#0038 - Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan

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On this episode, we cover the Lex Friedman podcast, episode 127, with guest Joe Rogan.

The No Rogan experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two two podcasters with 112 hours of Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan, his guests and their claims, as well as just anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media empire,

including where that empire and those influences stretch out beyond his studio and into the extended podcasting universe.

I'm Michael Marshall and I'm joined by Cecil Cicerello and today we're going to be covering Lex Friedman's September 2020 interview with Joe Rogan.

So Cecil, how did Lex introduce Joe in the show notes?

Okay, so Marsh, let's start with the title.

Joe Rogan, Fear, Love, Chaos, and the Joe Rogan Experience.

So let's just, okay, let's just revel in that title gore for a second.

The show notes describe Joe.

Joe Rogan is a comedian.

UFC commentator and the host of the Joe Rogan podcast.

Please check out our sponsors to get a discount code for this podcast.

And then he listens, he lists his various sponsors.

And he also mentions unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden as kind of an inside joke that they never casually let listeners in on.

They just, it's an inside joke that is just thrown throughout the podcast.

I guess you would need to know a lot about Joe Rogan to get it.

Yeah, maybe, because I had no idea why they kept returning to unlimited breadsticks.

I have a limit to breadsticks, to be honest.

I have a limit to breadsticks.

You're not American.

That's your problem.

So Cecil, we are the No Rogan experience.

We cover Joe Rogan.

Why are we doing this with Lex Friedman?

Well, so much of our show has been listening to the odd and problematic guests that Joe has on and pointing out things that are illogical or untrue.

And while we've actually focused on Joe on some of our episodes, oftentimes the guests take the center stage.

So, you know, if we're covering a show with Candace Owens, it's going to be a show that's mostly about Candace Owens and her thoughts.

And occasionally Joe will enter into the picture.

But this show is dedicated to getting to know Joe Rogan.

And we really haven't done much of that except for sort of peripherally.

So we decided to take a detour into the Joe Rogan expanded podcasting universe and visit another show.

So our plan is to visit other shows periodically and hope at some point we're able to follow the themes in the Joe Rogan podcastosphere without having Joe Rogan as part of it, but as someone who is sort of like the genesis of it.

And so that starts today with Lex Friedman's interview of Joe Rogan on the Lex Friedman show.

And we figure while we're here, we might as well explore Lex Friedman as an interview to interviewer too.

And that might help explain his popularity.

Yes, spoiler alert, it definitely won't explain his popularity, not in the slightest.

No.

Yeah.

But yeah, so I think going off into the expanded sort of Rogan verse, verse, I think it's useful and it's interesting because one of the things you and I talked about early on when we've come up with the idea for this show and why we wanted to focus so much on Joe Rogan is not just because he has such a huge platform and so many people listen to him, but that platform is used to introduce.

the listeners to other people.

Absolutely.

And there is therefore a risk that people kind of follow that guest to where they're from.

So Ian Carroll, we've seen Ian Carroll come on.

He's got some pretty extreme conspiracy theories.

I think he now hosts or he was hosting Candace Owens' show during her maternity leave and onward from then.

There's a risk that when Ian Carroll is being platformed and praised by Joe Rogan, listeners think, this is a guy I want to listen to, and they go off and listen to him.

The same was true with, was it Darrell Cooper, who was the

pseudo-historian, the guy who said he was a historian, but was actually very sympathetic to the Nazis.

And so the things that people say on Rogan's podcast are the kind of things they say to Rogan's audience.

But if that audience follows them to where they're from, the question is, what are they saying there?

Yeah.

What aren't they saying on Rogan?

What extra stuff they talk about?

And also, who are they platforming?

And where do you end up if you keep tugging at those strings and following those

rabbit holes?

So that's what we kind of want to do with some of these extended Joe Niverse,

extended Rogan verse.

We'll come up with the name for it somewhere.

So what did Lex and Joe talk about on this particular episode?

So after a short guitar solo, the podcast focuses mostly on Joe, Joe's views on life, death, comedy, fighting, training, hobbies, etc.

Joe's motivations, his training regimen, his family, his wealth, his advice.

And somehow, the Olive Garden comes up more than one time this episode.

I'm saying like five times it comes up.

Yeah, it is a recurring theme in this episode.

So the main event, we're going to be getting to know Joe Rogan through his own words and the questions put to him.

So that's going to be our main event this week.

But before we do that, as everybody want to say a huge thank you to our Area 51 All Access Past patrons.

Those are Mike Fish, Billionaire Oligarchs, Lucy Cortez, Slaty Bartfast, KTA, The Fallacious Trump Podcast, Stargazer 97, Scott Laird, Darlene, Tax-Free Nuclear Beer Run, Stoned Banana, Laura Williams, No, Not That One, The Other One, Definitely Not an AI Overlord, Eleven Gruthius.

Grotius the End of All Things.

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Sorry, I ran out of space entering my name.

It's Fred Argruthius.

Don't thank me.

Your show is just worth investment.

And our new patron, our newest patron, for the love of God, please put normal names.

Excellent work, for the love of God.

Please put one normal names for not just joining as a patron at this level, but also having such a deeply and intentionally ironic name as you've chosen there.

Very, very good work.

You too can subscribe at patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

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These are all things within your control.

You can do it by going to patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

Whenever you do that, you'll get early access to episodes.

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And this week, Joe is going to tell us of his love of mounting, topping, and strangling.

Kellyante.

So you can check that out at patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

But now it's time for our main event.

It's time.

A huge thank you this week to this week's veteran voice of the podcast.

That was Eggman Brian Eggo announcing the main event.

If you're in the Glasgow area, by the way, be sure to check out Glasgow Skeptics in the public, which Brian runs.

He didn't even ask me to say this, but it is genuinely one of my favorite skeptical groups in the UK, if not the world.

I always have a blast whenever I give talks.

Fucking amazing.

Stephanie chats.

Genuinely amazing people up there.

Absolutely.

They made us feel so welcome when we came.

They are amazing.

Yeah, they made me feel welcome.

And so did the 20 or so anti-vaxxers who would gate crashed my talk to yell at me in the Q ⁇ A.

Absolute delight.

One of the most enjoyable skeptics nights in my life.

I feel the most.

You used to go all the way to Edinburgh for a rough crowd.

You just stayed right in Glasgow.

That's amazing.

You can find that on Odyssey or Rumble.

They filmed the whole thing.

It was filmed by the anti-vaxes.

Whole of the story.

Anyway, remember that you too can be on our show if you send us a recording of you giving us your best rendition of it's time.

You can send that to no roganpod at gmail.com.

And remember to remember to tell us exactly how you want to be credited, and we'll do that.

Okay, so Marsh, we're going to get started.

At the very beginning of this show, it's the open, and Lex, he's going to shred a little on the guitar before we start.

Do you ponder your mortality?

Are you afraid of death?

I do think about it sometimes.

I mean, it does pop into my head sometimes.

Just the fact that, I mean, I'm 53.

So if everything goes great, I have less than 50 years left.

You know, if everything goes great, like no car accidents, no injuries.

But it could happen today.

This could be your last day.

It could be.

That's kind of a stoic thing to meditate on death.

There's a there's a bunch of philosophers, Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon.

They believe that death is at the core of everything.

Wrote this book, Warm at the Core.

So does that come into play in the way you see the world?

I think having a sense of urgency is very beneficial.

And understanding that your time is limited can aid you greatly.

So yeah, we can't stress enough that wasn't a jingle.

That wasn't audio played over.

That was that was Lex playing the guitar.

And I think missing a couple of notes here and there.

And then at the end of that, his opening question is, do you contemplate mortality?

I mean, I do when you make me listen to you on the guitar, mate.

I'm not being funny.

But look,

joking aside, what is that as an opening question?

That is an incredibly self-important opening question.

That's an attempt by Lex, in my opinion, to to seem like an intellectual heavyweight, you know, talk about mortality and bring up all this philosophy stuff.

But what does he expect Joe Rogan to say in response to that?

You know, oh yeah, the philosophical writings of Ernest Becker are a big influence on my work, which is reflected in how often I get my guests to smell any salts.

Like, what is Joe meant to say to that?

Yeah, it's Joe.

It really feels, it almost feels like, it feels like a little kid saying, wow, you're really old.

You're going to die soon.

You know, like, it almost feels like that.

Or it's that I'm really smart.

I'm really smart.

Let's talk about a big topic.

What's the meaning of life?

That kind of stuff.

I don't disagree.

I think, and I think it's one of those questions, too, that like,

if you're going to ask that question,

I think following it up a little better than he does, at least try to, maybe try to couch it a little bit, but it just seems like such an out of nowhere, really deep, trying to jump into the deep end of the pool really early on.

Not great.

And we're going to see this later on, too.

This is sort of a preview of our undercard.

These are the kinds of questions that Lex will ask of his guests.

And so there's some really strange ones that come up and we'll cover that later on in the show.

The only weird thing here that I really pick out is Joe's

mention that if everything goes right at 53, he has 50 years left, which to me seems really strange because I don't think that anybody in their 50s is thinking they have 50 full years left of life.

That's a long, 100 years is a long lifetime.

That's not a usual lifetime.

And I wonder if that is sort of an insight into Joe's guess about his sort of biohack longevity experts that he has on.

I wonder if there's something to that where Joe thinks that that is a normal thing you can achieve.

We've heard multiple people on his show say, I don't think it's unusual for someone to live 150 years.

We should be able to live that long, long, et cetera, et cetera.

So I wonder if that's an insight into Joe's psyche there

that maybe we should pay more attention to these biohack people and these longevity experts.

Yeah, that's interesting, especially thinking of the timeline, because this is September 2020.

Yes.

So I don't know how many biohack experts or biohack, I'm going to use experts incredibly loosely, but people who are going on there to promote biohacking, how many of them had been on Rogan before that point?

If he's talking to Lex like, I'm 53, I need to be careful.

I need to make sure that I've got another 50 years in me, that might be the causality might run the opposite direction.

That might be why he starts talking to quite so many of those biohack bros in the kind of, I can see the horizon, and I want to keep it as far away as possible.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the next question is more on mortality.

I think knowing that this is a temporary time, that we have finite life spans, I think

there's great power in that because it motivates you.

It gets you going.

I think being an immortal, living forever, would be one of the most depressing things, particularly if everybody else was dying around you.

And I think one of the things that makes life so interesting and fascinating is that it doesn't last.

You know, that you really get a brief amount of time here.

And really, by the time you're just starting to kind of figure yourself out and who you are and how not to screw things up so bad, it's like time's up.

The ride's over.

So yeah, I agree with Joe here.

Yeah.

This is this is pretty good stuff.

You know, it's the idea that we we do have one life and that life is therefore precious because it is limited.

If it was unlimited, if there was a lot of, if we believe there was things coming after or that we could live forever that would devalue that what we have here.

And I think it does also come out of one of the things that I think is positive about some of the things we've heard you're talking about, which is this idea of kind of seizing opportunity and, you know, getting, getting on with things, not being, not having to wait for permission to do stuff not having to wait to go through kind of structures to get to to something if you've got an ambition if there's something you want to fulfill go off and do it because life is limited i think those are good messages i think they're positive messages to to uh put to help people comprehend that the the uh the value of life is in its finiteness and our chance to sort of grasp with both hands what we're what we're here for because we're not here for much longer.

We're not here for very long, really, I guess.

And I guess also the message is very useful to the demographic that I think he attracts, which is young men, right?

So a young man, this is a great message to say to a young person, which is don't squander stuff now, especially the time that you can never get back.

Don't squander it now.

Be focused, be

prepared, be ready to act.

Those types of things I think are really important to that audience too.

And I think they're very receptive to it.

So it's a useful tool for him to say, even.

I want to talk just for a second about this piece.

He says, I think being an immortal, living forever would be one of the most depressing things, particularly if everybody else was dying around you.

And I think what's so interesting about that statement is you could take it in one of two ways.

If you're religious, you could hear that and think, well,

he's right.

And if I was immortal, I would be living in heaven and no one would die, et cetera, et cetera.

Or you could look at it in a sort of humanist way and say, yeah, that seems like it would suck to live forever.

So I think you can reach two different audiences.

And that's a really interesting thing to think about when we think about Joe's potential turn towards Christianity, or at least his softening towards Christianity later on that we start to see in more recent years on his show.

Yeah, and we definitely have to dig into exactly where Joe is on the religion question in future shows.

That's something we need to be able to cover.

Yeah.

All right.

So now Joe reflects on how fragile society is because this is happening 2020.

2020 was a huge upheaval year.

Yeah.

It's stunning how fragile civility is.

It's stunning how fragile

our society really is, that something like this can come along, some unprecedented thing, unprecedented thing can come along.

And all of a sudden, everybody's out of work for six months.

And then everybody's at each other's throats.

And then politically, everyone's at each other's throats.

And then with the advent of social media and

the images that you can see, you know, with videos of police abuse and just racial tensions are at an all-time high to a point where, like, if you asked me just five or six years ago, like,

have racial problems in this country largely been alleviated, I'd probably say, yeah, it's way better than it's ever been before.

But now you could argue that it's not.

Now you could argue it's, no, it's way worse in just a small amount of time.

It's way worse than it's ever been during my lifetime

while I'm aware aware of it.

You know, obviously when I was a young boy in the 60s, they were still going through the civil rights movement.

But now

it just seems very fever-pitched.

And I think a lot of that is because of the pandemic and is because of all the heightened

just tension.

So I think this shows one of the things that's going to be a bit of a theme of what we learn about Joe here is that he's actually quite detached from social issues.

So he's saying that he honestly thinks that racism was mostly alleviated, that things like in the last five, like five, six years previously, you asked him, things have been mostly alleviated, but that the George Floyd protests moved things back again into kind of the main focus and moved things back and sort of turned the clock back a bit.

That's how he sees it.

Now other people who actually are affected by those kind of issues way more, way more than Joe is, would see it that there was always racism.

People of color have always suffered, but they suffered in ways that just weren't as visible to Joe.

So he didn't notice them.

He considered, yeah, there were civil rights issues in the 60s and stuff, but like mostly, yeah, racism is kind of over and stuff.

And it feels a little bit like if a floorboard gives out and then you can see that it's rotten, you don't ask, well, what just happened this morning to make this floorboard rotten?

It was fine this morning.

So what's happened since then?

No, it's been rotting for a while.

You just didn't see it.

I wonder, and this is not me trying to apologize for that mindset, because I realize that the mindset you're describing is a mindset many people, especially people that are white have, right?

They think that, oh, what are we talking about?

This racial stuff just sort of popped up out of nowhere.

And I think that Joe is probably, and I'm not trying to excuse it, but I am trying to understand it.

And I think perhaps he's looking back at

Obama's presidency and how there was a sort of sense of representation there that was never available before, which certainly made people think that things were getting more,

at least if they weren't 100% equal, they were on their path to be more equal in the future because we were starting to see more and more people of color in positions of power.

And that could really change the trajectory of our nation.

And so I think that maybe he's thinking about it in that sense.

And you, you hear the term he uses, which is five or six years ago, five or six years ago, is the Obama presidency.

It's before Trump.

So it might be that that's what he's thinking of.

I'm not trying to excuse it because I 100% agree with you.

I think the exact same thing.

But I wonder too, if I was even caught up in that sort of thing at that point, where, you know, even I was looking at it thinking this could be a real change for the United States instead of what we got afterwards, which was a

dial back to making America great again, which means the 1950s.

Yeah, no, I think that's fair.

I think when you were talking there before you even brought Obama up, that's exactly what I had in my head: that idea of like, what do you mean, racism?

We've had a black president now.

And it reminded me of a line from a comic character called Philomena Kunk, who you may have seen.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

She does the idiot abroad stuff or whatever.

Stuff, I forget what it's called, but it's in that kind of area.

She was written by Charlie Brooker, and one of the lines she had talking about President Obama was, he showed that a black man can be anything in America as long as it's president or shot.

And

those are the opportunities for people people of color in America.

Fucking yikes.

Okay, well, all right.

So now Joe weaves in activist movements.

He was just talking about

police brutality, civil rights.

Now he's going to talk about more modern activist movements.

Is the most disturbing for me is that I see what's going on.

I see there's a lot of losers that have hopped on this and they shove it in people's faces and it doesn't have to make sense.

Like there was a Black Lives Matter protest that stopped this woman at a restaurant.

They were surrounding her outside a restaurant.

They were forcing her to raise her fist in compliance.

This is a woman who's marched for Black Lives multiple times, Black Lives Matter multiple times.

And the people all around her doing this were all white.

It's all weird.

My friend Coach T, he's a wrestling coach.

He's also on a podcast.

My friend Brian Moses.

His take on it is that black, and he's a black guy.

He says, Black Lives Matter is a white cult.

And I'm like, when you see that picture, it's hard to argue that he's got a point.

I mean, it's clearly not all about that, but there's a lot of people that have jumped on board that are very much like cult members.

So I think this gives us a really good insight into how Joe has a filter on the world.

Because he's talking about a thing that he saw in social media, a photo.

He even says there's a photo in there that he didn't like, that he's seen a certain way.

And he's combined that with an opinion from

one of his

self-selected circle of friends.

And he says that's him seeing what's going on.

But he's not seeing what's going on.

He's seeing through a very narrow and specific lens.

That isn't reflective of the wider Black Lives Matter movement, even if those particular stories, even if the story is exactly as he was portraying it, there's a question as to why did that story come across

his radar and not, for example, all of the stories of police brutality and various other things that were genuine issues that were that the BLM movement was there to try and push back against.

So he thinks he has an idea of what's going on, but instead it's just this notion that he's got this skewed filter on the world and he doesn't know it's skewed.

And that makes it particularly difficult for him to understand how out of touch he's become.

Yeah, that's a great observation.

And I think you're right.

I think that there is.

It's something that not just he does, but I think it's something that happens with some of the guests that

he has on.

They will find some sort of thing that happens in the world that doesn't, that might not suggest anything of uh of what that entire movement is about or what that entire uh you know when it happens at a university they seem to blame the entire university even though it might just be a small segment of the population of the university who's doing something they seem to not only blame the entire university but they might blame higher education in general so they might there might be a place where someone picks out a safe space in a university and say this is a safe space and it might be a small group of a small uh university somewhere tucked away but if it makes news, it's now suddenly the biggest, the biggest story in this intellectual dark web thing.

And it's a form of confirmation bias.

It's how they do,

it's what they do as a, as a way to confirmation.

It's a way to reinforce their value, their views on the broader spectrum of things they disagree with.

Yeah,

it's a dark side of cherry-picking.

It's sometimes called nut picking, is that you're representing the entire movement by cherry-picking your way to the most extreme and

sort of misrepresented versions of it.

Yeah.

It does also show, too, that I think this is a theme that Joe doesn't like it when someone says, you're doing something wrong, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't act this way.

Joe, I think, pushes back really hard on you shouldn't, or you should act in a certain way.

Because listen to how he's talking about Black Lives Matter.

He feels personally attacked almost.

It almost sounds like he feels personally attacked by that group.

So he has to discredit them by calling them cult members.

He feels, it's almost like, um, it's almost like the reaction that you saw to Me Too, which was not all men.

It feels like Joe is almost like a not all men host where he hears something and it it it it prickles him so much that he has to explode and fight against it.

And he will call those people whatever name he can come up with that is and it often revolves around religion.

So he'll say things like it's a religious belief or they're cult members, et cetera, et cetera.

And he does this.

I've seen this happen with four or five different themes throughout his show.

Yeah, exactly.

And again, just to bear in mind that he's saying BLM must be a cult because my friend told me that and he's black.

Yeah, but if

there was somebody who was absolutely ardently a passionate supporter of BLM, they probably wouldn't be on your show, George.

They probably wouldn't be one of your friends.

They wouldn't be in that circle.

So you've already essentially pruned your potential social circle of anyone who might hold those dissenting views.

And then you point to your social circle as a way of evidencing that your views are correct.

Okay, so Lex and Joe here talk about the Spotify deal.

But I also think that I've fallen into this weird category, particularly with the Spotify deal, where,

you know, I'm one of them now.

I'm not a regular person anymore.

Now I'm like some famous rich guy.

So you go from being a regular person to a famous rich guy that's out of touch, you know, and that's a real issue whenever you're talking about the economy, about just real life problems.

It's interesting.

It kind of hurts my heart to hear people say about Elon Musk, he's just a billionaire.

Yeah.

It's an interesting statement, but I think if you just continue being you and he continue being him, people...

I think people are just voicing their worry that you become some rich guy.

I don't even know if they're doing that.

I think they're just finding the way he describes it, an attack vector.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think he's right.

I think they just can dismiss you by just saying, oh, you're just a that.

You know, you're a, you know, you're easily

definable.

Right.

But there, I mean, there's truth to that.

You, if you're not careful, you can become out of touch.

But you.

That's an interesting thing.

Like,

why haven't you become out of touch?

Like, as a human off the podcast,

you don't act like a, like you talk to somebody like me.

You don't talk like a famous person or

you don't act rich.

Like you're better than others.

There's a certain, listen, I've talked to quite a few.

You have too, but I've talked to a specially kind of group of people that are like Nobel Prize winners, let's say.

They have sometimes have an air to them that's

of arrogance.

Yeah.

And you don't.

What's that about?

So there's a lot here.

First of all, it is genuinely interesting that Joe has enough self-awareness in this moment, at the start of that clip, at least, to recognize that he could be at risk of becoming out of touch.

That he's gone from being an every guy to being a fabulously wealthy guy.

He's talking about that huge deal he got with Spotify, and now you're just another rich guy.

And so it seems like he's sort of sitting in that potential for self-awareness in that moment.

But Lex...

completely removes that self-awareness with flattery and sort of faux self-deprecating flattery of like oh you can't be out of touch because you're so sweet to people, to nobody's like me.

And also this comparison to Elon Musk as well.

I'm surprised that, you know, people like Elon Musk aren't out of touch.

You're not out of touch.

The problem is, Joe is out of touch.

He absolutely is.

He surely was out of touch earlier in this conversation when we talked about Black Lives Matter, but we also see it when he talks about his health regime and what he's got to do every day.

He talks about how easy it is to hunt for your own food rather than go to the supermarket.

Even when he talked about how he can tell what's really going on in the world by looking at his specific social media and talking to his specific circle of friends, these are all signs that he's out of touch.

And Lex's argument is, well, you can't be out of touch because you're perfectly nice to me off camera.

Well, what would he be like if he was out of touch, Lex?

How would he treat you if he was out of touch?

I don't think you have to be an arsho to people to be out of touch.

You can be perfectly nice in conversation, but have almost no awareness of what it's like to be an average person these days.

I want to remind people of how Lex got,

at least how a lot of people think Lex got famous, right?

Yeah.

Lex got a lot of publicity and a lot of people looking at him because he wrote a paper about Elon Musk's self-driving car

and said it was a good system and praised the system.

while being an adjunct professor at MIT or an assistant, not an assistant professor, that's too high.

It was, he was in, he was like a lecturer there.

So he was working, doing, I think, some post-grad work and was maybe doing some lecturing there.

And he had an MIT address and he wrote this thing and he published it without peer review and it got circulated online and Elon Musk saw it and retweeted it.

And Lex used that boost to launch his podcast, to launch himself as a media personality.

And his whole shtick,

if you look at at it, is connected to Elon Musk.

So in this clip, he is falling all over himself to tell you, it hurts my heart when people say, oh, he's just a billionaire.

He is a billionaire.

And he's not just a billionaire.

He's one of the, if not the richest person on the planet.

And he is a multi-billionaire, which most people can't even comprehend that kind of money.

Oh, yeah.

They can't even consider how much money Elon Musk has in his possession.

So

him, for him to apologize in that sense, to say, oh, well, you know, he's, he's just, you know, they say he's just a billionaire.

It's these people don't live the life you do.

Joe Rogan doesn't live the life that normal people do.

We've talked about it multiple times.

He sits in his sauna for a half an hour.

He works out for two and a half hours a day.

He listens to stoic podcasts or whatever for two and a half hours while he's lifting iron.

I don't know anybody who has that kind of time.

So Joe is living a life that's very different.

He doesn't have to do his own shopping or his own cleaning or his own taking care of things.

He doesn't have to do all the menial tasks all the rest of us humans have to do.

So Joe lives a different life.

So does Elon Musk.

To say that they're not real, real people is not trying to attack them.

It's just saying a true thing about them.

Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine Joe Rogan or Elon Musk vacuuming their living room.

I just can't imagine them getting good.

like, yeah, perfectly on the thing.

And the thing is, Lex may genuinely believe that Elon Musk isn't out of touch because Elon was very lovely to Lex.

We've had conversations, but like Elon's lovely to Lex because Lex is giving credibility and legitimacy to AI, to Elon's particular form of AI.

So, yeah, he might be lovely to you.

That doesn't mean that he's nice to people who haven't got something for him.

And then you look at that last question from Lex.

And again, we'll come to this in the undercard, but his question is essentially: how come Joe doesn't have the self-assuredness or the arrogance of a Nobel Prize winner?

Yeah.

A complete mystery.

A complete mystery.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

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Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?

I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.

Obviously, the goal is a championship.

That's...

There's no doubt in that.

And that's the goal.

We want to win a championship.

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Okay, welcome back.

Let's jump right back in.

Okay, so next clip, Joe talks about struggle.

Well, you got to know what that is, right?

Like that air of arrogance comes from drinking your own Kool-Aid.

You start believing that somehow or another, just because you're getting praise from all these people, that you really are something different.

Usually it exemplifies

there's something there where there's a lack of struggle, you know?

And I think struggle is

probably

one of the most important balancing tools that a person can have.

And for me,

I struggle mentally and I struggle physically.

I struggle mentally in that I, like we were talking about on the podcast we did previously, you and I on my podcast said, I'm not a fan of my work.

I'm not a fan of what I do.

I'm my harshest critic.

So anytime anybody says something bad about me, I'm like, listen, I said way worse about myself.

I, you know, I don't like anything I do.

I'm ruthlessly introspective and I will continue to be that way because that's the only way you could be good as a comedian.

There's no other way.

You can't just think you're awesome and just go out there.

You have to be like picking apart everything you do.

So I think this is really interesting because I would argue that given the guest selection of who makes it onto the Joe Rogan podcast, how many of them are friends and how many of them come from a specific, who aren't his friend, but come from a specific part of either the political spectrum or the sort of alternative medicine landscape or the conspiracy theory landscape.

And then also the curation of his comedy club, who gets to do shows at his comedy club, what kind of material it is.

I'd argue all of that,

that bubble that he's formed around him, is him drinking his own cooling.

I think that he has this barrier now, this bubble around him that stops penetration of any real solid criticism getting through.

And we see that when CNN criticize him for using ivermectin, and Joe takes it incredibly personally.

And he's saying, oh, they've changed my image this way.

They've lied about me this way.

They've said all sorts.

I don't think in that moment, Joe is the harshest critic of him and his stuff, even the work that he does.

I don't think he's his harshest critic.

He says he struggles all the time.

We've watched him regularly through many shows that we've covered have been from 2025 or 2024.

From the stuff that we've seen in that period and even in the years between this Lex Friedman interview and today,

I don't think ruthlessly introspective is the term that I would use for Joe's approach to his worldview and not even the approach to his own material necessarily.

So I think this is him not really having good good self-awareness, not having good self-knowledge, but having a picture of himself as the hero in his story.

Yeah.

One thing that I think is interesting when you hear people who are

someone who might have struggled when they were younger, because Joe talks a lot about he, you know, he talks about his family life wasn't good when he was a child.

He worked several jobs

before he went, he didn't go to college, but before he finally broke it into comedy and started doing, he was working multiple jobs and he was, you know, hustling a lot and doing a lot of work.

And I think sometimes people like that are really bad representations of

because what they seem to think is hard work fixes everything.

No matter what, hard work will fix everything.

And they seem to forget that making it is also,

it relies deeply on luck and privilege.

And they don't realize or count the luck and privilege that they've had in the past.

They seem to think they were the ones who sort of created their own destiny.

And I think sometimes these people are unreliable narrators of their own story because they remember all the hard things they did, but forget about all the times that they got help or had someone help them.

And I think about my own story like that, and I have to catch myself often and say, yeah, I did come from, you know, my parents had a really rough time, you know, difficult upbringing.

I wasn't, I didn't have a lot growing up.

We had to move a bunch.

We were evicted from our home, bankrupt, all that stuff growing up.

And I have to remind myself that I also had a lot of help throughout those.

I didn't just pick myself up by my bootstraps.

I had a lot of help throughout my years to push me into the places where I am to live a life now that is a lot more comfortable.

than my dad lived, right?

Than my parents lived.

And I think it's really hard.

You get caught up in your own,

you know, you smell your own scent too much and you think you're, you think you're, you've, you've risen above all this because of all the things that you've done.

And I think Joe often is an unreliable narrator, narrator when it comes to that.

And he will think of himself as a common person and he's not anymore.

You're not a common person anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I'm not saying I would argue he has,

he's certainly talented.

He's certainly charismatic.

He's made the best of the breaks that he's had.

He's worked very hard.

He's was maybe, I don't know his comedy.

Maybe he was a good comedian to begin with, but I imagine starting out, it was easier for him to get into comedy than if he was a woman at the time in comedy.

Far fewer comedians who were women at the time, far less accepted in the comedy circuit of the time, that's changed significantly.

If he was trans, that would have been a massive difference too.

So there's lots of other things that were working kind of in his favor.

But yeah, he'll look back and say, well, I got here through just hard work.

He also says here that he's able to take criticism.

But I think he's always, from everything I've seen seen of him always been incredibly defensive when it comes to something that's speaking to what he wants to be true what he believes something that could be seen as uh as an attack on his beliefs you know he's talked about it a little bit here but go right back to his moon landing denial days that i first came across joe rogan when he was on pendillette's radio show um arguing with the astronomer phil plate We may cover that in a future show, where he was explaining that he definitely believes that the moon landing was faked.

In that, he's not critical of his own views.

He's not able to take criticism of his views.

He's in massively defensive mode.

I don't think he is good at taking criticism.

I think he even mentioned it on one of the shows we covered that he says when something comes up that's kind of challenging, his first thought is to defend, is to win the argument.

He says he has to stop himself doing that.

I forget which show that came up with him.

I remember him saying it too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he's, I just don't believe, I don't buy that he is as good at taking criticism as he likes to believe that he is.

Okay, this next clip is about Joe's inner demons that are also monkeys.

There's certainly some genetic violence in me.

So you channeled it.

Yeah.

It's basically your life is a productive exploration of how to channel that.

Yes.

How to figure out how to get that monkey to sit down and calm down.

There's another person in there.

Like this is a calm, rational, kind, friendly person who just wants to laugh and have fun.

And then there's that dude who comes out out when I did Sober October.

That guy's scary.

I don't like that guy.

That guy just wants to get up in the morning and go.

You know, it's like, it's, um, I mean, when I was competing, it was necessary, but it makes me remember.

I didn't really remember what

I used to be like until that.

It's like when I'm working out seven hours a day and just so obsessed.

And, and all I was thinking about was winning.

That's all I was thinking about.

Like, if they were, if they were working out five hours a day, I wanted, I wanted them to know that I was going to work out an extra three hours and I was going to get up early and I was going to text them all.

Hey, pussies, I'm up already.

Take pictures, send selfies.

I was like, you're going to die.

I kept telling them, you're all going to die.

You try to keep up with me.

You're going to die.

You weren't fully joking.

No, I wasn't joking at all.

That's what I was fucked up about.

So this, I'd say, is what toxic masculinity looks like.

It's what it does to someone when you can't address the way that you see yourself as a man and just take on board all of these kind of poisonous messages from society, you start seeing yourself as having to out-compete everyone around you for working out and become obsessive about it.

I think that's really damaging stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, even listen to how he's talking about his own friends.

These are his friends and he's sending them messages saying, I'm better than you and you will die.

These are not things that you should be sending your friends if you aren't like, if you're just a normal person, but if you're captured by this, like you suggest, toxic masculinity, it's a that's a real easy hole to fall into.

And you guys can all soup each other up and spin each other up, basically sending this type of thing and keep on with that, that toxic shitty culture that doesn't help anybody.

It doesn't help you.

It doesn't help your friends.

It's literally the most negative thing out there.

Yeah.

And even at beds, he admits, you know, it's super fucked up.

And like, he can see at least that it's particularly bad.

But what he's telling us is that when he's not drinking, when he's not doing weed or whatever else he's taking, he becomes obsessive and aggressive and competitive.

And like, I don't know Joe, and we don't diagnose things at a distance, but this does sound like someone who needs therapy to deal with the damaging aspects of what he thinks are the expectations of him as a man.

Also.

get yourself checked for ADHD because it sounds like you're self-medicating your way and you have an ADHD spiral.

I'm not an expert in that area.

We don't diagnose from a distance, but man, it does sound that way.

It sure does.

It sure does.

Yeah.

And I think scrolling back to that toxic idea, turning working out into a competition rather than a chance to self-improve, I think is one of those really toxic traits that you see all the time.

And it's not a necessary thing.

Try to get better than yourself.

Who cares?

I couldn't care less how much Marsh can bench press.

It's about how much I bench pressed yesterday.

I don't care.

There's no competition between us.

All right.

Sad example.

Okay, let me use Tom then.

I don't care how much Tom bent from Tom yesterday.

I care about how much I did and how much I can do tomorrow.

That's the key.

Think about that.

That's a healthy way to look at yourself and look at how you can improve yourself.

Just try to think about it a little more healthy than texting your friends, you're going to die if you try to keep up with me.

That's

horror.

Okay.

Next, they talk about

taking no pain, no gain a little too far.

Scary thing: when I interacted with Goggins and what I saw in you

during that time is like this guy, like, like, this is why I've been avoiding David Goggins recently.

Is like, because he wants to meet, he wants to do, like, talk on this podcast, but he also wants to run an ultra-marathon with me.

And I felt like this is a person, if I spend any time in this realm, if I spend any time with the Joe Rogan of that Sober October, like, I might have to die to get out.

Like, there's this kind of

thing.

Yeah, there's a competitive aspect that's super unhealthy.

I mean, you saw the video that we watched earlier today of Goggins draining his knee.

That would stop me from running ever again because I would think in my head, okay, I'm going to ruin my cartilage.

I'm going to need a knee replacement.

I would start thinking, I would go down that line.

But he is perpetually in this push-it mindset.

You know, what he calls the dog in him.

You know, he's got that dog is in him all day long, and he feeds that dog, you know, and that's

who he is.

is that's one of the reasons why he's so inspirational and he's fuel for millions and millions of people yeah i mean he really is he motivates people in a way that is it's so powerful but it can be very destructive

Okay, I don't know who this person is, but this sounds incredibly bad.

Incredibly bad.

This is terrible advice to be so inspirational that you push through your knee cartilage and you start to become actively destructive.

That sounds terrible.

Like you're inspiring people to harm themselves and to sacrifice their health and their future health on the altar of supposed masculinity.

That isn't something he should be inspiring people to do and it isn't something people should be aspiring to do.

Also, just as a side note, why do all these men have different animals or personas inside of them?

It's like every single one of these guys, the psyches, are strapped by a morning breakfast radio show.

You're listening to Monkey, the dude, and the dog.

We're sitting in for General and the Bitch.

You know, it's every one of them.

It really is.

Everybody.

But Marsh, everybody has two wolves inside of them.

You've heard that before, right?

Come on.

But Gary Brecca's wolves play basketball with his giant LDL visualizations.

They do a complicated pick and roll with his cholesterol levels.

All right.

So here, this next clip, we're going to get a glimpse of Joe's thoughts on personal protection.

What about we're in Texas now?

What about guns?

Well, that's the best martial art.

No, but would you,

like, in this crazy time, should people carry guns?

It's not a bad idea to have a gun because if you need a gun, you have a gun.

And if you don't need a gun, if you're a person with self-control, you're not going to use it.

You're not going to just randomly use it, but you have something to protect you.

This is the whole idea of the Second Amendment.

The whole idea of the Second Amendment gets distorted by mass shootings or by terrible people who murder people and do terrible things.

But it's that all those things things are real, but they don't take away from the fundamental efficacy of having a firearm and defending your family or defending your life.

And there are real live situations where people have had firearms and it's protected them or their loved ones or they've stopped shooters.

There's many of these stories, but people don't like those stories because then it tends to lead to this gun culture argument, is pro-gun culture argument that people find very uncomfortable.

It's, it's human beings are messy and we're messy in so many different ways, right?

We're messy emotionally, we're messy physically, but we're also messy in what's good or bad.

What's we want things to be binary.

We want things to be right or wrong, you know, one or zero.

And they're not, but, but there is crime in the world.

There is violence in the world.

And you're better off knowing how to fight and you're better off knowing how to defend yourself and you're better off having a gun.

So yeah, I don't think this is a good take at all.

I mean, we're obviously recording this in September.

We're not long out from a very, very public incident where somebody was on the wrong end of a gun in a very significant way for American politics.

Like, I don't think the proliferation of guns is a very good idea.

And sure, Joe can say you're better off having a gun, you're better off defending yourself.

You can cherry-pick your hero stories.

He said there are stories out there where people have used a gun to defend themselves.

You can find those, you can cherry-pick for those.

But to do that, you're gonna have to wade through the vast majority of cases where a gun has only made things more dangerous,

has made a situation that wasn't dangerous, made that dangerous because it's the accidental shootings and various other things like that.

There are so many people, it seems, in your country who live in a worldview where you have to be prepared to fight at any given moment.

And that's just not the rest of the world, not the world that the rest of us live in or that I recognize.

There's very few times in my life I'm thinking, I need to be prepared at any given second now to defend myself.

I've got to be able to to fight in any moment.

And I think if you do any kind of self-defense classes, anything like that, I used to do martial arts when I was younger.

Every single person who teaches anything like that always tells you in any situation, regardless of how armed anybody is, the safest move you will ever make is to try and run away.

And if you can't run away safely, you fight and you fight up until the point you have the opportunity to run away and then you run away.

All this fantasy that we see on in other parts of this episode about like, oh, we can have a chalk hold hold like this or do a takedown like that and getting into a shootout.

That's a fantasy for children.

That is not the real world, but it's the world that unfortunately too many men, it turns out, live in.

Yeah, no, you're not wrong.

I will point out that that gun violence that just happened, the political gun violence that just happened, the murdering of Charlie Kirk,

there was guns in the audience.

He had people surrounding him with guns.

They didn't help that situation at all.

They didn't stop that person.

So you always hear this, oh, you know, all you need is a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with with a gun.

Well, there was plenty of, you know, quote-unquote good guys surrounding Charlie Kirk with guns.

There were people in the audience, police officers that were there, campus patrol people, his own personal security detail.

They all had guns.

They all had firearms.

And anybody in the audience also at schools in Utah can concealed carry.

That was a law that they had.

So you could carry it at school.

So there might have even been people in the audience with guns.

None of those things

prevented what was going to happen.

So that's just a silly fantasy that so many people think of.

I also 100% disagree too.

And I'm a gun owner and have carried, concealed, carried a gun in the past.

So I've been public, concealed a gun on my person and carried it.

I've never once felt safer with that gun.

In fact, I only did it one time

because I had taken a class and I wanted to see what it felt like to carry the gun.

And it was very, I felt, I felt more vulnerable having that gun than not than just being a normal guy just walking down the street.

It's a much, I don't see what, where they get the security in this.

In fact, it made me feel 1 million percent more vulnerable carrying that gun than any other, than if I would have nothing.

It makes me feel vulnerable just to hear you tell me.

Just to hear me say it, right?

Just to hear me say it to me.

Like, I mean, I have a pistol and a concealed carry holster, and I have a concealed carry license, and I never, ever, ever, ever do it because it makes me feel really super vulnerable.

It makes me feel like someone could take that gun away from me, or I might get into a situation where I might feel compelled to use it, where instead of, like you suggest, you could just run away or get away.

You might feel more brave with that gun than you should.

And I feel like it's just a terrible, dangerous tool that we should not let people have.

We should do what the rest of the world does and take most of those guns away from people and keep like varmint guns and hunting guns, et cetera, but also strict up our gun laws so you can't just walk around with a gun or carry a gun that's loaded, et cetera, et cetera.

There should be a lot more gun laws in our country.

We should do what everyone else in the world does, but we're really weird and frontier-ish and we need to have, still have our pistols on us.

So it's a very strange world we live in.

We sort of concept teased this last episode.

This is Chris Ruffo's mention of fuck you money.

Well, this is Joe talking about fuck you money.

You mentioned fuck you money.

I feel like I have fuck you money now.

A year ago, I was at zero.

I have fuck you money now because probably my standards, my

I don't need much in this world, but because also probably because of you, but it's 300 to 400,000 people listen to every episode I do.

That's a lot.

And that result is weird.

That's a successful television show on cable.

Yeah, it's crazy.

But it's all you.

Yeah.

It's hilarious.

That's amazing.

But at this point, that also resulted in F you money in a sense that I don't,

you know, I don't need anything else in this world.

But so by way of asking, I've looked up, you've inspired me for a long time.

Do you have advice?

You've done this on the podcast side of life.

Do you have advice for somebody like for me and somebody like me

going on this journey?

Eric Weinstein is going on this journey.

Is there advice, both small and big, that you have for somebody like me?

I have advice for you.

Ask a better question.

That's advice.

Figure out what you're going to say.

It is a terrible question.

And it comes after Joe was talking about fucking money, which we will cover in the undercard, in fact.

But what is this question?

This question is: hey, I'm pretty rich now.

I've got a large audience.

What do you think?

Thumbs up, thumbs down.

Like it's

mad to me.

This feels like humble brag more than anything else.

That's a great, great.

If you wanted advice, I don't think you asked that kind of on air.

But it also does show what a market there is out there for this kind of material.

You know, in a way, in a way, you could say that Lex has been very smart to be able to tap into that market.

He got his big break when he praised Elon Musk's self-driving cars, despite experts saying they don't work very well.

Elon saw that, retweeted him, and as a result, Lex Friedman has fuck you money.

There is an economy being the little fish that cleans the food off the shark's teeth.

Oh, great.

And you could say that, like, Lex is just being smart and just following that where it will go.

You could say that.

He's made a lot of money off it.

What I will point out is there isn't as much of an economy in pointing out the problems with all of this stuff.

Cecil and I, we don't have fucking money.

We do not

subscribe on Patreon if you think this has value money.

That's that's the money we have.

Yeah.

And we would like more of it.

I'll tell you, man, you know,

when you hear and when you see these people who are

like Lex Friedman, who is clearly garnering a gigantic audience.

And you think you have you don't have any talent for this.

And you see him and you think, my goodness, how is it possible that this person is popular?

And I think that there is something to leaning into telling billionaires and normal people what they want to hear.

And I think that he has this big

audience because of the luck that he's had and the message that he has reinforces what people tune in to hear from Joe and from Lex.

And if he can just repeat those words back to people, they will listen and they will tune in every week and he'll get 400,000 downloads every single episode.

Yeah.

And, you know, part of me, part of me thinks it must, it would take an enormous amount of moral fortitude to be in the position that Lex was in and not turn into Lex Friedman.

Because if you're handed this

conveyor belt of golden eggs, you know, the goose laying the golden egg,

you'd have to make an overt decision to slay that goose and stop the golden eggs coming in.

And instead, he makes a decision to keep feeding the goose.

I'm losing this metaphor.

Keep feeding the goose whatever the goose wants to eat to keep the golden eggs coming.

Shamming foie gras or whatever and stuff down there.

I don't know.

Okay.

Now, Joe talks about the sort of guests that he cultivates.

And I'm happy to talk to anybody.

I'm just as happy to talk to you as I am to talk to Trump, as I am to probably more happy to talk to you, as I am to talk to Mike Tyson, as I am to talk to Joey Diaz.

I like talking to people.

I enjoy doing podcasts.

I enjoy talking to a variety of people.

And I schedule them based on, I want to like, I try not to get too many right-wing people in a row or too many progressive people in a row.

I don't want to get repetitive.

I try not to get too many fighters in a row.

I try to balance it out.

Not too many comedians.

Comedians are the one.

one group where I can have three, four in a row, five in a row, because that's my tribe.

You know, those are my people.

It's easy.

So, what I can say, he's been very successful at not having too many progressive people in a row.

Sure has.

Or even in a year.

Yeah.

Or any women, really, at all.

Yeah, that's also

the thing.

I wonder if this is

sort of the thing

that listeners of his show see and think

is true is that he talks to anybody

and they think that means them too.

And I wonder if this is one of those threads that Joe throws out in the world to cultivate the image that he has created to make him seem like an everyman, like he can talk to any old person and make it interesting.

And there's a lot to unpack there because, like we suggested before, we get Joe's email sometimes.

And the people who email, there is a definite streak of people who say, I'm a regular guy and you should have me on your show.

There's not just one email that we got like that.

There's many, many, many emails that are like that.

And I wonder if this is part of that myth that he's created of himself while in between

interviewing billionaire Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk and funded by a billionaire JD Pants, he might have on

Tim the truck driver or whatever.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I do.

And I think it is, it's a myth he's cultivated, but it's also a myth he's bought into.

I think Joe, well, I think Joe sees himself as being able to talk to anyone.

And I'll go further.

I think Joe Rogan could have an interesting question, an interesting conversation with just about anybody.

He just doesn't.

He likes all he, the curation of his show, like you or I could, well, maybe not you right now.

We may have burned that particular bridge, but

I think the average person could go on there.

And I think Joe is genuinely curious about people's lives.

He could shoot the shit with people.

He could get into some interesting conversation because he's listening and he's doing the dance.

I think he could do that.

He doesn't do that.

He has a very specific guest list, and that guest list has become more and more curated over time.

And I don't think the picture of himself in his head has been updated to match what his show actually is now.

And I don't think the picture in the audience's head

has been updated either.

All right, Joe.

And this clip reflects on the masculine nature of the themes in his show.

Yeah, that was the thing about men, too.

This podcast

is, my podcast is uniquely masculine.

I'm a man and I'm not, I'm also a man that doesn't have to go through some sort of a corporate filter.

I'm not going through executive producers who tell me, don't have this guest on.

Don't talk about that.

You know, we looked at focus groups and they don't seem to like when you do this.

Like there's none of that.

I just, and I, I, I, I just do it.

So if that's, so I have a whole podcast where I just talk about cars.

Yeah.

And people are like, I don't want to hear you talk about cars.

Well, good.

Congratulations.

You found what you like.

Here's good news.

There's 1,500 other ones.

Go listen to the other episodes where I don't talk about cars.

You know, you don't have to listen.

And it's not like your brand.

You just are who you are.

And that's what you do.

But it's like, it's authentically what I'm interested in.

I think.

Most of the pursuits that he talks about in the show are very masculine.

And I think being unapologetically masculine is going to win him like a real, like a lot of people who spend their lives in privilege and any move toward equality feels like oppression to them.

So they want to be reinforced in their own masculinity and listening to him is a great way for them to reinforce that masculinity.

So I think this is a great, it's a great niche that he has carved out because I think he is so unapologetically masculine.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I also think there's this.

In a way, there's nothing wrong with having unapologetically masculine pursuits.

They don't have to tip over into what we've seen him talk about, which is from a very toxic perspective.

You know, wanting to work out and talking about how much you enjoy working out is fine.

Talking about how when you're sober, you want to work out for seven hours a day and lord it over your friends and tell them that they'll die if they ever try and keep up with them.

That's not good.

So I think having something that is just a masculine space, especially as that

there is this

very real and very understandable sense that what position men have in society is under under review.

It's undergoing changes.

It's undergoing kind of

like a renewal, a sense of kind of what is the male role in society.

Because for centuries, it was very prescriptive.

It was very clear that you were the one in charge.

You had a household.

It was a very easy pathway to being a successful man.

Quite rightly, that is changing.

Quite rightly, there are more people allowed to the table.

That's exactly what should be happening.

But in doing so, there's kind of a gap as to what being a man means.

And I think something that explores the positive ways of doing that is totally, is totally legitimate and has a right to be popular.

Unfortunately, Joe is pursuing the stuff he's interested in and he doesn't have a good filter on whether that stuff is true or not, whether that stuff is accurate, whether it's dangerous or not.

That's where the real problem comes in.

If he talked about cars and the gym all the time, you and I wouldn't have a show.

Wouldn't even be doing this.

Last clip is about passion and people passionate about their interests and why that interests joe it's kind of like interest inception going on here

i i like when people are into you know i've talked about this before like things that i have no interest in making furniture but i like this pbs show where this guy makes furniture by hand yeah i love watching it

because he's so into it yeah he's exanding this and polishing that i'm not going to do that i don't give a about furniture furniture for me is function like this desk function works but i love when people are into it yeah you know and i'm happy happy that someone can make it and they do a great job, but

I'm not interested in the task or even the finished product as much as I'm interested in someone's passion for something.

The passion that they've put into this that shines through.

Again, there's nothing wrong with celebrating passion, with featuring people who have passion for what they care about.

But it is telling because he talks to other people about things he knows nothing about and he gets caught up in their passion.

And because he doesn't know anything about it, he doesn't know enough to evaluate whether anything they're saying is true, whether it's reflective of what other experts would say, whether it's safe or any of that kind of stuff.

And that's fine when he's talking about furniture.

You can only do so much damage by being a bad furniture, a passionate but bad furniture maker.

My table was made with love and has wonky legs.

That's fine.

It's going to be annoying, but it's not going to be an issue.

But he also got caught up in Suzanne Humphrey's passion for being against vaccines because tetanus will just solve itself if you leave the wound to air.

He got caught up in Darrell Cooper's passion about how maybe the Nazis weren't all bad.

And because he doesn't know anything about it,

because he's caught up in their passion, he follows them into incredibly dangerous places.

I wonder, too, if...

he mistakes passion for someone digging their heels in because they've been criticized.

And, you know, when you think about somebody like Suzanne Humphreys, who has been roundly criticized for her views, and someone like Graham Linehan is a perfect example, right?

There's a guy who's passionate about something, but he's passionate about something that he's been criticized for multiple times and has never once changed course on, even though people have given him the grace to change course many, many times.

He has pushed those people away and said, no, I'm right.

And I wonder if he's mistaking that for passion in some people.

Yeah, he mistakes stubbornness for passion and he mistakes passion for expertise.

Yeah.

And that is a terrible pipeline for getting to truth for sure.

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Would you guys consider anything less than a championship to be a failure from this year?

I wouldn't say anything is a failure, especially because we all grow every day.

Obviously, the goal is a championship.

That's there's no doubt in that, and that's the goal.

We want to win a championship.

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The WNBA playoffs are here and I've got the inside scoop on everything from key matchups and standout players to the behind-the-scenes moments you won't find anywhere else.

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For all the biggest stories in women's basketball plus exclusive interviews with the game's brightest stars.

So, to be here, I think it's one that we definitely don't take for granted, but we also know, you know, that's just one stop along the way, and we're hoping to, you know, make a run.

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Well, it's just factually inaccurate on so many different levels.

I don't understand why you wrote it like that.

Okay, so for the undercard this time, we're going to take a look at Lex and his interview style.

And we're going to start off with how Lex views the medium itself and the importance of podcasting.

And there was something in the way you communicated about the world.

Maybe there was others, but you were the one I was aware of, is you were open-minded and

like loving towards the world, especially as the podcast developed.

Like you just demonstrated and lived this kind of just kindness or maybe even like lack of jealousy in your own little profession of comedy.

It was clear that

you didn't succumb to the weaker aspects of human nature and thereby inspire people like me, who

I was naturally probably especially in like the 20s, early 20s, kind of jealous on the success of others.

And you're really the primary person that taught me to truly celebrate the success of others.

And so,

by way of question, you kind of have a role in this of making a better 2025.

You have such a big megaphone.

Is there something you think you can do on this podcast with the words, the way you talk, the things you discuss that could create a better 2025?

I think, if anything, I could help in leading by example, but

that's only going to help the people that are listening.

I don't know what else I can do in terms of like make the world a better place other than express my hopes and wishes for that and just try to be as nice as I can to people as often as I can.

So, this is a classic example of Alex question there.

It's kind of deep.

It's sort of pseudo-deep, but really it's just painfully obsequious as to how wonderful Joe is, how he's just so kind and wonderful and lovely.

And he genuinely thinks you can essentially podcast your way to a better future by using words.

Let's use words to make the future better.

And we'll do that by going on Joe Rorgan's show and talking about things smelling salts and whether the pyramids were built by an

ancient race.

But Joe says he does it.

His only interest is in modeling, being as nice as he can to people people as often as he can.

Do we think Joe in 20 of 25 spends all of his time modeling being nice to people as often as he can?

That's not what I saw.

If you see the Graeme Linehan interview, for example, perfect illustration of is he being as nice to people as he could be, or is he calling trans people perverts?

It's very much the latter.

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder when he mentions words like that, I wonder if there is a certain group of people, very specifically the intellectual dark web, who really do think that, because they're the type of people who will say something like, there's a marketplace of ideas and these ideas fight it out in this gladiatorial arena of the marketplace and whichever idea is better, whichever words win word, those words are better than the other words that were there.

I wonder if they place way too much.

emphasis and worth on the right words in the right order to fix a whole bunch of things.

And it's funny when you look at Joe now and you see how much influence he had in the last political election it's hard not to see this question in a really really cynical way when i look back on it and how he's because he is blown away that he could even possibly create anything in 2025 and then you look at 2025 and look at the guests leading up to 2025 and you see that joe had a big hand in he had his hand on the tiller of america oh yeah absolutely.

And I think your point about their kind of placing too much faith in the marketplace of ideas, I think is very, very reasonable because they like to think that the best idea is the one that will win out.

But the idea that will win out isn't the one that's the most true.

It's the one that's best suited for winning out.

It's in the evolution, in the evolutionary race of ideas, the one that's best suited to spread will win.

And that doesn't mean that it's true.

It's just the one that's most persuasive.

And I think between September 2020 and now we've seen countless examples of ideas that aren't true but are very well suited to spreading yeah

okay so uh lexis following up on the toxic competitiveness in this next clip

have you ever considered competing in jiu-jitsu no for that very reason i don't want to get obsessed That's my number one concern.

I had to quit video games.

Yeah.

When we were playing video games at the studio, I had to quit because I was playing five hours a day, like out of nowhere.

All of a sudden, I was playing five hours a day i was coming home late for dinner i was ending podcasts early and jumping on the video games and playing i get obsessed with things and i have to recognize what that is and these competitive things like competitive especially like really exciting competitive things like video games they're very dangerous for me the ultimate competitive video game is like jiu-jitsu and um if i was young i most certainly would have done it if i didn't have like a very clear career path it was something that i enjoyed my concern would be that i would become a professional jiu-jitsu fighter when I was young, and then I would not have the energy to do stand-up and do all the other things that I wound up doing as a career.

So Joe actually answers that question into a relatively interesting place.

But bear in mind, that question, as it occurred in the interview, came straight after the bit where he's saying that when he's sober, he's so competitive, so obsessive to a point where it's actively dangerous.

And this shows that Lex isn't a good interviewer at all, because he hears a man describing what sounds like a damaging addiction to competitiveness and his immediate follow-up question is have you ever considered getting back into fighting

that is not a good follow-up to it like he wasn't listening if he was listening to what joe was saying he clearly had no interesting interest in delving into what was going on in behind that obsessive competitiveness because he just so hard wants to be liked through all the way through he just wants joe to love him and pat him on the head and so he asks these incredibly facile softball questions when Joe is essentially opening up about being addicted to the idea of competitiveness.

And even in this answer, Joe brings it back around because he's making a better show than Lex can do.

Okay, so they're not done talking about jiu-jitsu.

This is more inside baseball stuff about jiu-jitsu.

So a lot of people ask me about

like, what's Joe Rogan's Jiu-Jitsu game like?

Like, like.

like assuming that I somehow spend hours rolling with you before and after we track.

I mean, what's a good,

We should at some point show a technique or something.

That'll be fun.

Sure.

I mean, I've got what's your game?

What's your

oh, there I saw, I saw you doing a, I think head and arm something online.

Yeah, I did.

That was, I fucked my neck up doing head and arm chokes.

I did them so much that I, I, you know, because you use your neck so much with head and arms chokes, I developed like a real kink in my neck.

And it turned out I had a bulging disc.

Again, Lex

isn't listening here.

He's just not listening.

You know, Rogan's talking about how he wouldn't have wanted to become a jiu-jitsu fighter.

It's too competitive.

He would have not had the energy to stand up in that kind of way.

And Lex's follow-up question to that is:

can you is to basically show off that he knows Joe Rogan.

All my mates were talking to me about how, like, oh, I must know what you do for jiu-jitsu because we're such good friends and everything.

And then they talk about specific takedown techniques.

After this, they talk about specific takedown techniques that Joe knows.

And it is the least interesting place you could possibly take a conversation

after Joe has been opening up about how damaging his obsessive competitiveness is.

But yeah, just every bit of Lex is just saying, it's just him wanting to be mates with Jaw and just looking for affirmation and validation of their friendship.

It's really painful to listen to.

Now, Lex tells us about the time he talked with a robotics professor from MIT.

I love jiu-jitsu though, man.

I just wish it didn't injure you.

Yeah.

You know, jiu-jitsu is like, if your joints were more durable, if they could figure out a way to make joints more durable, God, I could do jiu-jitsu forever.

Yeah.

It's so much fun.

I actually talked to this roboticist, Russ Tedric, he builds,

one of the world-class people that builds humanoid robots.

You were interested in Boston Dynamics.

He's one of the key people in that kind of robotics.

So I asked him the stupidest question of like, how far are we from having a robot be a UFC champion?

And yeah, it's actually a really, really tough problem.

It's the same thing that, you know, makes somebody like Danielle Comey, like on the wrestling side, special because you have to understand the movement of the human body in ways that's so difficult to teach.

It's so subtle.

The timing, the pressure points, like the leverage, all those kinds of things.

That's just for the clinch situation.

And then the movement for the striking is very difficult.

As long as you're not allowed as a robot to use your natural abilities of having a lot more power, right?

A lot more power and then more durable.

He says it's the stupidest question.

He's absolutely right.

This is a really stupid and boring question.

Lex Friedman has access to people who theoretically could be interesting.

Yeah.

And he blows it on questions that are just designed to make him look cool to his fans.

You know, could a robot beat a man in a fight?

Is what he's doing.

Could a robot win UFC one day?

Like eight-year-olds would ask more interesting questions of robotic experts than that.

And yeah, who'd have thought he'd fuck up an interview with Zelensky and Netanyahu based on this stellar performance?

I wonder if he asked Zelensky and Netanyahu, if you could just do an MMA fight and settle your differences, why don't you do that instead?

Yeah.

All right.

So

Lex now talks about Joe's early work and the recurring guests on Joe's podcast.

So I've been a fan of your podcast for a long time.

You don't often talk about it because you're always kind of looking forward.

But if you look at the old studio, they just left, is there some epic memories that stand out to you that you like you almost look back?

I can't believe this happened.

Oh, yeah.

Almost too many of them to count.

Is there something that pops into mind now?

All of them.

Elon Musk blowing that flamethrower in the middle of the hallway.

I got a video of that.

Have you ever seen the video of it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think he posted on Instagram.

I think I did too.

Yeah, he's a madman.

Having Bernie Sanders in there,

you know, just all the fun fight companions we did and all the crazy podcasts with Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell.

And there were so many.

There were so many moments.

You know, it's

just pure sycophancy.

This is not an interesting question.

Like, I don't think there's anything interesting you could get out of this.

If you wanted him to dip into

some of the

things that have occurred on his podcast, there's a way of asking questions like that that are going to sort of elicit

a more in-depth and insightful idea, an insightful response.

But instead, it's just like, hey, can you tell me some of your epic memories?

It's just, it's honestly painful.

As someone who's interviewed lots of people in my other podcast roles,

yeah, it's painful.

It really is painful to listen to.

It's really hard to listen to.

Okay, so Lex starts to ask a question about guest selection on this next one.

So just the idea that there's these, I mean, that's what I think about, you know, these CEOs write to me that they listen to the podcast

that I do.

And I have somebody like a David Fraver.

And I was nervous about it.

I was nervous to have a conversation.

For me, David Fraver is a Duncan Trussell, which is like.

Just because of his experiences with UFOs.

Yeah.

Just even just the way he sees the world, because he is open.

I don't know if he's always like this, but he opened himself to the possibility of unconventional ideas.

Most people in the scientific community kind of say, well, I don't really want to believe anything that doesn't have a lot of hard evidence.

Right.

And so that was to me like a step.

And as the thing somehow becomes more popular, there becomes this fear of like, well, should I talk to this person or not?

And I mean, you're an inspiration in saying like, do whatever the hell you want.

You have to.

Well, first of all, I have what you call fuck you money.

And if you have fuck you money, you don't say fuck you.

What's the point of having the fuck you money?

You're wasting it.

Like you're wasting the position.

Like someone said to me, like, why do you, why do you like sports cars so much?

Like, how many cars do you have?

A bunch of cars.

Because if I was a kid and I said, hey, if I was that crazy, rich, famous guy, like, I would want to have a bunch of cool fucking cars.

Like, so I, so I would do that.

Like, because

not everybody gets to do that.

Like, if you're the person that gets to do that, you're kind of supposed to do it.

Like, that's if you, if you want to, if that really does speak to you.

And, you know,

I've talked to you about this before, but muscle cars.

specifically ones from the 1960s and the early 70s, they speak to me in some weird way, man.

I could just stare at them.

Like, I have a 65 Corvette.

I walk around it sometimes at night when no one's around i just stare at it favorite muscle car like what's your most badass late 60s the person probably that car probably that 65 corvette

so first of all david fraver is a dunk and trussle to me is super accessible interviewing like yeah that's everybody who's going to tune in is going to say look up both those names

yeah exactly and given that that's not what this conversation is about but honestly this bit is so frustrating frustrating to me because it is arguably, I think, the one time Lex has asked something of any substance at all.

You know, it's the kind of question you should ask Joe Rogan.

You got this platform.

Do you have a responsibility for the people you're bringing on?

How do you deal with that responsibility?

Should we be platforming these people?

These are interesting questions.

And Rogan's response is initially quite instructive about how Rogan thinks.

It's a, Fuck you.

I've got fuck you, money.

I can do what I want.

It doesn't matter.

And that's because I grew up thinking that that's the kind of person someone who had a lot of money should be, should be.

They should just not be encumbered essentially by other people's expectations.

Okay, that's interesting.

I would disagree with it, but it's a perfect place to ask a follow-up question and to get into the weeds of, but are there limits to that?

And are there places where your fuck you money wouldn't be a good, wouldn't be the thing that would hold you back?

Or is there anywhere would you go?

Those are places you could go.

Instead, Lex follows up with, so what's your favorite car?

Which honestly is pathetic.

Like

when he starts talking about supercars, a decent interviewer doesn't pick up that breadcrumb and goes back to the meaty stuff, lets him like play that out a little bit and takes him right back to the meaty stuff.

And Lex just doesn't do that.

He just follows, you get strung along by what Joe wants to talk about.

And we miss an opportunity to actually quiz Joe Rogan about the responsibility of his platform.

Yeah.

And I would also push back on Joe with that fuck you, money comment, because I think Joe does what his audience wants.

I don't think Joe pushes away from his audience.

And as much as he says he doesn't read the comments, I disagree.

I think he does read the comments.

I think he obsessively reads all these things about him.

In fact, in this interview, and I don't know if we'll play it here or if it's in the gloves off, but there is a part of this interview where he says he's ruthlessly introspective.

And you're like, okay,

yeah, so he's ruthlessly introspective and he pays attention to how much people say.

And no matter what anybody says about him, he will say the worst things to himself in the mirror, etc.

So he does listen and he does pay attention.

I think he lies about how much he doesn't pay attention.

He tries to play it off as being cool.

I don't think he's cool at all.

I think he's following it.

And he doesn't, he doesn't have fuck you money because if he had fuck you money, he would just say, fuck you.

I'm doing a car podcast this week.

And I don't think he does that.

He follows along with what people want to hear, the people in his audience.

Next is Lex bringing up Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

But you wouldn't, like, say, I mentioned to you this before, and this is going to happen.

It's actually made a lot of progress towards it.

I'm going to talk to Putin, but you wouldn't travel to Putin if you want to talk to you?

Putin's a dangerous character.

He's not.

He's not.

Have you ever talked to, have you ever seen the thing with Jerry Kraft where they stole his Super Bowl ring?

Yeah.

Yeah,

I think that was a little bit of a misunderstanding.

Oh, really?

I think it's a little bit.

He just decided he's going to steal that Super Bowl ring.

Kind of.

I think it was a...

Kind of.

He thought, can I see your ring?

He shows him his ring and then he puts it on and says, I can murder somebody with this ring.

So he, and then he walks off with it.

It's possible he did it as a, he's a big believer in displays of power.

Yeah.

So like, it's possible he did that.

But

I think he sees himself as like

a tool with which to demonstrate that Russia still belongs on the stage of the big players.

And so he, a lot of actions are selected through that lens.

But in terms of a human being, outside of any of the evils that

he may or may not have done, he is a really thoughtful, intelligent, fun human being.

Like the wit

and the depth from the JRE perspective is really interesting.

I'm like his manager now, selling the he's a judo.

He's trying to get Trump.

He's really good at judo.

I have seen him practice judo.

He's a legit black belt.

And not only that, he loves it.

This is crazy to me.

This is such Putin apologetics.

He's going out of his way to completely whitewash the things that Putin's done

to play him as this kind of, oh, he's an interesting character who's like thoughtful, he's intelligent, he's fun.

This was in 2020.

He's saying that, well, Putin sees himself as a tool for the benefit of Russia.

I think there's only one tool for the benefit of Russia here.

It's Lex Friedman, 100%.

And I think it's interesting as well.

He was saying this in 2020, September 2020, I'm going to be interviewing Putin soon.

As far as I'm aware, that interview hasn't taken place.

And he is still saying it's going to be happening soon.

Five years later, exactly five years later.

Didn't he interview him?

There's lots of, yeah, if you Google, what you'll see is a lot of him saying, a lot of Lex Friedman on interviewing Zelensky and Putin, but he hasn't interviewed Putin, I don't think.

You're right.

He hasn't interviewed him.

He has put it into the zeitgeist that he's interviewed him in this way because he's said it so many times that he's now the Kleenex of interviewing race.

His brand is synonymous with Putin, but he hasn't interviewed him.

Wow, that's really interesting.

I have just manifested it in your brain.

He's Mandela.

See, he put it on his vision board, and we all believe it now.

That's insane, Marsh.

I thought for sure he had interviewed him.

This is like the Mandela effect in real time.

Yeah, it really is.

Wow.

I just want to say, though, just reflecting on this clip,

most of the stuff that Lex has said so far is just bumbling and not interesting, or messing up what could be maybe a good, juicy interview to figure out more of how Joe ticks, right?

That's what's been.

This whole undercard is more of a joke than anything else.

This is damaging.

What he's saying here, this is damaging.

This is bad stuff.

This is someone apologizing for another, for a dictator who is invading other countries on a whim.

This is not somebody who we should be looking at as a harmless person.

This person is spreading harm through this podcast, even if it is only two minutes.

It's two minutes of Putin apology.

That's what it was.

Yeah.

Okay.

So now we're nearing the end of the show.

Let's ask just this, another eye-rolling question here.

Last question.

I sometimes ask this just for to uh, what is it?

To challenge, to make people roll their eyes to make legitimate scientists roll their eyes ask uh

what is the meaning of life according to joe rogan i do not think there is a meaning i think there's many many meanings of life i think there's a way to navigate life that's enjoyable i think it requires many things it requires first of all it requires love you have to have loved ones you have to have family you have to have friends you have to have people that care about you and you have to care about them i think that is primary then Then it also requires interests.

There has to be things that stimulate you.

Now, it could be just a subsistence lifestyle.

There's many people that believe and practice this lifestyle of just living off the land and hunting and fishing and living in the woods, and they seem incredibly happy.

And there's something to be said for that.

That is an interest, right?

There's something and there's a direct connection between their actions and their sustenance.

They get their food that way.

They're connected to nature and it's very satisfying for them.

If you don't have that, I think you need something that is interesting to you, something that you're passionate about.

And there's far too many people that get sucked into living a life where you're just doing a job.

You're just showing up and putting in your time and then going home, but you don't have a passion for what you're doing.

And I think that is, that's the recipe for a boring and very unfulfilling life.

So, what a completely idiotic and self-aggrandizing question to your last question.

Yeah, just wrapping up.

Quick fire round now, just one question.

What's the meaning of life?

We've got about three minutes to wrap up.

It's not designed to elicit a proper response, I don't think.

It's designed to make you come away with the impression that Lex Friedman asks big questions.

He doesn't ask big questions.

He asks questions like, what's your favorite car?

And can you show me some jiu-jitsu?

Those are the questions he's been asking.

But he opens with this incredibly

over-the-top question about, does Joe Rogan ponder mortality?

And he closes with a question about the meaning of life.

And you're meant to think this is super deep.

Joe's answer isn't that bad.

That's not bad.

You know, it's kind of a have love, have friends, have interests.

It's a little bit live, laugh, love.

It is a little live.

It's a little live laugh, laugh.

He having it written on a wooden sign in the kitchen kind of thing.

It's definitely something somebody would have hanging in their bathroom.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Also, it's worth pointing out what he's talking about.

He's saying, you've got to have passions.

There's too many people who get sucked into a life where they're just doing a job and they've got no passions.

They have a boring and unfulfilling life.

Again, it's an expression of how out of touch he is.

There are people who don't get sucked into a job.

There are people who have to do a job in order to survive.

They haven't chosen to do a job that leaves them with no time and energy.

Joe's once again out of touch, but he makes the best of a very bad, but very bad final question.

Question for you, Marsh.

Has there ever been a greater squandering of Elon Musk's popularity bump than Lex Friedman?

He's got to be right up there.

He's got to be right up there, right?

Because at least there are bad actors out there who are using Elon Musk's popularity

bump in order to push their far-right racist agendas.

But at least they've got a plan.

Yeah, at least they're trying to accomplish something.

It's awful, but they're trying to accomplish something.

People talk to a marketer at least.

Come on.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Last.

Here's the final moments with Lex, and he tells Joe how much he enjoyed this interview.

I think

we mentioned Neuralink.

I can certainly guarantee that this is one of the memories I'll be replaying 20, 30 years from now once we get the feature ready.

Joe, it's a huge honor to talk to you.

I hope you're an honor to talk to you too, man.

I came down here for this, the first week of me doing this here.

And

it's very cool to have you always.

I hope you make Texas cool again and

do your podcast another 10, 11, whatever, however many years you're still on this earth.

Thank you, Levin.

Appreciate it, man.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Joe Rogan.

And thank you, our sponsors.

Okay, that was utterly painful, but I never noticed until just now that he says, keep doing your podcast for 10, 11, however many years you're still in this earth.

Joe thinks he's not 50 yet.

You have left.

Joe earlier was talking about 50.

He's like, you got about 11.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

But yeah, again, it's such a kind of painful, obsequious question.

Yeah, also, I'll point out, he says, this will be one of the memories, you know, that he'll replay when he when he's got a new relic chip in his brain.

Like, Lex, you've recorded this, it's on YouTube.

You can just re-watch, you don't need a chip in the brain.

It doesn't even download to your brain, bro.

It's like just right here.

Oh, gosh.

After this, he curled up on Joe's lap and he sort of fell fitfully asleep.

Well, he was, maybe he was even kneading Joe's leg when he fell asleep.

I don't know.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

All right.

Okay.

So we're going to replace our normal question.

Is there anything good with what did we learn about Joe this episode?

So yeah, I think we learned some interesting stuff that I don't think we really get as much from when Joe's talking to someone else and Joe isn't the focus of the conversation.

So I've not heard him talk as much about the obsessiveness, about how his obsessiveness of competition.

We know he works out, but how he can recognize that it's damaging.

I think that's interesting.

He recognizes how obsessive he gets about working out.

He can admit that that's a damaging sign.

I think whenever we've seen him elsewhere, he's been boasting about his workout regime, but here he actually opens up and says it can be dangerous.

He also talks about violence and how he's holding back violence at times.

He sees himself as like a violent person kind of trying to fight to restrain that.

I think that's really interesting.

He's capable of recognizing the risk of becoming out of touch, which I think is more self-awareness than I expected, but he hasn't recognized he's already out of touch.

So it's exactly the amount of self-awareness that I did recognize.

And I thought that him bringing up the concept of having fuck you money and where that comes from, I thought that was interesting.

I disagree with it, but at least I can sort of see that it's, he sees it as a, when I was a kid, if I was rich, I'd go off and buy a load of cars.

And this is kind of his podcasting equivalent of that.

So I think those are interesting things that I learned that I hadn't really heard Joe express or express openly before.

I think that there was certainly some pieces of this that came out that sort of

they certainly, when I saw them, made a lot of sense.

The unapologetically masculine portion of this, there's a long portion of this where I talk about being unapologetically masculine, but then also the topics that they talk about are all pretty much unapologetically masculine.

And that to me,

there was something there that clicked.

And I was like, yeah, absolutely.

That concept, I think, really does reach a lot of people and make you very popular in a very certain space online.

And I think that that's a really,

it's a useful insight.

I think in some ways he's sort of selling the idea here, even though I don't even know that he believes it, that he talks to everyone and he isn't biased.

I think that might have even been more true even back then than it is now.

But if you look at the types of guests guests that he has on, that's not, that doesn't seem to be the case.

But I think it's a myth that he tells himself.

And it's certainly a myth that he was telling himself all the way back in 2020.

And it's something that we've sort of noticed as we've worked our way through.

And I think there's also the one thing that I picked up on here was the threads of the intellectual dark web people, the talking about words and all the other, the way in which he'll take the smallest sliver of a population and say that that is the mindset of the entire group, like how he's doing with BLM here in the very beginning.

I think that

intellectual dark web stuff has infiltrated him back then and it continues to this day.

And I think that we can learn a lot about Joe Rogan by learning about intellectual dark web people.

I think the more we pay attention to those people, the more we're going to learn about how Joe Rogan thinks and why he says the things he says.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Yeah.

So I think this is a worthwhile look into the extended Rogan verse, the Rogan sphere, the Jonahverse, whatever we're going to talk about,

we're going to call it.

We should do this again.

We'll definitely do this again in the future.

But that's it for the show this week.

Remember that you can access more than half an hour of bonus content every single week from as little as a dollar an episode.

You can do that by subscribing at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

And you can also, you can hear more from Cecil at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed.

And you can hear more from me at Skeptics with a K and on the Skeptic podcast.

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