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Cheers, sir.

Patience. What is that? Black rifle.

Rifle. Yeah. We're up, Chris. What's up, baby? How are you?

Good to see you, man.

So how long you been in Texas now?

Two years.

Wow. Do you feel like this is where you live or do you like this?

Feels like home. Really? Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, I went back home for Christmas in the UK, and it's so strange to go back to a place that you know so well. You're super familiar with, but you're kind of different. And everything's changed, but everything's the same and you fall back into old patterns. You remember that tree that you used to walk past on your morning walk? And all of it's very disquieting, but it's fun, it's nice.

The oddest thing for me is the contrast and the amount of freedom you have for things that you would never think were important, like these little nicotine things in California. You can't buy this because it's flavored. In California. You can put a tent in front of people's houses and fucking cook meth and no one says anything, no one does anything. You could commit violent crime and you get arrested and released with no bail. They never find you again. The laws are so ridiculous. But you are not allowed to have flavored nicotine. Flavored nicotine is dangerous, Chris.

They're trying to ban flavored vapes in the UK very aggressively. Super aggressively. It's like, that's a big deal. That being said, I think it's like some non insignificant percentage of school children are using vapes. There's a no vapes sign in. Like, that wasn't something that was already self evident.

Well, cigarettes were a big deal when I was in high. Know a lot of kids smoke cigarettes. It was a cool kids thing to do.

What's the smoking age in America?

I think it's 1818.

Legally?

Legally, yeah, it's 18. But when I was a kid, people got cigarettes. Someone got you cigarettes? I don't know. When I was young, I remember before I turned to 18, they changed the legal drinking age because the legal drinking age, I believe, used to be 18, and then they bumped it up to 21.

I was like, damn it, dude. Have you ever seen the video of when DUIs came in in the 1980s and they're interviewing people in cars?

Yeah.

That is one of my favorite videos of all time. Please, Jamie, let me watch that video again.

Yeah, the lady's like, we're going to bring in communism.

Don't know what the world's common. Yeah, she's got a baby in the passenger seat.

No seatbelt.

Oh, my God.

Anybody who did have a seatbelt, there's no airbags. Those things are death traps.

It's one of my favorite videos. There's this weird. There's something I've noticed since being in America, your relationship with drink driving is a little bit more lax than it is in the UK. Yeah.

Not in Texas. If you have any alcohol in your system at all, they'll arrest you if you get pulled over. And they said, have you had anything to drink? And you say, yes, I have had one drink. You're getting arrested.

I fucking love this drink. Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic. It's kind of getting common, this. When a fellow can't put in a.

Hard day's work, put in 1112 hours.

A day, and then get in your.

Truck and at least running one or two beers, they're making it laws.

Look at the baby when you want to.

You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving. Yeah, she's wearing a seatbelt. It looks like the baby. The baby is more protected than I thought it was. It had that thing in front of it, that little cushion in front of it. So it seems like she was like, a little bit more.

The funniest thing about that is that thing their issue is it's not with not being allowed to drink, then drive. Theirs is one worse. It's drink and drive. You mean I can't drink and. Yeah, exactly.

Constantly.

Dude, I love that video. Oh, my God.

Yeah, you definitely shouldn't drink and drive. That's true. But also, you don't really want people telling you what you can and can't do. And once they start doing it with anything, Bill. William, you won't bring in communism. It's very cartoonish when they're saying that. It's very ridiculous. But kind of. They have a point. This is the only point. If you let someone tell you what you can't do, they're going to expand that power of telling you what you can't do.

Yeah, always. One of the problems is that puts.

Sobriety was somehow not fitting with the american way. What? Measuring sobriety. Okay, hold on a second. Okay. During the 1950s, the american public and the judicial system were still erring on the side of the drunk driver. Odly enough, some people were concerned with the mechanization of measuring sobriety. Was somehow not fitting with the american way. Kind of isn't. It kind of isn't. But also you shouldn't drink and drive like both things are true. We should teach people that. You should never fucking do that. I went to high school with a kid and he was a good guy. I knew him from the time I was like 14. And then when I guess senior in high school he was drunk and he crashed his car and killed his friend. And I remember running into him on the street. We were both walking and I walked by him and he had his head down and I wasn't good friends with him but I was friends with him. I always said hi to him, I said hi to him, I said, hey, man, how are you doing? He's like, he was done. He was done. His life was over, man.

He wasn't a regular kid anymore. He was a kid who killed his friend in a drunk driving accident. It was a different human his life. He was this one guy. He was a good, normal guy, fun guy. People liked him. He was a friendly guy. And then all of a sudden a pariah. All of a sudden everyone knows what you did. All of a sudden what you did. You can't believe you did this horrible, horrible, horrible thing and you did it when you were so young a kid. He was 1617. Whatever he was, he didn't know what he was doing. He had no idea. You're so stupid when you're that young. Your brain's not formed yet and you can't treat them like they're adults. You just can't. They're not adults. You're talking about a 16 year old kid, a 15 year old kid. Like, fuck. When they're doing things they don't even know what's real. And it's all completely dependent upon how they were raised. You could get really lucky and have solid parents and really have a good understanding of how to behave in the world or you could get fucked and you got some dad who beats the shit out of you and he's always on meth and your mother's a fucking liar and she steals money and she sells people stuff.

That could be your reality too. And to expect a person like that to behave exactly the way you do with your nice life is crazy. It's crazy and it's one of the weirder things that we do. And instead of looking at the origins of what are the origins of horrible behavior? It's all terrible childhoods. It's almost all terrible childhoods. Instead of looking at that, all we look at is a crime. It's very strange. It's a weird thing. It's like to know logically that you just have to take a few extra steps and you say, well, what's the root of this problem and how do we address that? How do we make it better? We have so much money for other things. We don't have any money for that. That seems like one of the most fundamental problems any country would face is the amount of people that grow up that become violent criminals because they were fucked from the time they were young. They had no shot at life. Their whole childhood was just violence and chaos. And that's not an insignificant number of people in this country. And yet any foreign conflict has to be addressed with the utmost urgency when the things that are paramount to our daily existence right here, with what our tax dollars pay for right here, are just completely ignored.

Completely ignored, never discussed. They'll talk to you about climate change. Climate change. Let me tell you something. If you live in the south side of Chicago and you get shot, climate change doesn't mean jack shit to you, okay? We should address what the fuck is going on right now, not climate change.

Do you know what the ideas of luxury beliefs are? You heard of this?

No.

So it's been repopularized by my friend Rob Henderson. So luxury beliefs are ideas held by the upper classes that confer status on them, but often cause costs for the lower class. So the seminal example of this is defund the police.

Yeah.

I walked past a house in Austin, not far from where I live that has a defund the police flag in the garden out front and a private security sticker in the front window.

It's so stupid. It's such a know. Do you know will store?

Of course. He's been on my show. I went for breakfast with him yesterday.

He's great. He's fantastic. Of course you don't will store, who wrote that book, the status game, was explaining all this and how what people are doing, what they're actually doing.

He's outstanding. So good.

He relates it to so many behavior patterns in life. It's just like, oh, my God, this all makes sense.

He's a legend of storytelling. He's one of the best writers in the UK. There's this really interesting example of my friend Mary Harrington talks about how the death of chivalry has caused an increase in domestic violence. So it's very interesting. So this is a good example of this luxury beliefs thing. So, yes, during the 1960s and 70s, if you were an upper class lady and the guys that you were dating were from households that had two parents that had taught them how you're supposed to treat people and they weren't mistreated and all the rest of it. They grew up like a well balanced person. To them, it might seem a little bit patronizing for the guy to hold the door for you or to pull the chair out or to make sure that you get home okay because you live an existence in which the danger of that not happening, not going appropriately, isn't that great. Now, what wasn't understood by a lot of the upper class feminists that were talking about this derogation of chivalry that they wanted was that that doesn't necessarily work for the working class or the underclass woman who is dating a man whose father beat him or stepfather beat him, or didn't have a father, or was homeless or addicted to drugs or in violent crime.

And she thinks it's a direct line, a single spectrum from you should hold the door open for women to, you shouldn't beat your wife. And I think that it's true. Women should be seen as something that requires additional protection, that are precious and should be respected. If you derogate the stuff up here, sure, maybe it means that you liberate some of the working, the upper class women to be able to go and do whatever they want. But what does this cause downstream when you don't have those guardrails in place for the men that the lower class women are dating?

Well, just all men, period. Here's the thing that this is how it's looked upon in the martial arts world. If I know that I can fuck you up and I fuck you up, I'm probably a bad person. It's never good that a guy who is like some trained killer goes after some regular guy, picks a fight with him and fucks him up. It's never thought of as good. It's always negative. Like almost entirely negative. Like, the entire fan base will recognize that terrible behavior. So if you're a man and you have someone who is your wife and she's smaller than you and female, you have the craziest advantage physically. It's the most awful tyranny physically if violence is involved, if you decide that you're going to start swinging and teaching people lessons and then lying to police about how someone got hurt and, oh, she fell down the stairs. And if you grow up seeing that, that's even maybe more fucked up because that's your model for what? And that's probably what their model was when they were growing up. But it's. As men, we have to look at that as the weakest of most disgusting behaviors, including beating up on people that are weak.

Well, that's the reason for the male monkey dance, as it's called. The reason for that is that it's rivalry between two potentially matched males, and we don't know who's going to win. That's the reason for the conflict. If there's a huge disparity, what's the point for the conflict? You already know who's going to win, right? That's why beating up a 70 year old guy or a ten year old boy isn't a big deal. But if you're a 21 year old dude, that's about this. This is exactly why you have weight classes, right? To create this degree of intrigue and fairness in the rivalry.

100%. 100%. Yeah. If a heavyweight beat up on a bantamweight, everyone would be furious. But that's what a lot of men are and a lot of women are. It's crazy. If that happened in the male martial arts world, people would be. It's horrible. And it's weird that it's always been a part of cinema. There's always been scenes like, james Cagney smacks a girl in the face, and there was one. God, I wish I could remember the movie. It was so crazy. But it was like a 1950s movie, and the dad was spanking the wife. Spanking her, like, had her over his knee. And the young girl was saying that that's how he shows mommy that he loves her. God. You remember that movie, Jamie? I know. We played it. It was insane. It was like this insane scene from a movie where you're like, what?

What the fuck am I watching?

But it's a time capsule into this evolving understanding of how human beings interact with each other. That's what it is. And it's a time capsule from less than a hundred years ago.

What was that? Super famous. Is this Shirley Temple?

Yes, it's Shirley Temple. That's what it bro. Thanks, mama.

Your darn toot.

And I did. That means you love her.

That's what I've been trying to tell her. Oh, my God, dude.

You're darn tootin darn tooten. I am. The guy's got his daughter over his knee, and he's spanking her into submission. Spanking her? Spanking her. That means you love her. Shirley Temple says. Shirley Temple was, like the propagandist. She was like a young propagandist. It's not her.

So it might be someone else.

How many of them were there? How many of them young, famous girl actors were there? How many of them came out great? Zero.

It's a mixed bag. Britney Spears is a work in progress.

I do not think children should be developing in front of the world. I think that's an insane amount of pressure. I think becoming famous in front of the world is an insane amount of pressure. Becoming a child and as you're growing up, you're in front of the world. That's not manageable. No one's designed like that. You're going to blow the hardware.

I had this idea about, we always hear the problems of child stars. Macaulay Culkin, Britney Spears, too much fame, too young. And I don't disagree that thinking about, oh, my God, this person's basically never known the world without adoration and attention and focus and scrutiny and all that stuff.

Right?

But there's a really interesting question about what happens if you're a, let's say, for example, canadian psychologist who's been working away in the dusty annals of some university for a while, and out of nowhere, you get thrust into the limelight, and then this bald MMA commentator plucks you out of obscurity. And now you're one of the most talked about people on the planet. The interesting thing here is, as the child, yes. You didn't know what the world was like before. I understand that can be disquieting. But what about when you had a sense of self, right? What about when you thought you knew who you were and your place in the world and your place in the status hierarchy as will would stay? Yeah, what about that? And then you just get ripped from your moorings and you're just out in space and the ISS is going past you and you're.

You're certainly going to make some mistakes. There's no way around it. You've never managed those waters before. If you just get in a raft for the first time and you're going down white waters to navigate, you're probably going to fall in like, you're probably not good at this if the acceleration.

Is quick as well.

Yeah, you're in a kayak and you're hitting rocks, you're probably going to fall in. You don't know what the fuck you're doing. But once you figure out what you're doing, then you can kind of achieve some sort of level of balance. But for him, I think a lot of it was exacerbated by the benzodiazepine thing. So he was taking antianxiety medication. He didn't understand when it was prescribed to him how addictive it was and what the consequences were of getting off of it. And he talks about it a lot, and I think he was sick for over a year.

I'm pretty sure that there's a number of psychiatrists that are hesitant about prescribing that for more than a couple of days. And Jordan was on it for months and months and months.

It seems like even for a couple of days, you're like. You're just kissing death. I just want to kiss you death.

Have you seen the Instagram account? Mug shorties?

No. Oh, what is it?

My God, this is one of the greatest things on the Internet. I can't believe I get to teach you about mug shorties. Come on, jmo, let's do this.

This is a fun account.

So it's images, mugshots of girls that have been taken in for questioning. So it'll say in the top in the description what they've been charged for. Look at the comment below.

She can drive me while intoxicated.

Your Honor, we're under her influence.

Her eyes are intoxicating.

Your honor, I think you've been drinking. Keep going.

Oh, my God. It's amazing. They're very funny. There's my valentine. Oh, so they're all funny comments.

Dudes that are just like, I'll fucking.

Yeah, but they seem to be making funny consensual. It seems to be funny, though. Oh, yeah, that's fun. What is it called? Mug shot. Shoddies. Shoddies. S-H-A-W-T-Y-S shorties. But shoddies.

O-W-Y. Possession of marijuana and possession of paraphernalia. It was my weed, officer. There's another one. It was like possession of cocaine, and someone replied and said it was medicinal.

My face id doesn't want to believe that it's me with this headphone on. It's od. I would think that that would be, like, a really good place to test jokes as a comic with mug shots. It's like a really fun exercise just to try to come up.

What can I come up with? The way that they look. And you've got a short description about the Caption.

You know who would excel at that is Tony Hinchcliffe. Tony Hinchcliffe would excel at that.

Mr. Roast.

He's the best at that. There's no one better. There's no one better at finding something funny about some horrible aspect of what just happened.

Jimmy Carr's pretty good.

Yes. He's very good at it. Yeah. The two of them could duke it out. It'd be a lot of fun. I think they might have done like a roast battle. They have. That's right, they have.

Wow. That would be like an unstoppable object and an immovable force.

Tony comes up with them. They're so fast. You can't believe they're not scripted. His brain just. Oh, but it's like that in the green room. He's always like, got puns for everything. His mind just works in a really weird joke writer way.

Well, Mark Norman's the same, right? He just can't not do it.

Cannot do it. Very similar. Mark's even more extreme.

Yeah, it's unrelenting with him. Fucking hell.

Mark can't. He gets panicky. If we're talking about something. He, he goes, I think they're going to think it's boring. His attention span, it's so short. I don't think he ever watches documentaries.

He's always going, I think I texted him a stat. About 77% of 18 to 24 year olds in the US are ineligible to join the military because of being overweight or mental or drug problems. And he just replied with meal team six.

Hold on. That's him 24/7 that's just how his brain works. He's so good at it. So good at it. It's a marvel of personality when we do protect our parks. If you were going to make a really good stew, it's not just meat. You want carrots in there, you want potatoes, you want spices. Like, he's a critical spice.

He's a big carrot.

He's something that's very important to that recipe being delicious.

Fucking phenomenal, dude.

He's such a good guy, too.

There's this idea about, in Blackadder, Rowan Atkinson, this famous british comedy, he was saying, you know your bits, don't you? One of the actors says to him, and he says, this is different. It's spontaneous and it's called wit. And I just always stuck in my mind that there's a difference between having prepared and well constructed stuff in advance and then being able to, no matter what it is, whether it's insights, whether it's debate, whether it's argumentation, whether it's analysis, all of those things. The ability for someone to just turn it on like that, the verbal sparring.

Aspect of it, some people don't like that. And then there's some comics that aren't really good at that. They're not good at dealing with audience members or anything like that. They're not good at answering questions, but they're good at long takes on things where they sit alone in contemplation and go over some ironic aspect of a topic, and then they write out really good material about it. It's still super valid. It's like there's no one that's better than the other, but there's different personalities that get attracted to the idea of constructing a stand up comedy routine. And for some personalities, they're not like a conflict personality or. Yeah, well, you're a this. They're not that guy or that girl. They're someone who gets some subject, bothers them, whatever it is, climate change, whatever it is. And they just sit on it and they're like, what? And then they'll be alone. They'll be in front of the computer, they'll get a notebook out. They just sit on it for fucking days sometimes. Bounce it around back and forth, twist it around, start it from this way, start it from the back it up, go from the conclusion first, and then explain your conclusion in a hilarious way.

See if it works better that way. And you'll do that. And then that type of comic, like that mindset can create great bits. They're great comics, but they just don't like to do the audience thing. But that's okay, too. It's like you can't ask someone to change their personality. But Tony is like, he's a razor tongued man. If you talk shit to Tony, he's going to fuck you up.

Dancing with death.

Yeah, and he's not physically imposing whatsoever, so it makes it even more brutal when he comes after you.

The same as Michael Malice. Michael once told me, he said, I couldn't get away with half of the shit that I say if I wasn't five foot seven.

Yeah, it helps. It certainly helps. It helps to be someone who you can't hit because they're weaker than you. Yeah, but Tony walks that fucking line.

Whitney was telling me before, I did a little tour toward the back end of last year, which was pretty interesting. And I was saying, what should I expect? He says, expect to get a bit more boring as it goes. Like, what do you mean? He said, well, in order for art to imitate life, you have to live a life. And the problem is, if you're on the road, all you know are airports and hotels and dinners and shows, and that's it. And she was saying that she was in a Hollywood script writers meeting, and they were saying, it's a Saturday morning. Where is she. And someone shouted from the back, she's at a baby shower. It was like, who goes to a baby shower? All right? She's doing a wine tasting. She's like, no one goes to a wine tasting. And the room turned and apparently said, no, Whitney, you don't. Other normal people do that.

Right?

So you've got this vicious trap of success. It must happen with musicians as well. How are you supposed to, if you're some heartfelt singer talking about your makeups and breakups of relationships, and now you're dealing with the fear of me, too? That doesn't exactly give sort of beautiful romance around what you're talking about. The same thing goes for comedians. Same thing goes for anything. The whole point of what you're trying to do is be representation, be representative for the normal person.

Yes.

And the more that your life becomes strange and rarefied and on the road, the less of that you get to experience, which is less inspiration for the art.

Yeah. It's a matter of, like, what are you doing when you're on the road? Are you on the road just to make money? Because then you just have to just treat it as a very fortunate job, and you definitely are not going to get the same kind of life experience. You're not. You're going to be traveling all the time, and you're going to be staying in hotels. You're going to be doing gigs most of your time, you'd be thinking about doing the material that you prepared and getting your set together, but you could still take stuff in if you choose to. You can go to cities and check out museums. You can go to cities and go on a tour of the town. You just have to be proactive. And you could watch documentaries. Like, I like to watch documentaries on the road. I try to educate myself more on the road than watching something just entertaining. So, like, I'm on the road. I'm supposed to be doing stand up. I'm awake. Let me watch something on Nepal. You know what? Let me. Let me get interested in something. Let me get my mind stimulated with something other than just performing and traveling.

But you have to choose to. It's like, you have to choose to go to the I. Everyone's like, how's the jet lag? I go, you just got to kill it. It's just, like, a thing you have to do. It's like jumping in the cold water. It sucks. But if you do it, you'll feel better. You got to go right to the gym. Like, the moment you land, plane lands, check into your hotel gym right away. No, if ands or buts, go to the fucking gym. Or do a hotel workout. You could do a great body weight workout. You could do a yoga routine.

Staying in hotels with gyms is the easiest hack.

Nice for that. Oh, it's so nice. If you go to a hotel and they have kettlebells, like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

Game over.

Yeah, this is amazing. And so just get a nice workout in. Really fucking exert your body, get that sweat going, get your heart rate up, and you'll settle in. All that jet lag shit, it's nonsense. It all goes away. Even when you travel. When I go to overseas, it's like just fucking work out one day really hard, and then it seems like pretty much resets everything. Resets everything. It's like a threshold. You want to really sweat, really get something. Push it a little bit. So you're like, now we're back. Just, WHOOP.

Normality.

Yeah, total normality. And then also, you got to make sure you're hydrated. That plane travel is just a brutal thing in your body. You're probably getting radioactive waves at an unhealthy level like those stewardesses.

I'd love to see a study looking at what's happening to their telomeres, what's happening to their dna of pilots and stewardesses and stuff.

Is there anything like that?

I have no idea. I'd love to know it, though. There must be. Someone must have done a longevity study on that.

You got to think, when they first started doing that, for all of human history, they didn't fly people in the air. And then they first started doing that, they had no idea. What if it made them psychic? What if all that radiation, what if it was like a comic book type deal instead of you get cancer, you get some crazy new power. In the comic books, everybody gets power. Nobody gets power in the real world.

They'll come back down and they're green or they're invisible or they see things.

They can see.

They can turn you gay.

I think our government's trying that one. They could do basically whatever they want. They can see through walls. We can come up with all kinds of superpowers that they would get. But the idea is, like, we really didn't know what radiation did for you. That's what those terrible injuries that those women got that were using. Loom. The radioactive loom. What is that shit called again, Jamie? Radium.

Radium?

Radium.

The watch faces light up so hard. And they were having babies as well. They were pregnant and their kids had problems.

They had holes in their faces. Their faces rotted off. It was hard.

I'm pretty sure. Didn't Mary Curie also have some problem like that as well? Like, everybody that did research around radioactive substances, early 19 hundreds just got fully, fully fucked.

Have you seen the hands of the ladies who used to test the x ray machines?

No.

It's a horrible injury, man. Because back in the day before, they knew that x rays were dangerous, they had to make sure the x ray machine worked in the office. So these ladies had put their hand.

In every day before the patient came in. So they were getting a dose of one hand.

Dose of every day.

And presumably. Oh, was it always the same hand?

You look at the hand. It's fucking gross, man. Their hands got cancer. They just got hand cancer. Their hands are all shriveled up. Fucked up. Yeah, that's an illustration of one. But there's photographs of one. That one up above the top row, the middle, and that's the one. Look at that, dude. That's a lady who got too many x rays. Just cooked her hand.

This hand showing damage from radiation exposure back in the 19 hundreds.

See, they didn't know. That's what I'm saying. Like, they really didn't know what was going to happen. Oh, yeah, they would test that motherfucker. Look at that dude's hand.

Cooked on the other side.

Yeah. So he'd just test the hand.

See ya.

So this is the 19 hundreds, Jamie. Wow. 1865 to 19. Four is when worked with Thomas Edison lived a glass blower. Wow.

That's a dude. Clarence.

Oh. He would test x ray tubes he made on his own hands and died after developing aggressive cancer. Aggressive?

He had both of his arms amputated in an unsuccessful attempt to save his life.

Oh, my God. Shortly after his death, Thomas Edison abandoned his research on x rays. Shortly after.

Dude, I got to teach you about this.

The other guy's fucked, too.

Everyone's wrecked.

What happened to that guy? Jesus Christ.

He was saved by the beard. I've got a new man crush that I need to teach you about. And he died 60 years ago, so it's okay. I'm sorry, Jamie. I think this guy might have the best top paragraph Wikipedia description in history. Can you just google the unkillable soldier and you'll see a Wikipedia entry at the top?

Is this a real human?

Real human.

When did he live?

1880, until about 1960 or so. So he went through. He's Sisu.

No.

Sir Adrian Carton. Sir Adrian.

No.

In the beginning of the movie, that's what they're the legend.

Maybe it's not a real guy, but. Well, Sissu is a scandinavian movie, isn't it? It's a good british Swedish who made sisu. Do you see sisu?

No, bro. What is it?

It's amazing.

What is it?

Is it John Wick in World War II? Is this one. This one fucking badass soldier that kills all the Nazis? It's incredible. It's one of the most satisfying revenge movies.

Yeah. So go to his wikipedia. Adrian Carton Dewart. I think he might have the best. There it is. Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Paul Giselaine Carton Dewart was a british army soldier officer born of belgian and irish parents. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration awarded for valor in the face of the enemy in various Commonwealth countries. He served in the Boer War, first World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, was blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, tunneled out to a prisoner of war camp, and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the first world War, he wrote, frankly, I had enjoyed the war.

There's dudes like that out there. You just have to know there's guys like that out there.

This guy's story, let me tell you about him, man. So he gets born in 1880 to aristocracy in Belgium, and you think he's going to go through the typical aristocratic route. He goes to Balial College in Oxford. His father wants him to go and study law. And you think, right, that's the end of the story. There. At 19, he decides that he wants to go and see war, sneaks away without telling his father, and literally offers himself to either the Boers or the British. The British take him.

Holy shit.

He was like, I just want to be in war.

Holy shit.

His father doesn't know, so he's away in war. He gets shot in the leg and the groin, gets shipped back home. His father says, you were supposed to be in university. You've now been shot. Okay, well, I'll bless this new military campaign you want to go on? He says, I want to be redeployed. Gets redeployed again to South Africa. He was the head of the camel corps, which was literally a group of people who rode into battle on camelback. So he gets shot. He gets shot in the ear and then in the eye, and then a bullet ricochets and hits him in the same eye again. While he's leading these guys into battle. He gets sent back home. The british military say he wants to go out on the first world war. He wants to go to the front lines of the first world war now. But they said, we can't send a guy with one eye out there because it's going to look like we've got really weak soldiers. So they give him a glass eye and say, the only way that you can go back out, see if you wear this glass eye.

And he says, okay, in the taxi leaving the hospital, takes it out, throws it out of a window, and starts wearing an eye patch. The first battle that he's in, when he rejoins the army in World War I, a piece of shrapnel explodes his hand, and all that's left are two fingers hanging on by the skin of the palm of his hand. And his watch actually embeds itself in his arm, too. So this is the first thing that he's encountered again. Goes to the field hospital. The doctor declines to amputate the fingers, so he just rips them off in front of him because he's in so much pain. The arm then has to be amputated. So he says to the guys again, I want to be redeployed. They're like, you are now a one eyed amputee. I want to be deployed. Battle of the Somme. His next battle that he goes into, there's reports from other soldiers seeing carton duart running into battle, pulling the pins out of grenades with his teeth, throwing them at the enemy, and reloading a revolver with one hand. So this guy is a single armed killer. During that, he gets shot in the.

Gets shot through the back of the head. Through the head. Doesn't die in subsequent battles. Oh, he got promoted for 24 hours before he threatened to punch his superior and then got demoted again. So he's just like this totally wild dude. Anyway, he goes through this series of different difficult military exposes. He takes over three squadrons who don't have a commanding officer. None of them have any communication. So he, this one armed, one eyed guy, decides to run back and forth between the three different companies, communicating his own orders. Rather than using a messenger, he just does it himself. That was what he got the Victoria Cross for, which is our equivalent of the Medal of Honor. During this time, he shot a bunch more. You think? Right? Okay. This guy's just led the most insane campaign through the Boer War and the First World War. Time for him to retire. Wrong. 60 years old in 1940, he gets conscripted and drawn back up to help run secret missions. So his first mission, one of his first missions, he gets shot down in a fjord going toward Romania. There's a german plane that shot his plane down circling overhead rather than get into the dinghy because it would be an easy target.

This one armed, one eyed guy and all the rest of the crew just bob under the water until this german fighter plane runs out of ammunition that goes away. He finally gets picked up. Second time, he goes up in a plane. This plane crash lands, and he swims to shore carrying an injured comrade who survives one arm but swims carrying this other dude gets captured by the Italians. He's then part of five escape attempts and digs a 60 meters tunnel with one arm and a bunch of other dudes. Then he spends a full week hiding out in northern Italy, despite the fact that he's 62 years old, one armed, one eyed, can't speak italian, and has covered in scars. Then he finally, finally gets picked up and released. They said that the only thing that the Italians had left to do was to use him to enable an armistice. They wanted to no longer be a part of the war. They use carton Duart to be an envoy between the two nations. And they said, well, you've been a prisoner of war for nine months. You don't look or smell the way that you should do.

Why don't we give you a nice italian tailor? And he rejected their offer to give him an italian suit and said he would only wear one if they got it from Savile row because, quote, he didn't want to look like a gigolo.

This guy's a human badger. He's.

He's 31 medals. Shot nearly as many times. Got used. He insulted Mao. He insulted Chairman Mao in China when he got used by Winston Churchill. There's photos of him stood behind Churchill. Eye patch, just a fucking sleeve. And he's my new. Look at him. Look at him.

Wow.

One of the coolest people from history that no one knows about.

What an animal. What an animal. Jesus. Why hasn't anybody done a movie on that guy's life?

I don't know. There's another that doesn't even really have a particularly good book. He wrote a memoir called happy Odyssey, which is like it's written by him as opposed know, a bit more exciting. Alistair Urkhart. This guy called the forgotten Highlander. This is probably one of my favorite books. I taught Ryan holiday about this, and it fucking blew his mind. So this dude was 18 years old and got conscripted in World War II. He was scottish. Scottish regiment gets sent to, I think, Singapore. Then Japan joined the war. The Japanese just invade fucking everywhere. Take everything that they can, including him. So this guy is made to forced march for weeks with nothing. A loincloth, bloody feet, being cut up by the surroundings. He has every tropical disease under the sun for five years straight. Dysentery and malaria and everything that you can get. Probably yellow fever and full works. He's part of the forced labor group that's made to build the bridge over the river Kwai. Famous movie. One of the prison guards tries to sexually assault him, so he kicks him in the nuts and runs away and hides. But there's not much like, what are you going to do?

What are you going to run to? You can't survive without the meager amounts of rice that they're giving you. So they find him and lock him in an open tin box to bake in the sun for three days. Doesn't die like, right, okay, well, this guy's sufficiently resilient, we can probably use him. If he's this resilient to survive this, he'd probably be a good worker. So let's keep him and we'll do the rest of it. So they then pull him out. They need to transport all of these prisoners. So they put them on what they called a hell ship. These hellships were just huge tin boxes with no swiss cross on the side, which is what you should have to say that you're transporting prisoners of war so that it's not a military vehicle. And they would just toss tiny morsels of food down to 100 men that were in the hold of this ship. And it was baking hot in the midday sun as they're traveling over the water. And these guys still doesn't die. They're stood in their own feces. People are dying left and right, starting to decompose. So because they didn't put the swiss cross on the side, a us military, I think it was a boat or a submarine, sent a torpedo at them.

So his boat that he's on explodes. He then catches a piece of flotsum or jetsum or detritus, like a little bucket that he can sit in so that he can float around. Basically has a fight with another japanese guy who's also doing the same thing. Finally washes up on shore. He's free briefly, but he's in japanese territory. I can't remember what country he washes up on. Maybe Singapore again. He then gets recaptured, put back to work again, and gets knocked off his feet by the bomb blast from Nagasaki. He gets hit by the bomb blast and knocked off his feet by it.

Holy shit.

50 years, this guy doesn't talk about it at all. Doesn't say a peep for 50 years by orders of the british government, and then finally writes this memoir as a call to arms to bring the Japanese to account for the atrocities. We had, the Nuremberg trials and stuff for the Germans, but there wasn't that similar kind of reckoning for the Japanese. And he thought, this is unforgivable because of what he went through. For the rest of his life, he could only eat tiny, tiny amounts of rice. His stomach, his whole digestive system was ruined by starvation, just extended starvation for this five year period, and very, very tiny morsels of food. So his stomach had adapted to that, and that was this guy. And he died in the early two thousand s and then wrote this book, the forgotten Highlander.

Wow. I got to get that.

It's so fucking good, man.

That's on the list now. Wow. Yeah, I read the rape of Nam King years ago.

What's it about?

It's about Japan during the war. What they did in China, just the atrocities they did with people's children, their babies in front of them, like, the way they just tortured people. What people can justify doing in times of war is absolutely terrifying. And when you read about it and you read about it from a time that's less than 100 years ago, it's so shocking. It's so shocking because when you think of the Japanese. When I think of Japanese, I think polite culture, warrior society, long history of martial arts, amazing engineering, incredible automobiles. I think of all these positive things. I don't think of what happened during World War II. It's really terrifying. There was a documentary about it, too, that I remember I had to buy online from vhs tape. It was very hard to get. It was some sort of a educational documentary, like something that they would show at a university.

It was like, oh, God, about the rape of Nanking.

Yeah. It's just horrible just to know that people are capable of doing that to other people, to children and women, and just anybody that's not them. And you can get away with it because this is war.

There's been an awful lot of very atrocious things that have been justified by those people are different to us. Let's do something to them.

Any reason, whether those people vote Republican or those people don't believe in masks or those people, they have a different belief. Those people don't believe in our one God. Those people, they're of the unclean faith. There's so many different ways people can look at someone as an other. And it's insane what we're capable of when we do that because people openly justify horrible things to people online. I see it all the time from Twitter. Justify horrible things to people because the people don't believe what they believe. And they'll attribute, like, the most nasty fucking descriptions of people just because they don't believe what they believe. It's like the least charitable view is highlighted the most. It's this thing that we have, this ability to other people. It's one of the worst aspects of human beings.

I think more people are bound together over the mutual hatred of an out group than the mutual love of an in group.

Yes, sure.

I think there's this really great psychological study that was done where they bring a big group of people into a lab and they toss a coin, and if it's heads, you're blue team, and if it's tails, you're red team. So toss a coin and it's a roundabout and even split, maybe 50 50 people, and they go over to the blue team and they say, so what do you think about the red team? Well, I mean, they're not as smart as us, are they? They're a bit, like, fucking stupid. You've seen them over there. We're definitely the better. You actually just saw the selection criteria. Selection criteria was heads or tails. 50 50. Completely arbitrary. Immediately, as soon as you give people the opportunity to find some tribal bias to lock onto, yeah.

They go, yeah, well, people are cowards, too. That's part of it. There's a lot of strength in being a part of an aggressive group that believes one thing. That's why you see a lot of people that have been sort of bullied their whole lives become the biggest bully. If they're on some side of something that they think is like moving progress, moving social progress in a certain direction, they'll get super hyper aggressive. It's like, this is their chance.

This is what I think most people don't understand about evil. The number of evil people in the world is probably quite low. What you have is people doing evil things for what they think are good ends. Almost all of the atrocities that we've seen throughout human history are people trying to doing something they feel is righteous, because that's what would motivate them. It's very unadaptive for us to do something that we know is wrong.

Right.

The best way to get someone to be a part and go along with an atrocious act is to make them think that it's in service of good.

Definitely. Yeah. Which is why we enjoy movies like John Wick and Sisu, because, like, retribution. Yeah. These people deserve it. Show him the trailer for Sisu. It's amazing.

How old is this movie?

It's not that old. Two years.

It was made during the pandemic. Came out 2022.

And there's maybe, like three words said in the whole movie.

Came out this 2020. There's all of those stats about the number of people that Keanu Reeves killed. Sorry, I can't. I'll ask after this. He throws a mine and hits a dude in the head with it.

It's so good.

He's a John Wick pilled, gun maxing killer.

Look, I'm a giant John Wick fan, but it's John Wick times two, because it's nazis. He's not just killing, like, dumb russian hitmen. He's killing nazis.

I tried. Check.

They tried to steal his gold.

It was made after the unkillable soldier. It said it was modeled after Rambo, basically from first Blood.

Rambo from first Blood.

And a real life military sniper named Simo Haya.

Oh, yeah, I heard about that dude. It's funny when you think about a movie like Rambo. Like, Rambo is a film that's indicative. It's another time capsule. It's indicative of a kind of a corny time. People are kind of corny.

Like a cheesy.

Movies are just like. They're hard to. Things are so much more identified, like, patterns of behavior. People are so much more sophisticated socially. I think about stuff. It's very difficult to get, like a Rambo type movie made. Like some of those, like the first blood ones, there was just like some Chuck Norris movies. They're fun to watch, but they're so indicative of the time. What's this one?

This is the trailer. It's just a lot of talking. I thought it'd be more action.

That's okay, Warren. Don't worry about the soapy stuff. Just save him.

Drag. Don't move.

I don't want you to catch your own throat. John Rambo.

Dude, I missed this guy. One man.

One man. They pushed too far, heading straight for the top.

We've talked about him a few times because the gray man. But they recently just said, sly said that Ryan Gosling could be the only.

Guy who would, like, vouch for Rambo.

But to carry on the torch. Yeah. He might be too pretty to do it, though, or something.

He's going to jump in the water.

This is basically the full movie. So long, trailer.

Don't push it. I'll give you a war you won't believe.

Everyone's TikTok brain wouldn't allow a trailer this long anymore. You and all your men couldn't handle him before now. What makes you think you can handle him now? Because God knows what damage he's prepared to do.

An explosion.

Fucking brilliant.

But it's a sign of the times. It's like that. Did we find out who the little girl was in that movie?

I found the movie. It's called back up. Frontier Gal is what the movie was called.

Frontier gal.

And it wasn't Shirley Temple. Beverly Simmons is the.

Was a. That was a time capsule. And Rambo is a time capsule, too. It's a time capsule to a time where the art form is just different. That was her.

Can I just check? I don't seem to recall the complex plot of John Wick. Is he still killing people because of his dog?

Well, see, they dragged him back in. See, here's what happened. He killed everybody because of his dog, and then he was ready to retire.

How far did that go? 1st 1 second.

1 second one.

Okay.

Second one.

Two full episodes of killing?

Yes. Well, he had to get his car back in the second one. So first one was Mustang.

Second one was car.

Yeah. The second one, he shows up. He kills everybody at the warehouse that's storing all the stolen cars. And then he toasts. Make a toast with the russian mob boss to. You know, it's like, can a man like, you really know peace? He's like, why not? He's like, okay, cheers. So the guy freaks out that John Wick doesn't kill him. John Wick leaves, goes back to regular John Wick. He doesn't have the slick back hair anymore. He's not wearing the suit anymore. Just like a regular guy. And he's got his car. It's all fucked up. And they fix his car. And then a dude that he owed a marker to comes to visit him and says, I want you to kill my sister. And he has to do it because he had this marker with his bloods in it. And so then he's back in the business.

That's the second one.

Yeah. And then he kills that guy. Spoiler alert. And then the whole world's after him. That's John Wick. Three.

And then there's a fourth one.

And there's a fourth one, which is basically a superhero. And the fourth one, they're over the top crazy. I enjoyed the fourth one. But it's a very different thing than the first one. The first one, you could kind of believe that all that could really happen. By the fourth one, they had a band and all that shit. They have bulletproof jackets and just, like, they're running into bullets. And it's cartoonish, but it's fun.

The most crazy movie across into real world thing that I've learned about is this modified rx nine hellfire missile. Have you seen this?

No.

This thing is insane. Do the honors, Jamie. Let's look at this.

Is it one of the hypersonic missiles? It changes direction.

This is more precise. So what they realized was that collateral damage is a big deal in war zones, because if you kill people that aren't just the target, you galvanize that group against your. Yeah, there it is. America's secret ninja bomb. Packed with blades that shred militants alive.

Oh, my God.

So there's no explosive in the front of it. It gets deployed using an existing platform. But rather than having an explosive payload, these razor sharp, six razor sharp swords come out the side of it and just turn human flesh into smoothies. Look at what it does to a car.

Oh, my God.

But how precise this thing is. It's so precise. You had the flying Jinsu. I think it's colloquially called the jihadi blender.

Oh, my God. They just shoot it into cars.

So it's so precise that you need to know which seat of the car.

The bad guys in.

Bad dudes in. Yeah. Because if it was a long enough vehicle, front right seat and back left seat. Back left seat will be scared, but it'll be fine. So there was this dude, supposedly one of the masterminds behind 911. They'd done surveillance on this guy, and every morning he'd come out and drink his coffee on his balcony, same balcony, come out, and he'd drink his coffee and look out. So they just timed two of those things comes out, and that's it. There's no explosion, there's no nothing. And this guy just gets turned into dust.

They shot two of the madam.

Two. Just in case the first one missed, I think. Oh, my laser guided. Set it off. And here's the other thing, because it only propels for the first 2 seconds, and then after that, it's just using fins so it works out the trajectory. So there's not even the sound of engine coming toward you. It's just silence. And then blades and death.

It's a flying rage hypodermic. Do you know what a rage hypodermic is? Rage hypodermic is a wild mechanical broadhead that they invented for bow hunting. So instead of a bow hunting broadhead being a fixed blade, like a solid piece of metal that's screwed into the end of your arrow, instead, it's a mechanical broadhead that, upon impacting tissue, opens up into this huge opening. They make giant holes. They call them rage holes, and they kill animals quick. And it's kind of controversial in that if your blade hits a branch on the way in or like a stalk of hay or something, it could trigger it, and then it would fuck up the trajectory of the arrow, and it might lead to a bad shot. So there's that. And then it could get deployed accidentally in your quiver, and you might not know it when you're drawing and shooting. It could be open, and it could open up in flight. But if it stays closed and it does impact, it makes a giant hole.

Cam took me to the bow.

Ah, you did. Lift, run, shoot.

I did. He fucked me up. He made me go up the hill. He made me carry that rock.

How long did you, what is, like 2 miles?

I don't know. I think it's maybe about a mile up and a mile down, but it's pretty steep. And, I mean, there's a 72 pound rock.

You got to carry the rock down.

Oh, yeah. Did we carry it down? I can't remember. I think it's supposed to, but he made me do the trail, but he taught me to shoot. And I was looking at, with gruesome glee, looking at all of the different types of arrows in the bo rack, looking at all of these different heads and all of the different attachments. It advertises exit wound, three inch diameter. Exit wound, five inch diameter.

Cam shoots this thing called a carnivore. And the carnivore is a broadhead that's got four blades. It opens up a canal in these animals. Yeah. It's like for bow hunting, though, it's extremely effective. If you can get it into the vitals, that's a lethal shot every time it's such a big hole.

I wonder how many. Is it more humane to kill something more easily, is my question.

Yeah, it's more humane to use a rifle in a lot of circumstances.

That's literally just the non rocket propelled version of what we just saw.

Yeah, it's like a carnivore. Go back to that carnivore thing so you can see what is. So that's a really big one. So the controversy in bow hunting is always, like, fixed blades are more durable but mechanical blades have more cutting surface.

What is that?

What is that? Jesus.

Turns stuff into pizza slices.

Colorful eagle. That's what it's called. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. Yeah, that seems like it wouldn't fly good. See, the problem is they have to fly good, too. And the more metal surface area you have, the more you have a chance of what's called planing. So as the crosswinds hit your arrows, your blade can drift because the wind hits the broadhead. So if you have a wide cut, solid, fixed blade broadhead, that's another thing that can catch wind. Yeah, people tune them. So if you have, like, a single bevel broadhead. So there's a single bevel broadhead, which is a broadhead, which is a fixed blade broadhead that has only had the edge sharpened on one side, and that encourages rotation. And that rotation has to align with the helical of your veins. You don't want them to be fighting with each other. So if you have a left helical on your veins of your arrow, you also want a left helical on this broadhead. And so these are tuned in tightly together. And so it's a very painstaking process. You have to make sure you're doing it right. You're going to move your rest a little bit, but once you get it dialed in and you can shoot accurate out to, like, 60, 70 yards with it, you know that it's called broadhead tuned.

So with field points, you don't really have to do that because the fletchings, they steer it enough. And you just have to be kind of on target. You have to be closer, but with broadheads, you have to be, like, really locked in. So that's the negative of the broadhead.

They made me shoot through the paper to see where are you pulling accidentally. And then they adjust and tune. Dude, I loved it. I love seeing anyone that loves anything that much. That degree of passion, to me, is so me and my housemate Zach watch these videos of the Colin McCrae is that rally cross. Sorry. And these dudes will go out to buttfuck nowhere, Scotland, in November, and it's pissing down with rain, and they're in ponchos, and they do it to see, and then they turn to each other and go. And they just lose their shit. And it's so, dude, it makes the hairs on my arms stand up. Jamie, see if we can find some of these videos. It's the most pure, loving audience of a thing. And just finding anyone the same as Wayne Endicott at the bow rack, just the way that they play with the bow. And they know that if they add a tiny little bit of flame from a lighter to the site that it'll sort of cinch it in a different way and it heats the sinew of the thread and it tightens that. Seeing anyone that loves anything that much is just.

There's something very gentle and honest and peaceful and beautiful about that.

It is.

Fires me up.

I couldn't agree more. I love watching people make things and put things together. And I love watching people work on cars, do mechanical things. I'd love that shit. But the bo rack, one of the things that's interesting about archery is that even just, if you're just interested in target archery, any kind of archery that you're interested in, unless you are shooting a traditional bow where there's no sights on it, and you're just kind of like doing it by field and you learn how to aim. Depending upon how much your arrow weighs, you can get pretty accurate with those things, but not nearly as accurate as you can with a compound bow. And with a compound bow, it has to be fitted to your frame. You have to go to a place like the bow rack. And if you're lucky and you have a place like that, that's great because they're really good at it. But you might not be lucky. So you might have to travel hours to go to someplace people were.

When we were there, I think it was maybe a Saturday morning, and we've driven 6 hours to come to this place.

And you have to go to a good place too, because the first place I went to that my draw length, they had an inch longer than it should have been. The peep site was weird. I had to cock my head weird to look at the peep site. And then I went to a good place and they fixed it right. And then I went, oh, this is.

An extension of my body.

Now, if you practice it enough, it never really becomes an extension of your body. But you do get so comfortable in that activity that it becomes a normal thing to you. So then that activity is all just about the fine details of breathing and thinking and shot execution in your head. And the goal is always, at least the way I do it, is always to make a surprise shot. I never want to get it to go off. I want to be in full draw. I want to have my pin on the target and I want to just be concentrating on that arrow hitting the mark. And then I just go through this shot execution thing and it goes off and when it goes off, the ultimate goal is to just watch that arrow go exactly where you wanted it to go. And when I do that at, like, 74 yards, it is the most satisfying feeling in the world. Just targets, just shooting at a foam target. It's so satisfying and it requires so much concentration that in that act of doing that, the world goes away. And that's the key to it. That's the key to anything that I really enjoy doing.

That's very difficult. I think you need little vacations from the world, and if you have an hour and a half to shoot a bow, it can provide you with a vacation from the world. You are literally only thing. It's so difficult to do, and it's so involving, and it's so rewarding when you get it right that you're completely locked into this one activity, and the world goes away.

I love it, man. I love the solitude and the peace that you get doing something that you know well and that you can get better at.

Yeah.

And I often think about, like, three types of Chris dopamine Chris, serotonin Chris and cortisol Chris. And my goal is to spend as much time in serotonin Chris as, you know, dopamine Chris is plays on modern wisdom and growing the channel and money and new stuff and traveling to new places and novelty and cortisol Chris is dealing with the operations and its executive function. It's answering emails and it's dealing with challenges. And cortisol is kind of exciting, too. But serotonin Chris is walking with your friends in nature and calling your mom and catching up and having dinner, going to a comedy show, watching live music. And I found that when I'm not feeling balanced in myself is when I'm spending too much time. And things aren't bad. Things are going well. They could be even going excellently. But I'm still in dopamine Chris a lot, and he's gangster rap and a v eight engine, and I want to be magic mushrooms and a hammock.

But wait a minute. Pause, please, because you just bought a Camaro.

I did.

You son of a bitch. You bought an SS too, right?

Two ss, 6.2 liter v eight.

Yeah. You embraced american culture.

I just need to get some beers.

Did you get a manual transmission?

No, I've spent. So, in the UK, almost everybody learns to drive manual. So there's two types of license in the UK, manual license and an automatic license. If you learn in an automatic, don't get to drive a manual. You have to take the test as a manual.

Oh, my goodness. That's a smart move.

Yep.

That's one case where England's got us.

Fuck yeah.

You guys win on that one?

Hell yeah. We got.

I think, you know, it's a dying thing, obviously, because it's not as smart. Why do I have to use my left foot?

Dude, your entire. In the whole. The left side of my body, left arm and left leg. Just go chill out. Go on holiday for the next hour while I do this journey. I can use right arm only and right leg, but, yeah, I remember hearing, I think it was Tim Kennedy talking about, if you're a guy who is cared about preparedness and you don't know how to drive a manual car, that's not preparedness. Imagine that you're halfway up a mountain and only one car works, or you need to get somebody down or there's been a car wreck or something and it's a manual car. Are you going to work it out on the fly?

Yeah.

How many people know how to drive manual cars in America, do you think?

Let's guess. I would say 10%. I'll guess 10%. What do you think? What do you think it is?

I have no idea. For America, maybe. I would have guessed like 50. I would have hoped 50%, but I don't know how many people are exposed to them. In the UK, I would say 90%. 90% of driving license holders will be able to drive a manual car, at least.

That's interesting. Yeah, I saw a lot of them in Italy. Everybody had a manual everywhere.

They don't give a fuck about their cars either. They're just crashing like little dinks here and there. We're so precious. Especially in the UK. I don't know how it is in the US so much. We're so precious. But the little scratch, you better get that painted up in Spain or France or Greece or something. That's just. That's a bit of. What's it called? Patina. It's a bit of patina on it. Gives it character.

Well, some cars, they look at it that, like here, like, if you have a jeep or something like that, get all scuffed up, that's fine. But, yeah, it's a good thing to know how to do. The real problem is if there's some sort of an electronic blast, if something happens, like a solar flare that takes out the grid, because if electronics get fried, and this is a real possibility. I know, you're like, what are you saying? First of all, you have to understand, entire planets get fried by supernovas. It's not just electronics. Things happen in intergalactic space that would end everything for us. And it 100% could happen. That's a real thing. But solar flares, taking out power grids, that's a fucking real possibility. Taking out satellites, that's a real possibility. And one of the things about most modern cars is most modern cars are essentially run by a computer. So if all the computers get fried, guess what? Your car doesn't work. If we're running into some sort of situation, some horrible event where all the computers get fried, that means your fucking car doesn't work.

You also can't move anywhere unless you.

Have an old car. Now, if you have an old car that works on carburetors, those are cars. Like if you have an actual real 1969 Camaro, not like the ones that I have. Ones that have new stuff in them. So all the new stuff is computers. They'll be useless. All the ECU that powers all the ignition and the electronic fuel injection, that shit's out the window.

Car is now controlled by China.

No, it's not controlled by anybody. It's a lump. It's a lump. And unless I could figure out how to put a carburetor on it, and I can't, I'm fucked. And you'd have to gut the whole system. All the electronics are wired into it. The speedometer is wired into it.

I was hearing that my neighbor has a Tesla, and I think he gets his insurance through Tesla, but they can see the diagnostics of how he drives the car. So his insurance is way more expensive because it knows how late he breaks, how fast he accelerates, how close to other cars he is. You want to talk about encroachments on freedom?

I didn't know they did that.

There's a algorithm that's used in China that when someone is applying for medical insurance, it uses the website to track the number of typos and the movement of the mouse. And they've mapped that with an algorithm to predict pre parkinsonian, pre Alzheimer dementia, all of these things. So basically, if you're filling in your medical insurance in China and you fuck up a little bit, your premium goes up.

Wow, that's coming. All that stuff's coming. And a lot of dummies, they're going to sign up for it because they'll attach it to something you think is important, like climate change. And that's how they're going to get you.

One third of fucking Greta Tunberg again. One third of Gen Z. Kids say that they would accept the installation of surveillance cameras inside the home to detect wrongdoing. One third, 30%.

I wonder if they really believe that or if they say that because they know it's not happening and they just want to say that they're a good person.

It's a larp. Yeah.

Maybe you're also a dumb young person. It doesn't understand what you're giving up.

Well, I think another potential reason for it might be you're part of a generation that has traded your privacy. Precisely.

Yeah.

From the moment that you were born.

You know what they do? Snapchat. They give each other their locations.

Yes. Snap map.

Yeah. So all the kids know exactly where all the other kids are. So if you're dating some gal, her.

With that other person that's on your.

Friends list, and you see you're not where you said you were going to be, what do people do now? They just, where are you? I see where you are. That's kind of weird.

You read the terms and conditions of TikTok a while ago. I can't remember whether you saw. TikTok has written into its user agreement that it can use the front facing camera to detect micro expressions and use that to inform the.

So if you see something and go, yo, like, see some crazy Instagram video, there it is.

They like whatever it is that they, yo, there's pleasure, there's disgust, there's anger, there's envy.

And I bet it's cross platform. I bet if they have that app, they have that ability, and you have it open, I bet they use it. No matter what you're doing, I bet if you're flipping over and now all of a sudden, you're on Instagram, or now all of a sudden, you're on Facebook or Twitter, I bet they still can see all your time. I bet they see exactly what you're seeing.

Well, think about with the apple vision pro that Jamie's going to have to debate about whether or not he takes it back over the next 12 hours. How much eye tracking. What is that able to tell from what you're doing? What about the latency between your fingers and your eyes? Is that able to predict early onset dementia or neurological.

Yeah. Yeah. Or could that be used against you? If they decide that, what do we get Chris on? I don't like Chris being the CEO of this company anymore. Let's decide that he's in decline.

Oh, and let's use that.

Start gaslighting him like you. Okay, Chris?

You seem a little.

You just seem off lately.

Dude, did you hot gaslighting. Did you see the outcome from this special counsel report on Biden?

No, I did not. Okay, let me pee because this is a big one and I'm holding in a pee.

Let's pee together.

Okay, let's do that. We'll be right back, folks.

Fun as well.

Yeah. I'm watching a movie.

17 hours. It's miserable enough as it is. I don't need to make it any worse, but, yeah. Hydration. Hydration. On planes, people don't think about so important or radiation.

Did we find out about that?

Do people die on planes?

Has there have been a study on the radiation that pilots and flight attendants receive?

Digging into it, there was not a lot of studies available. One study I found was from 1992. It just said that pilots die sooner after they retire, and it wasn't showing. Not radiation.

Yeah, but isn't that applicable to most men that quit their jobs?

Right. It could have been something.

A lot of things could have gone into that. People fucking die when they don't have meaning and purpose, too. That's a real factor.

People that retire die significantly sooner, way sooner. It's one of the reasons I think everybody, when they retire should be issued a.

Little. Carl. How's Carl doing over there? Is he sleeping? Carl's the cutest little thing ever.

He's amazing.

Yeah, that would help. But I think what also would help is have things you enjoy doing. You can still enjoy your life without having a job, and if you've got enough money where you can retire and you feel like you could pull that off, you should do stuff. Don't just fuck. Yeah, but some people don't know what the fuck to do when they're not working. And work was their everything. It was their entire existence. It was their social status, it was how they made a living. It was their social community. It was all their friends, really, because you're with your workmates more than you're with your partner, your wife, your husband. What's the number where you're awake at home? You get home at 06:00 you're only going to be awake till ten. If you have to work, if you're doing a nine to five, if you're a crazy person, you're up at 1111 30 and you don't mind being a little tired in the office, but if you're, like, trying to be on the ball, you're going to go to bed as early as you can. You got to get up at fucking 630. You got to commute.

How much time are you together?

I've been thinking about this idea of hidden and observable metrics for life. So an observable metric would be something like the amount of money that you earn per year. It would be the value of the car that you drive or the engine size of the car that you drive or the value of your house. A hidden metric would be something like the quality of your relationship with your partner, the amount of time that you get to spend without tasks to do the length of your commute, things like that. And it's my belief that a lot of people trade observable metrics for hidden metrics all the time. So someone will be offered, hey, Joe, we want to give you a raise. You've been doing really well at work, but this is going to come with more responsibility. We're going to need you in the office earlier, and you're going to be in charge of this floor of ten people. Okay. How much more money have you got? Well, I've got $15,000 added onto the observable metric. But what's the hidden metric cost that you're paying for that? Well, peace of mind and time with your partner, or you take another job somewhere else and your commute is now 45 minutes longer in both directions, 90 minutes a day that you're not spending with your kids or with your wife or with whatever, because money is the ultimate game.

It's the best game. It's literally global. It's universal. It can be exchanged between different currencies. I know your game can be compared to. My game can be compared to anybody else's, but I don't get to see the dashboard that tracks the quality of your sleep or the peace of your mind, or the relationship that you have with your kids or your wife, or the amount of time that you just get to yourself.

Right.

And I think people should be very cautious of trading observable metrics for hidden metrics. And one of the ways that you can try and fix this is to bring the hidden into the observable. So using a tracker of some kind, maybe to track your sleep, that would be a good start. Or if you were to note down in a journal how you feel each day. Oh, well, maybe I feel a little bit better today because I did some. That's just fine. Just breaking this.

Put that thing down. No worries. Yeah, no, I think just overall, general happiness gets thrown out the window in terms of the metrics of the numbers. The numbers and the observable things that make you superior. The car, the watch, the that. But, yeah, I always tell people one of the things about a house. I've said this many times, unfortunately, but when I first got my first really nice apartment when I first moved to California, I realized pretty early on, after a while I was like, oh, this is just my house. This is just where I live. It feels just like the place that I had in New York that was a shithole, you know what I mean? It's just where you live.

Did you adapt to it?

So where? This is what all you need is a safe, comfortable place that. A place where you can cook and eat your meals and a television or a computer. Basically the same experience.

Have you seen those memes of guys just need this to survive? It's like a lawn chair, ps five big tv and a mattress on the floor. It's like guy apartments or something.

Oh, yeah. If you're living with all dudes, there's a chance that you're both or just.

You on your own. That's it.

Yeah, for sure.

Tell you who I was talking to. I was talking to Dan Bilzerian about this, and he's kind of on an interesting arc because he sort of stepped back a little bit from public life from doing the stuff that he was doing before. And I was asking him basically whether he thought he'd overshot dopamine. Dan. And he said he was considering shaving his head, shaving his beard, and going working in an Amazon warehouse for six months to try and do like a hedonic reset to see. The problem is it was kind of like when Tim Kennedy did the boarding thing. There's a difference between electing to do something and being forced to do something and the fact that you know at any moment you've just got the ejector seat button, or that it's going to be over in six months or that it's going to be whatever. I wonder if that changes. But yeah, he basically said this rapid use and abuse of all of the things that you can, the partying, the cars, the girls, the jets, the holidays, travel, the drugs. Where do you go from there? It seems like having things isn't fun.

Getting things is fun.

Not knowing if you're going to get things and then getting them is fun.

That's the middle of dopamine, right?

Once you have things and you know you can get things, getting them doesn't become that exciting anymore then.

How do you mean?

Because if you could just get whatever you want, you don't get that excited about it. Okay. When I got my first nice car, I think it was a 95 Toyota supra turbo, and it was awesome. I couldn't believe it. It's like, this is, like, a real nice new car. And, like, the car I wanted, a supra turbo was this shit. I couldn't believe I had it. When I drive it around, I'd be like, oh, my God, I can't believe this is mine. I'd park it. I couldn't believe it was mine. But after a while, you get another car, and then you get another car, and then getting a car is just like, this is a great car, but you can just do it when you want to. So you could get to a point where I call it guerrilla Buddhism. So when people say that material things possess you, they possess you if you're really connected to them and they are your only measure of worth. But the only way to know that material goods aren't really. You're not a slave to them, is get them. Get them. Have them, and then go, okay, this is not that important.

This is bullshit. This is bullshit. You don't feel better in a $10 million house and you do in a $5 million house than you do in a $1 million house. You don't feel better. You feel like you're in your house. As long as it's not a shit. It's like rats or bugs. Or you want cleanliness and safety. You want normal stuff that people like. You want to be able to chill on the couch. Couches aren't that much money. Most of the stuff is bullshit.

Yeah. My friend James says, all wins feel the same.

Yeah.

And as you start to go up and up and up, the first time that you hit a thousand subscribers on your YouTube channel, or the first time that you buy a Toyota, supra is the same, or maybe even kind of less than when you get a Rolls Royce Cullinan, or you get a gold plaque from YouTube, or you get whatever.

Yeah.

All of these wins feel the same. So I've got this other idea that I love about how people sacrifice the thing that they want for the thing which is supposed to get it. So a lot of the time, we will sacrifice happiness in order to be able to achieve success, so that when we finally have enough success, we can allow ourselves to be happy. So you sacrifice the thing that you want, which is happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is success.

Yeah.

And it's a super common pattern amongst high performers. They grow up, and maybe their parents have high standards for them, and they say that the subtext is that love is contingent on what I can bring to the world. And growing up, this person internalizes the lesson. It is very important for me to overperform, and they're driven by this desire to do more and to prove people wrong and a chip on their shoulder.

And all of this.

The problem is, I think that, on average, high performers are more miserable than the average person. I think that more people are driven by fear and anxiety and a desire for validation and to prove themselves to the world and a desire for acceptance than some perfectly balanced, optimal loving. I just want to make life the best that I can. That's not to say that there aren't people like that, but I think, on balance, most people are driven by that fear of insufficiency, and they're hoping that the next thing is going to be the answer. But another friend, Alex, says, you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy. You've already achieved goals you said would make you happy. How can you presume that your happiness sits on the next side of the next set of goals, given that right now you are on the other side of your last set of goals?

So is the key to learn happiness while you're succeeding?

It has to be.

Yeah. You have to rewire your value system. And the word gratitude gets abused. It really does. It gets tossed into that word that, just, like, it makes things sound stupid. But gratitude is very important. And if you can actually appreciate where you are and what you're doing, even if you're not doing what you want to be doing, you're going to look back on these days. If you're successful in life and you're going to look back on the days when you're kind of struggling, like, wow, I was finding my place in the world then. Those are exciting times. If you can be excited while also motivated, it'll help your life immeasurably. And I don't think it's going to steal from your drive and ambition. I don't buy that.

I don't buy that either. I used to think that.

Yeah, I don't buy it. I don't buy it. I know some pretty happy, driven people. They exist.

There's a fear that some people have that haven't really thought about it. That if I allow myself to be too happy or grateful for the things that I've done, what if it kills my edge? Dude, you are powered by a nuclear furnace of ambition. You think that giving yourself a little bit of gratitude or acceptance or love or serotonin for the things that you've done is going to nuke that. No way. It's not going to nerf any of it.

It might if that's your only drive. If your only drive is to achieve financial success. But hopefully what you're doing is rewarding in a way, on its own. One of the beautiful things about standup is people do stand up for free all the time. Like big name comedians like Dave Chappelle does free stand up all the time. Just show up at a club and do a guest set. Just pop in. He's not on the list. He's not supposed to be there. Just does it for other. How many people's jobs, they just show up and just do them for free. If you can find something like that, then all the success and all the stuff, that's all wonderful, but you enjoy doing it so much. It's such a fun activity that you're doing. It's not just a making money vehicle. It's an enjoyable activity. It's so enjoyable, you'll go out of your way to do it for free.

Yeah. Robert Sapolsky, who you've had on the show, he says dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness, it's about the happiness of pursuit. That it's as you move toward things. Yeah, one step at a time. It's not the destination, it's the journey. It's so fucking trite. You're so right with what you say about gratitude.

They get you.

We need to rebrand. There needs to be like, it's not you, it's me. Like, how many people want to or Netflix and chill? These things get captured by cliches and you're like, no, fuck, damn it. I mean it my way. Not that way. But, yeah. That idea of it's far easier to achieve your material desires than to get rid of them, than to renounce them. It's way easier to drive a beat up Chevy truck if your last car was a Ferrari because you've closed that little loop. Mark Manson talks about. He has this great question, what pain do you want in life? He says that it's a much more accurate way of asking the question, what looks like work to everybody else, but feels like play to you. That's like a common thing. What can you do? That is play that to everyone else's work? That's a competitive advantage. That might be comedy for you, Chappelle, etc. I would happily do this for free. There are other people out there who would need to be paid an awful lot of money to go through the drama of getting up on stage. Mark's contention is that any pursuit, even the most existentially aligned, will regularly feel like work.

So what you need to look at is, what are the pains that you can deal with better than everybody else? There is pain associated. I'm sure it's not just pure joy as you stare at a Google Doc or a note in your phone and you're like, how am I going to get this bit out? I need to make this joke about cigarettes or something, and I just can't get it to work. You're grappling with something. There is a kind of pain. It's not pure pleasure every single moment. And I think assuming that your pursuits are always going to be perfect, just bliss out, man. And there should be no challenges, like, no, that's not the way that it's going to work, even if it's your calling in life. So a better way is, what pains can you deal with better than everyone else?

Yeah. And how much do you discipline yourself? How much do you really put a rigid schedule toward achieving goals and understanding that there's going to be these uncomfortable things, like the creative process. It's uncomfortable, so people avoid it. That's what Stephen Pressfield's book is all about, the war of art.

I love that.

Great, great book. Such a good book. Such a good book for creatives. I tell everybody I still have a stack of them out there, right?

It's got a fresh stack.

We've got a fresh stack. He sends it because I gave him out to so many listeners, because there's so many creative types that don't understand that. There's this fucking weird thing that's going on in your head called resistance, and it keeps you from doing the work that you want to do. That's almost always satisfying when it's done. And when you're done, you're like, God, I did it. But part of you is going to go, it's not too bad. Let's check out YouTube. Let's look at this. Let's look at the news. What's going on the news, man? Maybe some weird shit's happening that you need to pay attention to. And then next thing you know, it's an hour and a half later and you could have been writing the whole time. And every time I do just sit down and write, I'm always happier. But there's always this little bit of a resistance. So it's kind of the same feeling that I get before a workout or before a cold plunge or before anything. It's just this feeling of knowing that there's some shit you got to do.

There was this story that I learned about Victor Hugo.

Jiu jitsu guy.

No, this is a writer. I want to say Victor Hugo is that guy.

Victor Hugo is a world champion jiu jitsu guy.

He might also be a writer from the 18 hundreds. He might be both of those things.

Could be.

It's a time traveling man. So he was a writer, and he paid his servant to come in every night during the middle of the night while he was asleep and pull the bedsheets off of him, off his bed, leave six pieces of paper in his bedroom and a pen or a quill and lock him in. And until Victor had slid all six pieces of paper written on underneath the door, his servant wouldn't let him out. The level that people get to. But think about when you're really struggling with the creative process, the ridiculousness of the things that will look attractive to you. It's like, yeah, I haven't sorted the cigar cupboard alphabetically in quite a while. I really think that the cigar cupboard could do with. That's interesting. That brick that's been outside, I really should find a place for that brick. And the bird feeder needs refilling. You just find these bizarre things because your body is just doing everything it can. This is Huberman's thing, right? What's it called? The mid singular cortex. Msc. It's that thing. Apparently goggins has got, like, the biggest one in the world. It's just the thing that allows you to overcome doing hard stuff.

Right. It actually grows upon exertion, doing things you don't want to do. Yeah, I think it's real. I think I've always recognized that that's a thing because when I take time off of working out, it's really hard to go back to it. But if you do it all the time, it just becomes a normal part of your life.

Dude, routine is such a vicious cycle up and down.

Yeah, I think the whole body's that way. I really do. I think basically the way you can strengthen your muscles and you can strengthen your cardiovascular system, I think your mind works. This is exact same way. I really 100% believe that. And I think also the neglected conjunction of the two is significant. It's very important. So many intellectuals just don't think about their bodies. And so unfortunate. You're just racked with inflammation and just weak joints and weak muscles and just. You can't open up a jar of mayonnaise. It's like you don't want to live like that, man, you don't have to. It's like the idea that the two are mutually exclusive is stupid. That's a stupid idea. The idea that you shouldn't take care of your body and that you should really concentrate on your mind, that's just dumb. It's a dumb thing to do. You're not going to be doing complex math 24 hours a day. You can take the time to do some fucking push ups.

How many people do you think have it the other way around?

100%. Yeah, well, also, because in today's day and age, there's doing it for the gram, right? So there's, like, people that are really jacked that want everybody to see their muscles, and so you're doing it all day long. You're lifting weights, you're involved in recovery and all sorts of. If you've got the time to do that, if you have a job too, well, what the fuck? How do you have the time? But if you don't have a job, if you're like a fitness influencer, that is your job. You're fucking busy, man. You want to be jacked online all the time. Yeah. You're probably not reading a lot of.

Books, probably not meditating all that much.

Maybe you are. I mean, maybe that's part of your vibe. Maybe you're giving off that holistic vibe. That's what you're trying to push. You're falling into that line. You're bowing to people and shit.

You got to be careful with that, though. I tried to come up with a name for a trend I saw in myself, which was productivity purgatory, which is even the things that I was supposed to be doing for leisure, I was justifying because they somehow contributed to my output for work. Or I wasn't taking a walk in nature because I wanted to enjoy it. It's because I once watched an Andrew Cubman episode that said, 15 minutes of sunlight in the eyes improves your productivity throughout the day by whatever. If you're not careful, everything that you do is infused with this desire, this need, this compulsion to be productive.

Yeah.

And I think that's dangerous.

It is dangerous. It's just not good to be a human being with that. But if you want to be the best at something, you've got to be really the best strategy. If you really want to compete against other top dogs, you're going to have to do more or be better, be smarter. Figure something out that they're not figuring out well.

It's really a game of who's prepared to sacrifice most it's also who's prepared.

To learn the most, right? Who's good at recognizing what actually happened versus what you've been comforting yourself with.

What do you mean?

If there's a bad result, whether it's a bad result of business or a bad result of your personal life, there's always this desire that people have to find a reason why it wasn't their fault because it's uncomfortable. But if you can recognize, oh, this product tanked because of me, this is a stupid idea, and I need to course correct, and I need to realize what I did wrong instead of blaming the suppliers or blaming the manufacturers or blaming the other people on the design team or blaming this. But whatever the fuck you're making, or whether it's an album, you just put out that everybody hates it. What did I do wrong? Don't bullshit. What do I need to do different? And for a lot of people, that is an uncomfortable moment that they don't want to experience. And so if you're a high performer, the more you could recognize what you've actually done wrong and course correct and not just be. If you're like a CEO of a company, you've got so many people kissing your ass, it's like your ego's got to be inflated. It's going to be so hard to see the forest for the trees.

Just like being a movie star on a know everybody loves you. Here's your bagel, Mr. Williamson. Can I get you anything? You get a delusional perspective. So it's like, amongst those people, how many of them can keep their humanity? How many of them can actually just be a human? And then your metrics, how many of them are happy? How many of these. If you can be a guy who's like a super high performer and also be happy, I don't know how happy Elon is, but I know he laughs a lot. Like, I've been around that dude a lot. And he's always laughing about shit. He's always laughing about shit. He's clearly under an extreme amount of pressure. He's clearly a high performer, but he's also seems to be enjoying a lot of it.

Did you see this interview recently with Lex? I think it was maybe four months ago.

No, I didn't.

So on that, there's a really interesting point where Lex is asking him basically what it's like to be Elon. And Elon says, most people think they would want to be me, but they do not want to be me. My mind is a storm. They don't know, they don't understand.

He said that to me, too.

Yeah, it's fucking apocalyptic and terrifying. We spoke about this last time, Tiger woods. The price that people pay to be the person that you admire. Tiger woods goes through this really difficult period with his father and all the rest of it, and this is the best remedy for envy that I can think of, because people look at Elon as this dude sending rockets to Mars, and he's making the coolest cars on the planet, and he's on stage in Japan or China or whatever, doing weird robot dances and shit, and he's super rich. You don't know the price that he's had to pay for that. You don't know the internal texture of someone's mind. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else.

Yeah. Especially as a high performing athlete. What are your options if you want to be a fighter in the UFC? You can't also be coding. You can't also be working at Microsoft.

Can you also have a functioning relationship? Can you also be.

The thing about fighters is you do have a lot of downtime where you have to recover. You train a lot during the day, but if you make a living fighting, you will be able to have a relationship. And with some of them, that relationship offers them a significant amount of emotional reinforcement.

Parasympathetic activation.

Yeah. It gives them comfort. It makes them feel normal. Some guys separate from their families for camp because they just want to be animals. They just want to sleep in a fucking hotel room and just get up and train every day like a soldier. Their mind is on one thing this six week from now event, and until then, I don't want to hear shit. When Marvin Hagler's kid was born, he didn't go to the hospital. He wasn't at the hospital. He was in camp. Yeah. Marvin Hagler would go off to Provincetown. It's down to Cape, and he would run. He would run in the fucking winter on the sand.

There's that famous Darren till interview where he's saying, I've got a two year old daughter. Don't care. All I care about is legacy and greatness.

Yeah.

It's a high price that people pay. I mean, Sean Strickland, who continues to seem to. He seems to be sparring like any youtuber or streamer that's prepared to get into the ring with him.

Well, he beat up that kid who's a smaller than him streamer named Sneako, which is not a good look. He beat the shit out of that. It's. I just don't know why he wanted to do was so easy for him to beat that guy up.

It was what we were talking about before.

Yeah, it's not kid. I don't know what that kid thought. First of all, he's so silly for doing that, for agreeing to do that with Sean Strickland, because you know that.

He'S never going to have that hold back.

If you agree to do that with Israel, Adesanya is Israel, Adesanya will take care of you. I swear to God. He'll pop you a little bit. He'll let you know that you're helpless, but he won't fuck you up. He'll smile and laugh and he'll hug you afterwards. You could spar with him. I guarantee you could spar with him and then just touch your face, just to let you know. Like, you would have been knocked out, but I just touched your face. Just going to touch you a little bit. Move around. You can't touch me. I touch you. Here's this faint and nats coming at you. And if he's kicking, you're fucked. But even if he's just using his hands, if you're some streamer, he wouldn't hurt you. But Sean Strickland's a different animal. Sean Strickland has, you know, he's got this fucking man code and he believes in it. Like, you gotta get your ass kicked every now and then. He spars all the time. Spars constantly. And if you agree to get in there with him, you're essentially agreeing to let him beat the fuck out of you because you don't really have a chance.

Like, you have no chance. But in Sean's defense, when he lost to Alex Beheda, one of the first things he did was go to Connecticut to go over to Shera's gym where Alex trains and train with him. When we was training with Alex Beheda, he was light sparring. So this is fucking light. Watch. Find the video of Sean Strickland training with Alex Beheda. Because he's smart, because that guy's not sneako. You can't just tool off. That guy already knocked you out. Like, Pajeda knocked him out in the first round. He hit him with a left hook and then a right hand as he was going down. Like, Paheda is a monster. So he was sparring with this monster. He's like, let's just fucking be friends. Let's just be friends, buddy.

Cheat codes.

Exactly. And Paheda teaches people, which is very interesting, he's that confident in his ability that he'll take a guy that he just fought and a guy who is now the current. Look how they're sparring nice and light. See this? They're just touching each other, just using distance and sparring. And there was an actual. See, these guys are sparring, but they're not hitting each other hard at all. And there was a very interesting video that I just watched yesterday where this guy was talking about that in martial arts, I don't know if you'll be able to find it, but you know what? I guarantee you it's on my list of shit that I just watched because YouTube will give you a list of shit, the history. Yeah. Which is nice. But it was very interesting because it was talking about the importance of play when it comes to martial arts sparring. In that sparring, the only way to learn is to not be under this intense, high pressure, high stress situation. And for most people, sparring is terrifying, especially sparring. If you're sparring someone who's, like, really dangerous. Yes. This is that guy.

It's a long video, though.

Yes. And Max Holloway talked about it, how he doesn't spar and CJ, but what he's essentially saying is he breaks down the mind and where is your optimal time to learn? And he talks about how animals play and about young animals, like when a lion is jumping on another lion, they're learning rough and tumble play. And the ties, he also breaks down how the ties spar. Ties spar very light. They just touch each other. They're just touching each other.

I've been out to Thailand. I've seen it.

It's amazing. High level guys do that. And they do that so they can fight all the time because they fight almost every week sometimes. So when they're training, they can't be getting beat up all the time, so they learn how to. And that's for us, the hobby actually talked about that was fascinating for us. Is a genius. He's one of the greatest martial arts trainers of all time, if not the. So see these guys, they're training and they're touching. See, they just touch each other. And when you do that, you don't have the fear of getting hit back as much. And you learn combinations better, you learn timing better. When I first started coming to California, I started training at this place called the Jet center. It was Benny the jet Orquites, who's this world famous kickboxer. And he had this place in California that was, like, two places I wanted to go to when I came to California. One was a comedy store, and one was the jet center. And unfortunately, they had just been damaged. They had the roof damage from an earthquake, and so they had, like, flooding problems and stuff, and they had to move out of that location.

So I was only there for, like, a short period of time before they went under. But there was guys you could spar there that were, like, really good kickboxers, but they knew how to spar correctly. So there was this one dude I used to spar with all the time that I was getting so sharp because we never hit each other hard, and I knew I could trust him, and he knew he could trust me. So we were sparring all the time, and I was not getting fucked up. Like, I'd spar in a day that I had to film something because I.

Knew that I'd be able to still go to work without a bloody nose.

Or a black eye. So I did all my hard work on the heavy bag, but then when I was sparring, everything is just movement.

What are the bad habits that someone who does that too much can. Would you maybe begin to habituate pulling your punches, not telegraphing sufficiently?

No. If you've fought before, you'll never pull your punches, but you know what I.

Mean, because obviously you are dialing back that power, that penetration.

You could say that with point Karate, because point karate, they kind of dive in and just touch each other. But they all know how to hit bags, they all know how to hit mitts, they all know how to hit tie pads, they all know how to do that. They know how to hit things. It's just the real skill level is in control. The real skill level is in. Be able to counter quickly, but know exactly where your hand is going. And you can do that. You can learn how to control force in a way that. When I used to do taekwondo demonstrations, like, when we'd open up a new school, one of the things you'd have to do is throw kicks at people's faces, stop it at their face, just to show them the kind of control that's possible. And you would have your foot literally fly up right in front of someone's face, and you would have someone stand there who's another student, you would demonstrate on them.

Just going to stand there, not flinch.

Yes. And you just stand there. And my instructor used to do it to me all the time. He would do it to someone in every class, like, in the front row. He would demonstrate by stopping the kick in the air in front of your face.

Fuck, that's cool.

Yeah. And so you would learn how to do that when you would do that. The ability to pull a shot is a part of being a really high level martial artist. And the ability to spar and spar fast without hitting each other hard is also something you should know how to do. It's a part of the. But once you know that you're hitting, the only thing is, like, the anxiety of being hit and the danger of being hit. Because if you're just used to pulling shots, you could get an uncomfortable sense of. A dangerous sense of safety. Your robustness and your safety, because any one shot takes you out, any one good shot from a strong striker can take you out. So you want no shots landing clean. You want everything to be moving away from you.

This is new, though, right? I've heard a lot of guys, older school, UFC guys, saying that this light sparring thing is a pretty new invention.

Totally.

People were getting knocked out in sparring all the time.

All the time. Yeah. Some of the old school training camps, like, you'd hear stories about, particularly shoot the box. In Brazil, in Kuritiba, they had some of the best fighters of the golden era of pride. They had Vanderley Silva. They had ninja Shogun, Anderson Silva. They had so many killers that came out as one gym, and, bro, they beat the fuck out of each other. They beat the fuck out of each other. They knocked each other out all the time. Vanderly Silva and Shogun famously had a fight to see whether or not one of them would pay for a pit bull, because one of them had the pit bull. I think Shogun had the pit bull, and he's offered to sell it to Vandalay. And Vandalay said, I'll fight you for it. And so they fought, and Vandalay apparently won and got the dog just in the gym.

No one's getting paid apart from in a dog.

No, see, they would fight, fight. Like fight, fight. So when they would go to fights, they're so used to fighting.

I'd fight overkall.

The thing about it is, though, man, it's going to shorten your career substantially. Substantially. It'll shorten your durability towards the end of your career substantially. You see it in every fighter that comes from that sort of environment. And the traumatic brain injuries that they get when they spar like that all the time, especially when they're not slick. Think about, like, Anderson Silva, above all those guys, is that Anderson was slick. He was very difficult to hit clean. So Anderson Silva, when he's sparring like he's flowing and moving, he's very difficult to catch. Those guys would go to war, just point on the mouthpiece and fucking. Do you ever see Vanderley Silva fight?

Yeah, I think so.

His nick's name is the ax murderer. Vanderly Silva.

Was that the guy? Let's go now. Let's go now.

Chaos on him. But that was at the end of his career. That was at the end of his career when he came to the UFC post TRT. Yeah, he'd gotten off of all the stuff that he was on when he was in Brazil. You want fully roided Vandele in Brazil when he was a young man. He was a fucking animal, dude. He was an animal. He was so scary. This is the bare knuckle days. This is like, his first fight.

Bare knuckle's coming back.

Yeah, it is coming back. Well, bare knuckle for UFC was how they first started. Yeah, look, Vandal was. And he had a cool tattoo on.

The back of his head.

He was an animal, dude. He was an animal. I saw him meet a fan. I saw him meet a fan once, and the guy had the same tattoo in his head.

Oh, you can do head kicks on the ground?

Oh, yeah, everything. You do whatever you want in little briefs as well.

I love the briefs.

This is in Brazil. This is where it all started, man. This is how they did it in Brazil, man, in Brazil. Bare knuckle Valley, Tudo. It's just when the United States got involved that it became the thing that it gloves. Yeah, I mean, they were stomping and kicking each other in the balls. This is Vanderley when he got to the UFC. So, in these days, this was the UFC with zero testing, and you see him, he looks fucking shredded. And then Vanderley was a terrifying force. And then he goes over to pride, and he becomes a champion of pride. But he was fucking people. And there's him against Guy Metzger, who was a very good fighter. And Vanderley just overwhelmed him, bro. Overwhelmed him. It's just headbutts, everything. Knees. See that headbutt? I don't think that headbutt was legal, by the way. I don't think that was legal back then, but it didn't matter. They weren't going to stop it. And then Vandalay puts him away. I wanted to monster, dude. He was a monster in his prime. He had to get his face reconstructed because his nose was so flat that he couldn't breathe out of it at all.

So they took a big chunk of cartilage out of his rib and reconstructed his face. And he had a totally new face. They made it big. He got a big nose, so he could really breathe. Yeah, he looked like a different human. Like, after the surgery, he showed up one day and I was like, what is going on? We're at the.

My face.

I knew that he had got his nose fixed, but they gave him a different nose, like, it's way bigger, so he could breathe more. He's beating the fuck out of people. He wanted more air. Fuck. Vandalay was an animal.

Who do you think's more? Is there anyone else that was more psychopathic or more of an animal across your commentary career?

There's so many of them.

Who ranks close to the top?

Mike Perry, who's one of the bare knuckle fighters now. He's about as ferocious as a human being gets.

He's the dude that chipped Luke Rockhold's tooth, right?

Yeah. And he told him what was going to happen before the fight. I'm going to fuck you up and you're going to quit. He just went out and made him quit, did exactly what he said. He's an animal, man. He's a real animal.

This BKFC thing's interesting.

Yeah, well, it's a very different kind of fighting, man. When you don't have the protection of gloves, every punch hurts way more and it also hurts your hands.

Is the wrapping on their wrists just to provide a little bit of support structurally when they're hitting.

Yeah, structurally, it'll probably prevent some breaks. That's basically all it does, is prevent some breaks. It connects your thumb to the hands, too, because the thumb breaks easy. The thumb, like on a missed punch, you might hit a forehead with the thumb. The thumb will snap, so it'll protect it a little bit. Oh, see, Luke cracked him there with a good left hand. And Luke was a fucking hell of a fighter in his prime, man. He was UFC middleweight champion, and in his prime when he beat Chris wideman, he was a. I remember that fucker, man. He was a motherfucker. But Mike Perry is not a guy that you can think you have. He's just so tough. He's going to keep coming. And if Luke stuck and moved and maybe had a different strategy, maybe would have had a better time, but you let Mike Perry start mauling you. He's so dangerous, man. He's such a fucking killer. And he doesn't feel pain. Or if he does, he doesn't let you. He's. He's just uniquely built for that sport.

I wanted to teach you about something that I'd learned on the show. So you've had a number of conversations about trans athletes in sport and about the dangers, potentially, of biological males moving over into women's leagues. And it always kind of comes back to the same, well, if we can get their hormones down to this particular kind of level, basically, can we reverse some of the structural changes? And it kind of gets into this realm of hormonal fuckery, which is fine, but I think that's kind of been talked to death. There's something that I learned about on the show that I thought was even more important. So the male and female brain difference can be detected in utero, in embryos, in fetuses that are six months old. So this is a minus three months year old. And they can already detect sexed brain differences by the age of 1090. 3% accuracy of an MRI between a boy and a girl. That's exactly. Or that's around about the same as your accuracy of detecting whether it's a man or a woman based on looking at their face. That's the same degree of difference. So one of the arguments that would be put forward is social roles theory.

So, social roles theory is that boys behave like boys because they see boys behaving like boys, and girls do the same. They're socialized into doing this. That doesn't seem to be true because this is universal. It's across the board, it's present before anybody's even been born, and it's present before androgens. But the reason that this is, I think, important towards sport is that one of the key differences is in what's called visual spatial abilities. And males have a huge advantage in visual spatial abilities. This is preschoolers age three and four. Their throwing accuracy and their throwing distance already begins to diverge from girls. And by the age of 19, there's essentially no crossover at all. You could understand why this might be the case because, well, if you're an ancestral hunter, you need to, as a man, be able to see this is an animal running this way. I have this particular spear in my hand. I'm going to throw it to intersect this. So you go, okay, well, one of the problems of using that is you can't bifurcate a male's performance, especially with something like throwing visual spatial from the physical structure that they have, which is impacted by androgens.

So men have longer forearms, their shoulders articulate in a different way. They might have more trunk rotation, perhaps. So they did a study to try and work this out instead of having them throw things. The lecturers at this university brought their undergrads in and used a tennis ball firing machine, like you use for practicing returns in tennis as dodgeball. And the guys in the class topped out the ceiling. They were very, very difficult to hit. The same wasn't true for the girls. The reason is that the male proclivity to be able to see things in space, understand how they fit together, understand the proprioception of where my body is and how I can interact with this is very, very different. It's a sizable, statistically significant difference that you find between males and females. Now, females have their own advantages. Social cognition, otherwise known as emotional intelligence. Reading faces, lying detection, what's called, like, I think it's local memorization or spatial memorization. So, you know those games where you've got a load of cards down on the table and you got to match them? Girls would wipe the floor with guys at that. So there are predispositions, mentally, that men and women have, and this is something this is not, and this is the important thing.

This is not impacted by testosterone level. So you, as a biological male, can't take a ton of estrogen or hormone blockers and have your visual spatial ability be down regulated to that of a woman. So this, to me, explains an awful lot about why the WNBA is struggling, because you are talking about a very different set of capacities. And unfortunately, fortunately, I guess the way that sports are done is it needs to be visually compelling, right? You want to see cool things happening. You want to observe shit going on a lying detection test, or someone turning over cards and matching them doesn't lend itself to being a spectator sport as much, which means that males have this predisposition, which is more entertaining, given the current rule sets of sport. And this, to me, is a much more compelling unfairness when you're talking about male and female capabilities within sport. This doesn't have anything to do with what time were they put on hormone blockers. This doesn't have anything to do with what is their testosterone level at. This is innate, inbuilt predispositions.

But doesn't it have to be agreed upon by the people that are making these sort of decisions? Because most people, there's people that will resist that. They might not think you're lying, but they might resist that. They might resist that and say, it's not valid, doesn't matter, right? But you could see how people would have an issue with that, right? Even though it's statistically significant, people would go, like, who did the study? If you're trying to say that trans women are women, there's a lot of things that you could say that they have an advantage with physically proving it mentally. Just based on that, I agree. It seems an issue. Well, you know how big of it's an issue. It's an issue in pool. Pool is not a strength game at all. It's a finesse game. It's a game of executing shots under pressure. It's a game of angles. It's a game of geometry and feel. But very few women ever get to the level of, like, an elite professional male. It's like there's a small handful in history. In history.

And that's completely controlled for articulation of the shoulder strength. Maybe a tiny bit of strength on.

The brake, I guess, could be on the brake. But there's a lot of girls who break very well. And the brake today is more of a controlled break because they're breaking on cloth. That's Simonus 860. It's a very fast, clean cloth.

Dude. Your obsession with pool makes me laugh every time that I hear about it. It's so funny. It's like this other wing of you that I never think about. And then every time I walk in and I see that there's, like, a pool hall, basically, in here, I'm like, ah, yeah, the fucking pool obsession.

Yeah, I'm obsessed with it. But there's women that are really good. They're better than me, for sure, but they never reach the level of, like, a Shane van boning, who's like, one of the best ever. They just don't get to that place.

I just think it's an interesting addition to the discussion, because you're always having the same conversation. Well, what about if we get the hormone levels to here? Well, actually, we don't suggest that testosterone level. What about people that have got naturally high levels of testosterone? It never gets to innate, inbuilt, unchangeable differences about our capacities, about when it comes to the field of play. And if you were to take the top hundred female WNBA players and the top hundred male NBA players, and you were to say, let's just shoot three free throws, let's just see how many are made, that should be a pretty even playing field. And I bet that the disparity will.

Be very high, very high in the pool world. The reason why I was bringing this up recently, a woman made it to the finals of a tournament with a transgender woman and just quit. She said, I'm not going to play you in pool. Yeah, they got to a woman's tournament and this transgender woman. And by the way, with pool tournaments, I guarantee you they're not, like, checking estrogen levels. There's zero control. All you have to do is say, I'm a woman, and I could say, I'm a woman and I could play. Put on a dress and I'll play, fuck you, I'm a woman. And if you let it happen, you're going to get crazy. People that do this, and this lady, she took a stand. She's like, you're not a woman. I quit. You saw that, shook your hand.

You saw that canadian powerlifting coach that just entered a competition just didn't do it.

He was like, yeah, I'm a woman now. It's really bizarre that they're letting this happen. It really is. It's so strange. It's like women's rights have gone out the window in this sense over the name of virtue, the virtue that you're a good person. And you say trans women are women. Okay, in real life, maybe, yeah, but not on sports. You're a biological male. It's the same thing as if you tell someone, hey, I don't do steroids now, but I've done steroids straight every day for 20 years. And I'm so fucking stronger. Run through a wall. But I'm going to stop doing steroids and I want to compete with natural people. Well, fuck you. Fuck you. You cheated. You changed your physique. You changed it. Well, that's exactly what you would say for a woman if you had a woman athlete and that woman athlete developed a male voice and giant muscles but was still a woman, was beating up all these women, you'd be like, oh, that woman was on the sauce. She cheated. She cheated. Well, if you're going through puberty, guess what, fuck face? You're taking testosterone. If you really say you're a woman and you're going through all that, and then you're after puberty, you're an adult, and then you're going into your whole life of producing testosterone.

You have male tendon strength, you have the male bone density of different shaped hips. You have. Everything's different. Your competitive drive is different. It's so dumb that we're having this conversation and the people that suffer are the biological women. And that was the thing that we were always supposed to be protecting with title nine. That's the whole idea of developing regulations so that women have sports that they can play that are just with women, it's a fair playing field. The same reason why you don't let third graders play with fucking high school seniors. It's real simple. You have someone play within the parameters of a fair playing environment, and you're always going to get outliers. You're always going to get people that are, like, exceptionally strong and fast for their weight and their age, and then you're going to be at people that are struggling physically. They just have no experience whatsoever in athletics, and you got to find the comfortable medium. But it's within a fair parameter of the biological gender. This fucking thing that's on your birth certificate, what is it? That's what you can compete in. Whatever the fuck you at. What's your chromosomes?

Do you have x? Y? Yeah, you got to go with those guys. That's it. You don't want to fight anymore? Okay, well, then don't fight. But you can't beat up women just because you decide you're a woman. That's crazy. That's just crazy. It doesn't make any sense that we're allowing that. It's not compassionate. It's not open minded. It's not progressive. It's just stupid. You're just caught in some cult like mindset, and the people that are suffering are the women. The women that would be competing in just sports. You see that thing in Canada where the volleyball players is five biological males on a volleyball team, and the biological women were sitting there on the bench waiting while the biological males were dominating this fucking woman's volleyball game. See if you can find that, because it's so crazy. It's literally South park. It's South park like we're watching.

Strong woman.

Yeah. It's absolute insanity. You have crazy people.

Crazy people talking about basketball. I had Seth Stevens Davidowitz on the show. He's an ex Google data scientist. He wrote a book in 30 days using AI, breaking down a ton of stuff that no one ever knew about basketball. And it is so fucking cool for every inch in height that you gain the chance of you going to the NBA doubles.

Whoa.

So six foot one is twice as likely as six foot, and six foot two is twice as likely as six one. And it just continues to go. Continues to go all the way up. The most common name. Oh, here we go. Get it in there.

Most common name. Five trans players dominate women's college volleyball game. Come on. This is so crazy.

How many players is there on a game of volleyball on different teams?

Yeah, there's like three on one and two on the other. And they played during the entire game. Why the biological women sat on the bench.

Let's see if I can pick them up. Oh, God. This is a playing. This is a real talking about.

Oh, so people were freaking out, I guess. Yeah. Well, they should be freaking out. It's fucking insanity. It's insanity. And it's this thing where you're supposed to pretend that they're not lunatics. Like, there was a man in Canada that was a 50 year old man that decided he identified as a 15 year old girl. So he's competing in girls swimming events and he was changing in the same locker room as the girls. Hey, what are the ods? That guy's a creep.

Might be one to put on the watch list for the police, I think.

What are you talking about? It's so dumb. It's just so dumb that we're accepting it and more people are accepting it than should. It's insane. And it shouldn't be a sign of whether or not you're progressive or you should recognize that this is a dangerous opening. You're leaving a very dangerous opening here. And the people that are suffering are the women and the women that are athletes that are suffering. It's going to ruin their chances at college. It could change the direction of their life. They might not get a scholarship they should get because they had to compete against biological males.

The enhanced games. Get everybody off to the enhanced games. The steroid Olympics. Peter Thiel just put a ton of money into that.

Yeah, that's going to be interesting. How long before the government cracks down on them?

Well, the problem is it seems like from what I read, it seems like they supply the steroids.

That's what I'm saying.

Hang on. Are you a sporting body? Are you a my steroid dealer?

And then you have to think, like, what kind of an influence does that have on young people? One of the things about steroids being shunned and illegal, even if it was irrational in some sense, like that, if you have an adult male and this guy is 35 years old and he just decides, you know what? I want to take steroids, why is that not okay? But you can prescribe him a ton of different fucking things that can kill him. You can prescribe him antianxiety medication. You can prescribe him painkillers. You can prescribe him ozempic because he wants to lose weight. You can prescribe him all kinds of things that might have adverse health risks, but you can't nothing that makes you stronger. We have a limitation on that. It's very od, and I can see how you would make it banned for sports, but why is it banned for people? Like, says who?

I just want to get jacked.

Says who? But it's like, says who? Says one adult. Says another adult can't do this. Do people vote on that? Did medical experts vote on that? If they did, how'd they let fentanyl in?

I can't remember. I feel like it wouldn't be surprising to me if the cascade was. This ruins fairness in sports. And then we retroactively change the gym rat normal population rule set to ensure that the sporting rule set isn't wrecked. I feel like it was probably the trickle down that way from sports and elite sports and tested sports into the public. But Derek, from more plates, more dates, has talked about this, how if it hadn't been for the fact that there were controlled substances, we would have way safer, better researched compounds we're still using. Like, trend balloon is. It's from, like, the something.

That stuff's supposed to be scary. I've heard scary stories of people being on that stuff and losing their fucking mind.

Like, literally insomnia. You get this cough.

It's a trend cough.

Trend cough. Yeah. You pin yourself, and you get this trend cough. Supposedly terrifying. Going back to that basketball thing, the most common name of basketball players in the NBA. Christopher. I missed my calling.

Damn.

The reason most? Yes. So the reason for this, it's really interesting. Seth used a ton of different AI programs to analyze all of this data, and he said he was able to do what would have taken him three years in 30 days. He wrote this book in 30 days.

Whoa.

It's insane. It's really, really good. Who makes the NBA, I think it's called. And the reason that it's Christopher is that Christopher is the sort of name that is given by middle class parents to their child. So it's really an indicator of social class. And there is this belief that in basketball, it's a meritocracy where the underclass, hardworking athlete can clamber his way up. This is the LeBron. Lebron. Single mother who was 16 years old, makes it to the top. He's an outlier. That's not that common. The most common path is someone that comes from two parent households that's relatively well off and classic advantages that you get. Christopher is the sort of name that's given. I think Michael is another one that's up there, and he does this big word map thing where you can see the size of the names, and the bigger the name, the more likely it is.

Yeah.

One of the other things that no one really ever thinks about is hand span. Hand span, one of the biggest determinants for success in the sport. So Shaq has a 14 inch hand span from finger to hand, because palming the ball, if you're up there and you're able to palm the ball, that's a huge advantage. Yeah, it's terrifying.

That's so big.

Absolutely terrifying.

Just grab that ball. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. It'd give you an advantage. Yeah. It's fascinating when you break down data like that and you try to figure out what are the contributing factors. I wonder if they've done that with martial arts. I wonder if someone's done that with fighters, like height and reach and things.

What would you be interested in?

Height and reach, it's a big factor, but it's also like, are you as durable? Like, sometimes the stock, maybe something like neck width, the size of the chin. I think it's jaw size.

Hand size would definitely be one. So I worked on the front door of nightclubs for forever running our events. And one of the really naughty things that doorstaff would do, maybe they do this in America as well, is they get like a lead cylinder and in their leather gloves, they put it on the inside. So their hand now weighs a pound and a half more than usual. You hit someone and that's like a fucking hammer. So if that's the case, that rule is mass of hand equals damage. So someone that has denser bones or more muscular hands or bigger hands, that's basically just more weight on the end of your arms that you're swinging at someone's face. So, yeah, I mean, giant advantage. I think that breaking down sports in this way, that's why moneyball was so cool. Right? People loved like, oh, my God, this is so interesting because I never really.

Paid attention to that. What is moneyball?

So moneyball was a assessment of the MLB done by a guy that was picked up by the Oakland A's. And he was using very advanced mathematics to look at. You got something, Jimmy? I was just. Billy beans'name. I was trying to just. Yeah, Billy Beans. And he looked at undervalued players and what contributes to winning a game. And there were players that would bat in a weird way, that would throw or pitch in a weird way, but their numbers were fantastic. And he was the first guy that really, really assessed the numbers of baseball in this manner. Now, it's very very common. Baseball is largely a game of maths. They know exactly where hitters like to swing. They move the field around based on all of the statistics that they've seen, all of the analyzes that it's been done. But, yeah, the movie moneyball with Brad Pitt is outstanding. If you've never seen it, you absolutely should watch it. It's so much fun. But, yeah, I think this assessment.

I.

Don'T think it removes the magic of sport. I don't think it gets rid of the magic of sport to.

It just makes people nerd out harder.

Deconstruct. Yeah. And it allows us to obsess.

It still doesn't make it easy to do. So when someone does hit a fucking home run, it's still amazing.

Yeah. This is a good scene from the movie. I'm not going to play the whole thing, but just what's going on here is he's explaining to them the idea what he was just talking about, the money ball. But there's a bunch of old scouts. These Guys have been around for the whole forever, and they're just like, what are you talking about?

We can't do it that way.

They kind.

That's about really. So he just figures it out numerically.

And spoiler alert is it works. They won the World Series, like, the.

Next year or something like that. And it's based on a true story.

Oh, yeah.

An autistic kid. Yeah. That's exactly what basically was.

That's the secret advantage. Find people that have got autism.

There's an advantage in that.

I just heard that the guy out the chiefs that just won the bowl, they have a guy like that that's worked with the coach the entire time. They call him. Shit.

I forget what they call him.

He has a name. He's like the analytics guy. They're like, no one knows what his job. Mr. Numbers. Listen to him. And we trust whatever he says. Fuck, that's cool.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Dude, let's talk about this special counsel report thing.

Oh, yes. That. We were going to do that before we. Yes. Yeah. Special counsel report on Biden.

Yeah. So these Afghanistan documents, these top secret Afghanistan documents that were supposedly held in his garage, as you'd say, there's photos of how it was. It was just an open box in the middle of the garage.

This wasn't it in his Corvette or something?

I'm not sure. The photos that I've seen are just an open box with files in, like, you just have lying around here that need to be cleaned away.

I think he had one of those boxes in the backseat of his corvette. Well.

There it is.

Corvette. Yeah. There's his corvette. That's a Corvette that doesn't even have a backseat.

Corvette, I guess. Yeah.

So he's got a park. That's a fucking dope Corvette. That's like my year. I love that year.

That's pretty nice.

So the classified docks were found in his garage where his corvette was. That's the box right there. That's it, yeah. What's in those things?

Classified Afghanistan documents. I think it was from earlier in.

God, you can read them.

Garage box. After repacking. Repackaging. January 3, 2023.

So did he forget he had them?

So that's the argument. And the thing that most people are jumping on to do with this report isn't that it's the assessment. I think it was her. That's the dude that did it. It was the assessment of his mental state. Yeah, basically, yeah. Mr. Hur suggested that Mr. Biden's memory was failing and questioned some of his actions, even though the special counsel had found no basis to prosecute the president. The issue that he says basically in the report is if you tried to prosecute this guy, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, which is as a sympathetic, well meaning elderly man with a poor memory. That's literally what it says in the report. Well meaning elderly man with a poor memory. So basically, you can't prosecute this guy because he's not compass mentus, but you can let him run for the president of the United States in November. So that's the world that we've managed to get into.

But don't you think that that's a ruse, him running for president?

You don't think he's going to.

No. No. I think they're going to get rid of him. I think they're going to move him out. They're going to force him to step down. That's what I think. If I had a guess and it's just speculation, I'd say they're setting up Gavin Newsom for it. That's what I say. That's what I think. That's what it looks like to me. I think more and more comes out about this stuff, and more and more comes out about the Burisma thing and the, you know, the. Where the Chinese donated money to Penn State, and then he got a million dollar a year gig where he didn't even have to show up. That's old school. That's like mafia stuff? Was it a million dollars a year? How much was it that he got from Penn State? And he was telling people, he's a professor at Penn State, teach one class. Look at some of it is part of it's fun. If he wasn't the president, it'll be really fun because he's, like, always making stuff up. He calls people the wrong name, talks about someone that's dead. It's constant.

It was Penn, not Penn State.

Penn State. Excuse me. Penn was paid $1 million a year to teach, but never taught a single class. Yeah, University of Pennsylvania. That's what it is. That's a mob job. I had a friend of mine who had one of those jobs. He didn't have to really go to the Javit center, like an honorary. He was a mob guy. He got a gig. Yeah, he got a gig. And there was like, if you had made a union negotiation back in the day, like we're talking back in the day day, they would throw in a bunch of no work jobs. So no work jobs were a part of the thing.

Just a little sweetener on top.

Yeah. So if you're a mob guy and you're connected to some construction company, they would find companies that they would buy into and own pieces of so that they could kind of funnel their money out. They could say, I'm in the construction business or I'm in the sanitation business. They always had something that they were attached to, but they had no show jobs. You got real money, got a real fucking salary, a real paycheck every week, and you never did shit. You didn't do a goddamn thing. You never went there. You're just a mob guy.

I can't help feeling kind of sad about how difficult it must be to be Joe Biden. Like, if you're this dude, who is. I mean, what the fuck are they pumping him with?

Like, he is fun stuff.

I mean, he's having a great time. Like, first thing in the morning, Mr. President, come in for your happy pills or whatever? Yeah, exactly.

Fucking IV testosterone and cocaine right into his system.

So you think this guy who's holding on as best he can, like, trying to get through the presidency, and there's all of this scrutiny, and people are making jokes about him, and he's got the fucking red. His team are like, oh, let's put a fucking meme out of him with red eyes after the Super bowl. And then he's got to deal with all the rest of that stuff.

What is that?

And then it just makes me feel like, fuck, like, that must be really rough to be that guy, to actually be the human that is Joe Biden. That must be really fucking like, I don't know. You're going to be aware. You're going to be self aware of the fact that you're failing, that your mental faculties aren't there and you're, like, being pushed and just this rpm is being pushed higher and higher. 8000, 9000, 10,000.

I bet he doesn't do much. I bet the cabinet takes care of everything. I bet the press secretary makes all the tweets. I bet they dope them up every now and then. They make them talk. And they probably give him a lot of amphetamines or something. They probably give him something to make. I don't know. It's amphetamines. I would imagine if I was using.

Your Hitler, Hitler model, what I was.

Going to do if I had a guy like that. And they say, hey, Joe, this guy, he's really out of it. Let's pretend it's not Biden. It's some other guy that has to go and speak in front of people. He's really old and, okay, he could die if you do this. But what I would say is, let's start banging him up with testosterone. Give him, like, a good dose. Like, ramp them up slowly. We want to get them up to, like, 30 year old levels. And then some kind of amphetamine and then a big nootropic stack, like a heavy stack. Theonine, acetylchol, alpha, GPC. Yeah, let's stack shit. And I want, like, bull modality. So I want a bunch of different ones coming out, mushroom ones, all kinds of stuff. We got to do our best here.

The adaptogens. We've got everything going in there.

And then I got to break things down on cue cards. I mean, we can do this. And that's what they've done. They've definitely done the cue cards part. There's photos of his cue cards, like, stand there, say brief for mark. It's all capital letters. Have you seen those? No. He holds onto them, and then they take pictures of it and they zoom in on the picture and they go, look what it says. See if you can find that, Jamie.

Yeah.

This is his card. Presidential cue cards. Oh, he has cue cards for staff, too. That makes sense. But there was a cue card that he had that they were reading while he was on stage, where he was giving some sort of a presidential address.

You enter the Roosevelt room and say hello to participants. You take your seat.

You give brief comments, all caps with you.

I feel so bad for.

Amazing. It's amazing. Well, he just can't keep a thought in his head when he starts talking about things. He forgets what he's talking about all the time. He goes, well, whatever. He just says, well, whatever, and just drifts off someone.

So he did this after the report came out, he did this emergency press conference, which wasn't, I don't think, a particularly good idea.

How did it go?

I would say, suboptimally. Someone said, did he fail to impress? Someone asked him, how good is your memory? And he said, my memory is so bad, I let you speak.

Oh, boy.

Like what?

Oh, boy.

Sorry, what? My memory is so good, I let you speak. What, there's no way that I can repurpose that quote for it to make sense?

No.

Meanwhile, the new president of El Salvador just won with an 85% vote. 85%. So El Salvador went from having the highest murder rate in the world to now the highest incarceration rate in the world. This guy is locking up everyone. They have a brand new 40,000 person prison that's the size of seven football stadiums.

Whoa.

Jamie, have a look at this football stadium thing. It is wild what they've done. And he's cleaned up the streets. He's gone super aggressive. There's some dangers of what he's done, which is they're being very indiscriminate with who gets convicted. Twelve year olds can be. I haven't heard if they are, but twelve year olds can be treated like adults and thrown into the prison as well. If they break down the door and come in this room, and you're a bad guy. And me and Jamie are not bad guys, we're probably going to prison as well. So there's probably a good bit of collateral damage that's come with this. But this dude is like. It's insane. It's insane what he's been able to do. And, yeah, 85% was the vote. Yeah. Here we go.

Wow. Inside El Salvador's mega prison.

Turn the volume on, Jamie.

You'll find some of El Salvador's most dangerous gang members packed into massive cells, towers of bunk beds, in what looks like bird cages. It's a source of pride for President Naib Bukele that almost two years ago declared a war on crime.

A detention center the size of seven.

Football stadiums with capacity to hold 40,000 prisoners, the largest of its kind in Latin America. Known as the center for Terrorism Confinement, it opened its doors in 2023 after the government declared a state of emergency. The move limiting civil rights.

Look at the tattoos, dude. Look at that.

Tens of thousands of gang members. Wow. The director says the detainees have to sleep on hard surfaces to avoid giving them mattresses that could be used to hide objects. Their diet consists of simple meals that repeat every day.

Beans, rice, one hard egg in the morning.

Wow.

Yeah.

This guy just put the hammer down. That was when Duncan Trussell, when we were in LA, when the George Floyd riots hit, one of the first things he said, dude, we're going to have a right wing, authoritarian president now. That's going to be the next. Like, when this all collapses, the only response to that is people go hard right. They go hard right.

Oh, my God.

That's nuts. That's nuts.

I think it's. MS 13 is one of the big gangs. I can't remember what the other one's called.

If you wanted to.

Oh, my God.

Stop this at its tracks. You're not going to cure those guys.

There's only two bathrooms in each stall or each cell also. And how many people in each cell? People. Oh, my God. You got to go. You got to go.

But I guess you want to really clean it up. It's not going to be pretty. If you want to really clean up a very dangerous, gang infested place, it's not going to be pretty.

You saw Batman. That's what he did, right?

Yeah.

Recodes, like, 500 people.

Yeah.

The insight around, during a time of upheaval and uncertainty, looking for a more dominant leader and more authoritarian leader that has roots in evolution as well. So this is something that will store talks about, which is there's multiple routes to status, there's fewer routes to leadership, so there tends to be two, one being dominance and the other being prestige. So dominance is the more authoritarian. You will do this because there are negative outcomes if you don't do this. And it's more overbearing. Prestige is earning reputation through being positive. Some during times of war and strife, tribes would look for a more dominant leader because you have threat from the outside. So you're going to have someone that's going to be aggressive, they're going to lean in, they're going to try and fix this problem. Of course that's going to be who you choose. Problem is, if you have someone who is a dominant leader for times of war, when it becomes a time of peace, that dominant leader isn't just going to step aside, they're dominant. They're going to hold on to this power. They've usually managed to embed themselves. They've got sycophants. They've got a distribution network of people that can help to enforce their rule.

That's the problem that you have. But this absolutely has its roots evolutionarily.

Also, what a bizarre way to run anything, to have the guy who runs it be very vulnerable and only have a four year term, and then you can only do two of those four year terms. And then people are constantly trying to figure out a way to manipulate the reality of the world to get their guy past you, including high level gaslighting. I mean, we've seen some wild gaslighting, serious fuckery past couple of weeks, talking about the economy. There's so much. What was that gaslighting? Well, one of them was Gavin Newsom talking about how great Biden was and how what? The Democrats record that this has been one of the greatest presidencies ever. Full stop. It's like hot gas in your face. It's burning your lungs. It's just gas lighting. Gas lighting. You can't have a great economy if you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars financing wars overseas. It's not even possible. You're going to have inflation. How'd you get all that money? Where'd you get another 95 billion that you passed in the middle of the night? Like, where is all that going? Who's paying it back? Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of money.

I often think about the guys that are staples of the government, not the people that are part of the president.

Say it. The deep state.

The deep state.

Them.

Yes. The people that are in charge. We all know who we mean. Yeah. Taylor Swift.

That is a hilarious theory.

I love the conspiracy theories around, but.

Did you see that there was actually, like, a conversation that was had about what was the actual roots of it? There's an actual video where they talk about it in, like, God, it was like, 2017 or something like that. They talk about using a really popular person like Taylor Swift as, like, an asset.

The Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey's relationship is a deep state. Psyop. To be able to wild. I love that conspiracy.

It's a wild conspiracy. Because the problem with the conspiracy is they're saying this is why Taylor Swift is so big. No, you got to see how 15 year old, like, I have a 15 year old daughter. When they're around, like, Taylor Swift songs, they all scream. They go nuts. They love it. They actually.

That's not a psyop.

She speaks to them. It's not a psyop. She's super talented, fucking driven as hell. Writes her own songs like she speaks to them. I don't know what's great. The whole thing is it's wild. It's wild to watch a new Michael Jackson because that's kind of what it is.

That's a good point. I would love to know how many times the Super bowl cut to her. I saw someone win a bet that was like over 15 or something like that. There was an over under on the number of cuts to Taylor Swift.

Let's go. One of them, she chugged a beer, one of them slammed it down.

I want to bet because he bet on the streaker. Bet and then he. Was he the streaker?

Yeah, that's what he said. That's how it.

Oh, my God.

Well, they don't specify. That's a good move. If they don't specify that you. I mean, look, a deal is a deal.

That is a 200 IQ move. The only other 200 IQ move that I've seen recently, there's a new type of sexual kink which is called solo poly solo. So polyamorous, but solo. So fuck. Boys have rebranded themselves as solo poly.

Okay?

That is a 3000 IQ move. Don't kink shame me. I'm not sleeping around. I'm solo poly.

Solo polyamorous means someone has multiple intimate relationships with people, but has an independent or single lifestyle they may not live with partners, share finances, or have a desire to reach traditional relationship milestones. Which partners lives become more intertwined. Well, I think that seems to make sense with all the dating apps today and all the Instagram dms and all the people just. There's so many more options people have today. It makes sense that more people would agree to polyamorous interactions. They want to hedge their bets. It's a weird time to be a young person. Imagine you're like, just getting out of high school, just getting into college now and you're entering into the romantic workforce. Good luck.

The meat grinder. Good luck.

Yeah, good luck. It's crazy out there. It's crazy.

The percentage of people that say they're not looking for casual or long term relationships is at an all time high. It's really, really scary.

As are country music sales. There's like a swing in the other direction too.

What do you mean?

More people are like, look, we gotta get to a simpler life. There's more people listening to country music now than I think ever before.

Right? So they reaction to that, like, I.

Don'T want to do this.

They're finding solitude from a confusing world in Luke Coombs songs.

Yeah, the guy never sings about know.

Right? Yeah. Fucking hell. Well, I saw jelly roll was on the Super bowl commercial. That was pretty cool. And then Shane Gillis managed to pop half of his face when the camera panned in on, like, the Bud light balcony or whatever it was called.

Yeah. Shane Gillis is now a spokesperson for Bud Light, and we kind of manifested it on the podcast because we were talking about so many times, like, why wouldn't they use you? They're fucking smart. They use one of the funniest guys alive who's a legitimate bud light drinker. He never stopped. Even during the controversy, he never stopped. The first couple of shows he did afterwards, he wouldn't bring cans on stage. He poured into a glass because he didn't want anybody to hear it. He's still drinking bud light. And then on the podcast, you're going to drink Bud light out in the open? He's like, fuck, yeah, dude.

When you find your beer, you find your beer.

Well, with Shane, that's the case. It was just a match made in heaven. It's smart. It's the right time where they could take a chance on a wild dude like that.

What a turnaround, man. I mean, I'd said this at the time. I thought it was interesting that a lot of people whose common talking point was, don't judge someone just based on one misdeed that they do, based on one misspoken thing about some new social campaign or whatever it might be, didn't seem to extend the same kind of leeway to Bud light.

Now.

I don't know.

Weird, right?

I don't know how deep that ran. There's someone that says it was a marketing intern. There was another that says it went right to the top. And this shows that Bud light were the lib cucks that we've always known that they were. I'm like, I don't know. But if it wasn't infused into the company, what you're doing is taking a very isolated incident and using that as the canary in the coal mine to say, see, they're part of the deep state. They're taking over. They're doing the whatever.

Well, sort of. It was not one thing. It was two things that combined together. So the one thing was the Dylan Mulvaney picture on the beer can that drove people nuts. But then there was the video of the woman who was in charge who was explaining that they had to rework the image of the brand and that it was a fratty sort of like, bro heavy. I forget the words she used, but it was a juvenile. She was trying to literally. But it's literally. You're talking about your entire customer base. So she's deciding that the customer base should not be trans or the customer base. Literally. She's literally deciding she's going to make the customer base gay. It's going to be friendly to the LBGT community. It's going to be sponsoring floats on Pride Parade. And that's what they did under her guidance. She was like, I'm going to fix this. We're going to make it just like I believe the world is coming from universities that are hyper liberal into a community where you're in a corporation that's also subject to all those dei restrictions. And you'd think this is like the way of the world today.

And then you do that one thing, and then they catch you on video saying all those things about the customers. And then the coup de gras. Kid rock shoots your beer. When kid rock shoots your beer, that's a wrap.

Fucking game over. Until you get Shane Gillis.

Yeah. And then you sponsor the. It'll. It'll turn back around now. It can turn back around. Shane Gillis on stage with Zach Bryan. Oh, shit. That's amazing. When was this?

They had a big party in Vegas. Did he sing? Yeah, I mean, it's the revival.

Which song is he singing all night? Revival. Oh, that's incredible. Put Johnny on the vinyl. The whole crowd sings along to that. I went to see Zach when he was out here and they did that. He tried to get me to sing. I'm like, fuck, don't. I don't want to intentional Joe.

Just want to punch someone in the face.

Yeah, I want to enjoy the show, but it was fucking amazing show, man. He's so talented.

Where was that at?

That was out here. It was like the two step festival. Where was that? Georgetown?

I think so.

Yeah. Not far from here.

I learned from Schultz this interesting thing that I called Schultz's razor, which is, it's not coordination, it's cowardice. From the outside, things look like a coordinated attack. From the inside, it looks like people not trying to lose their jobs. So I think a lot of the presumption is that there is some grand plan, some grand. Maybe it's a conspiracy or maybe it's just coordination. What it is from the inside is this guy has just bought a new house that his wife wanted and his kids go to private school, and he needs to keep this job, man. And the thing that is currently being pushed at the moment is, okay, we need to go along with this new campaign. Sure, let's just do this thing. That to me is a much more. I hope that it's true. The reason I hope it's true is it's a much more reassuring way for the world to be a lot of these incidents, because what it shows is that people are just responding to incentives. And if you can change the incentives, if you can change the social structure of this stuff, you can quite easily change behavior. If it's coordination as opposed to cowardice, that's much more difficult.

If everyone's actually bought into this and they're part of some deep state conspiracy and it's all psyoppy and all of this stuff that you go, oh, this is completely out of my control, and that's much more scary. But I think on balance, based on the stuff that I see, I think that Andrew's right. I think that it is more likely to be cowardice than coordination.

Yeah, I think there's definitely both elements. I think specifically with some issues, there's coordination online. And one of the ways they do that is through bots. They do that through social media campaigns that are like fake accounts or hired accounts. There's that too. That does shift the narrative in a certain direction. But there's a lot of people that are terrified that they're going to get fired, and there's a lot of people that are terrified they're going to get labeled or ostracized or kicked out of the social community. So much so they're willing to go along with really ridiculous stuff because they think, like, that's where the tide of progress is now. This is where the world is, and you're seeing both things happen. You're seeing cowardice, and you're also seeing coordination. It's kind of naive to think that if you are a world power that is doing everything you can to sort of balance things in your favor, including launching spy satellites, establishing a space force, ramping up your nuclear capabilities, developing these weapons that fucking shred people with precise impact, for sure, you're going to do whatever you can to change the way a society views things and to influence things in a particular direction.

You'd be a fool not to. I mean, if that's what other countries are doing, you'd be a fool not to do that. You'd be a fool not to do it internationally. You'd be a fool not to do it locally. It's kind of the job of the person that's the evil fuck that's running the world. That's part of the gig. Part of the gig is if you want to lie to people about the economy, you want to gaslighting them about the record of the president, and gaslighting them about the immigration crisis, and gaslight them about how much money we're spending on these overseas wars. You would gaslight them online, too. You wouldn't just have the fucking White House press secretary lie and make shit up. You would have a bunch of people doing it all over the Internet. You'd have a bunch of articles written that are just ridiculous. And then people would retweet them. Yeah. His age really is a superpower. Yeah, man. Seth MacFarlane retweeted that and said, this is a million brave, crazy, so brilliant that they did can't. What did he say? Seth McFarland, stunning and brave.

It wasn't stunning.

And no, no, he didn't say it like that. He's a funny guy, but he said something like, this is written better than I could have written it, but exactly my sentiments. I was like, this is so crazy. You're talking about a guy who can't speak. We all know you're doing this. You're gaslighting and you're doing it because you think that this is the good side and the bad side is bad, and you do whatever you can to change the way people view things. And so you have these people that are doing it for virtue signaling. They're doing it to signal to the tribe that they're a strong, dominant member of this tribe, and even they're fighting for you. Yeah. There's something that I've been ratling around in my brain for some time, and Bill McBidden finally articulated here better than I ever could. It's worth a read from start to finish. Opinion. Age matters, which is why Biden's age is his superpower. Come on.

That actually sounds like a family guy sketch.

100%. Well, definitely a South park sketch. It's crazy to say, but if you're that guy and you're signaling to the tribe and you wanted everybody, a rational person who is a left progressive person would say, we have to figure this out. This is bad. This is bad. You can't just pretend it's good. The whole other side sees how bad it is. The world sees how bad. People in quiet say how bad it is. Most people in hushland were alone having dinner. You're like, what the fuck do we do? Like, Trump's going to win with this guy.

Yep. I don't think no matter who wins in November, I don't think that either side is going to accept the outcome.

No way. Not anymore.

I think we saw one, two elections ago, the final accepted. And even that wasn't right. That was no, there's Russia collusion and all the rest of it.

And how much are we going to see of organized violence? How much are we going to see of organized protesters? Organized protesters are a real thing. Funded protesters are a real thing.

Did that stuff turn out to be real about the piles of bricks? The piles of.

Yes. Yes. During the George Floyd riots? Yeah, during the George Floyd riots, there was. And some of them they attributed to different things. Some of them, they said it was a construction site that was nearby. It was just coincidence. And some of that, I'm sure, is true. But the people that I talked to that said that no stacks of bricks would just show up on their block. Like what?

The net result of all of this, I think, is people just feeling very uncertain about the future. I don't think that anyone's really convinced of any one narrative at the moment, but everybody is just uncertain and anxious. There's some really interesting surveys showing that the number of Americans that say, I do not fully feel in control of my life just continues to go up. There's very much an externalized sense of agency. I don't happen to the world. The world happens to me. I'm skeptical about a lot of these things. It's basically a soup for ambient anxiety. You're just causing people to be uncertain about stuff. And I don't know if you were trying to make people just feel more and more and more shitty. All that they're doing is spending time inside on their phones. They're watching porn. They don't have as many friends. The number of men in 1990 that had one or more close friends was, sorry, that had zero close friends was 3%. In 2020, it was 15%. So it five xed from 1990 to 2020. So people are more isolated than ever before. It doesn't surprise me that people feel despondent or nihilistic or fatalistic or uncertain.

Or it's not good, and then they're being manipulated. Correct on top of that. So you're already vulnerable, you're already scared. And when you have more of an isolation from community, you're more likely to get sucked into subgroups. You're more likely to get sucked into echo chambers, because finally you have some people that are connecting with you. You don't have any connection. It's like part of this little social dance. You're doing.

You remember that we were talking about how you work out whether someone is telling the truth or not. This interesting sort of set of questions that I think people can ask themselves, which is, when was the last time that this person I am friends with or whose content I consume on the Internet? When was the last time that their opinion surprised me? When was the last time that they gave a take and I was like, I might not agree with it, but that's not what I would have predicted had I have known them. Something occurs and their response is different. When was the last time that they publicly admitted that they were wrong about something? Also really good, difficult to fake signal of authenticity. When was the last time that they brought someone on or had a conversation with something that they don't agree with, or someone that they don't agree with for a reason other than just mocking them, but to genuinely understand what it is that they're doing. And then the fourth question is, do they bind their group together over the mutual hatred of an out group or the mutual love of an in group?

Is it because of othering, or is it because of using? And I think othering is always. That's the scapegoating. It's not about them. They're coming for us. It's this sort of anxiety fueled thing. But if you know one of someone's opinions and from it, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe. They're not a serious thinker.

Right. That is a hallmark of bad, independent political journalism. It's like, ripe with othering. It's ripe with casting the blame on the other side. It's ripe with not looking internally. There's very little introspection thought, maybe I'm wrong. It's always coming from a position of confidence that these other people are pieces of shit. And we're going to lay out some out of context examples with no context into why they think they think this. And what could steel man that? And how could we look at it from their perspective? And what's wrong about it? Everything is always, like, highlighting what's wrong, highlighting the cruelty, gaslighting. And they're doing it because they're a part of an ideology, they're a part of a political group. They're part of this little gang, and they want the love of the gang. There's people that fancy themselves as like, hitmen for the gang. They're going to go out there, and there's a lot of that. The Black lives matters riots in was it Portland or wherever it was? Or was it literally like, crazy, violent people. They're just wild antifa dudes that got lumped into these serious conversations about what's ethical, what's not ethical in terms of what should be done about police brutality.

And just psychos got involved in it with guns. And there's this one guy who wound up getting killed. He killed some guy, but he just killed someone who's on the other side. Just decided, I'm going to go kill somebody, and you can have that. And if you just have that thing that happened in Seattle where they had that whole section of the city that was closed down and the police shop. Police just gave it up. Just gave it up. You guys have this? They took over the police station, took over buildings, and they ran it for quite a while with all sorts of chaos going on.

I think they starved. After a while. They ran out of, like, sanitation and water and food, and they tried to grow a vegetable patch.

And then they had the mayor on television saying that maybe it was a summer of love. Like, what are you talking about? But all these things just highlight how uncertain people genuinely feel today, because we know those things took place just in really recent time, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was just a minor thing in terms of. I mean, it was a major thing in terms of the world, the impact of coronavirus. But it wasn't like airborne Ebola. It wasn't like something that's going to kill everybody. What would break down that we broke down for a disease that killed a very small fraction of people, and those people, almost all of them had four plus comorbidities. Almost all of them. It was like, in the high 90%, wasn't it? It was like 94% or something like that. Of people that died from COVID had four plus comorbidities.

Jesus, I didn't know that.

It's something nutty like that. And it was mostly people that are obese, diabetic, unhealthy.

It's a big predisposition.

Yeah. And imagine everything went that fucking haywire for something, like, wild, dude.

I mean, to have lived through that, it feels like a fever dream.

Fever dream.

To think about that really happened. It's going to be weird. We're going to be talking to our grandkids, and they're going to be like, granddad.

CDC study said over 75% of Covid-19 deaths in vaccinated people were amongst those with at least four comorbidities. That's vaccinated people. And this is from 2022. What I had read was people that got Covid before the vaccine, and they were talking about. They were trying to figure out who's dying and why. And one of them, a big one, was ventilated people, apparently. That was a big mistake that they made. That was something that they learned when they went to. I think Elon Musk talked about this when he went to China. Like, what was the biggest mistake that they made during the pandemic? They put people on ventilators. Apparently, that fucks you up. And some high number of people, like 80% or something like that, people who got put on ventilators died, as opposed to most of the people that get it. It's not that high, especially amongst healthy people and definitely not amongst children. It's very low amongst children. So when they did that, it was just like, what are you doing? You're just putting people on ventilators. And they didn't know. They thought they had to do it. And then the vaccine comes along.

And when you find out that 75% of the people who died from COVID have four comorbidities, well, that's the problem. That's the problem. Comorbidities mean you're dying. That's the problem. But think about how much society collapsed for that thing. Not good, obviously. Covid is not good. Obviously a tragedy. Definitely sympathetic to anybody who lost someone. But also, that was, in terms of what could happen to the world, a fairly small event in terms of what could happen. Like a war, like a nuclear war with Russia, even.

Severity of a different pathogen.

Yes, severity of a different pathogen. Solar flares take out the power grid. So this feeling of anxiety, like, oh, my God, this is not that stable. That's a valid feeling. It's a valid feeling because it went so haywire just for this one thing that most people wind up getting.

I think it pulled the veil off of a lot of people's eyes that we are in control.

Right.

That we have mastered that.

We figured nature. Yeah.

Yes. It's been so long since there's been a full scale kinetic war between two countries that the people in charge are a part of. Been so long since that's happened. And I think there's this sense we've kind of outgrown that. We're beyond that. The 1940s, that was the last dying gasps of this sort of brutal, tribal, primitive version of humanity. We're beyond that. We've ascended. Look, we can control the weather in Dubai. They seed the clouds. We can communicate to each other instantly across the Internet. We can have video calls. We've conquered many of the diseases that were going to stop us previously. All of these things look at how sophisticated we are. We have also overcome our nature. No, we haven't. And look what happens. Our grandkids will speak to us and go, like, granddad, what was it like during 2020?

Tell us.

Tell us, what was it like? You'll have to say fucking mental. Yeah. Absolutely fucking mental.

Mental.

And I lived through it. We all lived through it. It blows my mind. And this is the thing with this ambient anxiety that people have. I think it causes them not only to be uncertain outwardly toward the world, but it's uncertain inward as well. So my friend did a mushroom trip, and this question came to him, which I fucking love. He said, does the world love you for who you are or for what you do? Does the world love you for who you are or for what you do?

Isn't it a more profound question that you're assuming the world loves you? Why are you assuming the world loves you?

Well, does the world hate you for who you are or for what you do?

But it's an interesting question. It phrased it in a weird way. It's almost like a trick question. It's almost like, if I ask you, does your mother know you're gay?

Dude, let me teach you about this. So that's called a Milgram question. There's a name for this. I learned about it. It's called a milgram question after the Milgram experiments where they shocked people. So a Milgram question is where any truthful response is so socially cancerous that it's impossible to give a real response. It forces you to comply. The ultimate Milgram question would be, when did you stop beating your wife? You're like, another one would be, what makes a woman attractive?

Oh.

Because the socially acceptable answer to that is one that is untruthful. And the problem with this is, what.

Is the socially acceptable answer to that?

It would be to do with. It's about grace and poise. It's anything that isn't big titties. If you say big titties that you failed. Right? You can't say big titties.

Well, you can't say a nice single. You can't. If you are worried about acquiring a mate, you can't. If you are of a social dynamic that needs to have your job and you have a human resources center that's very stringent, they're very strict about what they allow their people to. Might affect your possibility of getting a promotion, might affect your standing amongst the women in the know, they don't like when you tell the truth, Chris, you work with women. You can't say, I think women with big asses and big tits are hot as fuck. You can't say that. You can't say that even though they know that it's true. Yeah, you can't be a good person. You can't be a good person and even admit that that's what I'm attracted to, which is OD.

When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people will stop saying what they think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive.

Right?

And this is why limits on speech become limits on sincerity, because I'm not going to change your opinion. Do you really think that by telling me that I can't say a thing, that I'm not going to think the thing?

Right.

I'm just not going to say the thing and think the thing in private. Right. So limits on speech become limits on sincerity. And this is the issue with the Milgram question. It's the issue with this circular purity spiral of the firing squads online. We were talking about it before this sort of toxic compassion thing, this prioritization of short term emotional comfort of everybody, especially dispossessed groups, over everything. Truth, long term flourishing, everything. So perfect example of this would be body weight has no bearing on health or lifespan outcomes, because you don't want to make people who are overweight feel uncomfortable, right? Even if your message of you're healthy as you are, you're living your true self, even if that message causes those very people to actually die sooner. The short term emotional comfort prioritization sweeps everything to one side. It sweeps rationality, it sweeps long term outcomes. All of that stuff. Another one would be, there is no advantage or benefit to children growing up in a two parent household, right? Even if that causes teachers and parents to misunderstand why their kids that may come from broken homes behave in the way that they do.

You don't want to do something or say something that disparages hardworking single mothers. So instead you do the toxic compassion thing, which is the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over long term flourishing. And you see this everywhere, this performative empathy, toxic compassion thing. The reason I think it's so prevalent online is it's perfectly geared to be memetically driven, right? All that's happening, like, if you have some harsh truth, tweet, some people are going to push it and it may catch fire if it's a real truth. But a lot of the people that don't want to hear that they're going to say that you're being judgmental, that you're being misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, whatever it is.

Right.

But if you say something which is comforting, like we need to push back against these white men, everyone can get behind that because it seems empathetic. It's one of the problems that anyone who isn't a hardcore card carrying liberal has on the Internet at the moment, which is if you're going to tell people things that they don't want to hear, you're going to come across like a bit of a dick for quite a lot of the things that you talk about, and that's not particularly good. But, yeah, this uncertainty, this, like, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? I think is a really interesting question to ask ourselves because it's that success and happiness thing again. Are you trying to achieve happiness through success? Are you trying to make the world love you, to force it by promising your value, by promising your validation, by saying, look, I must do this. But the interesting thing, and this was like the second half of his mushroom trip, was he asked himself, do I love me for who I am or for what I do? So I'm asking the world to love me for who I am.

Because if the world loves me, contingent on what I do, then it feels more fragile. It feels like it can be taken away from me. Right. If I stopped doing what I do, my love would also cease.

Well, that's a real problem with guys that are in the closet. Especially guys in the closet in show business.

How so?

Because they think the world loves them, but the world loves them for a thing that they're not really. They're hiding their true self and they're terrified the world will withdraw its love.

If they tell the truth, if they change.

Yeah, if they come out, they come out and come out of the closet and said, hey, I've been gay the whole time. If you're an actor, it's a death sentence because you cannot play straight male roles anymore. When was the last time a guy came out of the closet because was a leading man in a major blockbuster movie? It's never happened. It's not going to happen.

That's a really good point.

Yeah. It's the one area where homophobia is sort of guaranteed. Leading men playing straight men in movies. You do not want to see it. Nobody wants to see it. Doesn't happen.

That's broken my brain. No, that's really interesting.

Yeah. There's the one guy, the Doogie Hauser guy, what's his name?

Neil Patrick Harris.

Neil Patrick Harris. He played like in a sitcom, but it was like a cartoon version of a straight wasn't. Nobody believed it.

Kevin Spacey.

Kevin Spacey was in the closet. He was in the closet for a long time. I mean, he came out of the closet when he got accused, remember? That's really when he came out of the closet. Everybody kind of knew he was gay. People that work with him certainly knew he was gay, but I think publicly it wasn't something that he acknowledged, but it's a thing where, and he's an older man too. It's a different sort of know. But if you're a young, handsome, movie star, Daniel Craig type character, people find out you're like, no one wants you making out with that girl anymore. I don't buy interesting. Yeah, it's interesting because I would imagine that if you are one of those people, and I know a couple of guys that are in the closet and I've encouraged one of them is a friend of mine to try to come out. Not a good don't. He lives back in LA, but he wanted to and then he would not. And then he'd wanted to and then he would not. I go, well, if you ever do, people still love you, man, I swear to God, it's all in your head.

It'll be a huge weight, relieved off you and you realize how much people just love you. They don't care. No one really cares, especially in the comedy world. God, the comedy world is so open minded. It's one thing, are you funny? Everything else is just nonsense. It doesn't matter where you come from, what part of the world are you good? Are you funny?

If you make people laugh, then you win.

And can you hang? Are you cool to hang out with? Are you just like a psycho that only wants to be the only one that's funny and you hate everybody else's funny. There's just a few of those guys out there, too.

Yeah, well, that's one of the interesting challenges, I think, that no one really ever gets to see about the gamesmanship that goes on behind the scenes. No one knows about how easy Alan Richson from the new Reacher movie or Guy Ritchie or someone else. No one knows about how easy they are to work with. But you know, there'll be guys that have been on your show or been on my show or whatever, you're like. I actually quite enjoyed the episode, but I find them very difficult to deal with. They're really difficult to deal with. Outside of that, and they're at a disadvantage if they're not very personable, if they don't respond in a timely manner.

Whatever they don't understand the dynamics are imbalanced between a famous person and person trying to talk to the famous person.

Absolutely. All of these things. Right. And you're like, well, that puts you at a disadvantage, but that's not anything that's ever going to be front of house.

Right.

And you saw this with a number of the late night show hosts recently. That kind of the tide came back in, and who was swimming naked or swimming with a whip in their hand or being mean to the people that they worked with, that kind of got shown. And this, again, it's that toxic compassion thing. And this comes full circle to what we were talking about. You were saying, a lot of people assume kind of the worst of intentions. Here's a little morsel of something, and that's them being a really bad person.

Yeah.

I think that that's because deep down, a lot of the people doing the performative empathy, toxic compassion thing know that they're projecting a lie. They know that they aren't being truthful, that if someone did open the cupboard and have a look inside, that it's full of disgusting, scary lies and fakery and Persona and all this stuff. So they assume that theory of mind for everybody else as well.

Right.

They can't imagine a world in which this slight slip up by somebody couldn't be indicative of their entire personality, because they themselves know that this super cutesy, sweetsy, toxic compassion performative empathy front is just that. That if you poked it hard enough, there would be a hole and you'd find out that it was hollow inside.

Yeah. I think, obviously, all of that is accentuated by social media. And unfortunately, when I really extrapolate, when I really look forward, I think the way out of this is mind reading. This is what I'm really concerned with. I'm really concerned with the way out of this being some sort of new level of integration that we're all going.

To enjoy because of technology, neuralink type stuff.

Yeah. And that would be really a solution to all that ails us in terms of. It would be like, snap map times a billion. It would be crazy. Everyone would know everything about everybody's thoughts, but then it would be that thing like, hey, what do you got to hide? There's going to be a lot of dummies that are going to go along with that, but you're going to find out how fucking insane a lot of people are, too. If you can actually look into their mind and see the wiring.

Well, I bet that the people who are out front, the most empathetic, kind, loving, caring people, they are going to be. They would be first on my list for get inside that guy's mind. Have a look at what he's doing, because I think that he's probably a piece of shit.

He might be.

Yeah. Well, anyone that's working that hard to be like, look at how nice I am. Look at how completely unfettered snow, completely untouched. All of this stuff, it's always like.

The male feminists or some of the big sneaky fuckers.

Fucking hell. Have you been observing or have you been seeing this skew of young boys to the right and young girls to the left in terms of their political perspective? Dude, I think that will be the story of 2024. I think that's the story of this year. This huge breaking of young Gen Z males, teenage boys mostly to the right and of girls really sharply to the left.

Yeah. You know what's going to change that? An actual hot war. Everybody will go right over. Right back over. Yeah. When the ladies need. They need men to take care of them and that the men that have joined their side are all cowards and they're going to cry. Yeah. They'll go to the other side quick.

There's a lot of news stories at the moment about left leaning girls struggling to find a guy that they're attracted to. None of the guys that I'm dating want to hold the door open for me, and none of them really want to pay for dinner. And that's called a conservative. That's called someone who's right wing.

Yeah. You're looking for all your cake and you want to eat it, too.

Yeah. But because people date within their political sphere, typically it's not just a political crisis, it's a mating cris as well. I think one behavior crisis. One third of Democrat parents say that they would be afraid of their son or daughter dating a Republican.

Wow.

So you've got this assortative mating thing. But going forward into the political cycle this year, I think that you're going to see not only is it a political war, but it's a gender war, too.

It's going to be a lot of fun for us, buddy.

We're going to have lots to talk about.

Lots to talk about. It's going to be like, what a harvest we have coming up. We're farmers. We're growing pumpkins. It's a banner year. Budy. Look at those fucking pumpkins. What a year. Chris, you're an awesome guy to talk to. I really appreciate you, man, and I really enjoy your show. Tell everybody where to watch it. Your set's amazing. The set you set up in LA is really cool, too.

Thank you. We're working hard with this. I really appreciate, you've been super kind, super supportive, so I very much appreciate that. Modern wisdom, Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever else you listen.

It's a really good show. I really, really enjoy it. You're such a great conversation list and so many of the topics are so well covered. It's just really solid show, man.

I really appreciate you.

My pleasure. Appreciate you too. To Texas, motherfucker.

We did it.

Glad you got a Camaro. Bye, everybody.