Joe Rogan: Comedy, Controversy, Aliens, UFOs, Putin, CIA, and Freedom | Lex Fridman Podcast #300

the following is a conversation with joe rogan his second time on this podcast he has inspired me for many years with his conversations to be a better and kinder person and has now been doing so as a friend there's no one i would rather talk to on this 300th episode of this podcast on the 4th of july both the anniversary of this country's declaration of independence and the anniversary of my immigrating here to the united states a silly kid who couldn't speak english i could never imagine that he would be so damn lucky as to live the life i've lived and to feel the love i felt from the amazing people along the way from the bottom of my heart thank you i love you all this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's joe rogan charles bukowski said something in a poem called style about art he defined art saying style is the answer to everything a fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing to do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it to do a dangerous thing with style is what i call art what do you think you meant by that do you agree with this a dangerous thing with style is art he said bullfighting can be art boxing can be art loving can be art uh have you ever made love and it was art now okay i'm not asking every time bro opening a can of sardines can be art i think there's something to that yeah i think i think i i call the way people live life art like i wrote a forward to my friend cameron haynes's book and uh which is right now the number one selling audio book in the world uh i and i s one of the things that i said was that practice is an art that very few people appreciate and it's the art of the maximized life and that the discipline that he displays in his life and through his practices and all the things that he does it's so difficult to live the way he lives that for someone like me who understands it and knows what he's doing and appreciates it and appreciates how insanely difficult it is to have a full-time job and run ultra marathons get up at four o'clock in the morning run a full marathon before work like that's the kind of shit that he he does when he when he's training for these 240 mile runs all the the main at the same time being like a father um a husband uh having this full-time job also being the best bow hunter on earth lifting weights it's like how is he how does a person do this so in a way discipline is art too yes it discipline is art yeah i think it is because it's beautiful for me to see when i see someone who's really truly disciplined who like a david goggin someone who just like truly maximizes the grind i feel like there's an art to that and there's a there's an art to kindness like there's people that are really kind and really sweet and when i'm around them it's beautiful it's like there's a art to them no matter what yeah they still they got you know the world can throw a bunch of shit at you but through all that some people are just great at it yeah and it's a thing that you learn how to do and it's pleasing for other people to see and and that i think is where the art is well i think mukasky also said um and i'm just a bukowski quote generator today i love him i love him very much too uh he's a dark and troubled and fascinating and a weird person like hunter s thompson yeah he said what matters most is how you walk through the fire i think so there's a bit of the can hands in that too david goggins and that too what do you think he meant by that well how you walk through the fire i mean you can walk through the fire complaining along the way or you can walk through the fire and create an example for everyone else so that the the trials and tribulations of their own life seem trivial because they're comparing themselves to the way you handle things or the way you handle things with grace and dignity and discipline can show other people that they can handle their own life this way and there's there's beauty in that there really is and there's so there's so much so much inspiration to be gathered from other people if you're a charitable person if you're charitable and and and compassionate and you you you can look at people even even people that i don't like i try to look at the best aspects of how they live their life and and and recognize those aspects admire them give them credit for it there's something that we can all get out of watching the way other people live their lives so i got a chance to see you walk the fire a little bit uh privately and publicly uh this year in january i gotta ask you about that so there's like generic conversations about sort of cancel culture and all those kinds of things but as a human being this to me is fascinating sort of there's the uh n-word highlight video there's the criticism of the different guests whatever the side is on the covid pandemic and you i mean there's a mass amount of attack on you outside of being a public persona outside of being a comedian podcaster you're you're also a human being so how did you survive that how did you sort of uh walk through that fire because you seem to do it with grace i used mushrooms [Laughter] that was one way i did it yeah yeah really what's your as andrew huberman would say what was your protocol uh i took it was probably less than a gram every day every day yeah and uh [Laughter] i did a lot of like really hard working out but also i mean there's a great benefit to going through anything difficult and if you're aware like in advance and why enduring like anything that's going to happen that's very difficult and troubling the the great benefit is it gives you an opportunity to grow gives you an opportunity to express yourself under pressure to show your character to show you truly are and it gives you an opportunity to see how you handle a very difficult situation it also was fascinating as a person that's involved in media right because what we're doing right now is media even though you know it seems like podcasts seem like we're just having a conversation right and they are we in in that sense it's kind of the purest form of media because what you're doing is you're you're you're doing it without any fanfare you're doing it without any there's no executives looming over your head or network or big meetings about ratings or any of that stuff but it is media but what i got to see is the wiring under the machine of how the rest of media would try to take me out and you know like when cnn would be just be playing things over and over and back and forth it was wild to watch what was also wild to watch was people's responses because i gained 2 million subscribers during that time like the podcast never got bigger it just kept kept growing and growing it had never been bigger than it had been like at the end of all of it it just made it bigger and you know ultimately when if you've fucked up in the past or made mistakes or done something wrong that gives you an opportunity to discuss those things and to say to apologize if you feel the need to apologize and also to just address it and so people under that kind of pressure they get it's an opportunity for them to understand how you think about things honestly how you actually honestly think about things and there's no more honesty that you get out of a person than when that person is under extreme duress you know so i think in that sense i mean it's horrible to say that it's a benefit that it's a good thing that it happened but it was a benefit can you see how it can break a person yes i've gotten a chance to experience small small attacks here and there yeah ones that get to the core of things like even just talking to uh about russia and ukraine to stephen kawkin or oliver stones looking at different perspectives you gain a relative for me feeling like a sizable number of people who really don't like you yeah and say things about you that are um that may be cut deep for a reason i don't understand why it's just my own psychology what's also because you can't defend yourself because they're saying it and you're not there and you you don't have any opportunity for a rebuttal and if you do have a rebuttal you're doing it publicly and you're opening it up to the whole world to chime in and there's a general tendency that people have towards negativity when they're interacting with strangers online especially about controversial subjects and even if it's only ten percent of the people it's one out of ten that's a lot that's a lot of negativity when you're dealing with thousands and thousands of tweets yeah and i think maybe i'm just a very self-critical person but i hear their words and that probably somewhere deep inside see the truth and the criticism in some aspect of the criticism and that's why it hurts well it's but it's in one aspect of you right you know but when you're reading it it's so it it's boiled down to this one thing as if that one thing defines you totally like if you've made a mistake if you've said something that you shouldn't have said or if you said something and you know maybe you should have considered it more carefully giving the gravity of the situation you know that that's just a part of being a person and it's also part of being a person where you're communicating with things publicly in real time thinking out loud which is what we do you know it's complex and most people don't do it and you're to have these you're going to have genuine hot takes where people just see what you said and go why did he say that fuck him you know he doesn't know anything about he doesn't live in ukraine he you know there's like there's there's people that are going to have takes on that in that way and then there's also going to be these disingenuous people who just use any kind of controversial topic or subject as an opportunity for them to get clicks or views but that the number of those people can be quite large quite large and so going back to do you think it can destroy a person because i kind of worry about this and you're in many ways but in this way an inspiration that it didn't seem to have destroyed you but i kept doing shows i kept doing stand-up i ignored everything i didn't read any of it it's so it is possible to just think a hundred percent yes yeah i ignored it all well you have i knew it was there like your family didn't bring it up my family was very aware of it my wife was aware of it what was the conversation like if if your wife is aware of it is there like a rule don't break it pretend it's not happening no just like well i don't i tell her don't ever read past the green beans i don't ever let her like read negative articles to me you know i don't want him i don't he care i go that's a person's opinion you take a person's opinion you write it down it doesn't give it any more relevance like that person you know could have had that opinion in silence they could have had it with some friends at dinner they don't like me whatever i don't want to read it i don't want to absorb it i don't even know them especially if i'm not there and especially if it's some biased and uh it's it's not an objective opinion of me it's uh this you know they have a narrative and they want to stick to that narrative and they want to write an article and they piece it all together make you look a piece of shit and that's their prerogative they're completely out to do that but i don't i shouldn't absorb that i shouldn't take that in you're not supposed to be taking in the opinion of the world yeah you're supposed to be taking in the opinion of small groups of people that you encounter so that you get an understanding of how you make them feel and then maybe you say to yourself maybe i come across too rude or maybe i come across uh too insensitive or maybe maybe i could do better in this way or that way that's how we sort of shape our personalities and that's how we we develop our social skills but when the people don't know you and they have this like distorted narrative of you and you know there's fucking millions of people there's so many people you can't i think these are billions no actually i mean millions of people that are like communicating about something like during the height of the you know the attempt to cancel me or whatever that is i don't know how many people were involved in that people take this kind of stuff seriously but the problem is the uh false narratives take hold and then you you have meetings you have groups you have it builds on top of each other and there's this outrage and then it reaches you at some point and it can just have these destructive effects it does can but it also sometimes doesn't and in my case it didn't it didn't work uh what lessons did you draw from that mushrooms exercise my mushroom's an exercise exercise is critical so i don't think the mushrooms by themselves would have worked but that's the thing that i use for everything is the brutal exercise like my exercise routines are horrible and because of that everything else is easier i create my own bullshit and my own bullshit is so much harder and it's not just that it's also sauna and cold plunge and these torture sessions they in enduring those when you endure those it makes enduring other things much easier and it's also an understanding of what's happening like you have to know like media you have to understand like what the hot take you know youtube social media podcast ecosphere is doing like if they're talking about you know lex friedman said this and we have to comment on that and you know lex gets cancelled in all capital letters on a youtube clip and if you you watch that you're fucking crazy what are you doing absorbing all this negativity it's not good for you you are you you know you and you know generally if you've made a mistake and you know generally if people are upset with you you posted this awesome video on your instagram of a woman who was being interviewed in the 19th late 1920s maybe yes yeah yeah and she's close to 100 years old so she's lived through the civil war through world war one she was at the time living through the early days of the great depression so i was just looking back you know what have we as a human civilization in recent times survived especially in the united states you're talking about the two world wars in the 20th century the great depression the spanish food the pandemic at the beginning of the 20th century yeah what do we do in the united states uh 911 if you think of what are the traumatic events that shook our world it's 9 11 it made us rethink our place in the world the pandemic pandemic is a huge one i mean one of the bigger ones because it also accelerated and exacerbated our anxiety which people have a certain level of anxiety already especially sedentary people they have a very high level of anxiety already because i don't think they're they're giving their body what it what it needs i don't think they're you know your body has certain requirements in terms of movement and when you deny your body those requirements i think there's like a general level of anxiety that exists in almost everyone and then you have people obviously that have mental health issues and that also exacerbates the anxiety the lockdown exacerbated the anxiety losing loved ones to the pandemic exacerbated anxiety and then there was the the division that the different schools of thought the people that were never going to get vaccinated no matter what i ain't trusting it people who thought there was microchips in there people that thought that you know fauci's the demon and there's there was a lot and there's also like political leanings the right-wing people tended to not want to be vaccinated whereas the left-wing people for whatever reason all of a sudden are trusting pharmaceutical companies like explicitly it was weird it's a it was a weird time and i think uh over time as it's gonna as it gets analyzed and we we break it down it's gonna be one of the weirder moments for shaping human culture and unfortunately for throwing gasoline on this already burning fire of you know of conflict between the various factions of of of thought in this country it's just a it's already a weird time you know post-trump like the trump era is also going to be one of the weirder times when when people look back historically about the division in this country he's such a polarizing figure that so many people felt like they could abandon their own ethics and morals and principles just to attack him and anybody who supports him because he is an existential threat to democracy itself but don't you think it's not a cause but maybe like a symptom like it's going to get you said it got real weird maybe it's going to get weirder yeah i think it's going to get weirder he's going to run again well he's running against a dead man you know i mean biden shakes hands with people that aren't even there when he gets off stage yeah i think he's seeing ghosts yeah you see him on jimmy kimmel the other day no well he was just rambling i mean he's if he was anyone else if he was a republican if that was donald trump doing that every fucking talk show would be screaming for him to be off the air and by the way i'm not a trump supporter in any way shape or form i've had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once i've said no every time i don't want to help him i'm not interested in helping him the the the night is still young we'll see if i have month tonight is still young yeah i think i'll have them on i think you'll have them on really why do you think that because you'll have putin on [Laughter] and you're competitive as fuck no [Laughter] i i think ultimately um i mean you had you've had a lot of people that i think you might you may otherwise be skeptical would i have a good conversation which i think is your metric you don't care about politics so can i have a good conversation and i think you had uh like people people like kanye on for example and i had a great conversation with him i think you i think uh yeah but kanye is an artist like but kanye doing well or not doing well doesn't change the course of our country yeah but you know do you really bear the responsibility of the course of our country based on a conversation i think you can revitalize and rehabilitate someone's image in a way that is pretty shocking look at the way people look at alex jones now because alex jones has been on my podcast a few times yeah how do they which direction the people that have watched those podcasts think he's hilarious and they think that he definitely fucked up with that whole sandy hook thing um but he's right more than he's wrong and he's not an evil guy he's just a guy who's had some psychotic breaks in his life he's had some genuine mental health issues that he's addressed he's had some serious bouts of alcoholism some serious bouts of you know substance abuse and they've contributed to some very poor thinking but if you know the guy if you get to know him like i have i've known him for more than 20 years and if you know him on podcasts you realize like he is genuinely trying to unearth some things that are genuinely disturbing for most people like is the guy that was telling me about epstein's uh island fucking decade ago at least he was telling me about i was like what you're telling me there's a place where they bring elites to compromise them with underage girls and they film them really like what cut the fuck out of here like no president clinton's been there everyone's been there like but it sounds like nonsense and not only is it true but people keep getting fucking murdered for it did you see that latest clinton advisor that got murdered about it yep yeah hung with an extension cord shot himself in the chest 30 miles from his house and they're calling it a suicide and now even elon musk is asking where's the clientele list yeah we should we should probably see who's been to that island yeah we should probably see who's been to that island and there's probably more of those kind of things out there that haven't been exposed yeah but sort of uh to push back in you you had those conversations with alex jones wouldn't you be able to have the same kind of conversation with donald trump what's the problem reveal no it's not the problem you revealed that alex jones is a human being he's fucked up he has demons in his head he's obviously chaotic all over the place but there's some uh wisdom to the perspective he takes on the world even if though he is often full of shit he is able to predict certain things and very few people are willing to bring up so isn't trump the same way fucked up person egomaniac uh whatever personality things you can talk about isn't it worthwhile to lay it out like who's going to if you listen to interviews of trump who has the balls to call him out on this bullshit chris wallace did uh no calling out somebody on their bullshit is easy when you're just being adversarial but as a person who is genuinely empathetically trying to understand yeah i think you're really good at that like you pulled up i don't know if he would genuinely be there you know what i'm saying like i think he would be putting on a performance and that's because i think he can break through that in like 30 minutes i'd need more time than that and he doesn't do any drugs that's the thing about alex you can get alex high yeah get him drunk and he'll start talking about interdimensional child molesters yeah you know and then you you get the real alex or maybe maybe you have somebody else on as well to introduce chaos like alex no no no no no i would have to be just me and him i would have to that would be a focused thing i would have to like really take time with with trump but also i'm not um well versed enough politically to know all of the corruption that's been alleged and to understand what the the whole russia gate stuff what what's real like how much of it it's clear that there is more than one organization that's involved in communicating with russia before the 2016 election so it's pretty clear that the clinton administration was involved it's pretty clear that the trump administration had some communication with some people in russia it's pretty clear that hunter biden had some very suspicious dealings in ukraine and there's a lot going on there man and it's it's hard for anybody to parse it's really hard for anybody and especially to have an objective assessment of exactly what's going on and then to be able to do that and broadcast it publicly that's quite a project and i think if you really want to do that correctly it's something that i would have to research for a long time and to really really and i don't have that kind of time not not for maybe for certain for certain people that you're really curious about like you have that kind of time for bob lazar yes yes but maybe not for donald trump no that's different because bob lazar what what you know what he's talking about like i wanted to know with the bob lazar thing i wanted to know first i want to be around him and see if i could smell bullshit did you like did okay no i didn't man that was what's weird about it not only did i not smell bullshit i went over all of his interviews i went he hasn't done a lot but he's done enough and he's done them over the course of 30 plus years and it's alarming how consistent his story is which is really weird when you think about you're talking about back engineering alien crafts and working on a you know a top secret government test site that's carved into the side of a mountain and to camouflage it from satellites it's a it's such a wacky story but the guy really did work at los alamos labs he really is a propulsions expert he really is a scientist um did he really work on back engineering ufos i don't know but the way he described their motion is exactly like what's been observed by some of these pilots that have these videos that they've captured and i just love that like nasa i've been hearing from a bunch of folks who they're legitimately like funding research and there's people really taking this seriously of um ufo sightings investigating them yeah like adding more and more sensors to collect data from just observing higher higher definitions it's cool to finally see that he was one of the early people whether he's full of shit or not that kind of forced people to start taking this kind of these topics seriously or at least force people to have conversations about them and maybe attempt to debunk them because it seems so preposterous but then get sucked down the rabbit hole and start going hmm maybe well fucking it's the thing is like the fermi paradox like where are they right and when you take into account just the sheer raw numbers the vast majority of people objectively assume that there is life out there the vast majority well if if you really take into account what we understand about the universe itself what we understand about the concept of of infinity and the way neil degrasse tyson has explained it to me is that not only are there life forms out there but there's you you are out there infinity is so large that lex friedman exists and doesn't just exist but exists an infinite number of times like the amount of interactions that cells and molecules the same exact interactions that have happened here on earth have happened in the exact same order an infinite number of times in the cosmos well first of all it's not certain that that's true it's it's possible possible uh like sean carroll you know uh especially with quantum mechanics based on certain interpretation of quantum mechanics that's that's very possible but the question is can you access those universes right and so how far away are they the more the more sort of specific practical question is this local pocket of the universe our galaxy or our neighboring galaxies are there aliens there what do they look like are they so you can have this panspermia idea where a much larger like uh like daddy civilization uh like uh rolled by and just planted a few aliens at a similar time like prometheus yes yeah a different you know throughout the galaxy and those are the ones we might be interacting with they're all kind of dumb as we are relatively you know maybe um a few million years apart and then those are the ones we're interacting with and then we have a chance to actually connect with them and communicate with them or it could be like much more wide open and you have these gigantic alien civilizations that are expanding very very quickly and the interesting thing is when you look up at the sky and you see the stars that's light from those stars we might not be seeing the alien civilizations until they're already here meaning right like you start expanding once you get really good at expanding you're going to be expanding very close to the speed of light so right now we don't see much in the in the sky but there could be one one day we wake up and it's just like everywhere and they're here right right because the amount of time the light takes to reach us yeah and then the the thing that i've been really fascinated by is these alternative forms of transportation that they're discussing like the the ability to harness wormholes and the the ability to to do things that what a type three civilization is capable of i had michio kaku on my podcast recently fantastic love that guy he's so he's so good at taking extremely complex concepts and boiling them down for digestion and and you know and saying them in a way that other people can appreciate and not being hesitant about saying wild crazy shit that's out there but grounded in what's actually possible yeah he's all in on this ufo phenomenon now he's now he's like now the burden of proof is to people for people to come up with some sort of a conventional explanation for these things he goes because these things are defying all the concepts of physics that that we're we currently know in terms of what our capabilities are and and propulsion systems and and so many other things that you know what we know about what current science is capable of reproducing as far as what we know the problem is like these um military projects that are top secret like how much money do they have they have a lot of money like but is it possible and maybe you could speak to this is it possible that there could be some propulsion systems that have been developed and implemented that are far beyond just the simple burning of rocket fuel pushing the fire out the back which forces the rocket at extreme speeds forward that's something that does harness gravity something that can distort space and time and can make travel from one point to another uh like preposterously fast well not only is it possible i think it's likely that that kind of stuff would be kept a secret yeah it's just everything you see about these um about the way either if it's contractors like lockheed martin or if it's dodea the the the actual departments of defense they operate in complete secrecy just even looking at the the history of the stealth fighter just even stealth technology was kept a secret for a very very long time and not until you're ready to use it and need to use it does it become public and not officially public it just is being detected out in the wild so there's going to be a process where you're secretly testing it and that might creep up which is maybe what we're seeing and then it's waiting for the next big war the next big reason to use the thing yeah and so yeah this there's definitely technologies now there might not be propulsion technologies there could be ai surveillance technologies there could be different kinds of uh stealth drones there could be uh it could be also in cyberspace like cyber war weapons all that kind of stuff they're obviously going to be kept secret i'm i'm very skeptical lately and the reason why i'm skeptical is the government keeps talking about it the pentagon keeps talking about it nasa keeps talking about it in which direction you're skeptical i'm skeptical that it's their aliens i think most likely it's a smoke screen and most likely these are some sort of like incredibly advanced drones that they've developed that they want to pretend don't exist that seems the more likely scenario because otherwise my take is like what's the benefit of them discussing these things like what's the benefit of them discussing these things openly these are you know what the way they described it off-world crafts not made from this earth like why why would they why would they tell us that i mean unless there's an imminent danger of us being invaded and they want to prepare people so they don't freak out as much you know like maybe freak them out a little bit say that publicly the new york times article the pentagon discussing it all these different things that's the waters yeah well let people know that this is a thing yeah or my take is like that i don't think they do that i don't think they tell us i think they i think i think the government has a lot of contempt for for the citizens i really do i think they have contempt for our intelligence they have contempt for our need to know things and i also think they think that they are running us it's not we're all in this together and the government works for the people and the government is of the people i don't think they think that way yeah the the basic idea is you can't trust the populace to govern itself because we're a bunch of idiots i think that's accurate well they're not wrong but they're all they're also idiots power hunger idiots yeah i don't think they're i don't think everyone's an idiot but i think there are enough idiots that it becomes a real problem if you're completely honest about everything you do and you know you don't want to let everybody weigh in about things that are incredibly complex and that most people are ignorant of and on top of that there's this machine of intelligence now i've recently been reading a lot about the kgb about the fsb so i've several things sparked my curiosity so one i'm traveling to ukraine and to moscow and because of that i started to sort of ask practical questions of myself just travel and all those kinds of things so started reading a lot about the kgb jack barski has a book on this i talked to him and you start to realize you probably looked into some of this but you just start to realize the scale of surveillance and manipulation now a lot of them also talk about the incompetence of those organizations the usual bureaucracy creeps in but the point is it seems like there's no line they're not willing to cross for the purpose of gathering intelligence for the purpose of controlling people in order to gather intelligence now this is mi6 fsb there's not much information about the fsb or the gru but the kgb so we're always like 20 years behind or more on the actual information and so i started to wonder so i have not officially been contacted by any intelligence agency but i started to wonder well did i is there somebody i know that's doing that undercover cia or undercover fsb undercover anything you probably do have you asked yourself this question yeah for sure yeah people that have been on my podcast yeah for sure do you think there was actually a guest that may have been 100 oh man i would imagine would you know i have suspicions do you care is this i mean it depends on what they're attempting to do right like if i felt like there was some deception involved and they were trying to use the podcast to manipulate uh a narrative in a deceptive way to trick people into things yeah i would care but this is exactly what those are the kind of things they do they do plant narratives yeah i mean i would imagine if you have the number one podcast in the world that people would want to infiltrate that yeah there's probably meetings in all major intelligence agencies about okay what are the large platforms how do we just how do we spread the message yeah well i mean that's the the thing that really emerged when we were talking about during my cancellation that there's a clear there's no objective analysis of this in mainstream media there's clear narratives that they're trying to push forward to uh whether it's to [Music] promote certain ideas or to diminish the power and reach of people who are mavericks or people who who are you know who aren't connected to a system that you can't compromise that's where it gets dangerous right where it gets dangerous is when someone has the largest reach but is also completely detached and clearly is independent in the sense of um independent thinking has on whoever he wants but your mind can still be manipulated i guess i can i mean i guess everybody can be manipulated a certain way i manipulate my own mind i'm sure too but i also spent a lot of time thinking about what i think you know i don't just accept things like like the ufo thing like i was all in for a while and now i'm like man something smells fishy i'm in like why here's my problem with the ufo thing i want it to be real so bad yeah that's my problem with it i'm such a sucker i want it to be real so bad you know and that's that's a problem for me because i'm aware of it and so then i stop and think about like what is what what is my desire uh for uh ufo truth to be exposed what's because it's fun you know that's what it is so i have a desire to for it to be real and i mean i've talked to uh i talked to a bunch of folks about this so those with connection with dod and they do draw lines between people that are full of shit and people who are not there's a lot of people in the public sphere that they say are full of shit yeah for sure and you have to kind of tell the difference yeah cnn watch them talk well i mean even you know everyone is on the ufo topic though there's certain individuals that are like okay they're just like using this um in fact like people who are not full of shit are often very quiet right which is why you know even bob lazar is an interesting story because he was trying to be quiet for the longest time well he was worried about his own life according to bob and that's why he went public with it and initially the first videos he did with george knapp they hit his identity yeah yeah and then he felt like that wasn't enough and he really needed to expose his own identity just to protect his life which is a great story you know so you got to go well that seems so juicy i want to buy into it and that's where i get nervous you don't know you don't know who to trust right exactly how how do you figure that out how do you figure out who to trust in your life you're joe rogan a lot of people want to be close to cia agents fsb agents people that want i'm friends with a former cia agent yeah mike baker who's been on my podcast a bunch of times allegedly former former i think about that he's air quotes former yeah yeah i don't believe he's former i'm sure he has some connection to him i also believe he's a good guy but i gain a lot of very intelligent and well-informed insights from him as to how things work and you know i think uh yeah i'm sure he doesn't tell me everything about everything but he's told me enough where i i think i can understand things better from talking to him about how the way you know the elves work under the machine what about friends how do you know if you can trust well most of my friends are old friends time so time is the thing yeah like uh just going through shit together yeah and so much people that you know first of all comics like you can trust comics yeah comments are pretty trustworthy the good ones they're really good ones there's not that many of us if there's a thousand professional comics on earth i'd be stunned i'd be stunned i don't even think there's a thousand like real professionals who you get booked all the time headline weekends at clubs and theaters and arenas and then there's levels to that right there's like the guys who are middle acts who kind of like barely scrape by and then like how many headliners are there how many like really funny headliners that i would say you know if you lex you tell me you're gonna be in cincinnati hey this person's playing at this club should i go see them i'd be like ah you know like how many people would i give the recommendation to and then how many people sell out theaters how many people sell out arenas how many there's not that fucking many so those people like at the uh the levels of comedy where you do you know you've been doing stand-up for 20 years you there's a certain amount of honesty and a certain amount of understanding of each other that we all have oh so that that process of becoming a great comic is like humbling in the way like yeah jiu jitsu is humbling very similar like there's you've take you've eaten so much shit that yeah that that somehow even if you're insane if you even if you're chaotic even in the way even if you're full of shit you lie a lot all those kinds of things underneath it there's a good human yeah you could be surface bullshitter but on important things you're trustworthy hopefully i mean if you're not then people shy away from you and there are people like that too that are really successful but that are that are what i call islands um i've talked to other comics about that like you don't want to be an island because there's these people that aren't attached to the rest of the community and they're doing well on their own and usually they have like one opening act they bring with them on the road they've worked with forever and they don't have comedy friends and they're those people are miserable because they can't relate sometimes fame in itself is isolating so you have to actually do a lot of work and make sure you don't it doesn't isolate you yes if you become successful people start wanting stuff from you yes and then sometimes you want to push them away because of that as opposed to uh connect with them yeah i don't enjoy it when people want things from me it's not fun you just ignore it yeah it's fucking too heavy they want too much it's it's too much of a disproportionate relationship you know it's too unbalanced because uh there are people where you could tell that they're working towards something they're working towards an angle and they want to be close to you because you'll you will benefit them and then there's other people that are just there's not that many of us and so we all want to hang out together like when i one of the podcasts i love the most is this podcast i do called protect our parks it's a thing i do with uh ari shafir shane gillis and mark north that's great it's so fun because we just get obliterated and we talk so much shit yeah like there's conversations after that podcast where i go hey man we got to cut that part out yeah because like shane will go too far and go too crazy but we're just making each other laugh and it's just fun and it's like that kind of camaraderie between real comics is very precious to me my favorite part of that is like the non-sequitur stuff from mark norman you guys get so trashed that you don't even understand what the hell he's talking about but it's funny to the listener because he's still on point that is as sharp he's so good mitch hedberg quality yes well he's such a such a dedicated comic you know he loves comedy so much that's one of the things i love about him he's like comedy he gets excited like he loves it as to shane and as does ari yeah you know they really love it and it's um that's so so there's that like i have friends in that way and i have martial arts friends who are some of the uh also the thing about being humbled how things like jiu jitsu will humble you martial arts friends are they're also i they know they know who's been through it you know they know who's who really has gone through the gauntlet and emerged on the other end uh a better person well you said there's very few of us let's have the goat discussion you're not gonna pick anybody but who are the greats of comedy who's who's the who's the who's the greatest comic of all time well i don't think there is a greatest comic of all time it's like mcdonald nor macdonald was one of the greats for sure but by the way actually on that topic what what do you think about his i think as a person who is fascinated by the fear of death and death i think it was a truly genius thing to release a special after you're dead i don't know how that works i haven't seen it special have you it's not yeah it's it's um it's called i think nothing special which sounds like something normal to say and it's basically him in front of i mean i imagine he wouldn't would have wanted it edited that way because it's made to look nicer than i think he probably would have preferred it uh but it's him in front of the screen like in a zoom call doing jokes without lap cold really yeah and somehow given his like dry dark humor it works because it's almost making fun of itself almost making fun of that hole that we were stuck stuck alone inside and because he's still acting as if he's in front of the audience and he's almost making fun of the fact that this is what we're forced to do i mean it's quite genius it's really well and the jokes are really good but it also makes you realize how important laughter is from the audience the energy from the audience because uh but there's also an intimacy because it's just you and him because you're listening to it you know there's no audience yeah so that's i don't know it's i think it's quite genius and he's of course there's there's certain comics that are like not only are they funny but they're truly unique and like they're they're they're not in terms of uh friendship and all that kind of stuff but in terms of comedy they're an island yeah it's like they you know mitch hedberg probably is that of course a lot of people then start to imitate them and so on but steven wright stephen wright i mean there's like people who are like you know dave chappelle who's like probably one of the greats but he's just like raw funny yeah i don't know if he's an island he's just raw uh yeah i know what you're saying an outlier a unique individual yeah he's just great um norm is definitely unique in his greatness like like there's only one norm you know who's got a very specific style is there a reason you guys weren't he doesn't seem like he was you guys were close i mean i loved him he was great i always enjoyed talking to him um we just didn't work together that often we weren't around each other that often that's all it was but it wasn't like uh it was i loved him though he was a great guy i had a funny story about it norm uh twice just randomly i was on airplanes next to him seated right next to him just totally random yeah and uh one time we're on this airplane and we're having this talk and i was like yeah i quit smoking i was smoking a lot and i just yeah it's terrible terrible smoke it's terrible for you and we have this great conversation we get off the plane and he sprints towards a store and buys cigarettes like in the airport and is lighting it on the way out the door and i go i thought you quit smoking it was yeah i did but all that talking about smoking made me wanted to smoke again so before he's getting through the door of the airport he's lighting it up i can't wait he can't wait to get that cigarette at him it was he was just so crazy and impulsive and loved to gamble he loved gambling and in that way he embodied the joke like you can't even tell that certain people just like live in a non-sequitur ridiculous absurd funny way yeah that was him i mean non-stop just there was nothing artificial about norm you know that that was who he was his brilliance was his essence that was who he was you know but it's in terms of like the greats the godfather of it all is lenny bruce i mean i have a bunch of lenny bruce uh concert posters at my house and photos that i have framed and whitney cummings actually gave me this brilliant photo of him uh when he got arrested for one of the times when he got arrested for saying obscene jokes he was the most important figure in the early days of comedy because he essentially gave birth to the modern art form of stand-up comedy before that it was a bunch of guys that were like hosting shows and they would tell jokes they were just like you know you know two guys walking to a bar that kind of stuff yeah and he would talk about social issues you know he would talk about life he would talk about language he would talk about laws and it was just he was the very first guy who did modern stand up and what's fascinating is if you go and you try to watch it if you try to watch lenny bruce today it doesn't work because society has evolved like in many ways art is a window especially like pop culture art or modern uh you know at the time culture uh art art that discusses culture is a window into that time period it's a little bit of a time machine so you get to like you have to put yourself like what was it like to be in 1963 like what was he say in 1963 what was this like to hear him say this and the the civilization that existed in 1963 although it looked pretty similar they're all driving cars and they're all wearing suits and they're all it seems normal that's a it's a different world and the things that he was saying that are so taboo are so normal today yeah that they're not shocking and it's not not that good it's not that funny yeah you have to do the same kind of stuff for um like there's d.h lawrence has a book called lady shadowlay's lover and i know it sounds ridiculous but it was one of the early books i believe at the uh over a century ago that was very controversial for its sexual content it's sort of one of the great books because it dared to actually talk about a woman cheating on her husband and like and do so in the highest form and the same thing with gulag archipelago talking about talking about some of the darkest aspects of human history right when all of that stuff is forbidden when it's banned because now it's like not you know yes we all know this history but when in the middle of it when you're risking your own life when you're risking your book being banned or burned or you being imprisoned that's when it matters like taking that risk yeah and no one took that risk more than lenny bruce lenny bruce was arrested many many times and uh ultimately it wound up costing him his life i mean died on the bathroom floor shooting heroin and trying to cope with all the lawsuits that he was going through i mean this guy was constantly being arrested and constantly going through lawsuits and then his comedy deteriorated horribly there's some footage of him towards the end of his career where he essentially would go on stage with legal papers and read from the legal papers about his case from then it's richard pryor from him then the next great is richard pryor and he had the most profound impact on me when i was a kid when i was 15 years old my parents took me to see live at the sunset strip which is a richard pryor's concert film and i remember very distinctly being in that audience and laughing and looking around at all the people in the audience who were like falling out of their chairs just dying laughing just swaying back and forth and i was laughing hard too and i was like my god this guy is doing this just by talking i thought of all the great movies that i'd seen that i loved that were hilarious comedy movies and i was like nothing that i've ever seen is as funny as this and all he's doing is talking and that planted a seed in my head for my love of stand up comedy and my curiosity about the art form and that's what got me interested in you know watching it on television and then ultimately going to open mic nights and then eventually doing it i've actually been going to open mics a lot recently just listening for psychological examinations for people no i i it's actually really inspiring to me uh to see people that you know some are funny some are not so funny unapologetically trying putting it all out there night after night like eating shit yeah my favorite is when you know you're talking about like five people in the audience and the the jokes are just not landing and they still i don't know it feels like even just empathetically there's few things as difficult as that it's hard i still remember many comics will say this and i think dan cook was the first person i heard say it publicly that if he ever had to go back and do it again like from scratch he doesn't think he could do it doesn't think he could endure the struggle of open mic to you know ultimately to success and the numbers of people that try it and fail versus try and succeed are off the charts i don't know if there's any other art form that has such a low rate of success because it's psychological it's torture it is torture and it's also not something you can learn like here's the thing like if you uh you play guitar you can learn to play guitar someone can teach you the chords and if you do it and you could you could do uh all along the watch tower you could play it you can't teach someone how to do comedy you think it's you're funny or not or can you can you still figure it out like you still learn you can figure it out yeah can you start on fun can you start being unfunny yeah and become funny yes it's possible it's not easy though you're gonna have to eat a lot of shit you're gonna have to eat a lot of shit and you're gonna have to examine why you're not funny and you're gonna have to spend a lot of time with uncomfortable thoughts and try to figure out what it is like what's missing like you know and could you edit your stuff and make it better maybe you need to do drugs maybe you need to get involved in psychedelic drugs and rethink the way you interface with reality itself maybe you need your heart broken maybe you need to be in love maybe there's a lot of maybes there like maybe you just need more life experience but you know when i started comedy i was 21 and i was a moron i had no information you know i i could do impressions of people and i could talk about sex yeah those are the things that i was interested in back then i mean if i was talking philosophically i didn't know i didn't have a philosophy i didn't have a unique perspective on life i hadn't experienced much so every time you bomb it forces you to introspect to ask questions to yourself and then that's how you actually develop a philosophy yeah what you actually believe you learn through doing and i think you could say that about podcasting too yeah you know i'm certainly way better at having conversations than i ever was when i first started doing comedy or excuse me when i first started doing podcasts you learn stick with a kid because one day you'll be able to interview donald trump you'd be mad enough to handle that conversation um how hard is it to do because i've been really curious that uh it's been on my bucket list because i'm terrified i want to do everything i'm terrified of you guys stand up no but i do want to do like one five five minute like open mic why you do kill tony how hard is it to do five minutes would you say it's hard well it depends on you know how long you've been thinking about doing comedy it depends on how you look at things and also depends on your style of comedy like the most difficult style of comedy is like i think like steven wright style is probably the most difficult style of comedy complete non-sequiturs one subject doesn't lead into the next there's no flow to it it's just i notice this i noticed that and then there's this and then there's that and that that's hard to memorize and it's really hard to piece together uh an hour of non-sequiturs but it's easier because you can rely on the jo joke it sits more with the joke like whether you're funny or not is on the on on the actual material versus like the timing and the the energy the dance with the audience right because like if you don't have the raw jokes like stephen wright does or mitch hedberg um then you have to it's all about the delivery yeah and yeah that they either kill or they bomb is it random like whether they kill or bomb yeah well in the beginning i mean you're essentially a different person every day of your life you know you're similar but you're more tired you're more rested you're exhausted you're refreshed you have vitamins and food nourishment in your system you just get your heart broken you haven't slept in days you're a different person all the time and you go on to that stage you're in the neighborhood of who lex friedman is here in the lex friedman neighborhood which lex friedman am i gonna get yeah you know energy levels yeah it depends it all depends but oh the other thing with kill tony is it's videotaped it's yes so you eating shit is on there forever forever the world can see it but it's one of the most important shows in combat it's the most important show in comedy because first of all it establishes stand up in a sense that like for the open micros for the people that are starting it out it establishes that the most important thing is to be funny like this is what the art form is all about and there's a lot of insecurity attached to that a lot of fears and so to alleviate some of those insecurities and fears people will decide that the message is more important and they'll pretend that you know like you have to have like uh you you have to have you have to be socially aware that you have to promote things that are positive in your comedy which is bullshit there are the people that say that they're all bad they're all bad at comedy and that's where the insecurity is it's like they can't just kill so they have to pretend that they're supposed to be socially aware and that being socially aware is an important part into society like let me explain something really clearly it's not a fucking person on earth who's ever changed their life because of a joke that's not what they're there for they're there for jokes the people that say that they s what they say that socially important comedy is the only comedy that's necessary the only comedy that you have to do that is just because they suck yeah that is it it's like the cop-out is that they can't do the real comedy they can't crush it's not like someone goes from being you know take a like shane gillis one of the best comics up and coming right now he's fucking fantastic i can't recommend enough seeing that guy live i work with him in irvine and uh i hadn't seen like his whole set i was crying i mean he's so good i heard she's a i haven't racist to any of his material no he's so good and his comedy is just all just trying to be as funny as possible there's not a chance in hell that guy's just gonna go woke and he's just gonna start promoting some sort of you know socially conscious agenda that's you know facetious and just a bunch of nonsense that he's trying to elevate his own personal brand and virtue signal that's not going to happen the thing about kill tony is in that because you only have one minute and because it's live and because you don't want tony shitting on you everybody else shooting off everybody's just gearing up to try to be as funny as possible and no one cares if you are gay or straight or asian or black or trans or non-binary nobody gives a fuck are you funny if you're funny you're in and everybody loves you you could be 80 you could be 20. nobody gives a shit you could be a woman or a man or ambiguous nobody fucking cares are you funny and that's the most important thing for a community of comedy to really promote comedy just funny just be funny and so in that sense kill tony is a real cornerstone of comedy it's a reminder what comedy's supposed to be yeah that said even the funniest like the funniest stuff has underneath it some wisdom sure comes out of it but that's not the the primary goal of it yeah i mean it might be hiring and fun oh tim dillon's a great example of that yeah he's got some amazing insights in his comedy but still it's all about fucking comedy it's all about the funny yeah it's always funny he's got he's the best at doing that especially in a podcast form about weaving like really important points in with hilarious you know obviously just you know just jokes let me ask you speaking of tim dillon a chaotic fucked up individual can we go to your childhood real quick a brief stroll so your mom and dad split up when you were five from uh from a younging perspective if you look at your subconscious what impact do you think that had on you informing who you are as a man as a human being well at the time i thought that my father was like a hero you know he was my dad i think every kid thinks like that about his dad his dad is like your dad's your protector your dad is like the coolest guy in the world that's what you like yeah yeah everybody wants to be like their dad especially if your dad is like an imposing figure i remember one time me and my cousin got in a fight over nothing it was like over uh who's tougher king kong or godzilla yeah over nothing that's an important but yeah and uh he's like actual fight actually oh i punched him in the face and um uh this is when you were like five yeah yeah and so which side were you on uh king kong okay i was wrong godzilla's like way bigger yeah 500 feet tall and he shoots fire out of his mouth yeah yeah are you sure i mean there's there's an argument to be made it's not all about size right no there's no argument to be made 500 feet tall versus 50 feet tall one's a gigantic dinosaur one is a stupid monkey who gets shot down by a plane you can't kill godzilla godzilla no you can't kill godzilla with a plane like that shit wouldn't work in godzilla yeah killed king kong um king kong in the new movies kept growing it's getting bigger and bigger got to the point where he's as big as godzilla it just feels like king kong is stronger oh stop back take back immediate backtake you don't think there's a backtake there's a difference if he's the same size human weapons and two animals going at it of a different size you don't think there's in in the jungle a smaller animal can take on a bigger animal you got monkey versus uh let's see a lion monkey versus a bear what who wins a monkey versus not a monster no not a monkey what's the strongest uh ape uh girl no but gorilla see okay gorilla can't do backtakes i'm thinking of like a smaller you know what i'm saying because in jiu jitsu you see this all the time do you remember that scene in talladega nights do you know talladega where the the little boy's talking his grandpa i'll be all over you like a spider monkey exactly spiderman i was thinking all right there's some animals like here's a better example a wolverine wolverines chase wolves and bears off of their kills and they're not very big at all they're just so ferocious and they're so durable like it's very hard to kill a wolverine yeah and there's videos of like cats like not actual like domestic cats or uh or domestic dogs starting shit with much larger animals yeah and if they're ferocious enough well pit bulls are a great example that pit bulls are small like real game bred pit bulls are like 35 45 pounds and they'll kill much larger dogs anyway you were on on king kong's side yeah it was the shit out of your cousin i remember he said to me uh like i thought it was in like real trouble because i remember my cousin's mom was yelling at me and was like you monster all this crazy shit so um my dad got me a loan and he said tell me what happened and i told him you know we got in a fight we're arguing or king kong godzilla and uh i punched him in the face and he goes did you cry i go no he goes good don't ever cry and i remember that like whoa okay and i remember thinking all right i'm just gonna start punching people because like obviously my dad thinks it's a good idea if i go running around punching people as long as i don't cry like it i remember certain things about you know and also like this is a again like we were talking about watching lenny bruce in getting a timeline of what the world was like back then this is a different world yeah you know in 1970 this would have been 1972. it's a different world back then man like a really different world it's some of that so carl jung talked about the shadow it's the unconscious where you have dark stuff and oftentimes you used to project there's stuff that you're very self-critical about yourself but because it's in your unconscious you use it to project onto others you see it as flaws in others and that's a good way to like whatever um it gives a a quote like everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves so that's that's a nice way to investigate yourself like something that pisses you off you start asking questions of your mind and that's how you bring it to the surface but anyway from that those are formative years from that time is there still stuff in your unconscious you think you haven't examined some dark shit i don't think so i don't i'm not aware if it is because i've looked you know like if someone get you know someone says uh you know i i i left something over your house like where'd you leave it i don't know like all right i'll go look yeah i'll get a get a real thorough look but i'm pretty sure pretty sure it's not there yeah yeah i don't know i think i've looked i mean um it certainly had enough i think the positive effect also was compounded by the fact that when my mother married my stepdad who's a great guy it was a hippie very different we moved around a lot and so the bad thing about that was i didn't really develop long-term friends the good thing about that was that i was forced to develop my own opinions about things instead of adopting an opinion of the neighborhood and the group about anything i was forced to form my own thoughts and opinions about almost everything and so it made me much more of an independent thinker so that on top of the fact that you know losing you know my quote-unquote hero very early on and then having to form my own opinions about things it left me with a very uh very independent streak you know in terms of and and if i hadn't done the things that i got interested in martial arts and then and then comedy if i hadn't gotten interested in those things i would have been fucked because i was just too independent for normal jobs i was too independent for school i just didn't want to listen to people i was too feral i just didn't want to didn't want to sit still i if i was with the wrong parents especially today i most certainly would have been medicated yeah there's so many possible trajectories you can imagine where you would have not been the person you are today oh yeah this is probably one of the best possible today you're living this uni this particular storyline you're living through is was one of the better ones this timeline is as good as it gets for someone like me is there advice you can give to people to young to young kids that are living through a shitty situation of any sort a tough life find a thing you like try to find a thing that you really enjoy try to find a thing that you're passionate about like an activity yes for me early on it was drawing it was uh illustrations it was uh comic books i wanted to be a comic book illustrator and then it went from uh comic book drawing and illustrations to um martial arts so but it was just another thing that i was very very passionate about and that was my vehicle out of my dilemma that was my vehicle out of my my own anxiety and trauma and my own issues and insecurities and find something find a thing that you genuinely enjoy because getting good at things you genuinely enjoy is extremely beneficial for young people because it lets you know that like everybody thinks they're a loser every young person thinks they're a loser at least a young person in the situation i was at like i didn't know i wasn't a loser until i started winning until i started doing martial arts martial arts taught me that like i could get better at stuff that it wasn't i wasn't really a loser i just was someone who was like in a fucked up situation but you could channel all that energy that you have as a young person into something and get better at it and then all sudden people admired me i was like this is crazy so i went from being someone who was incredibly insecure and basically a failure to someone who was really successful at this one thing that was very dangerous that other people were scared of and that gave me immense confidence and also a real understanding of the direct correlation between hard work and success and uh kind of understanding that you're not a loser right that there is some a diamond in the rough yeah and also an understanding that you can't listen to people because even my parents didn't want me to do martial arts they didn't want me to fight they didn't want me to do stand-up there's like you you have to understand like who you are and then in the face of other people's either criticism or you know lack of faith in your ability to succeed you push through and there's great benefit in that and then you realize that you can kind of apply that to other things in life you can apply that to critics you can apply that to social media commentators you can apply that to a lot of things okay what about young people in their 50s can you give advice to like imagine you're sitting you're sitting back probably still here in texas in your 90s looking back what advice would that guy give to you today or like people you know people that have done some shit in their 50s you've gone through a hell of a life there's potentially some incentive to settle down you got a great family to relax um but maybe there's some incentive to still do epic shit still be david goggins running in the middle of the desert shit into a camera if you're david goggins you have to be david goggins i don't think there's a path for that guy that exists at this stage of his life other than that do you think he'll be 70 and still screaming yes okay a hundred percent 100 if if david and i are alive we're both 70 he's gonna call me up and say stay hard motherfucker guaranteed guaranteed so lean into whatever the fuck you are at this point well if you're enjoying it but if you're not enjoying it rethink your life try to figure out why you're why you're not enjoying it you still think it's possible to shift things in your 50s yeah if you're alive you can get better yeah what yeah no matter what if you're alive you can shift things i mean if you're 90 years old and you know you have a month to live you could apologize for the things you think you did wrong and maybe sort of reconcile and and shape relationships you have with the people that around you better so they they feel differently about you after you're gone yeah i always love people in their 70s who are like like getting back into dating or something like that yeah i was watching a video about a woman who's in her 60s who just started powerlifting nice yeah and same with you just so you see people get into jiu-jitsu a white belt that's like 70. yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of if you're alive you can get better at stuff and i don't think people are happy if they don't have puzzles and complex tasks and things that are interesting to them whether it's an art project or whether it's uh learning something completely new like stand-up comedy like doing things that are difficult is it it's as much of a nourishment of the mind as uh food is a nourishment of the body i think you need things that that are puzzling to you where you have to find your own human potential in the difficulty of the task and and work your way through things at least for me for me i mean i can only speak for me because i'm the only i'm the only life that i've ever lived that i'm aware of and in my life that has been a 100 constant i i am a very happy person and i have never had a moment where i'm not doing difficult shit yeah ever ah what matters most is how well you walk through the fires you just keep starting fires for yourself to walk through well they don't necessarily have to be fires right because fires are like kind of out of control lukewarm uh tasks the surfaces tasks give yourself something an arduous difficult task where you're challenged challenged mentally and one of the great things about being challenged physically is it's also mental the people that don't understand that have never really been challenged physically people that think that physical challenges are just like just physical it's just brute grunt work it's not it's uh emotional intelligence it's understanding your desire to quit and you know conquering your inner bitch all that stuff is it's mental it's playing out inside your head and there's a mental strength that you acquire from that that you can apply to intellectual pursuits and the the people that don't think that or the people that haven't attempted them and there's an arrogance to people that only pursue intellectual exercises only pursue intellectual things and don't pursue anything physical that the physical stuff is based it's grunt work it's primal it's not necessary i don't think that's accurate i don't think that they're i mean obviously there's people like stephen hawkings who have no opportunity to do anything physical right his physical dilemmas keeping us or was keeping his heart beating but for most people i think you can really benefit from physical struggle and you benefit from it in a mental way and i think that is overlooked that's unfortunately overlooked by academics and intellectuals who they make excuses for why they're fat and lazy or scrawny well they don't need to be it's not even about the fat or all that it's like literally there's something about the physical challenge that's really good for you especially if you're academic especially if you do intellectual types though there's this great roboticist at mit russ tedrick he runs barefoot to and from mit every day i love it um like seven seven to ten miles each way barefoot barefoot well he's uh he studies legged locomotion legged robots so for him it's also interesting how the human body moves he sees the beauty and all of in all movement what do his feet look like you know calloused destroyed right no just calloused they're nice they're they they want a nice it's not like i gave them a foot massage but but i mean they they look uh and i don't have a foot fetish so i don't uh i'm not able to correctly invest uh evaluate another man's feet i apologize for this but uh they don't look fucked up does he run on concrete yeah he runs all surfaces and he does everything completely barefoot uh the the running part at work so one of the things he has to do is fit into society which means he has to change clothes and appear normal right so does he wear like uh zero shoes you know those no he's not type shoes no because that's like very hippy wokey type of thing no like he doesn't he's barefoot when he's running and then he wears like normal looking stuff like dress she's working his way up to running barefoot uh so he was significantly overweight and his advisor this this this other uh famous person at mit who was a roboticist took his own life and that made him uh that made rust face his own mortality i think i mean the you start to ask big questions about your well-being like holy shit that's where i can end at any moment and so he started taking his sort of physical well-being seriously but as a result of that not did he did he become like shredded but he's also discovered the intellectual value uh the humbling value of physical exercise he's not preachy about it all i don't think i actually rarely hear him advise it to anyone he just does it as a as a almost like meditation or something like that it's it's definitely a form of meditation and you can attest to that right you do quite a bit of running there's a thing about it you kind of almost like a mantra gets formed and you you get into it it was great here in the austin heat 100 degree weather that tests you you know what i love to do outside pull sleds that's my thing i love to pull sleds outside in the heat yeah i did today yeah yeah i love it uh so you're also your wife is incredible you're in a relationship what uh and you're married you have a great family what advice would you give uh to me and to others like me who who are dumb fucks and and have not found david well you're a great guy so this definitely doesn't necessarily apply to you but be someone who someone would want to be in a relationship with there's a lot of people out there that want a great partner they want someone in a relationship but why would someone want to be in a relationship with you you know maybe you bicker a lot maybe you're jealous maybe you uh maybe you lie maybe you you know maybe you're cruel maybe you're you don't have a sense of humor maybe you're you know you're not kind like what is what is it about you that people would not enjoy being around or that people avoid fix that well this this applies to me as well like you you said something with cam hanes one of the things you admire is the the discipline it takes to sort of juggle so many things and yeah successfully i'm not sure i'm very good at that so juggling all this hard work and then also a relationship also relationship also family all these kinds of priorities i mean that requires having your shit together it does it's a different thing but it's also you got to find the right person there's a lot of people who sell for they settle for sexy they settle for hot for all right okay you settle for the wrong person like you can get hot and nice they're out there yeah but don't get hot and mean hot means not fun then you get amber hurt yeah you know and then you end up driving yeah yeah yeah you can be deceived by perfect symmetry so you don't think it's a good idea to record your partner i think you should record all conversations the cia's doing it no matter what i assume that every conversation i have is recorded because i'm pretty sure it is even when we had dinner with alex jones he was recording yeah i still remember that i didn't know that i was recording huh he might you know what be funny if he is this yeah he could be could be my advice about relationships is be somebody and then also like find someone who you can grow with right you don't want to be with someone who doesn't share your uh your value someone you don't want to be with someone who makes excuses you don't want to be with someone who's lazy or who's spiteful you want to be with someone who's like genuinely kind that's one of the things that i really love about my wife and she's very smart and she works hard she's like she's a dedicated disciplined person but she's also really nice that's why one of the things i like the most about her she's so nice she's always smiling and that energy is great yeah i mean you've seen us together yeah you've hung around with us she's fun yeah she's a lot of fun yeah she makes you just feel great to be alive it's good to have people like that aren't you she's happy she's a happy person she's happy to be around that's the kind of people that you could have in your life as friends and as co-workers and as lovers and wives and husbands you can find those people they're real and when you find those people your life is better like to have a good tribe is very important to have a good tribe of people you know and i think if there's anything that i'm very very fortunate about it's the the people that i'm around i have very good friends and one of which is you it's so valuable to have quality people around you because it makes you want to do better because you admire the hard work that these put people put in like my campaigns or goggins or many of my friends and people that are generous and people that are curious and people that are honest they inspire you to do the same and it's extremely valuable it's one of the most most valuable things is to surround yourself with positive healthy friendly generous people that's why i cut out tim dillon from my life i broke up with him he's not married no it's over it's none of those things the taxes non-stop the non-stop conspiracy theories the non-stop mocking of of my eastern european origins [Laughter] it's just not healthy for me um plus he's physically abusive and towering figure both emotional boy physically no no i love him okay he worked out he would be a house he's got a brick large frame you know so if i interview putin what should i ask him how's the cancer how's it doing buddy that's question number one in russian do you think he has cancer i don't think so that the narrative is terrifying right dictator of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world who also has cancer and he just invaded a sovereign country that's a terrifying narrative because that's what we're all afraid of someone has nothing to lose who just decides to let loose a nuke well i do think maybe it's projecting but if i had cancer or if you think about leaders that have cancer you're facing your own mortality i would think you'd be more focused on his legacy and the dropping nuclear bomb is not good for legacy i i do believe he wants to be remembered as a great leader as a lot of leaders do as a lot of even dictators do and i think he wants to figure out a way to pull out a win so he can say that whatever this thing was whatever this invasion was was good for russia it was good for the nation he ultimately made it a greater nation than it was before and perhaps he could justify an escalation of war to be that but i don't um and it's just the cancer thing concerns me so much because it's been so often part of this propaganda has been told about putin that he's sick right i don't know why it's always people kind of wonder that a lot about especially dictators but you had that even like with hillary clinton and obviously with biden that narrative is stickier so for some people that narrative is transparent yeah obvious but the degree of it is a question of blindness it does with with everyone like what's you know how healthy is this leader that's the right people sure always they were doing that about trump too um the thing about putin though is like his uh appearance is altered where he looks very bloated his body doesn't look much bigger but his face looks like puffy and swollen i had a friend who had uh sarcoidosis and they prescribed prednisone which is a type of a steroid and one of the things that would happen when he was on it is he he would his face would get really big it was like he would blow up like a swell up and maintain a lot of water and and inflammation and uh that's what it looks like when i'm looking at it so actually like if you're sitting with him one question is about health that's has as has biden been asked that kind of question no like without mockery you'd have to go on fox news like the mainstream media treats him with kid gloves in a way that i've never seen i mean it's it's so obvious there's something horribly wrong with his cognitive function well i i to push back i don't know if it's horribly wrong you don't think it's probably wrong i think it's no i think there's uncertainty to which degree is wrong i would love to there to be a serious like conversation about it with him in fact i actually have to now look because of course fox news will mock his like decree declining yes mental health and then i would love like sort of an objective discussion are you aware of this are you uh like what are you putting in place are you yourself because if i was a a person with a declining mental abilities like you have to start um you have to start thinking about that kind of stuff like who is around you who are the advisors what if you start stop being able to see the world clearly yeah i would be transparent about that kind of stuff well you would be but you also would never be a politician yeah because you're too fucking honest well yeah but actually from a conversation perspective it would be nice if that kind of discussion was that it would be uh but all jokes aside with putin um i would ask questions about democracy versus what they have i mean without without any disparaging descriptions of what is going on over in russia it's clearly not a democracy um it's they i mean the way he has it set up the elections are a joke he's so he would push back that's not clearly not democracy he is still very popular so majority of people are huge supporters of putin inside russia the he the the people that push back against that would say that that's because any serious opposition is pushed out of the country yeah so competition murdered yeah so but yes that's a really really good question the value of dictatorships one of the things about the united states that's fascinating to me is that every four years unless it's uh it's four to eight years right someone does two terms but every four years there's an opportunity for someone to be new and completely inexperienced at the most difficult job in the world which is ridiculous so the interesting thing is it actually makes sense after eight years you've gained the wisdom yeah you would actually be a pretty good leader to keep going yeah but there is some problem where you the power gets started getting to your head yeah and so like from putin's perspective i think he genuinely wants the best for russia i don't think he's lost his mind in terms of like it's all about greed and so on uh same as stalin i think stalin until the end of his days wanted the best for the soviet union so it's not like you become hitler i think lost his mind during the war like where it was like he wasn't seen clearly at all what putin believes is that he is actually the best person to bring out the best for his country now the problem is maybe refreshing the leader is in fact in the long term the best thing versus every leader believes they know what's best for the country my point is to keep refreshing it well and that's the case for democracy that's the case for the system we have that creates a natural maybe emergent balance of power i think it makes it evident that there is no clear-cut real right way to do it and that if you have the perfect person in having them for 12 20 years would be amazing if you had a perfect benevolent leader who clearly only cared about the people was doing their best and striving hard and got great satisfaction knowing that he is a dedicated civil servant that only wants to lead the country in a way that's going to benefit the most people in the most profound way um but we have a dirty political system that's completely corrupted by money completely corrupted by influence the fact that you know the lobbyists i mean there's an area outside of washington dc it's one of the richest areas in the country and it's where the lobbyists live there's so much money involved being a lobbyist there's so much money involved in special interest groups and how much of an impact they have on who gets elected and what decisions get made once that person gets elected we know this right we know it's not for the people by the people it's just not what it is i mean this country is an experiment self-government and if we could do it all over again i would say the most important thing is to have laws in place to keep money out of politics and to make it a heinous crime for someone to influence laws and and policy based entirely on the amount of profit it could generate for a party or for uh a company that is uh investing in a candidate that's fucking incredibly dangerous and it's corrupt and that corruption has been accepted we've just accepted that it's this corruption exists you know last question if putin asks to see this watch what do i tell him what would you give it would should i should i let him see it because we know what happens with a super bowl ring i think a super bowl ring is unique he could buy a watch like that yeah pretty easy you know but this particular isn't that a power move yeah this is the watch you gave me yes it's a story yes i would probably share it with him the story and then maybe you go look and i see this watch yeah and then he puts it on it's like thank you do you say no uh you go like this yeah there it is bro bro so many words i'm gonna have to find translations buddy bro um i guess bro's brother i mean if he takes your watch i'll buy you another one if putin steals it keep him going i'll just i'll just give you the same exact watch well first of all thank you for this my pleasure i really wanted to talk to you because um in a couple of days leaving to ukraine and russia and i hope i'll be back in one piece and drink whiskey with you once again and yeah i hope so too i'm nervous about you going over there you know i know journalists have been killed now it's um but they don't know jujitsu ah no i i think you'll be it'll be okay and i think there's certain things you do in life that just kind of your heart pulls towards that so much what's your objective over there i'm not somebody who thinks about objectives clearly it's just something about me says i need to go there uh but the to put in loose words is to to try to understand what that world is now so i remember what it was years ago when i was there i i know my family i know the generations of family that was there on that land in ukraine and in russia and the soul of the people the love that's there the beauty of the culture and i want to see what it is today and what this war has created both the anger and the love and the people and just hear them out and just talk to them no recordings none of that maybe a little here and there but mostly just for me and just to see i don't know this sometimes it's just it something pulls you uh to a place and i also because i'm able to speak russian and some ukrainian i i do want to try to have these a couple of the political leaders involved talk to them and i have all the right connections everybody has said yes of course you don't know the likelihood it finally happens but i want to at least have that possibility there sometimes you have to go to a place to really understand it you can't just read about it you can't just talk to the people that are living there you have to be there and i've never been in a war zone i've never been in in a land that's been damaged and wiped by the weapons of war and i just want to feel that because so much of that land is i remember you know i remember when everything was flourishing um yes corruption all those kinds of things but people were there and the culture was flourishing and people were happy there was lots of struggle but they were happy and now people are extremely angry there's hate in the air on all sides i want to i want to see that i want to understand sometimes it just pulls you and you have to go so it doesn't make any sense perhaps but you just got to do it what's the timeline of when i'm going how long no one way i don't know real plan wow yeah so i'm hope hoping back in in a month um but also not uh just to clarify i'm not somebody who seeks risk and um like you're somebody who seems to be terrified of bears and sharks so you don't like so why go swim out why go surfing why go school out in the ocean yeah so i'm somebody that's the same probably with sharks too i'm not taking unnecessary risk but certain things that just mean a lot to you you take the risk and so a little bit of risk willing to take to to uh to discover something about myself honestly is probably what it would all boils down to try to understand myself because so much of my me is from that place well this is the beautiful thing about america is it's like stitches together all these different cultures everybody came from somewhere else yeah and you try to understand in order for me to be a good american i need to understand who i was where i came from and that's nothing reveals the spirit of a people better than war it's like there's something about this conflict that's really uh cuts all the bullshit this is who we are this is who we are as a people so i wanna i wanna see it i wanna understand and i like i said when i come back drink some whiskey with you all right well i hope that happens i really do and i hope you're safe over there and i hope you come back with whatever insight you're you're trying to achieve thank you for doing this conversation my pleasure thank you for everything you you've done for me for the support for the love and uh everybody around you thank you for everything you're doing for everybody around you for for giving for giving for giving back but for just giving and being kind to everybody i love you brother i love you too thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with joe rogan to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with one of joe's and one of my favorite quotes from miyamoto musashi once you know the way broadly you'll see it in everything thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you