I have this theory that I think thin people are more prejudiced against people that use Ozempic than fat people are. So typically you would say, stay with me.
I think you're right. So you would have imagined, and this did happen, some areas of the body positivity movement said that it was denying their right to exist, that it was like erasure, you know, that you're losing your bigger brothers and sisters, I don't know.
But they're not actually threatened in the same way as in weight people are. So I'm aware that losing weight through a Zempic is not the same as getting in shape, especially if you don't do the health and fitness regime, if you don't do the resistance exercise, you end up gone, skinny fat, you know, jowls, big cheeks, all that stuff.
But the signal of being in shape, let's just take that as being in shape, right? Like a normal BMI. The signal of being in shape is usually a reliable indicator of what you've done to have to get that.
Disciplined, reliable, able to do hard things, self-motivated. Consistency.
Consistent, stick to a routine, conscientious, industrious, all of these things. So you look at somebody who's in shape and you think, I can infer from your body a lot of things about who you are beyond just your body.
I actually think that this is one of the huge benefits that most people don't realize about getting in shape if they want to attract a partner or whatever. Sure, the body looks great when you take the clothes off, but what does it signal about your personality, about your underlying values and what you do? Now, the problem with the introduction of easier routes to being in shape is that it's completely derogated the signal.
The signal is now no longer reliable. Right.
Because previously the signal said, I've had to jump through all of these different hoops. Well, now, how do you know if they've jumped through all of those hoops or if they're just shooting a Zempic once a week? Right.
And I think that this explains why a lot of people who are in shape have a real visceral reaction. Now, sure, lots of people are concerned about the drugs.
Fen-Fen was this thing in the 90s that fucked people up. It was speed.
Yeah. I mean, it's a good way to lose weight.
I knew a girl who was on it. She was a very pretty girl that was a little heavy and then got on the fen-fen and just wanted to talk to everybody.
Couldn't stop talking and got real thin. I was like, this is crazy.
And then she developed a heart problem. Yeah.
She kept for the rest of her life, I believe. I don't know her anymore, but I ran into her a couple of years later and she was telling me she has a heart problem.
There's been no free lunch in weight loss ever yet. No.
And I think that people are looking at the GLP-1s and thinking, where's the side effect? When's it coming? What's it going to do? Well, there's tons of side effects. It depends upon the person because obviously people are very different biologically.
Everyone has a different tolerance to alcohol. People have different tolerances to foods.
And you're going to have different tolerances to medications medications and I have good friends that have had horrible side effects from Ozempic they tried it they got on it terrible pancreatitis yeah I got a buddy mine was in he was in bed for two weeks he was really sick and I know several other people that just feel terrible when they take it and they had to get off of it it really fucking with them. And then I know other people that have taken it.
Like a buddy of mine that works at the UFC, we ran into him the other day. I'm like, dude, you look fucking great.
And he's like, yeah, I got on an Olympic. Fuck it.
I just went for it. I said, hey, man.
And he had a whole plan. He's going to get down to a certain weight, and then he's going to taper off.
Transition. But he looked great.
He looked great. You seen Alex Jones? Yeah, but Alex is not on anything.
I know. He's not on his epic at all.
He works with my friend Sean. On it? Yeah.
I've been watching him train. I've been watching him train on a Tuesday.
Not watching him train. He trains when I train.
I'm not following Alex Jones around. Likely story.
Getting after it. I know that's exactly what someone from the deep state would say.
Do you know him? Did you see him there? I spied him over the far side. You never had a conversation with him? I once saw him when I did Tim Pool's show in the RV outside of the Infowars car park.
Oh, yeah, I did that. Yeah, it was the same week.
That was the first week I was ever in Austin. It was three and a bit years ago.
I remember that live stream. That stream that was fun alex is a lovely person he really is he's working really hard in the gym if he just had that one thing that he didn't talk about that's it it's that one thing everything else has been mostly right about you know what i should have said alex jones is like the fucking patient zero for if you lose weight by going to the gym and working out and changing your diet people are just going to to say it was a Zen pick.
No, people think he's a totally different person. They think they've replaced Alex Jones with someone else.
Is this what, did David Icke have a pop at Alex Jones recently? Did he? Who did David Icke get in trouble with, Jamie? Was that, I feel like there was some, it was somebody else in that sort of a world. But yeah, I mean, if the reptile people, like it does, it gets a bit reptile-y when you get down to the lower body fat percentages.
David, I saw something, he got upset that I've never had him on the show. And it's just the reptile stuff.
It's just the shape shifter stuff. I would still have him on.
I think fascinating just to try to pick some of those ideas apart or listen to them. Even if you don't believe in the ideas, what's interesting is how does somebody arrive at them? That's what's fascinating to me.
When I do my show, I speak to someone and I'm like, I want to understand the psychology of how you have arrived at this particular position. Well, imagine if it's real.
I mean, if shapeshifters were real, if there really are evil reptilian aliens and they've infiltrated our society and they've been pulling the strings forever and only a couple people knew how ridiculous would that idea be how ridiculous it would be so ridiculous but is an alien shapeshifter rep you know reptile person is that any weirder than the most recent theory that our entire universe is taking place inside of a black hole that's in another universe yeah there's recent calculations that are leading these i guess it would be astrophysicists like who would who'd be studying this to believe if you see if you can find it jam? It's the most bizarre Headline because you're like what the fuck are you saying? Like the whole universe is inside of a black hole new NASA data hints We could be living inside a black hole great Now is that isn't that weirder than reptile people? Because reptile people those are two choices reptile people's not that weird right like octopi have the ability to completely transform their appearance and instantaneously adapt to an environment why wouldn't we assume to some super advanced species from another planet that would be we would be horrified if we saw their real face they just transform and look like the queen of england yeah and go sideways like that yeah fuck uh do you know what a boltzman brain is have you ever heard of this no okay so um in an infinite universe infinite there is only let's say the size of your brain it's like whatever 20 centimeters cubed or something maybe 30 centimeters cubed inside that space there's only so many ways that you can put matter together so that it creates anything. There's a limited number of ways that matter can come together with different elements, different structures, different everything like that.
So Boltzmann brain suggests that across an infinite universe, there will be a brain, the exact same as yours, the exact structure as yours, that comes into existence for a moment and then goes away.

And the reason that you could be experiencing the world that you are now, all of your memories, your past, your history, the person that you think you are, is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just comes into existence and then goes. Ludwig Boltzmann.
Why do you come into existence and then go away? Why don't you just exist somewhere else? You could exist somewhere else, but this brain appears just spontaneously because in an infinite universe, there is only so many different ways that you can piece matter together. Right.
And it means that if you, it's the monkey's typewriter thing. It's the exact same as that, but for the way that matter is constructed.
It's basically like a brain in a vat idea, but using infinite physics to kind of explain it. The way it was explained to me is that if the universe is truly infinite, not only is there another version of you somewhere, but there is another version of you that did the exact same thing you have done every step of the way.
Every time you sneezed, every hesitation before you spoke your mind,

every time you almost went into traffic when you didn't realize their light was still red,

all of those things have happened in the exact same order an infinite number of times. And

every possible conceivable variation. That you wore red instead of blue.

Yep. That you turned left instead of right.
Yep. Went trans instead of straight.
All of it. All of it.
That you live in a totalitarian environment, that you live in a utopia, that the Germans won the war. Yeah, all that.
Everything. Everything that could possibly be different would be different in every possible scenario scenario that's what infinite means it means it's so vast like the craziest one to me was the concept that inside every galaxy in the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole and that supermassive black hole is approximately one-half of 1% of the mass the entire galaxy if you go into that supermassive black hole, so there's hundreds of billions of galaxies, right? Inside that supermassive black hole is an entirely another universe filled with all sorts of different galaxies that have supermassive black holes in them.
You go into one of those, another universe, filled. Supermassive black holes, another universe, universe filled supermassive black holes another universe

filled all supermassive black holes each one another universe it's just a winzip file all the way why is that weirder than the universe is infinite why is that weirder i mean just the weirdness of what it is is so fucking insane the idea that it's infinite or that there's infinite multiverses and infinite versions of these things inside black holes and in all sorts of ways that we haven't even really figured out yet. That's not that much weirder than what's real.
What's real is insane. What's real is that the whole thing was smaller than the head of a pen.
And for no reason it expanded instantaneously and became the universe that you see in the sky today okay okay what what the fuck are you saying like we kind of had a great line about that that science requires of you but one miracle the big bang it's a bad it's a miracle it's it's what is that what is it if it's not that? I mean, it's a thing of science. Yes.
Okay. So if you can study all of the matter and you study all of the forces and all the energy and all the reasons why matter coalesces or matter expands, yes, you could probably, given enough time and enough quantum computing power power figure out what's causing everything to compress down smaller than the head of a pin and then explode but it's still crazy it's it's even if you can you had some scientific explanation for it it's fucking insane i got into super voids so there's oh yeah the buettas super void yeah so areas of the universe that have big absences of matter way more than there should be and the the uh buettas super void is the biggest one i think a ton 6118 or something is one of the biggest stars or one of the biggest black holes and then this buettetta's super void is...
Because you would expect homogeneity. Yeah.
Across the universe. Things would be distributed pretty evenly.
No. So what's this big hole? Here, Jamie, can you try and find a...
Boots, Buetta's super void thing? I love the videos that show you the size of Earth and the size of our sun and the size of other suns. You realize just how fucking insignificant you are.
You get to suns that are as big as our galaxy. What the fuck? Yeah.
What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know if there's suns that big, but there's definitely suns as big as our solar system. Well, looking at the night sky gives you a really wonderful piece of perspective.
It reminds you just how puny and insignificant you are i think that's a giant

problem with our society is that light pollution keeps us from seeing that all the time and the mysterious hole in the universe that's billions of times larger than the milky way so go one left a list of voids yeah that one just big holes yeah so you should not have it should be more evenly distributed.

And yeah, the buettas void

this huge lack. Yeah.
In the middle of, it's so cool. Imagine you take a left turn in a spaceship and you fuck up.
Not here. Not the Buetta's super void.
Not again. God damn it.
You can't land for 100 million years. Yeah.
had matthew mcconaughey on the show toward the back end of last year and we talked about interstellar's 10th year anniversary that show is still that that movie is still my favorite movie of all time it's an amazing movie i just saw it again like a couple weeks ago me too it was incredible it's so good it's so weird such a weird movie nolan's a fucking king. He's a wizard.
Everything that he does. Yep.
What's the new one? What's his new movie? The Odyssey, I think. Oh, yeah.
What is The Odyssey? Like the Homer. Oh, God, really? I don't know that story either, so I'm kind of...
Yeah, I don't either. Part of me knows that I should have read it, and part of me is glad that I didn't, so I get to...
I don't know how it finishes.

I don't know how it ends.

Yeah.

I think I probably read it in high school,

but I don't remember it at all.

This is all we got, I think,

is this picture of Matt Damon in this outfit.

Oh, he's going to kill it.

There are already complaints

that it's not historically accurate.

Why, because of Matt Damon?

No, because that's not what the armor

would have looked like, apparently.

He wouldn't have been able to see his face, apparently.

Oh, really? Yeah, but not if you make a movie. Makes for a shit movie, though.
Yeah, exactly. Do you know what I mean? They're complaining already.
I'm just a liar. Thank you.
Yeah, you can't always be historically accurate, I guess. Yeah, but that's all they got so far.
Cast and- Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson. Nice.
Absolutely stacked. John Bernthal.
Did you see Matt Damon do Schultz's trailer? Yes, I did. Yeah.
So fucking good. I have to say, man, that Schultz's most recent special is one of the best things.
I got to shout out Andrew Schultz. That was one of the best things that I've seen in so long.
I thought it was fucking phenomenal. It made me cry when I saw it live here in Austin.
Twice. I cried twice.
Wow. And then I saw it again before I had him on the show the other week.
I was like, in the back of an Uber, and like trying to not let the taxi driver see that I'm welling up. He's talking about, his wife says something to him where she says, the thing is, honey, you don't have problems.
We have problems. I was like, oh, it's just just so lovely and him talking about his experience trying to get pregnant and all of that stuff uh caused me to go and get uh get sperm count done i'm not trying to get anybody pregnant not the moment but uh how old are you 37 do you have a not a number where you'd like to start breeding breeding within the next few years i Do you have a gal? Yeah, at the moment.
Yeah, I do. How long have you been with this gal? Six months.
Do you ever go on a trip with her? Yeah. Yeah, you've got to go on a long trip with them.
Well, I think six months might be a little bit early just yet. No, if you want to find out what's up, you've got to go on a trip.
Oh, you mean to work out compatibility? Yeah, you've got to see how they deal with travel, how they deal with stress, how they deal with restaurant. Can they keep up their act when you're with them 24 hours a day for weeks at a time? It was when I actually did do a week-long trip in Jamaica and had to go from Montego Bay to Kingston twice to get my visa renewed.
Now, traveling through Jamaican traffic with somebody will really tell you an awful lot. So yeah, you're talking about like a Navy seal hell week of trying to throw difficult shit in that.
So that worked. You just need to see what people are like when they're with you all the time.
Because people put on a show. They put on a show.
You're a handsome guy. You're successful.
They want to impress you. They want to pretend there's something that you would love would love and then maybe they have ideas of morphing you and changing you over time you know you like you get a car i think it's pretty good but i like to update the engine i do some shit to the tires maybe change the way the interior looks you start changing it and then all of a sudden chris is wearing different clothes what's going on chris gotta be careful and put these glasses on that's why it happened um but yeah the i decided to go and get a sperm count thing done you know a varica seal is no okay I do this is something that I think every single guy needs to know about so it's basically when you go through puberty the way that the veins sort of form that blow heat off from your balls they can form in a way where they just don't get rid of the heat that efficiently.
They don't cool your balls good. Not enough.
And it's in 15% of men, so it's super, super common, but 50% of men that go to urologists have got this. And I go in and I've had these balls my entire life.
I've had these balls, thank you. They're not transplants.
I've had these balls since puberty and I found out at the age of 36, oh, you've got a medium varicocele. So the mad thing about this is, you'll know this, if you take testosterone, it plummets your sperm count.
So typically testosterone and sperm kind of work against each other in that kind of a direction. This is the one thing where if you get it fixed, both go up.
So the mean change in testosterone is 180 points. How do they fix it? They just, it's surgery.
It's a small surgery where they do an incision in your groin and they just fix the vasculature. Balls and surgery are two things that I don't like together.
I like both of them. I don't think they should be.
Never the twain she'll'll meet yeah ball surgery is scary do you know that if you get your uh you can get a dick transplant if like you lose your dick but you cannot get ball transplants you know why no because you will carry the dna of the original person so say if i die and you get my balls you will have my dna you will have my kids so why can can't I have your balls? Well, you could if I gave you permission, maybe. But it's unethical.
Why don't we swap one ball each? It's like tossing a coin. See whose kids make it.
And then we do a DNA test. Lefty was the one that came out that day.
God damn it, all my kids are Chris's. What the fuck? You'd come out speaking British.
That would be fun if we both, like, if you had an elective surgery to swap balls with a good buddy. Like, I so much i want to swap a ball with you yep we both just don't know which one it's gonna be today no it's like because i had a gay couple that were friends

uh that lived down the street from me and they had a kid with a surrogate and they shot their

jizz into a cup and mixed it up so they didn't know who's who's gonna be the one who has the kid

yeah two men one cup they had to do it twice too because the first time the lady kept the kid

Thank you. So they didn't know who's going to be the one who has the kid.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Two men, one cup. They had to do it twice, too, because the first time the lady kept the kid.
They paid her. They did the whole thing.
At the end of it, she decided she wanted to keep the baby. Dude, the ethics of surrogacy are really interesting.
It's weird. It's a weird thing.
You're hiring someone to have your baby for you, and then wealthy people are doing it so they don't get their cooch stretched out? That was the Kardashian approach, right? Allegedly, that's why she did it. Well, maybe she just didn't want to carry babies anymore.
She had a couple of them the normal way. But it's like so much of what the child experiences in the womb, it like leads to this, I would imagine, this bonding thing with the woman.
The baby's inside of you. You remember feeling the baby inside of you grows inside of you.
Then it comes out of you and you raise it and it breastfeeds. It's like this bond is I understand surrogacy.
If someone can't get pregnant, if this is the only way you can have kids, I'm not saying don't do it, but I'm saying it's fucking strange because this other person is whatever anxiety they have, fear, their cortisol levels, if they have domestic abuse in their house, like all that information is being transferred to the child. Pregnancy doesn't just make a kid.
It also makes a mother. Yeah.
And it's dangerous. I'm so confused.
I mean, test you babies.

What happens if we can just create artificial wombs?

You know, something that's weird.

I know that people don't get, they don't choose to be born, but somebody chooses whether or not these two sets of DNA are going to come together.

If you've just got sperm donor after sperm donor and egg donor after egg donor and artificial wombs, it gets to the stage where people kind of aren't choosing who's coming into reality that much anymore. Well, that is definitely the future.
I mean, look at plummeting sperm counts. Look at rising miscarriage rates.
Look at the problems that people are having with microplastics and the disruption of the endocrine system and pesticides and herbicides and all these different ubiquitous chemicals that are affecting people's sperm counts and fertility. It's a real factor and it's plummeting.
If you look at human beings from the last 60, 70 years and you look at males in America where their count used to be and where it is now, it's rapidly decreasing. There's a lot of factors, sedentary lifestyle, processed foods, but there's also environmental factors that seem to be altering the actual way a child develops in the womb.
And this is Dr. Shanna Swan's work.
Countdown. Yeah, which is an incredible book, but it's just an incredible fact that the plastics that we use from microwave foods and water bottles and all that stuff is literally changing the development of children.
It's changing the size of their testicles, the size of their penises. Anogenital distance.
Yeah, yeah. The taint shrinks.
It's really crazy stuff. And it replicates what happens in mammals when they do these studies with rats and hamsters.
And same things happen. A third of all children globally are going to be obese by 2050.
Jesus. That's the current trajectory.
And 1 billion people worldwide are obese. So the number one form of malnutrition globally is obesity, not starvation.
There's twice as many people that are obese than are starving. That's crazy.
If that's not a comment on problems of abundance, as opposed to problems of scarcity. Yeah, it's not even abundance, though.
It's the food is so calorie rich and filled with shit you know that you just you just you get so fat so quick like if you're eating nothing but junk food and drinking nothing but soda as i sit here with a large diet coke which i usually don't drink but i do occasionally um that is like a diet coke at least doesn't have the calories but if you're having a large coke like that like if you have a coke like this what is this a liter this is probably a liter 750 maybe early yeah it's a liter so how much sugar is in one liter of coca-cola let's find that out but there's nothing in that one right which is why it's the diet yeah it's Just brain cancer. Donald Rumsfeld approved brain cancer.

94.7 grams of sugar. That is so much sugar.
94.7 grams. And people polish these things off every day.
Someone's polishing off a two liter of Mountain Dew listening to this as we speak. So that's probably double that.
So that's hundreds, hundreds of grams of sugar. The big gulps.
The average American is fatter than the average American pig now. It's true.
It's true. Average American man, 28% body fat.
Average American woman, 40% body fat. Average American pig, 15 to 25% body fat.
Oh my God. Yep.
I would have thought it would be higher than 28%. I think we're doing pretty good.
For guys? Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I guess it's offset by like Brian Johnson and all of the Olympic people that are just- Shredding folks. Super shredded.
Yeah, exactly. And then there was that other thing about you talking about kids, that some huge percentage of 18 to 24 year olds couldn't join the military.
Yeah, like 70% because of mental health or obesity, or drug use or something. And half of them had two or more of these excuses for why you couldn't do it.
And I think if you track over time, the amount of military service that people have had, so much less. Yeah, it's so much less.
And I wonder how many of the issues that we're seeing, even women being attracted to guys, I think that what you want to do as a guy is try and signal, again, the same as going to the gym, reliable, orderly, conscientious, I can be on time, I can do hard things. This is one of the proposed explanations for the baby boom was that a lot of men that did come back from war was signaling their eligibility signaling how reliable they could be and it made it easier for women to be attracted in that way that makes sense i mean imagine a woman you're you're going to get pregnant and so you're going to be you could work for a little while but towards the end you're not gonna be able to after the trial, it's going to be very difficult to work.
So you're reliant on this other person that, like, how well do you know this person? Did you do that 10-day vacation in Jamaica with that guy? Did you drive from Montego Bay to Kingston twice in bad traffic? Do you know what happens when he makes mistakes? Does he blame other people or does he apologize? Like, who is he? You know, because all that shit's's gonna come up when you get four hours sleep because the baby's crying and and then you know maybe he doesn't like his job anymore he wants to quit and you're like you can't quit motherfucker you have to feed us you have to take care of a family now you're not gonna just quit what are you talking about you don't like your job show up And I can't imagine relying on another person like that. I mean, this is why women are so picky.
Like, when you see that 80% of the women are attracted to 20% of the men, and that's what that is. What did you expect? What did you expect? It's hard to have your shit together.
It's hard to be kicking ass in this fucking complicated, bizarre world that we live in. It's hard.
So for a woman, of course, they're going to grab, what about personality? Yeah, you're a fucking lazy bitch. That's part of your personality.
Part of the reason why you're not successful at 40 years of age has to be you. Has to be.
Some of it has to be. I mean, it could be a fucking avalanche of bad luck, one thing after the other.
But I would like to see that you're making progress towards a better direction. But if you're stuck in this mindset of, you know, the world fucks me over, it's like never going to, no one's going to want to be with you.

No one's going to want to have children with you.

No one's going to be willing to rely on you to support a family.

Like you have to get your shit together.

And you have to also be attractive, which is just dumb luck.

Like you have the dumb luck of genetics.

You got a good face.

Ooh, you know, you got a good body.

A lot of that's genetics too.

You know, like what they like and what they don't like is mostly about breeding. It's mostly about is this person reliable to breed with.
It's interesting to think about the – you mentioned earlier on about going to the gym is right wing and liking fast cars is right wing and all the rest of it. The number of liberal women that are struggling, I think, to find an eligible partner is going up because they just can't find a guy that will hold the door open for them, that will treat them like a lady, that will try and be the protector, provider, procreator thing.
You go, you're talking about a conservative. You're talking about somebody who's more traditional in that way.
And I get worried. You know, I sort of talk a lot about this stuff on the show, and I get worried about not helping men to improve in this sort of zero sum view of empathy, that if you give some attention to men, and the way that they're struggling, that it takes it away from some other more deserving group.
So a lot of the time, if someone's falling behind, 50 years ago, Title IX gets introduced, right, for women. It's not enough women in higher education.
It's not enough women expediting them through socioeconomic status. 50 years later, they've blown the fucking roof off the glass ceiling.
It doesn't exist. Two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030.
Women earn way more than men do in their 20s, way more. And now, how are you, it's going to be difficult for you to find an eligible partner as you begin to climb up your own socioeconomic ladder as you get higher and higher up.
You look across and there are fewer and fewer men over there. And what you think is, okay, well, typically, if a group is falling behind in society, we don't tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
We spend billions of money in taxpayer-funded charities and think tanks to try and work out what's going on and to try and bring them along for the ride. That's not happening with men because vestigially for so long, men had it so good.
And now it's – I don't know. It feels like twisting the knife in some sort of karmic retribution in a way like um this is penance that you're paying but a lot of guys you you can look at the number of ceos and sure guys that outperform on the top end yep but that's not necessarily due to privilege it's because putting yourself in that position to do what you need to do to get yourself to the position of being a founder, being a CEO, running a successful company is so fucking insane that most women would just choose to not go and do that.
You're talking about outliers. Evolutionary psychology says that men are nature's playthings, that there's more variability.
There's more male geniuses, but there's also more male retards. And it's all well and good pointing to the number of CEOs and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and all the rest of it.
That doesn't help the guy who is really struggling and has had that run of bad luck and has been really struggling trying to work on himself. And yeah, if women have a problem, a lot of the time we say, what can we do to fix society? Any other group.
But if men are struggling, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? And in some ways that's inspiring. Like guys want that sense of like, I can fucking do this.
I can do this. But it denies that the structural problems, I think the education system for young boys is really, really tough getting them to sit in a classroom still for six hours a day.
It seems like females are just better at doing that. Young girls are more effective at a sort of brain-based economy, highlighting and planning ahead of the homework that they've got to do and the assignments and stuff like that.
And you just roll that forward. Two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree.
Then I'm not saying, oh, let's rip women out of the classroom and out of the boardroom and put them back into the kitchen. Like, obviously not.
Obviously, that's not what either of us are saying. What do you think is the cause of it? Like, what do you think is the reason why more men aren't succeeding and getting college degrees and more men aren't going out and making as much money in their 20s? I think that the current environment does not necessarily lend itself to the disposition that men have got.
So they're less conscientious than women from a personality standpoint on average. That means that it's really difficult comparatively on average for you to be able to remind yourself that you need to do the sort of homework.
Men are more predisposed to addiction. They're more predisposed to using recreational drugs.
They're more predisposed to being in jail, to all of the sort of gang stuff that people get drawn into. It's just more likely for guys.
There are more routes that men can be pulled away in that sort of a manner. And on top of it, I don't think that there is a particularly inspiring vision for what men is, but you said earlier on about fitness right wing, fast cars right wing there was was this thread on Reddit, I think, in a left-leaning forum that said, people of the left, can you give me a good example of who you think a positive male role model would be? The top voted one was Aragon from Lord of the Rings.
What about Fabio? You've had to go to a fantasy land in order to be able to find somebody who's sufficiently pure.

And I think that this is one of the issues that we see on the left, which is there is no level of purity or the level of purity you need to be able to get to is so high.

It doesn't exist.

How many people have gone from left to right?

I left the left type thing like that. Quite a few.
How many people have gone from right to left? Very few. Why? Because if you have got a slightly fettered past, if you maybe said things in the past that didn't agree with where we are now, the right will welcome you with open arms.
But the left won't. Why do you think that is? I think that there is a level of puritanism on the left where they are unprepared to accept people who have had positions that they don't agree with.

There seems to be this odd purity spiral where they're constantly trying to point out people who are no longer agreeing with the ideology du jour of the modern world. What do you think? Why do you think it is? I think that's probably a factor.
I also think that corporate America, the whole structure of it with human resources and people working together, it's just like, it's not necessarily what men want. What men want, if you want men to work in the best environment

possible for men, they would work with mostly men. And they would probably be able to speak and communicate in a way that they did on Mad Men.
They'd act like men. Men like to act like men.
Most men that are involved in corporate life act like some strange character that is what a man is supposed to be, especially if you're supposed to espouse all the latest social justice, whatever the mantra is that you have to repeat. if you have to rigidly adhere to an ideology in order to fit in with your corporate environment,

you're going to do that.

And you're going to be trapped in that. And you're going to just desperately want some escape.
That's why CEOs wind up going to dominatrix and getting fucking ball gagged and kicked in the balls and shit. Like, what do you think that is? It's like they need something, something wild to escape from the mundane existence that they have in the corporate world.
That's the person that's in control all the time. So privately, I need to be out of control.
It's just not compatible for most men. Like that type of environment, a work office environment, it's not compatible.
Nobody wants to do that. What you want is the rewards of that.
You want the money. You want success.
You want status. You want all those things.
You want the corner office. But what you don't want is to work in that environment.
If you could choose to make the same kind of money doing things that you love to do, having fun, like if all these corporate CEOs could make as much money playing golf, I bet they would play golf. I don't think they really want to be doing that.
They're doing that because it's the way in order, it's the way to succeed and the way to make money. And it feels like hell.
It feels like hell. You're stuck in traffic every day.
You're stuck in the office. You're not working eight hours a day if you want to really make it.
And this is the difference. This is like the why the wage gap between men and women was such an insidious lie.
Because they were always saying women make 75 cents to every dollar a man makes. And people repeat that without understanding what it actually means.
No, it's job choices and hours worked. Those are the primary factors that lead to men earning more money than women.
It's not a man and a woman are doing the same job and someone rips off the woman by only giving her 75 cents to what the man works. If that was the case, and the woman does just- Everybody would employ women.
Yeah. You would only employ women because women, you'd pay them less.
They do a better job anyway, right, ladies? So there you go. It's nonsense.
But that thing that Obama repeated on television, I remember watching him say that going, he knows better than this. This is bullshit.
This is a bullshit statistic. But it's a heartstring statistic.
Good headline. Yeah.
It plays on what you want to believe rather than what's true. And women have to take time off for maternity leave.
They have to – if they get pregnant, it's going to significantly impact the amount of hours they're willing to work. They might not want to do the job anymore.

Once they're raising their children, if their husband's making enough money, they probably

want to quit. They want to be at home with their kids.
It's a normal thing. And then

a lot of women who are career corporate women are shamed for wanting to stay home with their

children.

Yeah. Oh, you've been conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic prostitute.
So I was talking to, was it Schultz that said this? I think it was. He's telling me on the show.
He said that his wife used to work at Google, I think. She's like super high powered, real smart lady.
And she used to bump into her old colleagues in the supermarket when they were together. And the classic question that somebody that's in the career trenches asks somebody else is, oh, so what are you doing now? You left work.
What are you doing now? And Schultz said this sentence that his wife replied with would fucking kill him. She says, oh, I'm just a mom.
He said, it's the just that really hurt. I'm just a mom.
Well, that's how you feel like you're supposed to admit that you're just a mom.

That fucking hurts, dude, to derogate the people that are literally raising the next generation. Yeah.
That's another point, actually, about sort of men falling behind. I think it seems like young boys are more negatively impacted by fatherless homes than young girls are.
So any boy that grows up in an intact, a non-intact household is more likely to end up in jail or prison than they are to complete college in the US. Any non-intact that's adopted, step-parent, single parent, any non-intact home, they're more likely to end up in jail or in prison than they are to complete college.
And the same statistic is not true for girls. And this, again, the zero sumness of the, so what do you say? Are you saying that we need to hold girls? It's like, no, you do not need to hold one group back in order to be able to raise another one up.
And we spent 50 years really pedestalizing and helping take the reins off of young girls so that socioeconomically they can look after themselves. They're no longer financial prisoners of their partner, which is a big deal.
You'd look at the divorce statistics from the past and proclaim it as some amazing cultural outgrowth. And you go, how many women stayed in those relationships because they fucking couldn't afford to leave? They had no other option to do that.
That's scary.

That's scary.

That's why women are so picky.

And they should be.

Yeah.

That's, yeah.

It's also crazy that we put value in our lives on money above everything,

including above doing a good job raising your children.

You put the money that you earn above that, and you just get daycare during the day i'll be home at six that's fine that's plenty of time to be with my kid and there's a lot of people that live their life by that and their ledger when they look at the amount of money that they've earned that's what that's the reward it's the greatest metric in the world though it's the most easy to optimize thing like i can tell you the size of the house that I live in. I can tell you how much money I own.
I can tell you what the car is like that I drive. I can't tell you how much peace I have when my head hits the pillow at night.
I can't tell you what the quality of the relationship between me and my wife or me and my kids is. I can't tell you how much time I got to spend in a hammock last week.
You know, these are the things I think that if you were able to metricate, if you were able to make it a game, people would be able to pay an awful lot more attention to it. But the money is the best game in the world.
It's literally transferred currency, exchange. You can exchange it.
I know what your wealth is compared with that guy in Japan, compared with that dude in Russia, compared with this person that's Australian. Whole world is the best game ever created.
And it's the game that so many people use to show their value. I mean, it's not just the richness of your life, the happiness that you have, the fulfilled feeling that you have when you do whatever it is that you do, where you feel like you have a sense of purpose.
No, that's not, can't quantify that. Can't measure it.
Can't put it on a scale. It's useless.
Meanwhile, it's the most important thing. The most important thing is satisfaction.
Satisfaction in your life, community, love, friendship, happiness, a sense of purpose. Like you enjoy what you do.
That's so important for life. If you are just doing something you don't want to do just for money, you live in hell.
And that's most people. Most people live in this like dull hell and they try to have fun while they're at work.
They try to, you know, have people that they talk to at work, hopefully make some good friends at work and you can enjoy your chitter chatter at the water cooler. But the reality of that life is just mostly suck.
There's a lot of problems, I think, that people that are driven face that don't get that much sympathy. So I had this idea that type A people have type B problems and type B people have type A problems.
So insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and lazy people need to learn how to work hard and be more disciplined. And most you know, most people that listen to shows like yours or mine are probably some version of type A, like a kind of walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity.
That's a great definition. It is.
It's really accurate. I think the thing that type A people realize is that if you're type A, you get very little sympathy because a outwardly successful but miserable person is way less, always appears to be in a much more preferential position than a content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy one.
Right. You know what I mean? Right, right.
So problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity like one feels like a choice and the other feels like a limitation one is like a bourgeois luxury and the other is like a systemic imposition you know i need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax feels dopaminergic and opulent and addicted and privileged i I need someone to teach me how to work harder feels noble and upward aiming. And like you're supporting the downtrodden.
Like every underdog movie in history has a training montage of some guy down on his luck that gets saved by the right woman or a Japanese dude that teaches him to wash cars or whatever it is. And through grit, grit and spit and sawdust, he sorts himself out and he fixes his life.
No movie explains how to log out of Slack at 6 PM or spend a day at the beach without feeling guilty. And so, yeah, I think in that sense, type A people may objectively have better lives, but subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.
Right. They wake up every single morning feeling as if they're already trying to repay some productivity debt.
And only if they dance through the day completely, perfectly, nail every single task, can they go to bed not feeling like a waste man. That's where they're at.
Congratulations. You might be very successful.
You also might be very miserable. You're most likely going to be miserable.
That's the cold, hard reality of most CEOs. Most really wealthy people, when you see them pull up in the yacht, they're fucking living hell.
I think when you look at people that are super outlier performers, you should probably your first emotion should not be envy. It should be pity.
You should think, what's that person? What's it like inside of that person to drive them to do what they did to themselves to put them in that position what's what's their background like what happened in their childhood what do they think about their own sense of self-worth yeah in order to how much adderall are they on the old performance enhancer yeah the testosterone for the businessman it's not just performance enhancer i think it changes the way you approach things. I think- Have you ever taken it?

No.

No?

No, I'm scared of speed.

I'm scared of anything that I think I would really like.

Yeah, you haven't done cocaine for the same reason, right?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I was very lucky when I was in high school.

I knew some people that had problems with it.

Big warning sign.

Yeah.

Well, and back then I was very driven.

I didn't even party, really. I only wanted to get good at martial arts i was so driven that i didn't want to do anything that would interfere with anything else what was it that drove you why why why this drive for so long uh there's probably a lot of factors i mean i got into it because i didn't want to get picked on because i didn't know how to fight, and I would be nervous around bullies.
I didn't know what to do. And I'm like, I don't like this feeling at all.
So I will become what everyone's afraid of. So I'll do that.
And then when I got into it, I realized that, first of all, I realized that I could get really good at things. I realized that whatever drive that I had and whatever thing about fighting, which was so scary to me, why it was so appealing to me at the same time.
And I realized that it was like a vision quest. I was on this quest to try to figure out how to harness my potential and what better way than to do something that's very difficult and very scary.
And then if you could get really good at something very difficult and very scary, you could probably master life. So you had this gateway drug through martial arts that was a proof to you that you could self-author? Yes.
Yeah, a proof that I wasn't a loser. For me, it was like that I could be successful.
I've heard you say that before about the loser thing. Where did that fear come from? Did you feel powerless as a kid at some point? Yeah, I'm sure it comes from broken home, moving around a lot, a lot of factors.
There's a lot of various factors. But it's also just the existential angst of being a young man.
They're looking for purpose. Who am I? What do I do? Am I good? Like, what gives me value? And for me, when I started doing martial arts, it was the first time that I was respected.
And not just respected. Like, I remember the first time I realized that people would gather around when I fought.
I was like, whoa, this is kind of crazy. Like they specifically want to watch me

fight. And that was a big deal to me is like that I was so good that people were gathering around.
Really it was they wanted to see something horrible. They wanted to see someone get head kicked, you know, and they knew I did that a lot.
Reliably you could kick someone in the head. I was pretty good at it.
And so that that changed me. It changed my self-reflection.
It changed who I was. I wasn't a loser.
Now I was an extreme winner and really good at it and super disciplined and driven beyond anything that I thought was possible before I'd done that. I never had that kind of focus before I got into martial arts.
But martial arts demanded that kind of focus because you can't pretend. There's no pretending you're good.
You have to be good. There's no pretending you're fast.
You have to be fast. There's no pretending to be technical.
You have to be perfect. Your technique has to be perfect because you're fighting against other trained killers.
Like you're not fighting. Your weaknesses will be revealed.
You're going to get hurt. And I saw so many people get hurt.
It doesn't matter about what you tweeted. It doesn't matter about your beliefs stepping onto the mat.
Your fucking rainbow flag that you have on your t-shirt. Nobody gives a shit.
So on that, that I think that's a very common pattern especially for young people who feel a little bit helpless in their life yeah I find a vector that makes me feel worthy yeah you know the the most common story of high performers I think is that I needed to do something to get the world to recognize me one of the problems I think as people grow up is that they internalize this belief that the only way that the world will value me is if I can continue to perform at this high level. And I think that there comes, some people can imbibe a type of insecurity in that, that if I stop doing these things, if I stop being as impressive to the world, it's going to deny me its love, that I'm going to be unwanted, unworthy.
And I think that this, talking about the high performer thing, talking about the pity of the CEO, go, how much are you running towards something that you want? And how much are you running away from something that you fear that there's not enoughness right right right

and the way i looked at it and the way i was taught was that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential and that through the incredible struggle of training and competing you will learn more about your ability to excel at anything you know this is the miyamoto musashi path. And I think that the problem with anything extreme but also fleeting, and athletic performance is fleeting.
If you're at the very best, you have a couple of decades at the very best. If you're really lucky, you have a couple of decades to define you as a competitor, but then your body will give out.
Your age will win. The beating that your body takes from all the training and all the competing, eventually you're not going to be able to perform at that level anymore and you're going to fall off.
And you see it with fighters. It's really hard with professional fighters, where their whole identity is wrapped up in being a champion.
Their whole identity is being the king of the hill. And then they're no longer the king of the hill.
And sometimes it happens very rapidly. Sometimes it happens over the course of just one or two fights.
You go from being the pound for pound best in the world to a guy who nobody thinks is going to win the title again like that.

So six months later, you're in a totally different reality.

You're in a depressed reality.

And then maybe you are physically depressed because maybe you got really hurt in your last fight.

So you're probably suffering from some brain damage.

So you've got endocrine disruption.

Your pituitary glands probably fucked.

Your cortisol levels are through the roof. Your hormone levels are all fucked up.
You might have a hard time losing weight. You know, you're tired and depressed because your levels are all fucked up and your hormones because you basically got your brains beat in six months ago.
Your capacity to fix the very problem has been taken away from you. Yeah, and you see it sometimes with one fight.
With with a fighter you see like tony ferguson is like my favorite example who was the boogeyman the light heavy the lightweight division of the ufc for years for years he was the guy who's like this unstoppable force that had bottomless cardio never stopped coming after you and was just hell-bent on destruction and beat the fuck out of everybody, beat the fuck out of everybody for years until he fought Justin Gaethje. And Justin Gaethje beat him so bad.
He was never the same again. It was never the same guy again.
He went from being a favorite in the Justin Gaethje fight. I think he was a slight favorite going into that fight to after the fight was over, he got stopped in the later rounds and never, never recovered.
Went on. You think that was a physical thing or a mental thing? Both.
More physical than mental. Because I think Tony's mental, his fortitude is unstoppable.
He's just got this mindset, but I don't think his body responded the way he looked different. I saw it on a stair machine with David Goggins, and Goggins is screaming at him to keep going.
He gets off, throws up in a bag, and gets back on the stair machine. No, he's an animal.
His mind is unstoppable. But at a certain point in time, particularly when you're being tested, right? So you're doing the USADA protocol at the time, and now it's a drug-free sport.
So there's no peptides. There's nothing that can aid you in recovery.
You can't supplement your hormones. You can't recharge your hormone development.
There's so many things that you can't do because they are, in fact, performance enhancers that would help you recover. If a guy like Tony Ferguson, Ferguson after that fight got on hormone replacement, got on testosterone, got his levels up pretty high, got to a point where he could train as hard, he probably wouldn't have had the slide that he had.
I think part of the slide is that everybody has to be natural. And when you're natural and you get beat up a few times, you're not the same person anymore.
And I've seen it many, many times. One bad beating and the guy's done.
It's a big thing in boxing. In boxing, everybody points to Melchor Taylor is one of the best examples.
Fought Julio Cesar Chavez. Chavez broke him down in the fight and then stopped him with like a couple seconds to go in the last round.

Dropped him and the referee called the fight with a couple seconds to go in the last round.

And Meldrick Taylor was never the same again.

And he did interviews after the fight and the interviews after the fight, like a couple years later,

pronounced slurring in his words, a very clear deterioration of his reflexes and his speed, very clear deterioration in his ability to take a punch and even avoid punches. His reflexes were off.
Have you ever felt any TBI stuff from your heritage of doing striking? No, not really. I'm sure it made me impulsive.
I'm sure I probably got the right amount of brain damage to succeed in life. I think so.
Because it made me not, I'm not very risk averse. I like risks.
I enjoy them. I get a thrill out of taking chances.
I'm not afraid to fail. I don't mind because I know that failure produces some of the best results.
Every time I've ever failed at anything, I've always, the humiliation and the pain of it has always forced me to work so much harder. Failure in comedy is a gigantic blessing.
If you have one good bombing, it sucks like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. But when it's over, you realize that that can happen.
You fucking tighten up your battleship. Some of the biggest growth leaps that I've seen in comics and even in fighters is a humiliating loss.
Yeah. There's a special category of lesson that I've been thinking about.
It's one that you can only learn by sort of having gone through it. And I think that bombing on stage or having a poor performance, I think that that's one of them.
So I think most of them you only learn by going through them. You learn something from watching other people's mistakes, which is why I've never done cocaine.
But maybe if I did do cocaine, I would have been sober a long time ago, and I would have had a much better understanding of the abyss. Cocaine is a performance enhancer.
Yeah, it's strange. No matter sort of how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out these things for ourselves, for some reason we insist on disregarding the mountains of warnings that we have from our elders, historical catastrophes and public scandals, and film and TV, and we think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.
It's the like, watch me do this mom mentality.

And yeah,

we decide to learn the hard lessons

the hard way

over and over again.

And unfortunately,

it always seems to be

the big things.

You know,

it's never about

how to charmingly

introduce yourself

at a cocktail party

or put up a level set of shelves.

It's never that.

It's always,

we spend most of our lives

learning firsthand

the warnings that previous generations gave us over and over again.

And then one day you're like, I'm going to throw all my money in crypto.

And then you will know about that.

But that's one of them.

One of them is money won't make you happy.

Fame isn't going to fix your self-worth.

You don't love that pretty girl.

She's just hot and difficult to get.

You will regret working too much. Worrying isn't aiding your performance.
Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. Like over and over again.
You should see your parents more. All your worries are a waste of time.
Like these, it's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. Like these are so trite.

They're such basic bitch insights

because everybody has heard them before.

But if they're so basic,

why does everyone who ends up arriving at them

talk about them as if they've just had religious revelation?

You know what I mean?

Like they have this fervor to them

about why it is so important for you to listen that we couldn't have seen this coming. How could we have seen this coming? It's like it is in every single fable and story from the rest of time.
And I think that one of the reasons this happens is if you don't have a thing, looking at somebody who has that thing, they have the solution to your problem. If you don't have money thing looking at somebody who has that thing they have the solution to your problem if you don't have money you believe that by having money you would all of your problems would be fixed if you don't have fame you believe that fame is the thing that's going to get if you don't have the goal you think that getting the goal is going to do those things yeah and it is only by getting there and looking back and going the issue that i thought would be fixed by getting the thing wasn't fixed.
Fuck, I need to look deeper. So not only do we refuse to sort of learn the lessons, if you talk about this on the internet, if you have a rich person on who says, you know what, man, I earned a couple of billion dollars and I'm still pretty miserable.
You bring some actress on, she says, you know, all of the fame and stuff like that, it really didn't fix my self-worth. The internet hates that.
It's a very contentious point to bring up. And I think that we believe our particular mental makeup would allow us to dance through this minefield.
Right? No, no, no. My unique inner landscape would be solved by this problem.

Especially men.

Watch me dance through this minefield,

avoid all of the tripwires,

do a couple of pirouettes,

and I won't kick any of them.

Yeah.

And then you kick one.

And you realize,

oh, fuck,

this worry of mine was so much more deeply rooted than the thing that's from outside but i genuinely believe that you kind of need to learn it yourself i don't think you can uh i've got naval on the show on sunday he's great he's fucking phenomenal i think that by the way the one that you did with him in 2019 is the best podcast episode of all time really that two hours yeah it's just one i've gone back maybe it's just like personally meaningful to me but But I must have listened to that, I think, more than any other CF. He's very wise.
He's awesome. Very wise person.
Although he did tell me that if he could invest more money in Clubhouse, he would have. And we were talking on the phone.
Questionable. Dude, I think this is just bad podcasting.
I don't think there's... But Clubhouse took off during the pandemic because people found themselves at home and, you know, it's kind of cool to be able to hop onto a call with a bunch of other people and you're basically sharing ideas of people you've never met before and intellectually sparring and people loved it.
But I was like, bro, when the world reopens, I did it with Tim Dillon. We did an episode once and, uh, and he was like, yeah, it goes out there and then you know no one ever has i go bullshit people are recording this right now i go it's gonna be online and he was online immediately immediately i go this is nonsense yeah it's like uh at the mothership making people put their phones in the bag but you can reopen the bag it's like that if you could reopen the bag yeah yeah but you can reopen the bag it's like i'm allowed to.
It's like, wait, everything's not. Yeah, it's a real interesting one, but he's got this quote where he says, it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them.
It's much easier for you to drive a beat-up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari. Sure.
Because you've closed that loop. That what if.
I wonder if it is the money. I wonder if it is the fame.
I wonder if it is the... But it depends on the circles you're keeping too.
Because if you're keeping circles that are valuing those items that show you've achieved milestones, there's a bunch of people. You don't have a Maybach? You don't have a this? Keeping up with the Joneses is a hell of a fucking drink.
Oh, your house is not in the best neighborhood. I was thinking about why I'm attracted to some of my friends, like why I like to spend time with some over others.
And I sort of realized this interesting dynamic that I hadn't really heard get talked about much, which is we think that we want to be charismatic. Like we think we want to step into a room.
Our stories are electric, energy, the aura, everyone's super impressed by us. I didn't actually notice that that was the sort of people that I was choosing to hang around with.
There's this story about Jenny Jerome, who was Winston Churchill's mother, and she gets to dine with William Gladstone and Benjamin Israeliraeli, the prime minister and the opponent, one night after the other. And she says, after I left the dinner with Gladstone, I left feeling like he was the smartest person in England.
And after I left the dinner with Disraeli, I felt like I was the smartest woman in England. And I think this really helps to explain why we gravitate towards certain people.
Some people feel interesting, and around some people, we feel interesting. Yeah.
And that's my favorite sort of person. I think charisma, being charismatic, being energizing, it's the sort of thing lots of people are seduced by.
They love the sound of it, but it of like developing real charisma like matthew mcconnor has sit opposite this guy and he's fucking oozing charisma but it's way easier to be interested than it is to be interesting and it gets you probably 80 90 of the way there just by caring and asking questions yeah i want to know what you think about this right that's cool joe tell me about tell me more about that And why do you think that you're built that way? Right. And it helps.
I want to know what you think about this. Right.
That's cool, Joe.

Tell me more about that.

And why do you think that you're built that way?

Right.

And it helps.

I mean, people just love to talk about themselves.

And the other thing is,

you know everything that you know.

You know barely anything that the other person knows.

Right.

And I mean, this is why our job

is largely the most selfish one that we could do.

We've, hey, smart person,

come on here and tell me about your entire life's work.

Tell the least educated person in the room about what it is that you've spent your time doing yeah and it's also it's very beneficial for the people that are listening which is another service that it provides like you get to be you like the person listening to your podcast gets to be you as you interview these spectacular people so So they get to like, oh, why did you do that? And then you say, why did you do that? And I'm like, yeah, good question. Good question.
You know what it feels like? It feels like watching a sports game sometimes. I think the best conversations, whether they're around a table or a podcast or whatever, it feels like watching a sports match and the two teams are kind of working together

to get the ball in the goal.

And you get all excited and you're like,

oh, he's going to do this.

Oh, the head kick.

Whoa, that's what I wanted.

Yeah.

And yeah, if you're ever listening to something,

I'm sure that this maybe happened to people

listening to this episode.

They go, fuck, I hope he asks him about the thing.

Hey, ask him about the thing.

Yeah.

And yeah, there's this sense

that there's a third participant,

not just Jamie, in the room.

Where's Carl?

I just realized there should be a fourth participant. Carl snores a lot.
Okay, he's a sound risk. Sometimes he gets a little loud.
And while the podcast is going on, you hear, like, nudge him. Roll him over.
Make him shut up. Yeah, I am.

It depends on who I'm talking to.

Like, if I'm talking to, like, a theoretical physicist and there's, like, some very difficult thing to grasp and you hear Carl snoring, it becomes a little bit of an issue.

If it's coming through the headphones.

He's loud.

Sleep train.

Sleep train that dog.

No, you can't.

He's gotten older.

He can handle it.

He needs CPAP.

Doggy CPAP?

Fuck. Have you seen what their faces look like, the skulls? French bulldog skulls? No.
Oh, it's horrible what they've done to them. Through selective breeding? Yeah.
Just slowly, slowly. They just shove their fucking skull.
It's all twisted where their sinuses are non-existent. Their whole face is just smushed in.
So we can't really complain about theoring well i mean we did it to them they used to be wolves yeah yeah yeah they used to be a wolf yeah i uh i told you about that man crush that i had last time that unkillable soldier guy yeah and uh it sort of sent me down a rabbit hole i fell in love with stories of crazy bastards from history so i found this other dude called amo koivonen ionen. Oh, I've heard of that guy.
The Finnish soldier. Yeah.
Yeah, so he is out on patrol with a bunch of Finnish soldiers, small group, and they come upon a Soviet force way bigger than they are. They can't fight them, so they have to flee.
As they're fleeing, they're skiing away through the snow, and the force is way bigger. Eimo is at the front.
He's trailblazing, trying to break free from this group, but he can't go fast enough. If they get caught, they're going to be captured or killed or worse.
So he needs to speed up. He doesn't know how.
He's carrying the entire patrol's supply of Pervitin. Now, Pervitin was a German miracle drug that was used to keep soldiers awake during the war.
Meth. It's otherwise known, yep, as methamphetamine.
And he decided, I mean, you might think this wasn't just any normal meth, right? This was pharmaceutical grade wartime human horsepower, right? It was the most intense. So you might think tolerating the dose could be a good idea.

There's a rumor that apparently it had melted in his pocket.

But whatever he did, he took 30 people's worth.

He took 30 soldiers' worth of meth.

The entire packet.

Just ate the entire packet.

Whoa.

Unsurprisingly, he manages to break away from the pursuing Soviets, and he leads his group away.

So they chill out on the far side once they're finally free. And they notice that Amo's behaving a little bit oddly.
And he seems to be a danger to himself and to them. So they take his ammo out of his rifle and they take his knife off him.
And they're sort of putting stuff away in the pack. They turn around and he's gone.
Like, fuck, where's Amo gone? He skis for 63 miles on his own, just skis away, doesn't really know what he's doing. He's in this sort of fever dream thing, lays down, goes to sleep, wakes up the next day, no idea where he is.
Doesn't know where his group is, doesn't know where the squadron is, doesn't know where he is. Immediately sees a Soviet soldier over the far side, raises his rifle, click, fuck, they took my ammo.
Hurls the rifle at this Soviet soldier and he explodes in a cloud of white dust.

Turns out that it wasn't a Soviet soldier.

It was a tree branch with snow on it and that he's actually hallucinating.

So he's in a full-on fever dream now.

Imagine this Soviet soldier throws the gun at him.

He explodes.

He's like, fuck, okay, I need to find my squadron.

How am I going to get back to them?

So he decides to just try and navigate around for a couple of hours and he sees him over the far side. He sees a fire and he sees his group over the far side, but way far away.
So he skis for

another two hours. Turns out that it wasn't his squadron.
It was more Soviet soldiers.

So he just skis straight through the middle of the camp. All of these guys immediately chase

after him, but there's no chat. Like he's the lebron james of meth right you're not you're not catching this guy so he goes straight through again second night finds a hut finds a wooden cabin in the middle of the the snow decides to set a fire but he doesn't set it in the fireplace sets it in the middle the middle of the wooden hut.
And throughout the night, he sort of shuffles himself further and further away. For some reason, his back's getting a little bit warm and he keeps on sort of shuffling himself further and further away.
He wakes up the next morning on the outside of the hut and it's completely burned down. So he's burned the only bit, the only structure that was going to give him any safety.
He's managed to burn it to the ground. And as he wakes up, again, sort of may have noticed that this is a recurring theme, a wolverine attacks him.
65-pound wolverine, fucking fangs, yellow eyes, attacks him. So Amo uses his knife, kills this wolverine, fight to the death, kills it.
But then he realizes, I don't have a knife because my my soldiers took it from me it was his compass which was the only thing he could use to navigate himself he'd smashed his compass to bits and then he looks down and it wasn't a wolverine it was a tree log so he smashed his compass on a tree log thinking it was a 65 pound wolverine he's still just deep deep in the hole continues to ski around he's trying to find someone trying to find any way market that he can now with no way to navigate. He's got just deep, deep in the hole.
Continues to ski around. He's trying to find someone, trying to find any way marker that he can.
Now with no way to navigate, he's got no compass, he's got no weapon. I mean, the rifle that's got no ammunition in it.
He finds a Soviet forward operating base. But you'll know this, a lot of the time when armies left these behind, they booby trapped the fuck out of them.
They boobyoby trapped everything so he walks onto the middle of the forward operating base immediately gets exploded by a landmine foot gets blown so he's laid there in the snow kind of waiting to die and one day later he's not dead so he's like well fuck it i might as well try and get into the forward operating base gets up continues to go forward opens the door to the floor no foot uh it's damaged it's severely damaged gets toward the front of the operating base opens the door there's another booby trap there that explodes him and the door like 20 yards backward he just lays there in the snow waiting to die he lays there for about five or six days waiting to die and he's melting uh snow in a little tin can thing like melting it so that he can drink a little bit of water. He's got this door on him.
He thinks, well, someone's going to find me. It's going to be the Soviets.
They're going to kill me or I'm just going to die. So he waits.
Death doesn't come. Three Finnish soldiers come upon him of all of the different nationalities of all of the different people.
Three Finnish soldiers come upon him. And he thinks, finally, for all of this time, after being confused, after getting lost, I'm going to be saved.
They say, it's okay, we can take you back. We can save you and take you back.
And the front guy of the three Finns steps on a landmine, blows himself up. And the other two are like, hey man, there's kind of a priority list here and you're at the bottom and he's at the top.
So we're going to take him back. But just hold on for another couple of days.
We'll come back and we'll save you.

They go away and he just thinks, they're not going to find me again.

They're going to forget.

They're not going to be able to come back.

Someone's going to kill me before they do or I'm going to die or whatever.

But they do.

They manage to come back.

They manage to get him and they take him back to the medical bay.

14 days was how long he'd been traveling around.

He'd moved 250 miles in this time. His resting heart rate was 200 beats per minute.
And he weighed 98 pounds. He'd survived this entire time on meth, water that he'd melted down into a tin cup, a couple of pine nut things that he'd melted to, and a siberian jay that he beat to death with his ski pole and just ate raw and he lived until he was in his 70s died in like 1989 and just lived a great life i fucking love that story dude this meth-fueled finnish maniac just like skiing through everything setting shit on fire hallucinating getting blown up twice survived it meth's a hell of a drug maybe you should have done it maybe i should try now it's amazing what was accomplished on amphetamines i mean uh norman oler's book blitzed i loved those episodes that you did with yeah incredible it's just an incredible story that they they literally went through poland in three days just methed out of their fucking minds and the most the most meth was given to the people at the very front the people that drive in the tanks they were the most cranked up because they'll drive the rest of the group forward yeah and also they have to be the most psychotic because you're you're going to be the first people to encounter resistance uh so you need to be the most risk of us yeah the least risk of us least risk of us the most psychotic because you're going to be the first people to encounter resistance.
So you need to be the most risk averse. Yeah.
The least risk averse. Least risk averse, the most maniacal and murderous.
I wonder, you know, it's kind of a debate around how much of Hitler's behavior was because of Hitler and how much was amplified, worsened by the drugs that he was on. That Theodore Morrell, that crazy kooky doctor had is injecting him with bull semen he's getting cocaine everything yeah a lot of it had to do with that it had to I mean it had to it's a factor it's a giant factor just how much of it what would have been like what would the wars have been like were there no meth I mean that's probably the first amphetamine fueled war right was world war one fueled by amphetamines did they have amphetamines back then i mean i don't know what you do to get people to go over the top to certain death like how do you i mean you motivate people by everybody else doing it i guess suppose it's sort of crowd behavior in that way well they know that meth was given to the kamikaze soldiers which makes sense I mean, you motivate people by everybody else doing it.
I suppose it's sort of crowd behavior in that way. Well, they know that meth was given to the kamikaze soldiers, which makes sense.
I mean, it's a great way to just going to fly that plane right into that boat. You're like, what? I'm in a great time.
Sure. Yeah.
No, I'm going to fly to a fucking island and hide. During World War I, militaries used cocaine and other drugs for medicinal purposes and to enhance performance.

So cocaine.

The British Army sold cocaine-containing pills under the brand name Forced March.

That is the best branding in the world.

Increased endurance, suppressed appetite.

1960 British Army Council banned the unauthorized sale of psychoactive drugs.

I wonder why they did that. They didn't want to win? You don't want to have fun? What? Are you the fucking fun police? Wow.
That's pretty crazy. Yeah.
Is it go pills? Is that what they give to fighter pilots? Yeah. They give them something.
British Army's pill number nine. What's that? Pill number nine was just a strong laxative.
This is AI. Lies.
What was in there? Specific medication used by British Army during World War I. Primary ingredient, pill number nine, was Colomel.
Mercurious chloride. A mercury-based compound.
Used to treat intestinal infections and other ailments. Oh, okay.
Just massive diarrhea pills. I don't know how that's a performance enhancer.
Yeah, I don't think it is. If your stomach, maybe just clear it out.
Feel light on your feet. I don't know.
It seems like the cocaine would be more effective to... I mean, cocaine will make you go to the bathroom as well.
For accomplishing our goals. Yeah.
You know, you said before about sort of that self-authoring thing, like taking control of my own life. My friend George has got this great question where he says, you're stuck in a third world prison and you get one phone call to ring somebody to get you out.
Who'd you ring? And that idea I love because it helps you to identify who the highest agency person is in your life. Who is it that can think on their feet, that doesn't need permission to go and do anything, that'll overcome obstacles, that is this sort of permissionless reality bender? Right.
Who would you call? I don't know, man. That's a good question.
That's a really good question. I'd have to really think about it.
Also, I don't know anybody's number. That's true.
That's a problem. Can I Instagram DM them? Is that all right? Can I log in? Actually, can you give me my phone because I've got two-factor authentication on.
This is going to be really awkward. Is that all right? I need to do that.
Yeah, I mean, I would be tempted to ring Tim Kennedy. I think he would probably be quite high up on my list.
Yeah, he would help you a lot. If I had access to my phone.
Yeah. Dirty deeds done

dirt cheap. Correct.
Yeah. I mean, it might be a bit gratuitous.
I get the sense that he would take more pleasure in getting me out than would be necessary. You know what I mean? Yeah, probably.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man.
That's got to be the worst place to be in the world. Foreign prison with no way to call somebody?

Poof.

You know, this is the criticism about these... That's got to be the worst place to be in the world, foreign prison with no way to call somebody.

You know, this is the criticism about these illegal aliens that have been shipped off to – is it El Salvador?

Is it El Salvador that they have the super prisons?

Yeah, I think that's – we spoke about this last time.

That was just as they'd been created, these football stadium-sized monstrosities. They essentially got all the gang members off the streets and locked them up and dropped crime radically, dropped violence radically.
They essentially said, enough of this. We're just going to go after all these gang members and lock them all up.
And the criticism about these deportees that were sending people over there, we were sending plane loads of people over there. What if you're in that group and you're not guilty of anything? What if you're just a guy who came over here from Mexico and you're a tattoo artist? U.S.
deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights. Yeah, there's a court ruling to halt the flights.
But here's the thing. If they are gang members, if they are Trendy Aragua or, you know, those gang members that took over.
Yeah. If that's real, then this all makes sense.
But the fear is that there's going to be certain people that are rounded up in this that are not guilty. Collateral damage.
Right. And then these poor people are going to be certain people that are rounded up in this that are not guilty collateral damage right and then these poor people are going to be trapped in this el salvador prison and no one's going to believe them that they're innocent it says it all that el salvador has got a reputation for being so good at prison and law enforcement that they're fucking importing people over there it's like oh like, oh, we need to, you said before,

if I've got a bad knee,

I want to go to the guy that looks after the Lakers.

It's like, you're the Lakers PT doc of the rehabilitation world.

It's not even rehabilitation, I suppose,

just incarceration world.

Yeah, it's just incarceration.

And there's probably a financial incentive.

We probably pay them to house these prisoners.

But the question is, are we sure?

Like, how many of these people are being accused of being gang members because maybe they tattoo gang members? You know, maybe they were caught up in a raid and maybe they are friends of gang members. Maybe there's an artist who happens to be an illegal or maybe there's someone who's working on a construction site and they get rounded up and they get shipped over there.
That's a legitimate question. When you're arresting people and prosecuting people and your goal is to arrest people and prosecute people, you do your best at that.
And the question is how many people get arrested and prosecuted that are innocent? Well, in the real world, what we know is quite a few. I mean, I do a lot of podcasts with my good friend Josh Dubin, who's spent a considerable amount of his life helping innocent people get out of jail.
That's his main thing that he does, is work with unjustly prosecuted people. And you find the levels of corruption to be horrific.
The prosecutors, DAs, the amount of corrupt judges, it's shocking. It's shocking when you lay the facts of these cases out, like the Ohio Four, these people that were in jail, proven that one of them could not have possibly been there when the crime is committed and still was in there for 30 years.
The actual guy who was the informant came out and said that he was told to say all these things, it's all lies, then was told when they were going to bring it to trial again, you will be arrested for telling lies now. You will either be arrested, you will either be arrested because you're lying now, or you'll be arrested for telling lies previously so he then he won't this is like that thing you know uh if she sinks she's not a witch and if she floats she is right right right right yeah yeah it's crazy it's crazy and then there's the game aspect of it the game aspect of it is victory right if you're a prosecutor your job is to arrest people and prosecute them and convict them.
That's your job. That's what your self-worth, who you are as a prosecutor, your reputation is based on success.
Yeah, your record, your perfect record of this many convictions. Yeah, it's the same with cops, unfortunately.
A lot of cops, their whole thing is making arrests. Making arrests.
It's a shame, isn't it? You talked about the fire service earlier on, three emergency services, fire, police, and ambulance. When the fire service turns up anywhere, I don't think that there's any issues.
I don't know how often firefighters find themselves up against a crowd that's unhappy. i guess if it was a riot of some kind perhaps but for the most part it's a hero right it's coming to save the cat stuck in a tree the house that's on fire the baby that's upstairs yeah like hooray well done for you yeah a medical service turns up somebody's really badly hurt or somebody's broken some kid yeah some kid at a sports match has broken their leg thank you so much please look after them look after them and then the police turn up and the reaction could not be more different yeah and i don't know i i understand that there's a particular type of control that cops have that sort of firefighters and emts, firefighters and EMTs are doing stuff exclusively sort of in service of others, whereas cops are doing something that sort of subtracts away.
But it must be tough. Like if you're a good cop, especially now, especially after the last few years, it must be hard because you want to feel proud about your job.
It's unbelievably hard. It's also very hard to get people that are good people to sign up for it now because they don't want that abuse.
I wonder if that's been reversed over the last few years. I mean, I bet it has in certain jurisdictions and certain areas where they've valued cops.
And, you know, this whole defund the police thing was just so wild. It was so crazy to see that people would think that that would be a good idea.
And even to espouse it publicly, to erode public confidence in law enforcement, just writ large. You notice that that's largely dropped off now? Yeah.
No one's really talking about defund... Well, it didn't work.
It had the opposite effect. Crime escalated.
And the people that lived in the communities wanted the cops back. In the areas that were the worst affected as well.
It's a luxury belief. It's something that's held by the upper classes that only impacts the lower classes.
Yeah. And it's also a thing that the political establishment will use as a tool to align you with them.
You know, people will say it like Kamala Harris in 2019 was saying, I mean, defund the police, we should defund the police, which is just crazy to say, you need to fund them more, train them better. You know, they need training the way military groups need training constantly, consistently.
And, you know, they're encountering horrific things. I mean, my friends who have been cops and, you know, and have served overseas, they'll tell you, most of them will tell you that they suffered more PTSD as cops than they have even in the military.
Yeah. Depending upon your service, depending on what you had to do.
But a lot of them, it's just like every day you're seeing some nightmarish situation. Horrific violence, domestic violence, child abuse, murdered kids.
You're seeing so much horror. And then your version of reality is based on your experiences.
Your experiences are horrific every day. Do you think you'd be able to switch off if you had a job like that? You'd be able to partition, compartmentalize? I wouldn't even ever guess that I could pull it off.
I wouldn't even guess. I don't think anybody even understands what that even means unless you've shown up and seen some guy's brains blown out all over the curb for nothing, for some stupid argument about nothing.
When you've seen some woman get shot in front of her kid by the husband, You have no idea. No one has any idea.
You don't know unless you experience it. And then you have to go home to your own children, go home to your own wife, and you're just, your brain is on fire.
You know, your soul is just in agony. We were watching a video the other day of this guy who had to shoot this guy this cop this guy was something was wrong it was clearly mentally unstable was yelling was you know telling everybody what he was going to do they tased him that didn't work then he's charging at this cop and the cop shoots him and then the cop's sobbing and shaking and his partner's telling him to breathe how to breathe and he's just probably the first person he ever had to kill it's horrible it's horrible and that's that's he succeeded he's he stopped a threat and he you know it was justified this person was trying to kill him what about pulling people over and the windows are all tinted and they won't roll down the windows? You're standing there vulnerable.
It could be a shotgun inches away from your face and you have no idea. And they've all seen all these videos where people get gunned down.
You pull people over, also in the back window explodes with machine gun fire. I mean, they live with that every day.
They live with that fear every day. And then they have to hear this rhetoric everywhere of defund the police and calling cops pigs.
And it's crazy. It's crazy.
And it ultimately destroys the fabric of our society. And, you know, there's plenty of evidence that cops have done bad things.
It's not excusing the bad cops. There's bad plumbers.
There's bad car mechanics. There's bad everything.
And there's people that shouldn't be cops. And when you see a video of someone who shouldn't be a cop and is, you know, on their last nerve and snaps at someone or overreacts at someone or brutalizes someone totally unnecessarily.
It gives you a very distorted perception of the average encounter that a person has with police officers. Because most of the interactions that people have with police officers are fine.
Most of them, the vast majority, no one gets hurt. No one goes to jail.
Most of them, you know, but you see the ones that go sideways and then you think this is what cops are doing. They're out there trying to kill people.
Well, that's one of the disadvantages, I suppose, of the way the algorithms work, that edge cases that are unbelievable and shocking are the ones that catch the most fire. Right.
And what it creates is it moves the fringe to the middle because most of what you see by design is the stuff that's the most outlandish and then it gets used as a political tool correct you mentioned about uh biden and kamala what what do you think you do if you're either of them now like trump's just running ragged flying high having all of this fun like what are they doing like what do you do when you've lost two people have lost a campaign in the space of six months. I don't know.
Tim Walsh is out there talking again. He said he could fight any Trump supporter.
Yeah, he said he'd kick their ass and they're scared of him because he could fix a truck. They're threatened by his masculinity.
I know how to fix a truck. So he said, like, do you? I bet you don't.
The lady doth protest too much. I bet you don't.
I fear. I bet if I bring a broken truck to you and a bag of tools, you're fucked.
That was kind of the redress, right? That was the attempt. It was like the symbol of masculinity on the left is going to be Tim Waltz.
It was Aragon from Lord of the Rings and Tim Waltz. Yeah, it's so crazy.
I think they're lost. I mean, they're also lost in that they can't control the narrative anymore.
I think when they had control of Twitter and they had control of all, essentially all of social media and pre-Trump, they had the reins like firmly held. They were in control of the public narrative.
If you strayed from that, you will be kicked off social media. You'll be banned from YouTube.
And for things that were factually correct, like the lab leak theory is now finally being embraced by the New York Times. The New York Times, I don't know if you saw that article the other day.
They said, we were misled. Like, bro, you misled us.
We were misled by ourselves. There was a big op-ed in the New York Times that has people up in arms because they're like, fucking duh.

Do you know where it is?

I could send it to you.

I saved it because it's so ridiculous.

It's so ridiculous.

I was like, what are you saying?

How are you saying that?

It was you guys.

It wasn't just some random people that did that.

Do you find it anywhere, Jamie? I know I saved it. Which was it called? It was the New York Times saying that we were misled.
There was a big op-ed in the New York Times. I saw people spreading.
I never saw the link. Yeah, I read it.
I read it for the first couple chapters, but it's all duh. The whole thing is just fucking duh.
God, where did I save it? I save too many things. I'm a hoarder.
Digital hoarder. I'm a digital hoarder.
Do you know why that happens? Do you know why people hoard stuff? The interesting way that their brains work. So looking around this table, you're able to discern between stuff that is useful and stuff that isn't useful.
There it is. We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.
Who are you badly misled by? Do you think you guys had a factor in that? Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, as the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, almost certainly sparked by a research mishap.
Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers. Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a lab accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks in this newspaper.
Many public health officials and prominent, by the way, not by this person, I'm not blaming this person. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory.
I wonder why they did that. I wonder if there's an email paper trail that's already been established.
There is. Insisting that a virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China.
And when a non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a great grant, lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research that if conducted with lax safety standards could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world. No fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
Yeah, they defend themselves. I mean, it's appeal to authority.
And they fucked us. And you guys were a part of it, by the way.
That newspaper was a big part of it. Big part of calling the lab leak theory racist, which was really kooky.
It's strange that everything is concretized on the internet for the rest of time. Yeah.
I mean, people can go back and try and retrograde, remove stuff that happened. But there's always Internet Archive is fantastic for this.
yeah for the rest of time. Yeah.
I mean, people can go back and try and retrograde, remove stuff that happened, but there's always Internet Archive is fantastic for this. Yeah, for the most part, you can find it if you're inspired.
So how is it that so many U-turns, regardless of what it is, regardless of which side it is, the sort of permanent state of amnesia that everybody's in, there was this WhatsApp message. You ever have one of those WhatsApp messages where it says forwarded many times at the top? And you're like, oh, this is going to be good.
Right. It's just an advert.
It's just a banner. Forwarded many times.
And it was a single squaddy, a guy in fatigues, walking down the street in London. and a screenshot, I think, of a text saying that someone had said that the army was going to be deployed on the streets of London to keep everybody in the house through martial law, that this was how intense that the lockdowns were going to get.
And it was going to happen on this particular day. It goes crazy on Facebook, crazy on WhatsApp.
Never happened. And like all of the people that shared that, that were adamant, that created all of these stories and theories around it, like no one ever actually went to go and call those people out about what it was that they'd pushed.
All of the people that were adamant, global health passports, the vaccine passport, that's going to come, that's going to happen. I mean, the unfalsifiable version of it is because we knew that it was going to happen, they weren't able to do it.
So actually, we were the righteous resistance in doing the thing. And the same with whether it's lab leak theory, whether it's Joe Biden's mental decline, no matter what it is, you can put this position out there.
It's fucking fortified on the Internet for the rest of time. And after long enough, you're like, I don't remember that.
You know, you're like fucking the most gaslighting partner that you've ever been with i'm not are you sure yeah i don't think i don't think i did say that i did i do this like fucking fugazi like switcheroo lexical brazilian jiu-jitsu yeah and i don't have to i don't have to atone for my previous sins anymore well i think in this case you have an individual journalist who wrote this story i do not know the history of this individual journalist, but what they said is accurate and important. So it's good that the New York Times has this come to Jesus moment where they lay out, hey, the conspiracy theories were all true.
That's what the title should be. The conspiracy theories were all true.
Yeah, the shot wasn't effective. Yeah, there were therapeutics that were available that were dismissed and that bad studies were created in order to make sure that people weren't taking these drugs because we needed the emergency use authorization.
And the only way you can get that is if you have no treatment. So you had to rely on one thing and that one thing was the.
And they all participated in it. How much do you think New York Times with articles like that, Bezos coming out recently and saying that there's this sort of balance thing that he's got going on at the Washington Post, Zuckerberg's recent sort of pivot with regards to fact checking on meta platforms.
How many of those do you think would have happened if there hadn't been a Trump victory in November? How much of this is blowing with the wind, do you think? Most of it's blowing with the wind. It's the society.
Society's decided we're done. You know, this was Trump getting elected.
This was Elon buying Twitter. This was, you know, and this is the blowback that you're seeing, these organized protests and vandalism on Tesla dealerships and keying people.
They're encouraging people. There's so many videos of people just smashing Teslas, carving swastikas into the side of Teslas.
Because sentry mode, these cars all have sentry mode. So you could leave your Tesla parked and it has HD video of everything that's happening all around it.
And it uploads it so you can just see who did what? Yeah. Yeah.
You can. That's why all these videos are out.
All these videos are out. Those people extracted them from their cars.
The video isn't published by the rioters. The video is published by the victims.
Exactly. Fuck.
Yeah. And there's tons of people that have been arrested for this now.
Tons of people. I don't know what...
I mean, I guess it's a way of trying to protest against some person that you don't like but it's funded that's what's crazy and it's all because what elon is doing with usaid and what he's doing with doge the department of government efficiency is finding a lot of inefficiency waste and fraud most of it he believes is waste some of it is fraud and it's a lot of there's a lot of money that's going in directions it shouldn't be going. And then there's stuff that's legal that probably shouldn't be legal, like non-government organizations doing the bidding of the government because they're funded by the government.
There's certain things the government is not allowed to do, but a non-government organization, an NGO, can do. What's an example of that? Well, regime change.
Like a lot of what this money is going to, it goes to foreign countries where we have an interest in having the people that are running that country on our side, or we don't like them and we want to fund the rebels. And so you can fund the people, you can fund them through all sorts of organizations where you hide and mask the money.
And you move it around. And you have essentially blank checks.
And you can just funnel billions of dollars all over the world with no accounting. Mike Benz is like the most prophetic person of all time, isn't he? Oh, my God.
I mean, he talked about it on this podcast before Doge and before usaid and everybody is like oh conspiracy theorists and this and that this guy so he used to work for the state department what the fuck does he know apparently he knows everything he knows all of it and he can spit it out his recall is incredible and you know that guy's got to be fucking terrified because he's out there exposing he's's essentially the guy who led Elon to the coffin where the vampire sleeps. Like this is where it is.
It must be an odd situation to be in because most of the time, the level of scrutiny that you're under and the level of security threat that's likely is kind of, it goes in line with status, fame, and that also goes in line with maybe some resources too. So as people get more likely to be a target, they're also more able to perhaps be able to protect themselves with living in a nicer house, gated community.
Security, like Elon. Yeah, having security and stuff like that.
But this is one of those weird situations where your knowledge, your particular insight makes you so uniquely vulnerable or such a heavy target, but it hasn't come with the concordant increase in status and resources that would allow you to be able to actually protect yourself. And this is, I guess, the crisis of a whistleblower.
Yes, yes. Whistleblower and investigative journalists.
Yeah. I mean, this is why Julian Assange spent so much time in jail.
I was just about to bring up Ross Ulbricht. Yes.
You guys must have tried to reach out to him. Yeah, we reached out, but he doesn't really want to talk to anybody right now, which is totally understandable.
He's got an open invitation. If he ever just says, okay, I'd like to talk, whenever.
Yeah, I'd love to sit to sit down and talk to him you know i'd love to find the real story because the the narrative and the you know the documentary the docudrama that was made about the silk road and what he did you know i'd like to know how much of that is bullshit because i think a lot of it probably was. I think they were trying to set him up for sure.

And I think there's probably some things that he was accused of that aren't accurate. I'd like to know.
Isn't it funny that we always think about conspiracy theories, all of this stuff as always being in the past. and that when something is unfolding right now,

I wonder how much stuff is being ignored by the media

but will be studied in the past. And when something is unfolding right now, I wonder how much stuff is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians.
I wonder. I wonder what would be.
That's one of my friend's favorite questions to ask. What is being ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? I certainly think that smartphone use will be one of those.
You know, there was that five deathbed regrets of the dying, I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I wish I hadn't worked so much.
I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I'd lived the life I wanted and not the life that other people had for me, blah, blah.
Yeah. I would bet everything that I'm worth that within the next couple of decades, I wish I'd spent less time on my phone.
Yeah. Would be one of those.
No doubt. 100%.
Well, your time is so valuable. And how do you have five extra hours a day? Well, look at your screen time.
It'll save five hours. We were talking about this before we got started, that you have the same number of hours that somebody did 100 years ago.
But the average amount of time that Americans spend on screens is eight hours at the moment. Is it eight? Eight.
Eight is 6.5. So people are sleeping for one and a half hours less than they spend their time on their phone.
And what are you getting out of it? Nothing tangible. It's so hard.
It's so addicting. It's designed to be addicting.
I mean, you've had Tristan Harris on here. The way, the variable schedule reward that tempts you, that keeps you there, you don't know what's going to happen.
This is so interesting. I had the guy who wrote, Stuart Russell, he wrote the original AI textbook.
It's translated into 70 languages around the world. And he taught me this really interesting thing about how the algorithms work.
So we know the job of the algorithm is to predict what you want to click on, right? So what it wants to do is get better at working out what Joe likes on his YouTube feed or on his Instagram feed or whatever. But there's actually two ways that it can become more accurate at being able to predict what you're going to click on.
The first one is to be better at providing you with things that you'll select. The second one is nudging your preferences so that you are more easy to predict.
Because if you just give something the optimizing function of cause Joe to click on a thing and stick about what like click through and watch time, if you get it to do that, it'll just find any route. It's not bounded by, and you must make sure that it's his existing preferences.
You can't change his preferences. But this is one of the reasons I think why polarization has increased, not just that edge cases get used, it pushes people further apart, they get put off into their silos, echo chambers, recursive stuff, blah, blah, blah.
I think a big part of it is just the algorithms find it easier to be able to predict you, which gives them an incentive. Now, it's not

like a conscious incentive, but it gives you this incentive to be pushed out to the sides.

And there's this worry about, I learned about this idea called knowingness. So polarization,

everyone thinks it's a big deal. And I think it is.
It's a big problem. But knowingness is like

an uncurious intellectual insulation. So people believe that they know the answer to the question before the question has even been asked.
I know what the outcome is. I know what the answer is before you've even asked me the question.
And what's interesting about this epidemic of knowingness we have at the moment is if the problem is poor information, you can fix it

typically with better information. I will give you a better quality of information.
But if the problem is knowingness, you are insulated from ever updating your beliefs because no amount of existing new information is going to actually help you. There's this really cool quote that said, most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.
and I think

it explains why the culture war is so boring

culture war is largely Most people think that they are thinking when all they are doing is rearranging their prejudices.

And I think that explains why the culture war is so boring.

Culture war is largely super boring because both sides act as if the facts are already settled whilst not agreeing on the facts. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah. So how is it that we've got to the stage where people's, their prejudices just get moved around until they can come up with the outcome that they already wanted before you even ask the question about the thing that you're talking about.
That's the situation we end up with. And I think it explains why the culture wars feel so samey and nothing really ever seems to move.
Like it's not moved forward. It goes at such a snail's pace.
The news is operating at light speed and the way that we move forward with our conceptual understanding of the world is moving forward at a snail's pace. How are these two things happening together? Well, it's technological advance, right? Technological advance is so much greater and faster than biological advance.
This is the scariest thing that leads us down the road to AI, is that as we are so limited in our biological ability to evolve, biological evolution takes so long, cultural evolution takes so long, whereas technological evolution is almost instantaneous. And we are being overrun by this thing that's captivated our attention.
I was talking about this the other day. I was like, imagine if there was a drug that made you stare at your hand for six hours a day.
He'd be like, keep me the fuck away from that drug. But that's what your phone's doing.
Mostly you're getting nothing. Occasionally you get a funny meme.
You know if I looked at the amount of time that I spend online on a given day and how much of it is really fascinating to me. Well, every now and then you get a story like that story about the whole universe might be inside of a black hole.
And then I'm on a rabbit hole. So there's this interesting insight about that.
There's a few things you'll get. But I kind of feel like you will get those if you're offline just by other people being online they'll send it to you like you you're almost better off you don't need to be the one doing the first pass scouring exactly you you're you're your resources are better utilized by not doing that did you see that it was a guy who removed people's phones from their hands the photographer who went around i think it was maybe New York City, and he took photos of people and then CGI'd the phones out.
You know, you're talking about, imagine if there was this thing and it made you stare at your hand. He actually did it.
So it shows just how absurd it is. You know, you've got an entire train carriage on the subway on the underground.
And everyone's staring at their hand. And it's just people staring down at their hands.
Like this. And it needs that to sort of throw the absurdity into it.

But then on the flip side,

if you don't live with your parents,

you're in a different city,

you work a job that you're not that enamored by,

maybe your health's good,

maybe it's not so good,

you're a little bit worried about stuff,

you're kind of bored a lot of the time,

you need to be sedated.

Yeah.

Oh, there we go.

Oh, wow.

Oh, those people just sitting there staring.

Oh, that's so crazy. Jamie, go back up to that one of the kid

wow

it wasn't that long this was 2015

in 2012 I started trying to take pictures

of people in public looking at their phones

and it wasn't that common then

well that's like when social media

kicked off in the beginning

no one was on it

it's like most people weren't even on Twitter

they're like why would I be on that

and you know people were using it to promote

Thank you. That's like when social media kicked off.
In the beginning, no one was on it. You'd see it.
It's like most people weren't even on Twitter.

They're like, why would I be on that?

And, you know, people were using it to promote things, and then they started using it to elevate their profile, and then people became influencers.

And once people became influencers, and once people, like a regular person, get a couple of million followers, then all of a sudden you get sponsors, and that's your job now?

Notoriety, respect.

Yeah, and fame.

I remember when I was living in LA.A., it was right around the time that a lot of these – God, what was it back then? What was the thing that was like – it wasn't TikTok. Vine, yes.
Yeah, it was Vine. Vine influencers were the first.
And they were famous and they were famous so they'd go to restaurants like that's blah blah blah like who's that like oh he's got 35 million vine subscribers like what it was bizarre because you seen just regular people that would do antics or cause scenes or do something to get attention and they developed large followings wasn't isn't it the number one job that primary school gets one is to be a youtuber or an influencer yeah well they all watch them they all watch people eat food and open up toys and it's like very weird it's very weird stuff because no one would have ever predicted that that would be something would captivate people's attention on a television. There was no unboxing shows on television.
But yet, unboxing shows on the internet are huge. People get sucked into the most mundane things.
Someone opening a package, oh, look at this, here's the new phone. Unboxing, in some ways, I actually think is quite satisfying.
I quite like watching the people that have got his new MacBook M4 thing and it's shot all nice. MKBHD.
Yeah, he does a great job. Watching him do his stuff is really great.
But he also does a comprehensive analysis of the tech. It's not just, here's me playing with a new MacBook.
No, he's doing a review of state of the art. Where is technology currently? And what's the best version? I think when it comes to desiring a life, looking at, okay, what is it that I want? You need to be very, very careful about what the process is in order to get the outcome that you want.
Because if you want the outcome, but you're not prepared to live the life needed to get it, you're just asking for disappointment. Yeah.
Well said. My friend talks about Call of Duty versus war.
And he talks, you know, you think about this is what going on holiday to a place is. And this is what having to live there is like.
You can go to somewhere and go, it was lovely for a week. We were in the Congo.
Yeah, it was so nice. But you go, what's it like if you can't leave? It's literally the difference between going camping or being homeless, right? One is an imposition and the other one is a choice.
And I think that more young kids need to realize what the reality of being an influencer is like. It's not just going to the Seychelles and uploading a selfie or getting, I don't know what they do, like Play-Doh, fucking jelly, new video games.
That's not what it's like. Look at the Twitch streamers.
streamers look at most of the twitch streamers they have got they are like the fucking grunts of the content creation they are factories of content eight hours a day five days a week just straight just fucking stream of consciousness someone put something in the chat and you go well let's watch this thing let's watch that thing it's like is, it's not, if you do not want the life that you need to get in order to get the outcome that you're looking for, you need to be very, very careful about, because the reality is war. It's not Call of Duty.
It's the same thing with being in a band. It's like, I love the idea of traveling the world and playing to these big crowds and doing all the rest.
It's like, okay, you're going to have to live in a van with four other sweaty dudes for like half a decade first. If you're lucky.
And that's if you've managed to break through. You're going to have to spend so long, a decade learning to play guitar.
You're going to have to write songs that never see the day of light. You're going to have to do all of this stuff.
And you have no idea if it's going to work. there's this um i think about the gap from where people are in a place that they don't want to be until they get to a place that they do and i think of it like a lonely chapter so everybody that has got from a place where they don't want to be to one where they are there's a point where they they're so different that they can't resonate with their old set of friends right but they're not yet sufficiently developed that they've created their new set of friends and there's this temptation to go back to the old patterns the old ways of thinking and this i did this live show uh in london last year my first big headline show at the eventim apollo in lond pretty cool.
And this idea, I think, was one that really resonated with a lot of people because everybody's trying to grow and there is an incentive for you to stay in the same place because not that many people grow. Most people don't change.
They make little changes. You know, they'll cut their hair or they'll lose five pounds or, you know, they'll switch from one company to another.
But how many people do you know that have lost 50 pounds or moved to a different country or have genuinely changed the way that they see the world? It's pretty rare. It's not that common.
And we are such mimetic creatures. We're so shaped by the people around us that we can't help but be tempted.
You know, you're going to have to you want to go from where you are to where you want to be you're gonna have to do something that makes you more different more weird more easy to be mocked especially if you come from a country like the uk where i'm from being different is not particularly celebrated in that way it's the sort of thing that's quite easily there's a big culture of piss taking and if you start what are you talking to people on the internet for it weird. Like that's, that's stupid.
That's not going to work. Why are you going to do that? So if you don't have that level of enthusiasm, there is no support around you to tell you that the thing that you're trying to do, the taking up the martial art, why are you, why are you training this Taekwondo bullshit? Like, you know, fucking six nights a week.
Why are you coaching all of these moms and all of these like like old guys and how to do Tai Chi or whatever? Why are you doing that? Well, because maybe I'm sort of pulled to it. And there is this temptation to go back to your old ways of thinking, go back to the road that you already know how it's going to end.
And I get the sense that this is not a bug. It is a feature.
It's a part of moving from a place that you do not want to be to one that you do. And for the most part, you actually need to live through this lonely chapter.
And you look at it and you go, well, the fucking Rocky montage was 3.5 minutes. For me, it's been five years.
Where's the championship ring? You know what I mean? I haven't won the fight. Where's Apollo Creed?

None of this stuff's happened.

The thing that I wish more stories talked about,

if you watch it in the movies,

yeah, sure, there's ups and downs in the journey

of the athlete that's going to change his life around

and get the goal.

But his self-belief never wavers, right?

He makes the decision,

and it's one straight shot, typically. And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there.
His self-belief never wavers, right? He makes the decision and it's one straight shot, typically. And there'll be some challenges, but he'll get there.
His self-belief never wavers. I don't think that that's what the experience of doing personal growth is like at all.
In my experience, you're just swimming in uncertainty and fear and a lack of belief that it's even going to happen. You don't even have the promise of glory on the other side of it.
I don't even know if this is going to be worth it. And I'm fucking doing Sam Harris's waking up meditation app and I'm journaling on a morning.
I'm going to the gym. Why am I eating meat and fruit? Does this even work? Like, you know, you're doing all of this stuff, trying, scrabbling like a guy in a fucking well, trying to find a handhold.
And if you don't have a good community of people that are also doing that you're on your own yeah yeah and this is most people i think most people's experience because if most people don't change you are going to be an outlier if you're somebody who does change i think about um personal growth kind of like a a rocket ship taking off and as you take off you've got a particular velocity that you're moving at. And what you want is to find other people moving at the same velocity as you.
But the quicker that you move, the fewer people are going to be like you, right? So some people will be ahead of you and you're in this lonely chapter and then you catch up to them. And then, oh no.
And this isn't, you know, some comment on people that work on themselves are like morally better or worse than anybody else but it's just a stark sort of fact about you you talk to people and you resonate with people that are at the same level of life as you are and that kind of makes sense you have things to discuss you're encountering the same sorts of challenges whether it's in terms of your self-worth or your wealth or your relationship status or all of these things, birds of a feather, right? And one of the, I guess, difficult realizations of people who want to change their life is that if you do it well, you might have to go through a period where you let go of all of your friends. But the really bad realization is if you do it really well, you might have to do that multiple times throughout your life you find a group of people finally i've landed after oh that period where i was i was on my own and i didn't really understand oh fuck i'm still going i've over and i now need you mean i got to do it again i've got to do it again i just thought that i'd found my group and i've got to do it again this This lonely chapter thing is a, it's a big deal.
And I think that it explains why so few people make big changes because the temptation is always going to be to just go back to what's normal, go back to what I know. And it's why, you know, America for all that it's a horrible cis hetero patriarchal superstructure that's misogynistically keeping everybody down, it's an enthusiastic and sort of excitable country.
And you guys have kind of got permanent first-line cocaine energy about everything. And for me, it seems to be a real enthusing environment.
It encourages me to do things, helps me to take risks. Either that or get kicked in the head a lot.
And I just love it. I love the fact that it makes me feel confident in doing difficult things.
And, yeah, I wish that more people had that community around them. I think largely Reddit is just a website filled with people who couldn't find other people to talk about their niche in their hometown.
Like this particular Warhammer 40k version or whatever. But yeah, it's difficult.
And when you get to the stage where you're faced with some personal growth decision, you're always going to have to make this value exchange of, do I want to move forward on my own or do I want to go back with my friends? That's a good point, man. Chris, always great to talk to you, brother.
Really appreciate your insight. You're a very brilliant guy and you're always, you're fun, fun to talk to.
I appreciate you too, man. Thanks for having the courage to put all your thoughts out there and I love what you do.
I love your show. And you're awesome, man.

You're awesome too, dude.

Thanks for being here.

Every time that you bring me on, every time that we get to speak, I really appreciate it.

So thank you.

My pleasure.

All right.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.