#2574 - Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin

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Chime by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Always good to see you guys. I haven't talked to anybody about this, so I'd like to talk to you guys about it. Do you know what the fuck is going on in Brazil? No, not intimately. Not specifically? Not specifically, but Flavio Bolsonaro, who is the son of the guy Jair Bolsonaro, he was one of the candidates in the election, and in the moment, when the election finished, they took his passport away. And I think he's ended up fleeing to the U.S. now. Is that right? I don't know. I've heard that he fled, but I don't know if there's any evidence. Yeah. I mean, that's just like Twitter talk. Yeah. But first of all, just taking his passport right away is kind of crazy. And I think they did warn him as well. They said, the Lula said, if I'm elected, you know, it was kind of like you're going to be in jail when Trump said it to Hillary. They followed through. But what are the charges? I don't know the details of it, Joe. But the whole thing was, so it was someone that was Lula's former defense attorney. He elected to the Supreme Court of Brazil, and then that person opened up the polls for an additional two hours, and that allowed Lula to win. Is that accurate? I think so. Yeah, that bit, I think, that's what I saw. But this is the thing is, like, you have to really do a, a lot of research now to even know the basic facts of anything. So if you just see something on X or Facebook or whatever, I am hesitant to believe it now off the top. Do you know what I mean? A hundred percent. I read stories all day that I know are fake immediately. And it's like breaking. And then you read the thing in all caps. And you're like, oh, that's a fake story. And there's a lot of them. They're all, they're all over the place. And I think they've done something where you don't get monetized for those. So you can't make money. You can't make money off of them. So there's less of an incentive. But if the goal is just propaganda, then they don't care about the money. Like if these are, if this is a country or a government that's involved in doing this or someone, you know, with a vested interest in fucking up American politics or Brazilian politics or whatever, you just, who cares if we're making money? What we want to do is fuck up the waters. We want to muddy up the water. So nobody knows what the fuck is real. If there's, you know, people that are voting, we want them to be completely confused or lied to where they have a totally incorrect narrative of what's going on. And you see so much of it. And, you know, like, I feel like maybe when there's a fact check, like, like a grok fact check, and it proves to be absolutely incorrect, maybe they should, like, just take it down so that you don't have to go into the thread because I'll go into the thread, I'll read something. I'm like, that's fake. And I'll go into the thread. I'm like, where, where does someone ask grok and someone asks grok and it says, no, this is not correct. And then grok lays it out. Maybe then they should take it down. Right. Because you just, there's, it's just your timelines just flooded by straight horseshit completely made up stories about, you know, people being arrested and you'll have AI photos of someone handcuffed. It's crazy. It's really crazy. And then amplified by bots or foreign. And actors as well. I mean, that's what, that's one of the interesting areas where I think there's probably a solution, which is kind of like digital border enforcement, where you actually know that people are commenting on this and where they're commenting from. Because I think most people get their political opinions from other people. They don't necessarily have a, they don't sit down for three hours and think about this stuff. They just go, this seems to be what everyone thinks. Right. And that's where this kind of manipulation is so powerful because you're creating the idea. That a narrative is popular. Right. And a lot of people then go, well, maybe that's what I should believe. Especially with the bots. Yeah. Because you'll have a story that's clearly either biased or full of shit. Totally. And then you'll have a bunch of bots agreeing with it and, you know, saying what should be done to these people. And this is a, this is an outrage. And then you find out it's completely fabricated. And you're like, well, what are they doing? Like, what's happening here? Like, why are there so many of these, you know, Bob six, seven, four, three, two people that are commenting on this. And what are they trying to prove? Or what are they trying to push? And it's not just that. It's also, you get certain influences and you see them come up on your timeline time and time and time again with these takes that are just straight out ridiculous. But they, and then you look underneath and you look at the amount of retweets, you look at the engagement, you go to, you think to yourself that, that, that just can't be real. Cause that is such a ridiculous take that they've just given you. But the engagement is unreal. And then you see it time and time. Again, from the same influences. Yeah. Well, I think just becoming outrageous is profitable, right? Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah. So like you could just have a take, like, so let's take out fake stories. So you could just have a contrarian take that's preposterous and just gets you angry the moment you read it and then you see, ah, fuck you. And then, but that's, that's engagement. That's what these people want. And some people on Twitter are, they just didn't get exist for engagement. They're not good faith actors. They're just weird people that, you know, are probably on all sorts of weird drugs somewhere. Just fucking tweet up a storm. Yeah. And it's also as well, because, uh, now you can monetize your ex. Yeah. That means that that's incentivized people to create posts that are going to get more engagement. Yeah. And what's the, what's one really easy way of guaranteeing engagement is negative engagement. If you piss people off, if you say something that's outrageous, that's far easier. To then get people engaging with you then to do something funny or to take it easy. That's been our business model for eight and a half years. You're fucking ruining it. But actually, I mean, we're joking, obviously. I'm actually really happy. We, uh, this in the last few episodes that we've put out on trigonometry, you've got, um, we've got David Packman, who's a left-wing guy, Dave Smith, who's like a libertarian guy. And we've got Steven Crowder coming out soon. So we'd like, we actually got to the point where we always wanted to be, where we're talking to everybody. It's what I always really enjoyed about you and the way you do it. You've always been able, I actually kind of marveled at how you were able to do it because when we started, we had a very hard time getting more of the left leaning guests on. Yeah. You never seem to have that problem. You just get everybody on and they're happy to come on and talk. Um, and I, that's what actually you need more of in the world. I think the outrage stuff you're talking about, it really pushes people apart. We were really interested in how do you bring people together to have one conversation based on an agreed set of facts. I think as long as you're getting people that are honest, that are good faith. conversationalists you know and i think that's that is an issue and i that's what i don't want to do anymore i don't want to have on uh these people that i think are full of shit that are propagandists that are that are loyal to a party to the point where they just distort facts or obfuscate or talk over you when you're trying to make points like the pierce morgan model where you see like someone will be saying something and the other person just chime in and just talk over them to try to disrupt their pattern of thinking it's very annoying and stupid and i'm not interested in that at all yeah and i i'm not interested in talking to people that i think are just outright liars unless like i have some fucking obligation to expose them but i don't i don't want to i don't i don't want that to be a thing that i want to do all the time where it's just bring on people that i know you're full of shit and like say i've got the facts like i like to talk to people that i'm interested in talking to and that's my business model i mean it's not a business model it's just like it's what i started doing and that's what i want to keep doing and if that you know like i was very interested in talking to bernie again you know i don't agree with him on a lot of things but i don't think he's a bad person you know and i think he you know he's an older guy with some ideals that just didn't pan out and i think he still believes that there's like a way to do this that's different and better for the people and for the working people but i think after a while you say these words like you know what it's like when you have an act and you've been doing a bit for a long time and then the bit stops losing meaning you just say it the way you've always said it but it doesn't have any meaning to you anymore and the bit starts to get stale and it starts to die off and if you're smart you pull it out of the act you put it on the shelf and you go i gotta rework that thing or something it's like i don't i'm not attached to it anymore it doesn't feel real i'm just saying it to go through the motions that's how i feel like when he starts talking to talking about climate change and stuff like that and i go okay what are we talking about how much have you looked into it because if you really look into climate change it's very fucking confusing like it's not as simple as like there was just an article today that someone sent me that they think that global warming may have stopped uh an imminent ice age that was coming which is one of the things that they were talking about like during the 1970s that was a big thing it was a big narrative about climate change that was the big fear was that a new ice age was coming in fact uh an episode of that leonard nimoy show did you ever watch that in search of great fucking show it was great because it was a mix of like horse shit doom and gloom bigfoot ufos all kinds of stuff but it was leonard nimoy you know spock from star trek and uh he had a whole article about imminent ice age and that like that's the thing that we really should be afraid of it's a fucking terrifying proposition that the world freezes over again because if it gets hot you just move to the places that you used to be cold and get air conditioning right yeah get air conditioning we don't have air conditioning joe in england no no no well that's why you guys die every year yeah like more people die in england from i think this is a fact i think more people die in england not in england but in europe in all of europe from heat stroke during summer than gun violence in the united states i might have made that up yeah you know but actually there is a series i think it's a high number though because i was just gonna say i was just gonna say like that just sounds real yeah that sounds real after the summer we've had it must be true yeah well it sounds real i don't understand why people haven't uh adopted air conditioning is it a money thing well it's the same green uh nonsense that you're talking about oh no because air conditioning consumes a lot of energy and it it therefore causes a lot of energy and it causes a lot of energy and it causes a lot more climate change quote unquote actually more people die in in england from cold in winter than they die from heat here we go yeah europe had an est okay yes if you mean deaths attributed to heat rather than specifically heat stroke european heat death estimates can exceed the total number of u.s firearm deaths but the comparison needs a few qualifications same year comparison europe had an estimated sixty one thousand six hundred and seventy two heat related deaths you're right you're right you're right you're right you're right during the summer that's fucking crazy united states recorded more than forty eight thousand firearm deaths over the entire year according to cdc that includes suicides homicides and other firearm deaths not just murders including also cops shooting bad guys so in that year yes uh even europe's summer heat death estimate exceeded america's full firearm death count i will well heat stroke we don't have to say heat stroke that was a maybe a bad terminology but just from heat what about from cold how many look look up how many europeans die from cold every year what do you guess i think it's more what do you guess i think it's more i don't know about europeans in britain i i don't know about europeans in britain i know more people die from cold and heat know more people die from cold and heat in britain specifically wow that's crazy in britain specifically wow that's crazy i imagine in italy less so that's crazy i imagine in italy less so that's crazy like in the south in the south it's like in the south in the south it's confused because you spelled year wrong confused because you spelled year wrong jimmy jimmy jimmy 364 000 people a year die from cold 364 000 people a year die from cold 364 000 people a year die from cold right across 30 european countries right across 30 european countries right across 30 european countries according to a 2024 study according to a 2024 study according to a 2024 study wow wow wow that is an estimated that is an estimated that is an estimated annual average based on 1991 to 2020 annual average based on 1991 to 2020 annual average based on 1991 to 2020 not a count for the latest year that is not a count for the latest year that is not a count for the latest year that is really crazy though well this is what really crazy though well this is what really crazy though well this is what people don't understand about the the people don't understand about the the people don't understand about the the climate change agenda is it's it's climate change agenda is it's it's climate change agenda is it's it's pushed electricity prices up and so and pushed electricity prices up and so and pushed electricity prices up and so and gas prices and so energy is much more gas prices and so energy is much more gas prices and so energy is much more expensive so you literally have expensive so you literally have expensive so you literally have pensioners freezing to death in winter pensioners freezing to death in winter pensioners freezing to death in winter because they can't afford to heat their because they can't afford to heat their because they can't afford to heat their home properly because we're saving the home properly because we're saving the home properly because we're saving the planet anyway your point i think is we planet anyway your point i think is we planet anyway your point i think is we need the second amendment and air need the second amendment and air need the second amendment and air conditioning in the uk conditioning in the uk conditioning in the uk that would help a lot yeah that would that would help a lot yeah that would that would help a lot yeah that would help you guys a lot yeah a lot of things help you guys a lot yeah a lot of things help you guys a lot yeah a lot of things would change yeah yeah i mean the fact would change yeah yeah i mean the fact would change yeah yeah i mean the fact that we don't the majority of places that we don't the majority of places that we don't the majority of places don't have aircon like if you're if don't have aircon like if you're if don't have aircon like if you're if you're dating joe and you want to bring a a lady back to your flat all you need to say is you've got air con so it is available to some yeah yeah so like imagine if you move into a place and it doesn't have air conditioning how much hoops and ladders do you have to go through to get air conditioning into the into your place well so now i'm having air conditioning installed in my house right now you don't have it right now uh i just bought a house that doesn't have it um but it you know the the climate is not like here in austin like it is survivable uh you know it's just hot it's hot right right um like what is it what is a hot fahrenheit day in england i don't know what i don't know fahrenheit give me celsius 30 we've had like 37 38 maybe up to 40 this year okay so that's like in the 90s that's high yeah it's high what is that jamie what is let's uh let's let's say 40 what is 40 fahrenheit or 40 celsius rather 40 is probably about 100 degrees because 40 is when you're having if you have if your body temperature is 40 you've got a very bad fever 104 104 okay so you get you guys have 104 days like one or two over the course of a year yeah but you got to remember though joe is like the infrastructure and the houses and the trains and all the public transport they're not built for that kind of climate right so if you go to on holiday in italy and it's 40 that's one thing if it's 40 in the uk in houses that are built to keep the heat in during winter it's a different conversation you know so the average daytime high in uh july and august is 70 degrees but we have had very hot days the last couple of summers very hot anyway that's when people start freaking out about climate change but that's just so narrow-minded and it's not that we shouldn't be concerned if the earth gets warmer that's not what i'm saying but i'm saying it's never been static so this idea that oh my god this is we're doing this like are we do you know do you know about the entire history of the world's temperature because it varies insanely not only that there's been many times in earth's history where there was way more carbon in the air and it was way cooler it doesn't make any sense and if you don't understand differential equations you understand like the way the wind blows and solar activity and all these different variables that come into play along with greenhouse gases along with carbon there's so many different variables that come into play like this these narratives are so unscientific for the people that want to say trust the science well the science on climate change is fucking incredibly complex or just climate period forget about the word climate change and it's so interesting you use the word unscientific because i often think about this most of my family are scientists but physic physicists biochemical engineers the thing with like when a normal person hears the word science what they think is if i pick up this phone and drop it is going to fall at a predictable speed because we understand the rules of gravity we can calculate it we can calculate the speed the acceleration all that stuff climate science is modeling modeling right that's not the i'm not saying it's not science exactly but that's not what we think about as normal just ordinary people when we think about science we think of about something that's 100 predictable measurable calculable you can go if we change this and this is going to happen climate modeling it's not like that it's it's an approach to climate change it's not like that it's an approach to climate change it's not like that it's an approach to climate change but it's an approximation and an estimate based on a lot of assumptions and we don't know how accurate those assumptions are but even if you accept all that what's interesting in britain is do you know what percentage of global carbon emissions britain produces oh god hard it's got to be masculine one percent yeah so if we reduced it to zero we'd not have any impact on the climate at all while just destroying our economy killing people and that's what we've done we have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world that's why you can't you can't build anything in the uk can't run a business an industrial business you can't make anything um you know it's funny you guys are having this big battle of data centers here yeah we don't have that because we're not fucking building in here yeah the other super inconvenient thing when it comes to carbon is that there's more vegetation more leaf coverage in a in the world now than there has been in a long fucking time global greening yeah it's because of carbon because plants actually consume carbon dioxide it's like like what are we doing like what are we what are we freaking out about well we're freaking out about a bunch of people that have any engineered a narrative to get us to freak out about it so they can profit off of it and that's the reality of it is that all of these green deals and all this green energy these people get contracts and these and then there's mandates for what you can and can't use and what you should and shouldn't do and then people profit off of these directions that we go in and that's the real problem it's not like we're looking out for the world shut the fuck up when people say that we need to look out for the world we need to look out for the world we need to look out like none of these people pushing this are looking out for the world just so you know you might be you liberal lady in east austin with the fucking science is science bumper sticker on your fucking prius maybe maybe you really are a genuinely good person looking over the the people that are pushing that are not they're trying to profit they're sitting in boardrooms and they're showing spreadsheets of how much money they'll make if a certain bill goes through because if a certain bill restricts one type of energy and promotes their type of energy even if their type of energy like windmills is terrible for the environment and radically inefficient they're going to profit and that's what they're thinking about and so then they're going to pay politicians to push certain narratives they're going to fund these people they're going to put out advertisements for a greener texas you know paid for by a greener texas who's paying that corporations people making large amounts of money and they don't give a fuck about your environment they want to make money they're vampires they're vampire people and it's always been that way like oil companies funded anti-nuclear right right it's just that's how it works that's how it works in britain now so i am actually going to get an electric car soon right and the reason is they've created the incentive structures whereby if you get an electric car especially through your business you can basically get a car that's twice as good for the same money because you get so much tax write-off because like you said people have created a structure whereby if you encourage people to do this they save money right and who benefits from that well it's it's it's the it's the people who who are producing that type of vehicle 100 in texas we have an issue right now where they're trying to ban marijuana and why they're trying to do that because alcohol sales are way down like way down like disturbingly down and uh one factor that a lot of people aren't taking into consideration is gop ones it's ozempic there are fucking millions of people on gop and millions more that are lying the guy that i know is on him i said dude you're looking great what are you doing he's like i got calorie restriction well technically you're not lying but you're lying you're an ozempic motherfucker you know what you're doing yeah it's embarrassing you know i always feel like when you talk about any issue a lot of it just comes down to education you know people don't have a good grasp of actually what's happening so what it is that people have inside them is a vacuum and eventually something has to fill that vacuum right because you can't operate particularly now with a going when someone asks you about whatever it is climate change the middle east the war and whatever subject you want to talk about most people simply don't have the education the answers they don't have their own opinions so they simply reach for something and you know what you're going to reach for you're going to reach for a slogan right and it's going to come from the most prominent person there is i have a theory about why the left is so much more loony in my opinion currently i mean it's not like the right isn't loony the right is very fucking loony but the left is loony and some like things that don't make any sense and um i think it's because the left is secular like almost universally like when you think about the left you generally don't think about like christianity or any any religion really it's more of like a science-based like we're too smart for that thing and i think they're just lost there's no there's no moral scaffolding to hold on to there's no not and i'm not saying you know religion is 100 great but what i am saying is there's something about having a structure like 10 commandments or what you know whatever they have in whatever religion we're talking about where there's rules to abide by because there's a higher power and then you worship and in worshiping there's there's a humility to that and a humbleness to that and then there's this community where everyone's drawn together and we're all agreeing on certain rules like i always talk about like the church parking lot is proof that christianity works because everybody's so nice they all let you go like you go you go like it's all so orderly like nowhere on earth i'm like just that alone proves that christianity can work and that there's something to that i guarantee fucking to you if you went to like some trans rights rally and you parked your car and tried to leave it would not be so kind it would not be the same it would not especially if you were like in a pickup truck or something with an american flag on it you're right they'd be rude as fuck to you whereas i think a part of what's wrong with this this side of our politics when you look at the two sides the left and the right is that the left is almost like i would i would i wanted to know like what percentage of people who identify as progressive have any religion um we could probably find that out yeah yeah let's find out that actually would be interesting it's what you were talking about with a vacuum so i think this is my belief at 59 years of age that there's a part of people that almost like is designed a part of people that is designed to be a part of people that is designed to be a part of people of the the human psyche that's designed for religion and we have had it for so long we have had it for so many thousands and thousands and thousands of years i just think it's the way the human mind works and i think in the absence of religion we find something that stop that for a second we find something that does the job of religion and that thing that does the job of religion is being progressive or being whatever you're being you know like find find a cause find change whatever it is find a thing that becomes your religion and anybody that is confronting that with an alternative perspective is a heretic that's a bad person that's the evil that's an infidel and that's how they behave they behave like religious zealots regard like i'm sure you've seen these conversations and you've had them with people you just confront people in the street and start asking them questions if if you don't agree with them even if like you you're great at it they just don't want to be confronted by alternative perspectives very much like a religion no it's totally and it's interesting we just had jonathan high uh on back on the show we haven't released it yet but it's one of the things we talked about we talked about religion and he's not a religious person but he was like i used to be very snooty about it and now i just go whatever you believe it's a social technology for achieving cohesion within a group and forgiving people and you know on a personal level as well i think one of the things that christianity in particular is very very good at is gratitude which is just a practice that forget about god and all the rest of it the practice of acknowledging how fortunate you are at any point in your life is something that changes how you experience life and if you do that every day i think it's much much harder to be a deranged lunatic who who who thinks that they're political like there's political causes i feel very strongly about but i'm not gonna go on a march and scream at people who don't agree with me because i just that's not it's not coherent to my worldview of what it is to be human it's also radically ineffective and completely ineffective never changes anybody's opinion right ever yeah no one screams in your face you go wow what are the what are the stats you were trying to pull up earlier jamie so here we go affiliated with a religion 78% of republicans republican leaning independents identify with a religion so with democrats it's about 60 percent wow interesting it's a lot more than i thought religiously unaffiliated about 39 percent did not answer about one percent like what is that fuck off one percent across the board i'm in that group that is the most intelligent group on earth on earth the about one percent the one percent that will not answer pro polls that was my take on polls always i was like here's the problem with polls most people don't answer polls if somebody calls you up and said i'd like a few moments of your time to ask you for questions Anybody with a life, anybody that has like a family and stuff to do and hobbies they enjoy, friends they want to hang out with, they don't sit around answering some fucking poll. So you're literally getting the opinion that people are so fucking stupid they answer polls. So add it on to those people. Like if there's an issue, like 49% agree, that means less than half of the people that are so fucking stupid they're answering polls agree with you. That's not good. Right. You know, it's the same with studies that they do at colleges because they always use college students. So like you're getting a very skewed perspective on humanity. Yes. Yeah. If that's how you're measuring what human beings respond to. Another thing that's interesting with the religious thing when it comes to the left is there's been this larger than normal presence of these like LBGT pastors and these people that are promoting a very different Christianity. You know, and they're talking about things that, you know, biblical scholars like, hey, wait, what page is this on? Where does it say abortions? Okay. Like, how are you getting to that? Where does it say God's non-binary? You know, there's a lot of this weirdness that this woke weirdness that sort of entered into religion in some pastors are doing it. And you go, okay, is that good? I don't know if that's good. I mean, is it because you're not following the original? So if we're going to not follow the original stuff, shouldn't we go and take out the slavery part first? Like, shouldn't we go and take out the slaughtering of women and children first? Because that's in there. There's a lot of stuff that's in there we should probably concentrate on first before we start saying God's non-binary. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's true. It's true. Because I was raised Catholic and I went once to a couple of times to a church of England mass. And it's like, look, if you're going to mass, you want the product. Right. You want the, you know, you want the real deal. You want the Marlboro Reds. You want to hear the Latin. Yeah. You want the good stuff. Yeah. You want to sit there and think to yourself, fuck, I'm going to hell and it's going to be awful. We really should get the original. The original version when they would come down the aisle with incense, it was cannabis. They would have these big fucking, like, things where they'd handle, you know, those things. Yeah, with the incense. I mean, yeah, it was cannabis. It was cannabis. What church are you going to? They're high as fuck. They're getting everybody high so they get along with everybody. No wonder they're trying to ban it in Texas, man. The Texas thing is all about the alcohol. It's all about alcohol. It's like traceable money to Dan Patrick and some other people. It's traceable. Like, you could see how these people support him and you see that they want this because it's like it's hurting their business. And if people can just get high and, you know, like, here's the thing about marijuana. Even if they do what, like, Colorado did. So Colorado was the first. The first. Shout out to Colorado. The first to legalize cannabis. And one of the things they did is say, we're going to put a crazy tax on it and just use that tax for fucking schools and all kinds of stuff. Everybody be happy because you've got all this new tax revenue. I think it was like 39 percent. And everybody's like, great, fine. Because marijuana is relatively inexpensive. Like, if you go out drinking with some buddies, fuck, man, you bring five buddies, you're picking up a tab, they're picking up a tab, you guys are having fun, you're drinking, you're ordering. You have five, six hundred dollars at the end of the night. Easy. Easy. Right? Easy. Marijuana, six hundred dollars, you're dead. You smoke six hundred dollars worth of weed, we'll fuck you up for a month. You'll be just lying in your bed going, why did I do that? Yeah. That's not going to happen. It's a different thing. It's like one joint. Like, what is a joint these days? Jamie, you're a young fella. In California where you can legally buy them? Yes. Probably in the range of 15 to 20 bucks. 15 to 20 dollars, I bet. Yeah. 15, 20 bucks. You're barbecued for the whole night. Yeah. And especially California cannabis. They've got scientists that have been working on this shit for a long time, man. They are not normal joints. Every now and then, Ron White will bring one by the mothership, and you're like, get that out of here before everybody dies. No one can handle this. They all dust them with keef. They have THC crystals all over them. It's like, they're going too hard. They sell some joints that are guaranteed to fuck you up. They're like a hundred bucks. And it's also as well, it's like young people don't have the money to go out boozing like we did when we were young, when everything was much cheaper. Well, there's also, I think, and this is a positive aspect of the internet and all these health and wellness influencers, is that a lot of people are realizing like, hey, alcohol is actually bad for you. I like it. I took a long time off of it. It took like eight months, which is a long time for me. And I noticed a big difference the moment I stopped drinking. I just forgot. I just felt way better. Felt better throughout the day. Felt like my energy levels were much more consistent. Felt better waking up. It's better. It's not good to poison yourself all the time. Right. But it's also fun. Well, right. It's like all drugs. It's got good and bad. Yeah. I would say alcohol is kind of a shit drug in terms of the good versus the bad. I'd like a glass of wine with dinner or something. But beyond that, the trade-offs go way down. Like the second, third, like you're not. Right, right, right. It's not improving your enjoyment of the evening. No. It's very expensive. And at our age, you wake up the next day. Oh, man. I'm like, after one glass of wine, I wake up the next day. I'm like, oh. You know, even. One glass of wine? Yeah, yeah. That'll do. You know what it'll help you? Glutathione. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially liposomal glutathione. It's more bioavailable. But glutathione's really good for. You take it the night when you're drinking? Take it while you're drinking. Uh-huh. Take it before you're drinking. Take it after you're drinking. All right. I'm back on the. Thanks, John. But also, one of the issues with alcohol is dehydration. Yeah. And it's an immunosuppressant. So you should be taking amino acids. You should be taking definitely some electrolytes, but also glutathione. It's a kind of mixed sales pitch. Imagine you were like a rep for an alcohol company. You can have a glass of wine, but you need to take about five supplements at the same time. Well, listen. I think everybody should take supplements anyway. Yeah. I really do. I think there's a lot of misleading doctors out there. You shouldn't listen to. That'll tell. I got a doctor with a potbelly once. Tell me that you get everything you need from a balanced diet. I'm like, shut the fuck up. You shut the fuck up. I didn't say that to him, but I really wanted to. I was kind of gentle about it. I said, sir, I have been taking vitamins for a long time, and I noticed a market difference between when I take them and when I don't take them. There's a lot of benefits, and there's a lot of peer-reviewed studies that show benefits of vitamins. Yeah. So let's just stop talking about this before I get fucking angry at you, you fat fuck. Fat fuck. Giving out health advice. Yeah. Thanks for looking at me when you said that, Joe. I appreciate it. I didn't. I looked at him first. And then you looked at me while she said fat fuck. Well, I had to look at you. I'm being kind. I'm joking. I'm a polite host. But one of my cousins, this is a true story. He was a cardiologist. He used to smoke like 40 a day. Great. Perfect. He's probably stressed out. He's probably got bills to pay and fucking, I don't know what you guys have over there because you have. Your education isn't free. To what level? Up to like, so to get a doctor's degree. No, no, no. That's not free. No, no, no. It's free up until college. Yeah. Then you have to pay. And then what about liability insurance? Do you guys have outrageous liability insurance for doctors? Because that's a giant issue with doctors in America. I don't think it's as outrageous as it is here because our laws are different and we're also not such a litigious culture. Like a British person who's had a bad experience, unless it's really, really bad. will not be like i'm suing the fucking like we don't tend to be nice wouldn't that be nice yeah but there's a trade-off to it which is like our service culture in the uk is objectively disgusting it's a lot closer to the soviet union than it is to america like in the soviet union when basically if you went to a shop they would treat you like they were doing you a favor and britain is much closer to that than it is to america wherever yeah where people are like happy to see you like i walk into a restaurant in texas they're happy to see i'm like what the fuck and it takes me like a week to adjust to the fact that people are nice but people are nice here in general yeah much nicer than california and i think one of the reasons is there's less people i really believe that there's an effect that it has on humans no matter who you are when there's an enormous number of people surrounding you all the time i think it's just i totally agree man i think it's this place is only a million people well you know there was a guy i talk about this all the time when we talk about you know everyone's concerned about plummeting birth rates and all of that and a lot of people everybody but elon yeah he's pumping them out man um he's actually is concerned that's why he's doing something about it yeah uh i'm i'm at a replacement rate with my family now good job uh but i but i think uh my sense has always been i read this great book by a guy called desmond morris he was a primatologist he studied great apes and he wrote a book called the human zoo which was all about how the city creates in human beings the kind of responses that a zoo creates in animals higher rates of interpersonal violence higher rates of mental illness lower reproductiveness higher rates of depression all of this stuff totally makes sense and i've moved out of it the small town that i lived in outside and i already noticed the difference like we went in on a saturday to do some shopping and i was like get me the fuck out of here like after 10 minutes now for work, do the work, come out and just hide in my house. house now yeah so you become accustomed to that buzz of the city yeah but it's not necessarily good for you it's not good for you i don't think it's good for you i don't think it's no being accustomed to the buzz of the city is like being accustomed to social media it's constant dopamine it's constant constant constant new you're always looking for the next thing you're always looking for something to stimulate you it's why a lot of people in the city when things go quiet they can't handle it right yeah i have a good friend who's lived in manhattan for boy more than 30 years and he recently got a place on fire island not recently like within the last 10-15 years and he said without that place in fireland he wouldn't even be able to keep his place in manhattan he said he can't deal with it anymore but fire island's like a small island i don't think they even have cars i think you get there on a ferry and everybody rides bikes and it's like and so he goes there and then he comes back bb fuck you but he just tries to the two of them makes it livable yeah whereas when i first met him he was like i fucking love it i love the energy of this city and i was there like i've got my own energy i gotta get the fuck out of here i don't like this i like woods i like peace i like to be able to sit on top of a hill and see birds fly overhead that's what i like i like nature i do not like being in like a cramped fucking group of all kinds of people stacked feeling each other's energy it's fun occasionally new york's fun to visit but living there sleeping there it pays it you pay a toll you you do pay a toll because that city like we've got a friend who lets us use his apartment and it's a beautiful apartment in manhattan but you can never really sleep because what you said is like fuck you fuck you in the ass and it's like you go what's going on and it's like it's 3 15 do you know what i mean right and you're going that people are insane they're driven insane by this well it's also a 24-hour city a legitimate 24-hour city you know and when i was single it was great because uh pool halls are open in new york city 24 hours a day so you know chelsea billiards which is where we would go was like this crazy place that was like a playground that was open 24 hours a day like this is nuts and then you go to a diner you can go you could get a real meal apparently a lot of this died during covid but you can get like a steak dinner at 4 a.m like a nice restaurant you could sit down like this is crazy this place is nuts it was fun when i was 23 it's fun it's fun new york is a lot of fun we have a good time we're there for a week we go to our favorite cigar bars you know all of that it's fun it's fun but i think it's also once you get married and you have kids then the calculus changes completely like i would rather spend half an hour with my son walking in the woods yeah over you know whatever the best new york has to offer you know what i mean it's just for sure well it's for me too a lot changed um as i when i'm when i got uh on moved to los angeles i started moving further and further away from the city and as i moved further and further away from the city i became more and more relaxed i was like i think there's something to this yeah and so where i lived most of the time when i was living in um la was not even in la county i was living in the neighborhood county neighboring county i had plenty of acres i had mountain lions and bobcats and all kinds of shit in my neighborhood deer in my neighborhood it's way more relaxed it was way more relaxed it was just i could go outside and just hear birds and you know and see you know a hawk circling over a canyon looking for a rabbit it was awesome i loved it it was just so much better than just being inundated with sounds sounds and movement and activity it's just like you know when i when i was teaching i remember every year because when i was teaching a really rough part of east london we used to take the kids away for a one week residential in out in the countryside and they would do activities and they would do activities and they would do activities and they would do activities and whatever else and you would literally see a different side to these kids 100 you would when you saw them on the playground they were surrounded by concrete and just skyscrapers and tower blocks they everybody even when you started the day everybody and these some these were 10 11 year old kids everybody just felt amped like they were ready to come for confrontation they were ready to go yeah after a week in the countryside you saw a different side to these kids yeah because that's how people are supposed to live that's how we evolved just like that we evolved with religion we also evolved in nature and i think we're struggling with the absence of both of those things in our society and the big one to me the biggest one is not just nature but it's also light pollution yeah you know we were talking about the other day uh column tyrell hilarious stand-up comedian was on and uh he was talking about how he goes to uh big ben and uh goes down to uh there's an area of texas and south texas that is like one of the best places to see the sky the night sky and how insane it is he just just you're just confronted by the milky way and all these stars i think that chills people out too that puts that puts your place in the universe in perspective and in the cities that's the most absent you can't see any stars so in the cities everything's bright you just see a black sky who gives a what's up there let's go eat let's go do this let's go to that these people like you fascists whatever it is it's like you're you're living in this this very tiny blindered world i think for people like us as well who who by virtue of what we do are digitally plugged in like we have to kind of pay attention a little bit to what's going on so i certainly spend a lot of time on my phone when you know i remember a month or two ago there was some shit going on people talking shit about as always about us on social media or in the papers and then i just sit in my garden and i see these two giant trees that are like 300 years old yeah who gives a fuck yeah when you're there you just go who gives a fuck it's you know it's also the cost of what we do yeah the cost of what we do is people are going to have opinions you want them to have opinions some of the opinions are going to suck and some of them are going to be completely outrageous and some are going to be just outright lies where they just want to take you down that's okay yeah yeah the lies piss me off i'll be honest the lies piss me off because i'm like i am happy to be criticized for mistakes i make i'm happy to be criticized for things that i said inarticulately i'm happy to be criticized by people who don't like my world view but don't fucking lie about don't make a bullshit about me and and tell other people that that's what i am yeah that pisses me off that we should reject that from everyone from both sides and the problem is if it aligns with your ideology you won't call it out and you accept it and it's fine it's just like you know i always say that these parties that you know unfortunately we only have two are defined by the craziest members of those parties like when you think about the left what do you think about people that want trans women in sports and communism and an open border and then when you think about the right what do you think about like patriot front and fucking you know religious fundamentalists that want the bible in every school and you know xenophobic people that think this is a white christian nation and that's it it's just so exhausting and if you spend enough time absorbing all of this online it completely warp your worldview instead of just basing your worldview on how you interact with people in real life you know and most people now are tainted by this so even interacting with them in real life is a problem especially if you don't catch them one-on-one yeah you know it was three of them and one of you then it's a problem like why are you talking to me like this like you would never talk to me like this was you and me and we were alone this is crazy this is a crazy way to talk to people if you have an opinion about something and we both have the time which is another thing to actually discuss this like this is a time-consuming nuanced discussion like let's if which is a beautiful thing what we're allowed to do well we can sit down and have those discussions and i think it's super beneficial for other people to be able to listen because if someone sees some twitter hot take on you they get a very distorted perception of who you are and then they hear you on a podcast they go wait a minute this guy is pretty reasonable he's yeah seems like a nice guy like the fuck is going on in the world right right but if you're only a clips person and you're only a twitter person and you're only a hot take person you just and you're tired you're you're working all day you have a fucking whole bunch of obligations you're gonna like lock into a fake version of the world and that version of the world is going to give you anxiety but it's also about incentives because if you are a hot takes person if you are a clips person you actually don't care about the truth because that's not what you're aiming for what you're actually aiming for is engagement it's views it's all the rest of it it's money so unfortunately as we all know there's the truth is important but it doesn't generate it doesn't engage people as much as a hot take as much as something that is potentially devised here's how i push back on that the success of podcasts like yours and mine like this is the difference right it's like it's clear that there's a thirst for this there's a hunger for people having discussions and for people that say oh well i see this point of view i see why you would think that way this is what i think and let's talk there's a hunger for that obviously yeah it's not just that the only interaction that humans are having is these bullshit artists that are making these fake posts or these these very biased posts just to get engagement because that's how they make their money which are that's a it's a sizable population online but there's also plenty of people that are having real conversations yeah and it's like you said i think politics is what what changes all of it and and maybe that's where I acknowledge that when we started the show, we had a rule that we would never have sitting politicians on the show. And then, you know, we got interested in more politics and we had access to more politicians. And suddenly we talked to a few of them. And then people go, oh, OK, so this is like you're on a team, you're on the other team. And now the gloves are off. Man, it is crazy. Like we were sitting in Airbnb yesterday preparing for one of our interviews, watching something on YouTube. But because we weren't logged in with our own account, you get YouTube ads. And right now, as we're recording this, it's the midterms coming up and the political attack ads. Have you seen this shit? Oh, I've seen a lot of them in America. Bro, it is. If you show that to a person who's not used to it, like it is shocking to me. It's like Ken Paxton loves pedophiles. I was like, whoa. Right. And the other way, too. Yeah. James Tallarico wants to take your daughter and rape her and then trans her. Whoa. It's nuts. Imagine talking about people like that. Right. Right. Imagine. Imagine you came on here and you were just like the Republicans want to trans your kids and the Democrats. Oh, no, that would be crazy. The Democrats want to trans you. Well, listen, give it another 30 years. Right. And it could completely swing. Yeah. When the Republicans are transing your kids, that's when you know you really are fucked. Well, that's when we know that the world is a changed place when there's secretly straight people. Right. Yeah. So like there's someone living a gay lifestyle because it's super popular, but he's secretly straight. And we have to like find them and teach them. Right. And then you have to like, you know, you have to DMZ catches him making out with a woman. Like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Somebody gets outed for watching straight porn. Yeah, one day. One day. One day, if the Democrats have their way. But then, like you said, I mean, the stakes. I also see it the other way, though, because the stakes are high. Like, if you take illegal immigration, like, that was a real problem in this country under the Democrats. Like, gigantic, right? Yeah, gigantic. Not according to The View, by the way. The View fact-checked me on that. In fact, the border was closed. That was one of the things. Is that what happened? Oh, my God. They did a fact-check of me saying why I voted Republican. And I said there were so many things that were going the wrong way with the past administration. One of them, you knew that it wasn't Biden running it. Whoever was in his cabinet, they were running the country. It wasn't Biden. He was out of his fucking mind. We all know that. We accept it. There's a bunch of people who have come out and said that that were working there now. So that was one. The other one was the border was wide open and that people were fucking coming through. And fucking Sonny Hostin fact-checked me and actually was saying that Biden told people not to come. Like, come to— But they did. And, yeah, look, Greg Abbott, our governor, did bus people to New York City because, like, look, you guys are passing these policies. You want this border wide open? You fucking handle these people. And that is true. But it was also true that the Red Cross had stations. That were set up where people give people maps, tell them how to get in, that once people did get in, they were given plane tickets. They were given EBT cards. They were given cell phones. They were put up in luxury hotels. All this is true. Not just that, but a disproportionate amount of people who moved in, who came here illegally, moved to swing states. Kind of crazy. Seems a little odd. Seems a little odd that you get a large portion of them set up in Ohio and set up in a bunch of these different places. Like the Haitians in Ohio, it's a famous part. But it's like there's clearly an incentive. You know what the incentive is. The census counts humans. It doesn't count legal citizens. So if there's 10 million humans and half of them are illegal, it doesn't matter. That indicates how many congressional seats you get. That's real. So if you just flood a place that you're already in control with illegal immigrants that you're paying for, this isn't rocket science. That's going to help you stay in power. And that's what was going on. And I felt like that is crazy. So Kamala Harris was recently talking about how they need to add more people to the Supreme Court. And then they need to turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into states. And why do you want to do that? Because if you do that, then you have control forever. And that's the reality that I was confronted with, with the choices between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It's not like I elected the Trump administration and say, well, this is perfect. This is exactly what we want. I love it when he has a picture of himself as Jesus and he posts it up on True Social. This is great. I think some of the things he's done are good, for sure. And I think some of the things the FBI has done. This is one of the things that the left does not want to confront. There's been a significant drop in crime. Significant. Significant drop in crime. A measurable drop in crime because of the FBI. Under Kash Patel and this new administration. Now, I don't know why. I don't know what it means. Some people say it's because of underreporting, which is an issue. Because especially places like Los Angeles, no one gives a fuck if you get robbed. No one gives a fuck if your car gets broken into. They're not going to do anything. So it's underreported crime. And so they say crime is down. But is it? No. Not if you talk to people. Everybody that I know that lives in Los Angeles says it's fucking Gotham City now. It's fucking nuts. Whereas it wasn't 15 years ago. So what happened? What happened was the same policies that you fucking people keep voting for keep going further and further and further and further down the line. And the further they go, the more things get shitty. And no one wants to change because you're in a cult. Yeah. It's also worth, you know, people say these policies are kind, that it's the right thing to do morally. As, you know, as somebody who talks to, whenever I see a Venezuelan person, I always want to talk to them because I want to see. How they, how they're doing, how they feel the country is doing, how Venezuela is doing. Because you're from Venezuela, we should tell people that. Yeah. And one thing that I remember this conversation I had with an Uber driver and he was talking to me and he said to me, look, when you go on the pods, because I follow your pod and I listen to Joe and I follow these pods, please tell people that Venezuelan people, we're not criminals. We're not people coming here to cause trouble. The vast majority of us only want to come here to work. And he goes, but those are the people who do it legally. The other people who come in now, I'm sure that some of them just want to come in. A lot of them want to come in just for a better life. But you're also allowing a portion of people to come in who are criminals, who are going to cause trouble. And that's going to give a bad reputation to every single Venezuelan person who is here. Because the moment you hear Venezuelan, you think, Oh, Tren de Aragua, which is the very famous gang, which is causing huge, which was causing huge amounts of problem in America, runnings, killings, gang activity. So immediately, when you think of a Venezuelan, you go, Oh, Tren de Aragua. You don't think of the guy who's coming along, who's going to work for you, who's going to drive your Uber, who's just doing what he can to make ends meet. Now, let me ask you this. Do you think that allowing the illegals in and the criminals in, not just the illegal, let's say, because everyone who comes in that doesn't do it the right way is an illegal. So allowing criminals to come through as well, knowing that this. This will increase violent crime. Do you think that that is just an unintended side effect of the goal they're trying to achieve, which is get more congressional seats, control districts, make it so that the other party can't win? Or do you think that they have calculated this and said that this would probably be a way that we can institute much more control like flock cameras and have the ability to tap into people's phones? And that people will actually allow us to do this because we'll do it under the premise that we're making the streets safe again. And it's probably quite hard to separate the criminals from the non criminals as well. If the border is open, then they just come impossible, right? How would you know? The other thing we had Andrew Yang on recently, and this is where it gets even worse because one of the reasons he left the sort of conventional Republican Democratic Party model was he said, actually, neither party wants to solve the problem. And he was saying. The Republicans will deliberately avoid allowing Democrats to close the border because it gives them something to run on. Of course. Yeah. And that's fucking crazy. Yeah. That is fucking crazy. Yeah. And Anna Paulina Luna explained that to me. Yeah. She was like, there's a bunch of issues that they don't want resolved because that's how they raise finances. They can run on it. They run on them. That's campaign talking point. It's like you got to have it. You got to have it in your bag. See, this is where I think the left has a lot of very good points. Actually, which is the accumulation of power within big corporations and government. That's why when I was younger, I always thought of myself and I haven't really changed my opinions very much. I thought of myself as being on the left because the more actually we do our show and the more people we speak to who are in positions to know, the more I'm just confronted by how much behavior in that part of our society is driven by greed and not morality. These people are not moral. Right. Instead, they're immoral. I think they're worse. They're amoral. They don't give a fuck. As long as they win the election, they make money, they increase their bonus. That is so scary to me. It's much scarier actually than people intentionally doing bad things in a way. That accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of people, that's a real thing, man. It's a real thing. It's also a part of the culture of those groups of people, right? There's a diffusion of responsibility aspect of being a part of that. It's a part of a corporation that's doing things that are fucked up. Say if you're working for a corporation and they manufacture something and you find out that these people are dumping some sort of toxic waste in the third world. Like, not me. I'm in Dallas. I'm working on, I'm at my desk. I'm doing spreadsheets, you know. But you are a part of this corporation, right? But you don't think, oh my God, I'm a part of an evil movement that's killing fish in a river somewhere in Cambodia or whatever. That's not how you think. You are a part of this culture. And you, if you're a lawyer, hey, I know he's guilty. I got to get him off. This is the job. If you're working in a corporation, hey, we're here to make money. Like, this is what we do. We have shareholders. We're working 16 hours a day. We're on fucking Adderall. You know, we don't have time for morals. Okay, maybe one day I'll be moral. But right now I want a house in the Hamptons. I want a yacht. I want a fucking jet. And I think I can get there because I know that the guy who used to be the CEO, he left, he got $600 million. And this is what the culture is. The culture is all about making the most money as possible. And when you're around a bunch of other people that are doing that, it seems fine. The responsibility of being moral is completely removed. You're a part of a giant machine that you can't stop. And so, listen, you know, we are, you know, Xerox or Raytheon or whatever it is. You don't think, you know, oh, I can have an effect on the world with my decisions and I should probably do the right thing. Like, there's none of that going on. No, and also as well, the people that do think like that, they're going to self-select out of that system. Yeah. Because they're going to be like, oh, I'm going to do this. They're going to be there going, oh, dude, we're doing this. I can't live with this. They'll leave. They'll write an article for The Atlantic. Nobody will read it. That's it. That's the end of it. It's how I think about what we do, though. It's like, I think of Trigonometry as like a family-owned restaurant, right? We're feeding people information, right? Or conversation or whatever it is. But we are providing something that people ingest. Yeah. There's a responsibility that comes with that, right? You shouldn't put, you know, lead. And Mercury and all kinds of shit in there to make it taste better or make more money and whatever. And we know there's people we could have on our show that would get 10 times the views. Right. But it's just not what we do, you know? Yeah. And I respect that. I think it's clear in your conversations that that's not what you're trying to do. You're not going to play gotcha. Whereas no disrespect to Piers Morgan. That's his business model. His business models have a bunch of people on, have them fucking yell at each other. Whee! He's great at it. It's also a time thing. I think when people have a very short period of time, it inevitably becomes that. If you ever see Piers doing long-form interviews, some of them are incredible. Oh, sure. I'm not even talking about him. I'm talking about his show. Yeah, the model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Yeah, I can slag off Piers. There's no problem. You douchebag. No. The model, I agree. That model is, what it does is it attracts attention. But I think once you've watched it, I think it was actually, our mutual friend Chris Williamson told me about this. He said, there's a thing, you know that post-nut clarity? Yes. There's post-content clarity. Oh, yeah. And when you watch something that's outrage porn, you get that post-content, ugh, like why have I spent 15 minutes watching it? You know? Yeah, I try not to. When I see people like, you know, destroyed this guy on this, I'm like, I don't want that in my life. I'm not interested. If something's particularly interesting, someone will send it to me. So this is my filtration system now. Or online content. If a friend doesn't send it to me that I think is a cool and interesting friend, I don't read it. Yeah. So most of what I get, unless I'm on the toilet, I'm getting from the toilet, I will just give it. The toilet is where bad things happen. And I will give in and go, what are you on about? But it's made my life infinitely better. Yeah. Infinitely. But the issue is the incentives are baked all the way through. Like when I wrote my book, Uneducated, I remember people saying to me, oh, you're going to write about the culture wars and education, talking about, you know, how the culture wars affected you in your classroom. I was like, mate, I was teaching in a fucking ghetto in East London. We didn't have time to talk about decolonization. Because you can't do it. You can't do it. How are you going to talk about decolonization when a kid's throwing a chair at your head? But it would have been, and then when you go and promote the book, people are like, whoa, did you talk about trans in the classroom? I'm like, no, mate. I was trying just to have a lesson. You know, we didn't, didn't have that. But the moment you know that by doing that, you're going to forsake a large part of what, of outrage, you know, interest in what you do because you're not playing that game. Right. And you're forsaking the clips for that. Yeah, but who cares? Yeah. It's like, that's not what you're into anyway. It's like if you run a vegetarian restaurant and that's what your thing is. I have the look of a man who runs a vegetarian restaurant. But you don't get upset if someone else is, you know, making money, selling steak. Like that's what they do. If you want to sell steak, you'd sell steak. Yeah. Not, that's a bad comparison because what you guys do is better. It's like, you're the steak. We're the steak. Yeah. It's like someone's out there buying vegan burgers and getting really sick. No, it's, and then that's what we try to do. It's, you know, you realize, I know it sounds kind of hacky, but when your platform goes to a size, like we're about to hit 2 million subscribers now and you do an interview, you think, oh fuck, like we've got a real responsibility. If somebody says something that is actually, you know, that you think isn't right, it's your duty to challenge them. It's also your duty to, you know, to make sure that the interview is prepped properly so that when they have their arguments, you can go, well, actually, what about this? What about that? Right. All of these things, because you realize what you're putting out into the world, it matters. People are going to consume it and they're going to take it as fact. Yeah, it does matter. And if you abandon that feeling of responsibility, just because you want the outrage clicks, it's like you're just a part of the problem. Yeah, I mean, you got to be able to have conversations with people. And this is why I push back against the idea that people have a shorter attention span than ever. It's like, do they though? I feel like they're just people. I feel like people are just people. I don't think I'm unique. I think I like listening to audio books because I think they're interesting and I think I'm not alone. I think they're very popular. They sell a lot of audio books. It's one of the big reasons why Spotify, got into podcasting is because their audio book sales or streams rather, a lot of people were streaming audio books. They're like, wow, a lot of people just, they don't just want music. Let's get into other things. People like to be informed and have their brain excited. It's good. And you can have it excited in a negative way, like get outraged. And that's the problem. It can hijack your concentration in that way. It can hijack your attention. But also what's more fulfilling is getting your brain stimulated in a positive way or at least an intriguing way. Something that like really makes you think about things. I love when I listen to a podcast, I listen to a conversation and I carry that thought with me. Like I'll shut the radio off and I'm driving. I'm like, wow, okay. And I'll just contemplate and think about things. You know, and I think there's, I'm not alone. This is not a unique thing that I have. I think there's millions of people out there like that. They're just, that desire is not being fulfilled. So it gets, their attention gets hijacked by horseshit. Well, and I think the direction of travel is clear. I mean, a lot of people in our space like to be like, oh, TV's dead. Well, if you look at the absolute numbers, they are way up here, right? Then collectively, then YouTube and podcasts. But the direction of travel is only one way from here. They're going to go down. We're going to go up. Do you think that the views on television are higher than the views on like, say, YouTube? I don't even think that's close. That's interesting. YouTube is infinitely more popular than any television show. Yeah, but it's not all, like, most of the views on YouTube are like guys, kids unboxing toys and, you know, guys going camping. I discovered this channel the other day called Outdoor Studios. Are you familiar? Or Outdoor Boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he stopped doing it. He stopped doing it. I was like, this guy, 20 million subscribers, every video is like 90 million views. And he just was like, yeah, I don't want to do this anymore. Well, I think the popularity thing is, like, overwhelming. And the, like, fame, it freaks you out. Yeah. And I think he probably reads the comments, unfortunately. And he was just a regular guy that's really into survival, you know, stuff. It's amazing content. And he seems like a really nice guy. Seems like a lovely guy. I think maybe the one thing that pushed him in that direction, just watching it, is he kind of got his family involved. So a lot of it would be like him with the kids going to places. And I imagine if you never fully signed up for 20 million subscriber fame, and you're a five-year-old or a 10-year-old or now you're an 18-year-old, that's a whole different ballgame. Yeah. And that's probably extremely disconcerting and unpleasant. Well, I don't think that's wise. I don't think that's wise at all to do that. No, no, no. I mean, when I see people getting their children involved in their television shows, I'm like, please don't do that. Yeah. So like you didn't ask them and they're going to have to go to school and then deal with the consequences of it and all the bullshit that comes. I mean, it's pretty straightforward show. The guy's just like. You know, camping in a fucking igloo, no big deal. But even then you're still exposing yourself to schizophrenics and crazy people and the whole, the world, the whole world out there. Yeah. And also as well, number one, they can't consent because they're too young. So they don't understand actually what it means to consent to something like that. And what are going to be the long-term implications, but also it's just weird. It does get, it takes you a while when people come up to you and they go, Oh, I feel I know. know you. And you obviously don't, but as an adult, I can rationalize that imagine what it must be like as a kid well that's the real problem with child stars right yeah they all get fucked up like i've become friends with zach efron lately uh he's been coming to the club very nice guy but talks openly about it like just like becoming famous when you're young when you're really young you're a kid it's just so fucked up for you i can't i liken it to when you make cement and you don't put all the ingredients in and then it kind of forms but you can never fix it so it's never fully formed and i think this is an issue with i've met a lot of child actors that became adults and every one of them was fucked up um macaulay culkin was probably the least fucked up oddly but he'll he talks openly about the struggles that he's had and what is it that makes somebody really struggle with life having been famous as a kid like you get adored for no reason right you're you're six and everybody loves you you're supposed to earn that right you're supposed to have it from your family and then the way you behave is supposed to dictate how people treat you in the real world and what you're good at so like maybe if you're good at art or you're good at music people like jimmy i love how you play guitar and then so then people like you for that and then you like you want more of that so you work really hard and then you go through this whole process of becoming an adult and dating and girls don't like you just because you're on the cover of team beat they like you because hopefully they think you're attractive looking and then they think you're funny or you're smart or you're nice to them and then you go on a date and you guys jive and it's a learning process and you don't go through that at all when you're a nine-year-old and you're on the set of a television show that's in your name and then everyone around you is catering to you everyone's kissing your ass tommy can we get you anything would you like a juice would you like anything like everybody loves you nobody is telling you you have to do something you have to do this you have to do that nobody's punishing you nobody's nobody is like bullying you at school it's like your world is weird and people tolerate your shitty behavior i imagine a hundred percent you can throw temper tantrums and fucking smash windows and they mean that's why rock stars fucking tear apart hotel rooms why they do that because if they can they go to that hotel room just fucking throw a tv through the window rock and roll i mean it's in it's in all these movies right why they do that because they're out of their fucking minds and because there's no guard rails and to have no guard rails as you're growing up and to also be completely wealthy by the time you're 10 you know and then usually the parents are involved in some sort of a shitty scenario like i have a friend who's uh who's a child actor his parents stole money from him and he didn't find out until he's an adult like millions of dollars from him and he's had like this fucked up relationship with them anyway and that's kind of he found out that they were they were mishandling his money and stealing that's got to be so horrible he suspected it though he's like it's one of the things that happens when people see you being successful and you have money or they think you have money suddenly like all these people emerge out of everywhere who've got like these amazing ideas oh yeah for how to convert your money into their money you know the brilliant ideas for that and there's a lot of them yeah i yeah i get confronted all the time with stupid ideas and i just i don't invest in anything i'm like that's the best way for me to just defuse it all like i'm not interested yeah i'm not buying that and also with the child star thing is you have all of this success which is more success than the vast majority of people will ever encounter in their life and you're done by the time you're 16 because you've fundamentally changed the way you look so you you've now become an adolescent with all you know the awkwardness and the horrificness that goes through all of our teenage years yeah yet you look back at a time when everybody loved you and now no one does yeah you're peeing all the time at 15 but imagine being like tutankhamen became the pharaoh of egypt at nine oh what you're running egypt what huh yeah he wasn't really running it was like joe biden well he was there was a team joe there was a team yeah it seemed like he might be inbred or tutankhamen yeah there's something wrong with him he was very odd sorry i'm choking on something yeah i think um analysis of his uh bones i think they said that he might have he might have suffered i think that's some speculation people try not to be offensive when they talk about that but obviously inbreeding amongst royal families is not a unique thing it's not like what wait a minute you know like yeah and so the possibility that he was inbred here one of the most striking things about tutankhamen was his parentage 2010 dna study concluded his parents were probably brother and sister the researchers identify his father as most likely pharaoh akhenaten and his mother as an unnamed money as an unnamed mummy known as the younger lady and that was probably his sister the body uh differed from the idealized royal image researchers reported a club foot and damage to bones in his foot suggesting they had difficulty walking walking sticks found in his tomb support that interpretation uh these are medical interpretations of ancient remains rather than a complete certain picture of the body and the body was found in a tomb that was found in a tomb that had a picture of his health he became king around age nine died around 18 or 19 exact cause of death remains uncertain researchers detected malaria parasite dna and proposed that malaria bone problems and a fractured leg may have contributed to not any single cause was conclusively established apparently um the reason why they found his tomb versus all the other pharaoh tombs that had long been looted was that he was uh very disrespected and that once they uh buried him and they put him in his tomb they covered it with rubble so that no one could visit it they were like fuck this guy like yeah we did what we had to do but let's just cover the whole thing with rubble that's one of the one of the one of the pieces of speculation that's so funny there's so many guys in history who are like i'm gonna build an empire i'm gonna no one knows their name this dude was a shit king i know shit king nine years old and that's the one that everybody thinks about when you think about an egyptian pharaoh you think about king tut because they found his tomb intact yeah so the real question is what happened to all those other tombs and is where is all that gold where where are all those i mean if if that guy had such an elaborate burial and he was a shit king like what you know what did what did ramses what did his pharaoh what did what did that guy's burial look like i mean well it's been like six thousand years right and you know the ancient egypt is six thousand years ago at least at least there's a lot of real weird stuff when it comes to that real weird you know um there's also the the actual king's list or the the zep tepe king's list in in egypt that it's super weird because it goes back 30 plus thousand years and they want to talk about that as if it's myth and then it gets to a certain age where it's agreed upon that this is the the time in which these dynasties existed that people accept and so this is very it's very weird stuff and you i think you have to really understand hieroglyphs to be able to even comment on it so i'm not going to but one of the weird things about it is the ages of the older people the people from 30 plus thousand years ago they're like living 200 000 years 50 000 years it's very odd they reign for a long time and that aligns with the sumerian king's list too which is also super fucking strange the sumerian king's list has the same sort of properties where you have accepted historical figures that are later that live a normal lifespan but then when you go way way back you have kings that are ruling for 35 000 years isn't it the same in the bible where it's all like way extended and so is that maybe just a like a language thing or like a calculation it's probably a bunch of things right the real problem is you have a cuneiform right so you have the ancient sumerian writing so there's not like a language issue then because you have them detailing the ages of the people that are historically accurate where we know that they existed the real problem is like what were they talking like in the bible like when noah was 600 years old okay what is a year do you like what does that mean right is it every is every season a year is it an actual calendar year do you have a gregorian calendar like what do you what do you use it because they use a different calendar entirely in ancient history used to use a 13 lunar cycle calendar so it was a 13 month calendar it was a 28 day calendar which is 364 days so they would have to have a leap year every now and then but when you think about that that actually kind of makes more sense because that really does align with the cycles but somewhere along the line they decided to make it 12 months and some months are 31 days and some months are 28 days like what like what do you mean here like what so it's like what do you mean when you say he's 600 years old you know did you just mean he's old as you see no like that dude's like a million years old like you like how old's my dad my dad's 150 000 years old and he hates this you know like you know what i mean like people talk in a certain it's like the whole 72 virgins thing right you know when they say you get 72 virgins when you make yourself a martyr they don't mean the number 72. it's like saying you know oh i got a million friends it's just a lot they're just saying a lot it's like a substitute for a lot you know one of the interesting things is when when you actually go to egypt is genuinely how much we don't know about that about about their civilization the engineering how they constructed the pyramids i remember i went to the temple of abu simbel i don't know if you've ever seen this temple it's huge it's absolutely massive and there's a certain point in time during the day where there is a beam of light that comes into the temple and it lights i think it's at the altar they so they did that specifically that was a choice that they made and they designed the temple for that to happen and you go well how did they do that yeah it's super sophisticated engineering and um it's also that's it at a scale when when you're dealing with how far they move the stone how they quarried the stone what tools they use there's also real clear evidence of ancient tool use um and not just tool use but high speed drills um some sort of uh unknown technology that seems to be able to scoop sections out of rock. It looks like it was moving far quicker than what they would achieve with copper and sand and friction and all the different theories that people have proposed to how they did it. It doesn't make any sense. And I think it's way older than they think it is. I think it's way, way, way older. And I think one of the first people to propose that was Dr. Robert Shock from Boston University. He's a geologist. And he looked at the weathering of the temple where the Sphinx is carved out of. And he said, this is water erosion, like thousands of years of water erosion has led to these deep fissures on the sides of these walls. And then the furthest back you get where you have rainfall, like heavy rainfall in the Nile Valley, you got to go like 9,000 years. So that's 9,000 years. And then you have to deal with thousands of years of rainfall to achieve that. So when was it actually built? It might be 10,000 years old, might be 12,000 years old. It also might be newer than some of the other stuff that's there, which is even crazier. And then you have the stuff that's underground and you go, hey, like the things that they know about, like the labyrinths that they've discovered, that Herodotus wrote about, these enormous labyrinths, as he said, was greater than the size of the world. And then you have the stuff that's underground, greater than the spectacle of Giza, like greater than the pyramids. He said underground was even more preposterous. You know, and going back to our religious conversation, I never knew this. So I went to an exhibition at the British Museum where they were talking about the ancient Greek empire took over the ancient Egyptian empire. And there was a fusion of the two. And what they had at one point was the Greeks who were living in Egypt, worshipping their gods and the Egyptians worshipping their gods. And the elites then turned around and went, you know what, we've got a major problem here. If we don't actually do something to help bind society together, we're going to have a civil war. So they artificially created gods that both sections could worship. Which gods? I can't remember the name of the gods, but. They've made up some gods and everybody's like, oh, phew. Thank God you found the bridge. You know, and it's a kind of a genius like solution because you could still worship your Greek gods. They could still worship their Egyptian gods. But there was a gods in the middle, that everyone could worship. Well, that's an age-old tactic, right? I mean, this is sort of how Constantine pushed Christianity through Rome. You know, it's like, got to bring everybody on the same page. People have always done this. Whereas the Mongols had a totally different approach. Genghis Khan said, I don't give a fuck what your religion is. Come on board. Just pay taxes and don't fuck around. Pay taxes, don't fuck around. Let's kill folks. He didn't care what you believed in. He didn't give a fuck. Very tolerant. Tolerant Genghis Khan. Yes, very tolerant. It's really interesting. Dan Carlin had this great take on him where he was saying that if you, historians today, talk about Genghis Khan as like a Genghis Khan, there was a lot of positive aspects to his empire. And one of the things that he opened up trade to the East. Like, right. Also, killed 10% of the population. Like, it's kind of crazy that one of the biggest mass murderers in the history of the human race documented is also thought about in the positive impacts that he had on civilization. Well, it's funny. I took my dad to Uzbekistan because my dad grew up in Uzbekistan and I lived in Uzbekistan for four years. So we did like a father and son trip there. When you get to Uzbekistan, you get to Tashkent, right in the heart of the city. There's this giant statue of Tamerlane, Timur the lame. See, most people don't even know who the guy was. He was basically like a mini Genghis Khan. And they celebrate, they're not decolonializing that shit. They're like, this is where this is our boy. And by the way, that dude, he was as vicious and his empire stretched as far as Constantinople on the one side to China, to Russia, to India at one point. It just didn't last as long because he was a badass and most of his descendants were not. But he controlled this giant swathe of the Central Asia in particular. And in Samarkand, they still have his tomb. The tomb is there. And there's a story. I don't know if I told you this before. Do you remember about the Soviet, the German invasion of the Soviet Union? Did I tell you this before? Maybe. Basically, Soviet archaeologists were opening, about to open this tomb and all the locals were like, don't, don't, don't touch it. Don't touch it. Because on the tomb, it said, whoever opens this tomb will unleash a conqueror greater than I. They opened it. And the next day, Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. Oh, the next day? The next day. I think you did tell me this. Yeah, I probably did. That's crazy. June 22nd, 1941, Operation Barbarossa. Here's the interesting bit as well. The battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war. So Soviet Union, I don't know if you remember this, but the Soviet Union was basically getting its ass kicked for the first year and a half of the war. Absolutely steamrolled, million men armies surrendering en masse. The German were kicking ass. They got as far as the gates of Moscow. If you go to Moscow, there's these three giant tank traps outside. That's how close the Germans came. And a lot of historians actually argue that if Hitler had taken Moscow, which he was very capable of doing, if he didn't make mistakes, that would have been it. Because Stalin stayed in Moscow. And so Stalin would have been captured, probably killed, and the Soviet Union would have lost the war. Anyway, fast forward to the Battle of Stalingrad. The archaeologists eventually thought, you know what? We've dug this up. We should have opened it. And they gave him a proper Islamic burial, put him back in the tomb, covered everything up. And the next day, that was the pivotal day in the Battle of Stalingrad. And from then on, the Soviet Union basically pushed forward and won the war. Simulation theory. Right. In effect. It's insane, man. But you know what? Uzbekistan, you talk about spreading trade and stuff. That part of the world at that time, if you go there today, I loved going there as a tourist. It's like the Muslim Rome. It's just this incredibly beautiful testament to the greatness of their civilization at one point. These beautiful madrassas, beautiful mosques, gigantic, absolutely gigantic. People are really friendly. Food is amazing. It was a really cool place to go. I really liked going back there. Well, I think one of the things that set back the Islamic world in a huge way was Genghis Khan invading Iraq. How so? I didn't know about this. Well, I don't even think it was Iraq back then. What was it? Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia. Yeah. So Baghdad, the Mongols took Baghdad and the river flowed red with blood, the way they describe it. They just slaughtered everybody. They knocked civilizations back to the Stone Age. It was a famous story, as Dan Carlin talks about, it's one of the scariest ones, of the Shah of Khwarizmah sent an envoy to go to visit Jin China. And as he's making his way to Jin China, they see. They see what they think is a snow capped mountain in the distance, that as they get closer, it turns out to be a pile of bones. And that Genghis Khan had arrived before they got there and killed everyone in the town, everyone in the city and stacked their bones on, over a million people, stacked their bones on top of each other. Whoa. And then they had abandoned their carts along the way because the roads had become so degraded from rotting human flesh. So rotting human flesh. Oh my gosh, it turned everything into mud. So there were so many dead, rotting bodies in the road that they couldn't get their carts through. They couldn't get the wheels to turn through the sludge of dead humans. Maybe not that tolerant then. Let me open up a trade in the West. That's why we love interviewing historians so much on our show. Because when you talk to historians, you go, "Oh, number one, what we're going through, like people have been going through this since a year, dog." And you just get to understand so much more, not only about your society, but also about yourself and human nature and who we are as people. We always talk about these are unprecedented times. Nothing like this has happened before. But you go through history and you talk to a historian and they're like, "Well, it's kind of similar to '8 and '23 when you look about it because A, B, C, D, E, and F, or whatever it may be." And you're going, "Oh, right." And there's a calmness that comes from that. Yeah. People have always been fucked. People have always been fucked up, like always. I've talked about this a bunch of times, so I apologize if you guys have heard it. But I've been reading this, I finished it, this Alan Watts book called "The Age of insecurity. And it's about the 1950s. And it's essentially he's talking about how society is changing so quickly because of technology and culture shifting radically and people are so anxious. He's talking about this in 1952, I believe it was. And you read it and it applies totally today. And you realize like, oh, there's never been a time where everybody's like, life is great. And then we have this nostalgic view back to those days going all back to those days when I was a boy, the milkman came and he delivered your milk and everything was beautiful and everybody believed in God and there was no problems. No, there's always been problems. People have always been people. People are messy and sloppy and crazy. And they're always going to cause chaos. And as long as there have been people, there have been problems. And this is just a much more aware version of society than ever before. And maybe propagandized and maybe confused because of the internet. But also a lot better. I mean, if you look at what's going on in the world, there's a lot of things that are going on in the world that are going on in the world. And there's a lot of things that are going on in the world that are going on in the world that are going on in the world. And there's a lot of things that are We can talk about, you know, Gen Z are not as resilient and all of that shit, which is true. But also the way we're raising children now, like when I think about the way my parents and grandparents were raised in the Soviet Union. Like animals. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you, a five-year-old did something they didn't know not to do, get a fucking beating for just for that. Right. And that was normal. Yeah. Completely normal. And think how we understand a lot more about the impact of shit like that. Yeah. And that's why we don't do it. So in the world has improved in so many ways, but we are in the age of anxiety and insecurity because, I mean, you say, Francis, you know, all of this has happened before. I think AI is a different level. It's a different level of challenge to humanity. That's going to hypercharge everything. It's going to be very, very, very, very weird really soon. And maybe sooner than we'd like. Yeah. I'm a little concerned. Yeah. I'm a little concerned about what might happen post midterm. And one of the rumblings that I'm hearing post is after the midterms, the United States might start attacking Iran again. I don't know if this is true or if this is just speculation, but good Lord, I hope it's not true. So I don't know what it is, but I'm really concerned because this whole Iran thing is like we're at war, but no one talks about it anymore. It's been this like stagnated thing in the media and what is going on with the straight and form moves like boats are getting through, but they have to be ushered. You know, they have to be guided by battleships and shit. And like, are they fighting off people all the time? I hear they are. I hear people are trying to attack these battleships all the time. It's like, what, what happens after the midterms? Because right now, if they did it right now, they'd get crushed in the midterms. And there's a lot of speculation. They're already going to lose the midterms. So if that, if they're waiting until after that's over, before they do this, things get real ugly. You got, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, well, you say that I take that and I raise what's happened in the UK. Our defense minister came out and when he was speech, I can't remember what the exact context or where the speech was being held, but he was talking about how we need to start, how British people need to start stockpiling. He did say, let's, he said three days worth of whatever, but it kind of makes sense because our infrastructure is very vulnerable. We haven't built a lot of infrastructure. We haven't built a lot of the shit that we should be, should have been building because we're very green and all of this other stuff. But isn't three days the modern version of two weeks to stop the spread? Right, right. And Joe, before we do run, can I have a piss? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll pause. We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen. So where were we? We were on Iran. We were talking about Iran. Are we back on air now or not? Yeah, we're back on air. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Let me just do this. Here you go, Mike. Do you want to do that? I'm already, I'm doing the triangular things. Okay. Nothing like three white guys talking about geopolitics. Why'd you have to racialize? That's going to be one of the comments. You have to today. You have to today. Today it's very, is that working? No, it's, I think it's dead. I'm filling the sucker up. I'll give you this in two seconds. Geopolitics is actually, that's not really correct. When I read the original term of geopolitics, it's sort of wildly used. It's used to talk about different countries, but it's really about like resources and geology, which makes sense. Like what is the actual, pull that up. What is the actual original term of geopolitics? I'm pretty sure it wasn't originally about like how countries get along with each other. I think it was about resources and about like, You know, geo. I mean, you can argue that the resources is how about how countries interact with each other, right? Study of how geography, such as the country's location, borders, natural resources, and accesses to ocean influences political power. So we don't think about it that way. We think about it as like the relations between countries. Yeah. And actually, I think we're living in a time where people totally forget that geography very much affects. I've got it. Thanks, brother. Geography very much affects how countries behave. It's the real thing. It's the real thing. Like why we love Ukraine so much. Does it nothing to do with the fact they're on trillions of dollars in minerals? Yeah. Nothing? Well, and for Russia, the reason they feel so passionate about it is I think we've talked about this before. Eighty percent of all the shit that matters in Russia is in the westernmost 20 percent of the country. So Russia always tries to expand westwards to expand its buffer zone. And that's basically what has historically happened every time they've been strong. So invading Ukraine. Ukraine is a kind of expected thing for them to do as well. But coming back to Iran, I mean, the geography of Iran is what this is all about, because it seems like from the conversations we've had with people, the administration got a little carried away here. The American administration? Yeah. How dare you come to my country and tell us we're doing things wrong? I'm not sure about wrong, but. Yeah, I think they thought it was going to be like Venezuela. That's exactly right. That's exactly what they thought. This is the same mistake they made from Operation Desert Storm, you know, to when we went in in the 1990s in Iraq, it was quick and easy. Bang, bang, got it done, kick some ass. So when the 2000s came around after 9-11 and we went back into Iraq, I don't think anybody expected it was going to be this prolonged shit show that it became. I think the people supported it because they thought, yeah, well, they're doing it. That's how 9-11 happened. Let's go. Let's go in there and kick some ass. And then it's like, oh, my God, we're there 20 years later. What the fuck is this? But it's also this idea that you could bring democracy to Iraq, you know, a country that has never had democracy, that doesn't understand it. Yeah. And even in our own countries, like the UK, it took a long time for us to get democracy. Well, you think we're so special that we're going to go over there and go, hey, guys, we've got this magic system. Everyone's going to go, yeah, that's great. And then what? They're all going to live in paradise? Definitely. There won't be any corruption. That's really important. When a country comes in and fucking hangs your leader on television, you know, afterwards, everybody's cool. Well, this is the interesting thing with Iran, right? Because there were people. So last time we were here, it was right around the time that the war started. Yeah. And then we had this guy called Robert Pape on the show. I don't know if you've seen his stuff. He's a military air power analyst. And he basically said exactly how it was going to go. This is before the invasion. Yeah. Yeah. And we just had him on just now to talk about it. And he calls it the escalation trap. And he talks about how effectively America trapped itself in this situation, particularly with the Strait of Hormuz. And actually, his argument is now, look, I'm not I can't judge whether it's true or false. But so far, everything he said to us worked out is this is put Iran on the path to become a regional hegemon. They are now going to be in a position. Well, they're way more powerful than they were before this conflict. How so? Because they are they have been given the legitimacy to block the Strait of Hormuz. And they are now becoming more powerful against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, who are their primary opponents and also Israel. They control a lot of the oil and where that goes. And the Houthis as well. The problem is the Saudis have this pipeline that goes to the Red Sea. So the idea is you don't need the Strait of Hormuz. You can go around it. But the Houthis are bombing the shit out of that pipeline. Right now. So it's it's a trap. It was a trap, according to his analysis. And that's why coming back to your point, the war isn't over and you have to find a way to resolve it. And his argument was you got to get out of this as quickly as possible. Or it's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. And you see that now where Iran is in a position they've basically got it like they've got the global economy. And a real naked choke. That's that's what that's why gas prices are what they are. That's what diesel prices are what they are. It's why, you know, Trump talks about, oh, you know, Zelensky is it's not Zelensky bombing Russian refineries. It's causing the diesel price to get to this point. The war in Ukraine has been going on for four years. But the price started really going up when the war in Iran started. And this is where all these problems are coming from. And Iran can do this as long as they want. It hurts them, too. But his argument. they can carry on doing this because for them it's about survival. survival. It's like Russia in 1941. You're taking casualties, millions of people being captured, but for you this is about survival. You know Trump's got the midterms to worry about. You know after the midterms he's not going to have the House, may not have the Senate. He's going to be up to his eyeballs in investigations, congressional committees, impeachment proceedings, all of that shit. So this war has now put America in a weaker position or its leaders, maybe not America, but its leaders in a weaker position. That means you've got more leverage. And you can see in the rhetoric now with like I said the Zelensky thing and all the rest of it, there's a lot of flailing about. There's a lot of flailing about trying desperately to get gas prices down. And Iran knows this. They're not dumb. They're watching this and going every day that this goes on, we've got more leverage. And it's in their interest to carry on that until they get the deal they want, which is get American bases. Get American bases out of the Middle East entirely. Well, they've already fucked up the American bases in the Middle East to a point where it's going to take decades to fix them, right? Is that right? So we were reading, I don't know, what do I know? But they have bombed bases where American troops have, it's more than 20 of them. We pulled it up the number the other day. It's a large number. And you got to think like how much destruction, like we're not seeing videos where they're detailing all the different things that happened. And from what I hear, it's pretty extensive. And the problem with this asymmetrical warfare, the problem with drone bombing, the problem with all this stuff is that it's like regular countermeasures don't seem to work. Like what they figured out in Ukraine where they're using the monofilament line to control these drones so you can't even use anti-drone weapons. It's like you're almost exposed. And so if you have an air base and like the attack that the Ukrainians did on the Russians where they blew up all those planes, like that's kind of wild that you can go in there and do billions of dollars worth of damage in one night. And it's like, this is a different world we're living in. We're not living in a world where it just, you have to launch missiles. They see the missiles come and they shoot them out of the sky with the iron dome. That's not the, it's not the same thing anymore. Drone technology has changed everything. One of the things that I love about our job is that we get to meet so many interesting people either because they've been on the show or just because they're friends of friends. I was talking to an ex special forces guy and I said to him, could we put, I said, I don't agree with this, but could we put boots on the ground in Iran? And he just laughed. He went, let's take all the politics out of it. He goes, nobody would agree to that because the terrain is so mountainous. How are you going to achieve that? It's, it's impossible. You're not going to do that. And he, and he also said to me, I think Robert paper echoed this. There has never been a regime change achieved solely through airstrikes. And the first thing I said to him, I said, I'm not going to do airstrikes. It doesn't happen. So you go, well, what, how is this going to evolve? How is this going to actually evolve? Does anybody know? Is this just vibes? Is there a bigger plan? What's going to happen? Because What do you mean by, is it just vibes? Is it by vibes? It's like, did they actually think this through? Did they think if this actually happened, A could happen, B could happen, C could happen. And if A could happen, what's our strategy for A? If B could happen, what's our strategy for B? If C could happen, what's, or were they just like basically high off Venezuela and they were like, Hey, we smashed Maduro. Let's go in. Well, it's also how much does Trump know about how this all could possibly play out if they started bombing Iran and what was he told? And what did he, how did he manage the information that he got or how did the people get access to him or not get access to him? Right. So that's also part of this conversation. It's the same with, this is why Vladimir Putin is four years deep into a three day special military operation in Ukraine because he was told you're going to go in there, we're going to get Zelensky out, we're going to land paratroopers in Hostomel, land all our shit, everybody's, and the people are going to rise up and support us, which is exactly what they said about Iran, by the way. Right. Take out the leader, the people will rise up, take over and whatever. Um, and it seems to be that that's not how it works. And quite often you get these situations from what we are told where not all of the information is presented equally. There is not the process of deliberation that I think we'd all hope there is for decisions of this magnitude. Right. It's more like Francis said, Venezuela event went very well. We're on a roll. What's next? Mm. You know, and that sounds shocking and simplistic and whatever, but that is literally what people we have spoken to who, who are close to, to the decision-making process have told us. Well, it's also very enticing if you're a guy who wants to leave his mark on history to be the guy who took down the evil Iranian regime. You know, we took down Venezuela, you know, and then you, you can go in there and have that too, as your list of accomplishments. And if someone's blown enough smoke up your ass and if you believe it, you're going to die. Right. And we all know that Israel tried to get a bunch of different presidents to try to do the same thing. I mean, they tried to do it with the Obama administration. They tried to do a lot of administrations like, why don't we do this? And they were like, eh, I don't like it. Which, which is, well, for me, that's why the ultimate responsibility rests with the people who pull the trigger, right? A hundred percent. Because everyone's going to present you with all kinds of information. Yeah. And it's within, you know, Israel's interest to, to do it. I mean, they, they would like us to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's true. And I think that's where there's a divergence between the foreign policy interest of Israel and the foreign policy interest of the United States and the world. Right. And everybody, I understand why different countries pursue their own interests, but it's the job of the American presidential administration to do what's right for America. Yeah. How crazy. What a wild thought. Yeah. So it's complicated, but it's having a massive impact economically across the world. And, and as bad as it is in the US, you are actually way more insulated from the consequences of this war than we are in the rest of the world. In Europe, I have friends who are like farmers in Australia. They are really struggling to get diesel, you know? And the same with, you know, the, the European situation, most countries have a lot of supply for like a year's worth. The UK has two months worth of diesel supply. Oh God. Yeah. So it's, it's been a big problem. And the reason you say they might strike again is because what else do you do? Do you do, do you just let it keep stagnating? Like what do you do? Well, you, or you have to, I mean, I thought the best way out here was for Trump to do what Trump does, which is to sell, to sell a deal that he did with Iran. And that deal probably would have been worse than what was in place before, because you just bombed the shit out of their country. They're angry, a little bit unhappy about that. But you do a deal with them and then you just go, this is the greatest deal ever, you know? Right, right, right. Yeah. That would be nice. Yeah. Trump, if you're listening, that's the move. Just say you won. Well, we'll all go with you. We just don't want this to escalate, you know? And then the narrative is always they can't, we can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. It's okay. I agree with that. It doesn't seem like it'd be a good idea to have a regime that kills their own citizens if they protest. It doesn't seem like they would be the kind of people. That you would want to be able to just kill enormous groups of people with one missile. Yeah. And that's really the question, because I understand that logic, which is why I understand the Israeli position, which is like, these guys want to kill us. We can't have them have a nuclear weapon. And I understand a lot of Americans would also agree with that. Of course. The question is though, was this the right strategy to achieve that outcome? Also was the question, the question is, were they really capable of doing that? And were they, they definitely were enriching uranium past the point. They needed for energy. Yeah. Right. But they weren't at the point where they needed it for nuclear weapons. And then converting it into nuclear weapons is a completely different ball game. And Scott Horton laid that out on my podcast and I'll butcher it if I try to repeat it, but it was pretty complex and pretty, and he was pretty clear that they were nowhere near doing that. Also hadn't the Ayatollah issued like a fatwa against the construction of nuclear weapons? Yeah. But the question is- What was that like? Well, right. How much do you trust the Ayatollah? The Ayatollah, I mean, stereotypically speaking, they don't seem to be entirely consistent in what they say. My understanding is different on the nuclear weapon thing. I mean, with some things they are. Yeah. Beheading you for dancing. Yeah. You know. I'm very consistent on that. But my understanding on how easy it is to get, I remember talking to my granddad who was an astrophysicist about this, like it's not that hard to get from you've got enriched material to you've got a nuclear weapon. It doesn't take that long in today's world. The first one. And then that took a lot of effort with the Manhattan Project. But now that everybody knows how to do it- Well, this is why India and Pakistan got nuclear weapons. Right. It wasn't, we thought that you'd have nuclear power. Great. And they're like, "Look what we figured out." Yeah. Miraculously. So I totally understand the concern. I haven't heard a great explanation of how this conflict was supposed to achieve that. This is why the 12 day war made perfect sense to me. Like you bombed their nuclear facilities. You see if you get it, that's the percentage play. But this just, it doesn't seem, no one ever explained how one would lead to the other. How doing this conflict this way would achieve non-neutralization. nuclear run. In fact, it seems to me now, inevitably, if you're Iran, you do everything you can to survive, and then you do everything you possibly can to get a nuke as quickly as possible so that this can never happen again. Right? Yes. If you were Iran, that's what you would do. Yes. So there's been a miscalculation, it feels like, to me here. And I'm not sure that when people say, well, you've got to deal with Iran's nuclear threat. I agree with them. I'm just not sure this was the right way to do it. And it became very quickly apparent to us early on in this conflict that that was going to be the case. What do you think could have been the right way to do it? If you ask Robert Pape, he says something like, you've got to have regional balancing, so you've got to strengthen Saudi Arabia and the UAE so there's some kind of balance in the region and no one wants to escalate the whole region to nuclear level. I don't know enough to say, whether that's right or wrong. And I think that's the real big question here is how are you supposed to get Iran to not have nuclear weapons? And maybe the truth here is, Joe, once this thing has been invented, eventually people are going to get it. You know, Iran is not, they're not some shitty little country in the middle of nowhere. It's a giant country, which has control over a huge amount of its own natural resources, but also then one of the biggest arteries in the world for energy and fertilizer and gas and plastic and all of that stuff. You know, maybe the reality here is that there's no way that you can maybe extend that you can do deals, but ultimately they are going to get them. And that's a terrible outcome. But I haven't heard anyone convincingly explain how you avoid that. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting as well is that you look at countries that have had an empire, you know, they still have this sense of pride and honor in themselves. Like if you look at the Russians, you know, the Russians had a great empire. You look at the Persians. I mean, you don't need to be a historian to look. And, you know, the Persian empire was once very, very, very powerful. So there is still something in their psyche where if they feel that they're being pushed around, it's not like a smaller country, but they're still, how dare you? This is the Persian empire. This is where we came from. This is who we are. And we are going to fight you. No, it's 90 million people. It's a bigger country than Britain. That's crazy. Our empire was bigger though. I'm glad it was. Yeah. It's, it's disturbing to think that this could pop off after the midterms. It really is. It has been bothering me a lot the last few days. Why does it bother you so much, Joe? Because I have a feeling that this, uh, preparing for, uh, you know, having food and water is there's a real concern. I have a feeling there's a real concern. And, um, if the power grid does get attacked and if we, if cities do get bombed, it could get really fucking crazy in this country. I don't think Iran is in a position to do, to bomb America though. I think that's probably well, cyber attacks with the grid, but, um, sleeper cells. Like we, we really have no idea how many people came in over the last four years and how many of them are in a terror cell. And it's, this is not right wing speculation. You're just dealing with a number that is, it's so massive, right? So the low end number is 10 million. That's the low end in four years. And so some Republicans think the high end is over 20. We don't know. It's just pure speculation. There's the ones that they've counted. Secret service sites, heightened threat environment as air defense systems deployed at Mar-a-Lago and airport this today, surface to air missile systems have been deployed at Mar-a-Lago and Donald Trump international airport at the request of the U S secret service. I didn't even know there was a Donald Trump international airport. The spokesperson said the agency is operating at Mar-a-Lago and Mar-a-Lago international airport. They're operating in a heightened threat environment. Right. So I think something's about to go down. And, um, I mean all the, the, when you go super kooky, tighten up that tinfoil hat, people think that it's a false flag and that we, you know, this is so we will support this and that. And I don't know, but, uh, I do know that if you keep fucking around one day, you find out, and it seems like we've been fucking around and it seems like they're telling us, Hey, we have to find out. What's fascinating to me is how, because we, we don't live in the U S so we come here a couple of times a year. We see you, we do a bunch of interviews. I remember being here two years ago on the eve of the presidential election. And everybody in Austin was like, you, you guys are going to LA next. Fuck. No, no, there's going to be riots. It's going to be crazy. And we get there, the election happens. And it was so overwhelming because it was the presidency, the house, the Senate. The college, the electoral college, the popular vote. There was nothing in LA. Everybody was chill because like America voted for this. Like that's the, what's what America did. Well, people were very upset, but I think one of the real issues in America when it comes to protests is they're organized and paid for. Yeah. No question. And there, there was nothing to be gained by tearing up Los Angeles after the presidential election. That's a good point. They're like, listen, where's the protests about us? We're bombing Iran. Where are those? If, if protests are organic, most people are very unhappy with us going into Iran. But where are the protests? Well, there's no one organizing and paying for those protests. So they don't exist. That's interesting. Yeah. That, that's, I hadn't thought about, that is actually legitimately a very good point. It's so hard for people on the left to accept this. And I have friends that are very left and I talked to them about paid protesters and they push back and I'm like, listen, man, you just got to understand when you see those vans pull up and you see those signs come out and those signs already printed out in advance. And this is about an event that just happened 24 hours ago. What's the odds that someone's not paying for all this? And then when you talk to people that actually say they are paid to protest and there's people that show up at every protest and those people make a living protesting. It's a career now. This is a career. This is a real job. If you're a ne'er-do-well and you're also like, you know, sort of peripheral. Like, yeah, man, fuck the fascist. Like you can, you don't have to work. You could just go to protest and scream and yell and they give you a sign. And now you have a job. And it's a great place to meet girls, which I imagine. I'll bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not for the long term. I actually saw a lady. They're going to be a little unstable. If you're into mental instability. Who isn't? What is this, Jamie? I just Googled protests about it and there was an article in Reuters about. About the bombing in Iran? Yeah. Lots of protests. Lots of people died in other countries about it. Right. But in America. Yeah. 145 different cities. Right. What kind of demonstrations did they have? I didn't see any of them. I certainly didn't see them on the news. No. Were they small demonstrations? Like how many people were in these demonstrations? You had a map there, Jamie? Would you mind scrolling back up? Well, there's maps on this about a bunch of stuff. Oh, right, right. But it's interesting. OK, so there's ones with big signs that were printed out in advance. Clearly. Like, look at all the signs, all uniform. Like, who got who made the signs? How'd you get them? United States flag upside down. That's interesting. So I was wrong. It just hasn't been in the news. But I haven't seen it like the No Kings protests were huge. Well, this is your point. It's about scale, right? Like, you're not seeing it overwhelm the country in the same way like you had in 2020, for example. Right, right. That's. But coming back to my point about going to L.A. two years ago, I remember the mood. We had Rob Schneider on the show, like the day after the election. He was, like, really happy. The mood was different. And I just wonder, in an alternative reality, if Trump does Venezuela and then doesn't do this or does Cuba next, then it's like Venezuela. And it's just like you lock down your your hemisphere. You get the easy wins. It's a whole different legacy. Right. Yeah. You know, it's basically Blair without Iraq. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how much sense I'll make to Americans. But it's it's like you. You came in, you closed the border because you've got to give credit where it's due. Right. He's closed the border. Right. It was the Iran decision that fucked everything. Yeah. Yeah. Because even the ICE stuff. Look, most people in this country don't like the idea of a militarized police force with no identification just pulling people over. It opens up a world of problems. It sets terrible precedents. And this is what people that are pro ICE don't seem to understand. They could use that in another way. Now we've set a precedent. You're allowed to have a militarized police force with masks on and they don't have any identification and they're snatching up people. And some of them happen to be American citizens. Like if you're supporting this, you got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. OK, well, you just opened up the fucking hen house and now the chickens are running all over the place like you could do whatever you want. Now, if you're allowing that and that's normalized in society, that's not good. But at the same point, you do have a bunch of very good people. You've got a bunch of very dangerous criminals that trend to Aragua people. There's a lot of different gangs that have gotten in and they're setting up illegal activities and kidnappings and all kinds of shit. Cartel violence inside American borders. That's real, too. So like support of ICE to go after that is pretty strong. But it's also as well what it does to your democratic process. Because one of people, part of Trump's appeal, as we all know, is that he marketed himself as the outsider. I'm not part of the political system. Right. You're going to get a radically different presidency with me. I'm not going to be the other ones. And one of the promises was here you go, Joe. one of the promises was like no forever wars we're not going to go around we're not going to do these wars i'm going to put america first it's going to prioritize american people because we've got real issues in this country that we need to sort out and the problem is when you do iran what you say to people is it's just more of the same it doesn't matter who you vote for you're still going to get these types of wars and so what happens is that people then feel more and more disenfranchised that they're not connected that it doesn't matter who they vote for you're undermining democracy yeah and that's a really dangerous place to be because once people feel that democracy doesn't resent doesn't represent them then they start disengaging and again it goes back to that argument about vacuums that power vacuum still needs to be filled and then you have people going well what we actually need is a king or what we really need is to do our own thing and that's how the fractures appear within society you got those weird kids today that think we should burn it all down and start from scratch it's like okay show me your plan what's what's your fucking plan what's your burn it all down like long-range strategy well that's why i always uh look i'm not a historian but it's something i've always thought about i think calling the american revolution a revolution is uh inaccurate and that leads to a lot of confusion because it wasn't a revolution to me a revolution is when you overthrow the existing regime in your country right the russian revolution right you have the czar and the bolsheviks come in they overthrow the czar they install a new government right in the french revolution you have a monarchy the revolutionaries come in they execute the aristocracy and the king they institute a new government the american revolution is really a war of independence it's you guys saying we're going to separate away and in our part of the world we're going to have our own government you guys do whatever you want so america was not actually created in a revolution it's just people seeking independence it's like if scotland broke off from the united kingdom right and that i think changes the mentality because revolutions actually usually end very badly it's a very bad thing that happens they're very violent lots of people get killed the people who did the revolution usually get killed off uh first then they kill off the people who came this is what stalin did i mean his purges were just about you know you've you've the revolution has happened and now you've got all of these psychotic revolutionaries who don't know how to build anything they just want to tear everything down because that's what revolutionaries do and now we've got to get rid of them the revolutions are generally not the sort of thing you want to be around for when they happen um and so yeah the tearing tear it all down thing that doesn't appeal to me at all well it's just young kids that are saying this it's like this is these are the young democratic socialists and marxists they want to tear it all down it's a great message that resonates without actually having thought it through it's like you see that guy's pissing you off go punch him in the face okay what if he punches you back what if his friends show up you know what if what if there's a guy in a car across the street who sees it and he grabs you and throws you into traffic like there's a lot that can have let's play this out let's think this through if you fucking destroy america what what takes its place where does the money go where does your money go where who takes care of the streets like you know and i always say to these people who are like you know i'm a socialist i'm going you ever talk to a cuban talk to a cuban right talk to a venezuelan talk to a russian if it or talk to anybody from eastern europe anybody who's really experienced actual communism they're not fond of it no no they're not i remember i used to go to the coffee when i was doing when i was writing for stand-up and i i got a um i had a i got to know a guy who ran the coffee shop he was a cuban guy and we used to talk about communism all the time you know it's one way to pass the day and he actually said something to me he goes and because i was getting very frustrated at this point that right about 2018 2019 this the talk of socialism came back and it was very triggering to me on a personal level and and i was very upset and i was saying to him he was getting really frustrated and it was and i said to him like how do i how do you fight this and he goes you can't and i go what do you mean he goes look francis you know when you argue with somebody from the west who has grown up surrounded by this and you're saying about communism they can't understand it they can't comprehend it it's like saying to a really rich kid look don't walk down that alley don't walk down it at night because something's bad gonna happen to you he goes the only way they will ever truly understand is if they walk down the alley they get hit on the back of their head they feel the taste of blood in their mouth that's when they get it until then i hate to break it to you but you're fighting a losing bout and i'm talking as someone who grew up in cuba whose most of their family is cuban and have tried this time and time again there is a part of me that is slightly fatalistic that goes sometimes people need to see the mistakes for themselves you have to fall down you have to hurt your knees to realize like oh don't do that i also think we have to be honest and say that there is a thing going on in a lot of western societies where if you had assets in 2006 before the great financial crash you've done very well for the last 20 years but if you didn't your ability to buy a house to pay off your student loans all of that it's become more difficult and it's it's why that portion of society who feel that they've been locked out are feeling like they don't have a stake because they don't have a stake in society and that's when this kind of thing happens and i think that's something people people on the right and people like us who who i mean i i think communism is the most evil ideology that's ever been tried just numerically speaking it's a fact right but you have to make sure that it's not looking after people because what we do in britain we just go here's a handout you know you don't need to work just here's some money shut the fuck up right that doesn't work but what you have to do is make sure that society feels fair to everybody or to as great a number of people as possible and that there's opportunity to advance and for our generation we are in our early 40s now for our generation i'll be like joe if if we hadn't started trigonometry and haven't had the amazing success that we've had that we're so grateful for we'd be in that same boat we'd be in the exactly same boat and we'd be struggling now going like this thing it doesn't work anymore and i think that's where a lot of this stuff is coming from so yes it's it's one it's one of the things that i think people in the ai world don't really think about enough what happens when even if we don't if we even if we accept that actually in the long run jobs aren't going to all disappear and like all technology you create new jobs with it and all in the interim it's going to get very disruptive. And in that time, I really think Andrew Yang was onto something when he talked about the need to find a way. Yes, you're creating all this beautiful wealth. These five companies are creating all the wealth, but you've got to find a way that the rest of society feels like they've got a shot as well. They've got an opportunity. And unless we do that, I think this path down to where a lot of people feel really locked out and angry and frustrated and betrayed, I think that it's understandable. It's totally understandable. That's why the movie The Joker resonated so well. Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was. And I always say this. It's like society is basically a game. And, you know, you follow the rules, you do what you have to do, and you will get the rewards at the end of it. The problem is, is if for young people, which is very, very true, they feel they're not going to be able to do it. They feel they're not going to be able to do it. They not getting the rewards and everybody else's and they're working just as hard, if not harder than everyone else. Eventually, they're going to go, you know what? Fuck your game. Yeah. And the board goes up in the air. And that's what I think what we're seeing with young people. Sure. That's why they cheered when Luigi shot that United Healthcare guy. And that's crazy to me. But that's where it's coming from. Yeah. You know, that's crazy. It makes sense. And it's also that's the narrative that's being promoted in universities. You know, that kind of thinking, that revolutionary thinking making it sexy. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you when you combine that and also the other things they've been taught for generations now is to hate their own society. It's history. It's culture. You put all that together. It's a dangerous mix. Fun times. So but but I really think that there is a way to address it. Yeah. Which is that we have to think this is coming. People are locked out. How do we make sure they are included again? Yeah. Well, the if you ask the A.I. people, it's going to get super weird because the universal high income thing that you that you hear Elon talk about, that would be that every citizen of the United States would have a stake in artificial intelligence and that you would get just like if you live in Alaska, you get money from the oil companies. You get a check. People maybe people don't know this, but if you live in Alaska, you get a check. No, you get every don't know this, but if you live in Alaska, you get a check. No, you get every every month. Yeah, you get a check. Yeah, you get a you get an income. Wow. Let's find out how every month. Wow. Let's find out how many people in Alaska get it. you get an income. Wow. And what's the parameters, you many people in Alaska get it. And what's the parameters, you know, if you live on Native American they get checks. If you're Native American, you know, you can get a check. If you're a part of a tribe that has a casino, you know, you get a piece of the casino. And this is kind of what's going on with the United States when it comes to the consequences of AI and taking over automation, taking over jobs, taking over shipping, taking over commercial truck driving. You already see it all over Austin. You see these Waymos and cyber cabs. It's kind of nuts. I mean, I see as many of them sometimes as I do regular cars. It's really nuts how many Waymos you see. So those jobs are gone. They're taking jobs. And this is just the beginning of the storm. These are the first raindrops of the storm that is the consequences of AI completely taking over every aspect of society, which it'll probably do and do much better than what humans do. Then this becomes a problem of your identity. Like, how do you think of yourself as a person who works? And are you proud of that? Is that who you are? You know, you're proud to be useful. And, you know, you get great satisfaction out of your occupation. If all of a sudden your occupation is automated and you don't exist anymore, massive amounts of depression, massive amounts of drug addiction. And then you just give them a check. I don't know if that's going to be enough. Well, to your point about Native American reservations, from what I understand, the kind of social outcomes of that are not great. So here it is. No, not. Well, the Native American one is particularly bleak, but we can get into that. Alaska pays eligible residents an annual dividend called the permanent fund dividend for twenty twenty six. It's one thousand two hundred dollars per eligible person, including a two hundred dollar energy relief payment. So it's fourteen hundred bucks a year. That's not much. No, but it's a little something per what's that? Oh, per eligible person. Oh, oh, sorry. Includes a two hundred, including a two hundred dollar energy relief payment. So it's just. Twelve hundred bucks. Yeah. So if there's two people in your household that are eligible, well, how many how old do you have to be to be eligible? Who receives it? Is it a certain age? Those are an age requirement or is it all citizens or is it like voting citizens? Either way, it's not enough. No. Now, the the real question is when you're dealing with AI and this infinite amount of wealth it's going to generate, how much is enough? You know, when when Elon says universal high income, what are we talking about here? What does that mean? Are you saying you're going to give everybody five hundred thousand dollars a year? I'm not. I'm on board. OK, so then what happens? Are you, Joe? Because this is the flip side of this conversation, which, as you mentioned, the Native American situation site, you know yourself. You take a lot of meaning from the things that you do. Mm hmm. So just getting money. It's a dire straight song, right? Money for nothing. Yeah. And the chicks for free. I'm not sure. Well, with AI girlfriends, maybe you're going to get the chicks. They were talking about it. They were talking about guys complaining about people on MTV. Right, right, right. It wasn't really what the song was about. But I guess I think what I'm saying is there's a difference from saying, hey, I'm, you know, Mark or I am Elon or I am Sam and I've taken your job and I'm Elon, I'm Mark, I'm Sam. I've taken your job. ten thousand dollars a month there's a big difference there yeah and and unless that problem unless we as a society work out a way to do that you don't have to be a genius to work out that's not a recipe for a stable healthy society oh so i'll give you an i'll give you an example of something oh so when i was teaching i taught a kid he was very low ability he really struggled academically so we i gave him work which was you know which was less challenging than other kids sometimes he would be okay sometimes he would play up because he understandably had self-esteem issues one day he was playing up really really badly and i said chris look you're going to be in detention and i wanted to i never believed in just detention getting kids to be bored i wanted him to be useful and i was giving him what i thought was a punishment i said chris you see all the pencils in the room you're going to be in detention and i said i'm going to be in the classroom every single pencil i'm talking about colored pencils i'm talking about ordinary i want them sharpened and i want them perfect because we've got an art lesson after lunch he went and did it and when he brought the pencils back to me he was so happy he was so proud because he felt useful because he felt useful and he said and i saw a side of him that i'd never seen before because finally he got given a job that he could do he could do to a very high standard and he was and part of something and he said something to me that actually kind of teared me up he went can i come back tomorrow and do more so he felt good he felt good that he was useful and i think most people do yeah the real question is is it possible to teach people differently in school so instead of teaching people facts that they need to memorize and having to sit in a chair and making sure that you're doing everything that you're told because someday you're going to have to have a job and that's you're going to have to learn how to behave this way is it possible that you could teach people listen money is not the problem anymore resources in terms of like your ability to feed yourself and put a roof over your head that's not an issue anymore now your life is about pursuing your interests but we have to teach people that from the jump we have to teach people that from the time they're very young the older people that are set in their ways they're going to have a very difficult time changing and adapting but and then also people are going to have a very hard time having the same kind of motivation that people have when they grow up poor that's a superpower growing up poor is a superpower because it gives you a motivation like a drive that i don't think you get if you're a trust fund kid and your parents are worth a lot of money so we're going to have to teach people to have internal motivation instead of external motivation and we're going to have to teach people that there is a great benefit to to doing things that you don't want to do and then seeing the result to you know just putting off any sort of enjoyment that you might possibly have in the present time so that you can have more enjoyment in the future because you did that you sacrificed and you figured something out but we have to teach them how to that that way of thinking if you could teach them that listen man you don't have to worry about money anymore but that doesn't mean you don't have to worry about life like there's a lot of cool things that you can find that you can do with your life but now do those things and get a sense of purpose from you learning about yourself while you're doing something whatever it is whether it's becoming an author or whether it's you know what are making things whatever it is find a thing that you like and then teach people how to find the thing that interests them rather than finding just some menial job it's going to keep them depressed and just barely pay their bills i noticed this with my son the thing he loves to do with me the most is like paint the fence to him that's like the happiest time that we have together we we go and do something together that he feels is valuable he's learning he's doing it with me obviously you know father and son time as well but but he would much rather paint a fence with me than he would play a game much rather interesting it's more it's more meaningful for him right he's accomplishing something yeah and learning a skill and like you said you know there's stuff that people can do we have only been doing this thing this show up at a job and and doing working in an environment where people can do this thing they can do a city this is super recent in human history it's one of the reasons why subsistence tribes are so much happier than us because we've been doing that forever and the human reward systems are structured in a way that like if you hunt and fish and grow your own food that's normal like you're you've you've very little anxiety that's that the great werner herzog documentary happy people you know the documentary about the i haven't seen it tell me about it oh it's called happy people life in the taiga and it's all about these fishermen and trappers and hunters that live in siberia that have like no mental illness they're all just happy and they live a completely subsistence lifestyle and one of the most brutal climates on earth fucking siberia and you know and they they're fine like they're having a good time we're fucked up and we think oh my god i could ever love like that but you're not happy but they are happy what is our goal is our goal to be happy because this thing that we've created these jobs in in corporations and in cubicles and this thing that is normal for us is not really normal for us and we've kind of decided somewhere along the way that this is the only way that you have to have a job without a job what do we do what about the idea that something that the human race has created no longer makes it necessary for you to do a job anymore now instead of worrying about hunting and gathering food the next stage of being a human is pursuing interests i mean it could be a gigantic explosion of creativity and of innovation and art and who knows what people can do especially with the access to technology that we have today and all the different things that people can we could we're just assuming but this way that we live that sucks that everybody hates is the only way to live and i just don't buy that i mean clearly i'm biased because clearly i went through all those process of being a human being and i just don't buy that i mean clearly i'm biased because clearly i went through and struggling and figuring out a way in life and then trying a bunch of very difficult things that other people avoided and finding a path but i don't know if that's the only way way to live. And I don't think it is. I think there's a competitive drive in people that exist no matter what. And if we're not competing over finances anymore, maybe we'll compete over art or accomplishments or creativity or fill in the blank, like whatever you decide to pursue. And of course, you're probably going to make more money doing that on top of the money you already get. It's not like we're going to go into a full communist state where the entire population only get $500,000 a year. We take from the billionaires. We distribute evenly. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying like you start out with the $500,000, whatever it is. I don't know what the number is going to be. Start out with that. And then you can still make money on top of that if you want. But do you have the drive to live a special life, to live a fulfilled and interesting life? Well, there's a former soccer player called Danny Drinkwater. It's a great name. He won the Premier League with Leicester City. He's a very, very small team. It was one of the biggest surprises in football that no one ever predicted that this team would win. And he went on to have an amazing career. And towards the end of his career, he was struggling. He was struggling with alcohol. And then all these pictures started to emerge of him after he finished his career on a building site. And people were taking the piss out of him going, look how far Danny's fallen. He was a Premier League champion. Now he's working on a building site. And there was an interesting story. He was a former soccer player. He was a of him it was like i love my life i'm training to be an electrician i love doing this i get a sense of achievement out of it i get the same camaraderie that i got in the dressing room with the boys on the on the building site i'm actually happy this is what i want to do because he realized that he still needed something he still needed to achieve something but because in our own kind of fucked up way we see playing elite sport as somehow less than building something that it's lesser than but he's actually found the purpose by doing that well it's interesting that you would never go up to someone who's working as an electrician look at you fucking loser working as an electrician but if that person had been a movie star and then you know stopped doing movies and said i think i'd rather be an electrician then you're allowed to talk shit about them but it's just shitty humans one of the biggest problems we have is we're not teaching people how to think or not i don't want to say teaching people how to think but informing them on the more beneficial ways to construct your life through thoughts and instead we're allowing these stupid kind of like that kind of like tear them all down behavior to go unchecked like you really you know how transparently pathetically jealous that is to want to go up to a guy who is like an elite soccer player and you're upset because he has a job that's like yours you know how fucking nuts that is that's nuts it's a status thing i think we had this great guy on called will stork he wrote a book called the status game are you familiar with yes yeah yes this is the this is the reason people do this i think is it's a status thing so premier league footballer high status electrician low status and also let's be honest if you haven't got to where you've got to where you wanted to in life and you haven't got the status that you want it's kind of satisfying for some people to see someone else fall down oh yeah and then you go oh i'm not the only one sure it's actually one of the things i do i really like about america you have a kind of failure is just the step to the next success attitude here a lot of people have that here so it's very normal for people to start a business business doesn't work they start the next one doesn't work start the next one it pops and actually i was seeing stats i can't remember where i got it so i hope this isn't bs but i'm going to maybe jamie can check but i think uh with every business you start and fail it increases your chance of succeeding well not it increases but if you start by the time you start the third business your your chance of that business being successful is significantly higher than the first one i think this is elizabeth holmes strategy when she gets out of here by the way her uh husband lives in town lives in austin so we might be seeing her at the mothership one day wow but i think it's a really important thing that and i think we should all do we should we should all talk about our failures more because it's part of the journey yeah you know if success isn't as sweet when you get it first time around because you don't appreciate it but if you fail and fail and fail again and finally something works you just number one what that teaches you is gratitude number two is it shows other people oh shit if he's failed and failed and failed and then made it maybe i can do that maybe not in the same field but maybe my journey is going to be like that in a different way it's one of the main things that i think a lot of people can get out of jiu-jitsu other than self-defense is that everybody starts out terrible you you you i mean you have a little bit of an advantage if you're strong you know you have a little bit of an advantage if you've maybe done some other martial art before but not much i mean even me i i'd started out i had years of taekwondo and kickboxing and i got mauled just mauled i mean i was it was so humiliating but humbling in a great way where i was like wow i had no idea i was that vulnerable i was walking around all delusional thinking that shit's not gonna work on me you might work great but everybody who you train with if they stick it out you see them growing and getting better and better and better and better and better and better and we all you you all go on this path together where then all of a sudden i've seen guys that they started out they were terrible and then a couple years later i see them rolling with the new guys and manhandling them like this is amazing like look at this guy like now he's like tapping people out that are new and then you see the look in his face like wow i can this is real i learned i got better it's something that i thought was impossible in the beginning you're so the mountain is so high like fuck you take one step you fall down you're like this is terrible and for a lot of people their self-esteem can't handle it and they never go through that process but if you could force yourself to go through that process it's one of the very best processes of a failure and then learning from failure and then you get a little bit better and then more failure and then learning and then a little bit and you keep going and you realize like oh this is a journey and along this journey i can apply these same principles to essentially anything in my life and get better just even about just being a human just better at being a human realizing the dumb shit that you do that sabotages your life or fucks up your diet or gets you drinking again whatever it is you can apply the same strategy that you learn to get good at jujitsu to anything in life you know i remember when um i was nearly 10 years ago i was uh opening freddie izzard on his european tour and i remember people go to me like who's like one of your biggest influences and eddie was that person because when eddie started out doing comedy in london way back when like late 80s early 90s you know what his nickname was on the circuit what no laughs eddie that's what it was like he would come on and everyone's like oh my god it's this guy oh fuck really was that before or after he started dressing like a chick that was before so did the dressing like the chick turn it all around no i think what actually turned it around is that he was just and when i spoke to him he was like look i was relentlessly driven and focused i knew that this was what i wanted to do i knew that this is what i wanted to achieve and what was happening is that at the beginning it wasn't working for me so i needed to change in order to get to where i wanted to go but i know he likes dressing like a woman so maybe that was not letting that one go bro i love that guy but it's weird because he is a i think now maybe he's changed but he told me he likes women and i'm like cool you know like he came on the podcast he was great i've done a couple podcasts with him but the point is like that is what he enjoys doing and to stop him from doing that in the past maybe allowed him to be freer on stage which allowed him to be better on stage because it is a journey of self-discovery when you try to figure out what is it about your act that doesn't work what is it about this that the people are not buying like and maybe that was a part of it for him maybe it was a part but he's also trying to do something radically different at the time that nobody else was doing but once he nailed it he kind of he just exploded for him but i always remember that lesson that i took from him which was you've got to go through the shit you have to that's just part of the process and you've also as much as possible not going to take it personally because you've got to accept that this is what life is teaching you if you want to do that you've got to take the hits and you've got most of the time you do things it's not going to work out in quite the way you want but then you take the lessons from it and then you move on and it's gradual it's not like we all want to be the guy who steps on stage gets on a soccer field touches the ball everyone goes wow what a genius 99.99999 of us ain't like that yeah and even the one percent of the point whatever it is one percent they're not either yeah it's all bullshit it's a hundred percent there's like some people have a better sense of humor and some people have a better sense of humor and some people start than others but everybody has to learn and grow along the way and it's interesting with eddie like he applied that same sort of grinding strategy to a lot of the crazy physical feats that he did like when you ran around the entire U.K., and he didn't train for it? Have you seen that documentary? No, no. I remember the story. Insane. It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen because literally the skin on his feet were falling off. Like, he had to take a couple of days off. He's running a marathon a day with no training. And he had to take some days off because his feet were so destroyed, he couldn't stand on them. Forget about running 26 miles. I mean, you're seeing the raw, open skin. It's horrible. And he's got a doctor or a nurse tending to his wounds. It's terrible. I mean, just like raw, torn apart feet. Next day, 26 miles. Took a day off, maybe two, maybe two days off, and the entire time he did it. It was nuts. And it's like that same thing. Just keep going. You can do it. And in this TikTok generation where everybody wants everything to happen really quickly, you want to be an influencer, you want to get famous, you want to get this, you want to get that, I don't want to get fat, oh, take a pill, bang. You know, whatever it is. Or Ozempic. There's this desire to have something happen to you very quickly versus the satisfaction that you get from knowing, like, the Jiu-Jitsu mountain. Like, look, I started down there. I started down there. Now I'm all the way the fuck up here. Right. And that process just makes you into the person you're actually supposed to be. Yeah. It's the process that makes you into the person you're supposed to be. Yeah, and anything difficult. We often talk about this, you know, with our show, because sometimes. Sometimes we're doing interviews with people where, like, this is a serious thing that we're doing here. It's a serious person. This is going to be big. It's important we get it right. If you had catapulted us when we started the show into the position of interviewing that person, we wouldn't know what the fuck to do, and we would screw it up very badly. Oh, for sure. It's the process that gets you to the point where you're actually able to have a conversation on a high level. And it's different things. Sometimes it's about being prepared to challenge people, call out certain facts. Sometimes it's just about, like, the conversation's dying out a little bit. Where do we go to? All of that stuff you learn along the way. And if you haven't got the miles on the clock up until that point, being parachuted into that position, this is why it's actually probably very, very hard to, like, start a TV show and get the right talent or whatever, because they haven't got the miles on the clock to actually be able to do the job. And it's that process that gives you the ability to actually perform at a high level, because you've been there. You've. Right. You've fucked up. You've made mistakes. You've learned from them. You've grown as a person. You've become more humble. The process of doing stuff humbles you, like you said, because. No doubt. You go, oh, wait, I had this idea, and it totally didn't work. Maybe I need to revise how I think about this. And I think life is just this one long lesson in what you talked about, which is deferred gratification. I'm going to give up pleasure or comfort. And comfort's a big one, Joe. It's not even pleasure, is it? Right. It's comfort. It's comfort. That's what kills you. You get comfortable, and it's a lot more. It's a lot more comfortable to sit at home on the sofa. It's terrible for you, but it's comfortable. And it's overcoming that and learning to get out of your comfort zone. Like, all the good stuff, it's on the other side of that. That's going to be the real problem with giving people universal high income. Right. Is that, like, people don't like to just leave comfort. And they're not going to want to do anything other than just take the money that they get and then, I don't know, party. I think so. But I also think we've all been. I don't know. We've never talked about it, but I imagine there's been times in your life when you've gone down that route. You've taken some time to just veg, you know? And you do it for a bit, and, you know, you play a video game for a week nonstop, and you're just immersed in that and whatever. And then you realize it sucks. Like, the first day you do it, it's kind of fun. The second day is fun. But eventually, you get to the point where you realize this sucks. And I think with having this universe of universal high income or universal basic income or whatever, people will get to the point where they go, actually, this has been fun. It's like partying. A lot of people spend their, you know, 20s doing that. Eventually, you grow out of it. 99% of people do. Hopefully. You've met a lot of people who haven't grown out of it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, especially me, because I know a lot of comedians that are basically, like, 45-year-old boys. Yeah. Yeah. Because especially if you don't have any responsibility other than getting on stage at night. You know, comics have the most open-ended schedules. And a lot of them have zero discipline. And they don't have to. They can play video games all day. They work at a comedy club for a weekend. They make enough money to pay their bills for a month. They don't have to worry. And so they're childlike. And they just drink at night and fucking eat terrible food and play video games. Do they eventually, though, get married and have kids and settle down? Some of them do. Yeah. Some of them don't. It's a weird, like, sort of frozen adolescence. I think once you get to the kids thing, and we see it with, you know, people that work with us, you start, you get a serious girlfriend, suddenly the attitude shifts, they get a little bit more serious. Children's the big one. Yeah. Yeah. It just lets you go, oh, boy, I have to take care of a tiny little person. Like, this is not the same fun and games anymore. And set an example. Yes. Because they don't learn from what you tell them. They learn from what they see. Right. And so if daddy's sitting on the sofa, what are they learning? Well, hopefully the world will learn, right, in that regard. Like, so if Universal. Universal income becomes a thing. Well, I think there's a lot of pros that come out of it. And here's the pros. Starvation ends. Goes away. The lack of food ends. Goes away. The struggling to pay your bills ends. So all that stress ends. So how much crime do we lose because of that? I bet we lose a lot. I bet there's a long transitional period because people have been ingrained to certain types of behaviors and actions, and they have personality flaws they've developed over the years. Once society settles into the concept, I bet crime radically gets reduced. You mean like acquisites of crime, stealing? Necessity. Yeah, because they're. I mean, like, you know, the silly one was the AOC one, where they're, you know, stealing stuff from stores. They just eat bread for their family. Like, right. That's why they've got the Lacoste trainers. Yeah, right. No, that's not necessarily what's going on, right? But once society settles, and then there's not a haves and haves not situation at the same time. I mean, it's the same extreme that we have today. Because the extreme that we have today, not as much in this country, because it's kind of thought of as the land of opportunity, but there's a lot of countries where, like, if you don't have, you will never have. And this is just how it goes. If that becomes something that's adopted and employed by all nations, is that the amount of wealth it generates is so fucking extreme, and jobs are gone, and that people now have money. But you never have to worry about working. So the fear and the anger. The fear and the anger at least gets significantly mitigated. I mean, that's the hope. That's the real hope. And if they just want to play Call of Duty all day, like, who fucking cares? As long as they like their life. It's like, you know, it's like we need to train people to enjoy their life and not think that your life is just a thing you do that sucks so you can make money, so that you can buy stuff, so it makes you feel good about doing the thing that you do that sucks. And then one day you die. Like, that's. The encouraging thing about human beings is I think we are very adaptable. Yes. We are very adaptable. Yes. And I think the things that matter to us are the things that have always mattered to us. It's family, it's human connection, it's meaningful work, or meaningful activity at least. It might not be work, it might just be activity. You know, I love chopping wood to, like, I could buy wood, but I don't, I buy wood that I have to chop, 'cause I like chopping the wood. I like, and I like doing it with my son, I like teaching him how to do it. I could pay a guy to paint the fence. I could pay a guy to paint the wall, but if there's little things that I can do with him, or I can do myself, I actually prefer to do that. And I think it's actually some, so we will, I think we will find a way to adapt, because it's what we've always done. That's, I think, the big hope. But I do think the transition is gonna be a big challenge. And I think, I really hope the people who are doing this AI stuff think about this, a lot. I think it's gonna be them who's gonna have to think about this a lot. And if I were them, I'd be thinking, "How do I give as much of this away as I can so that everybody feels included in this thing?" - Yeah. - Otherwise, there's not enough robot defenders in the world who are gonna guard your mansion. - Right. - Is how I think about it. And yeah, I think we'll get to that. I think people will realize that's the reality of this. - I hope so. - Do you know what always gives me hope? Is that every time I taught Greek mythology to the kids and we did the Odyssey, everybody got locked in. And I taught in a place where most kids were first or second generation immigrants, we didn't have shared culture, vastly different experiences, some of whom were incredibly poor, but you taught the Odyssey, boom, they were all locked in. And why is that so special? It's so special because it talks about the human condition. It talks about struggle. It talks about overcoming. And I think one of the things, particularly nowadays, is we all think we're so incredibly different. Yeah, when Christopher Nolan does a retread of the Odyssey and puts it on the big screen, people flock. And people talk about, oh, it's an anti-woke movie or it's this or it's that. No, because it's a story about a man confronting his own demons and overcoming them and the importance of family. And I think that's a really important bit. That's a really important bit. The things, as Constance says, that matters have always mattered and this idea that we're more divided than ever and that we hate each other and we've got to believe that we can overcome that we really do because if we just see each other as an enemy or as an avatar we're never going to be able to transcend but if we see the humanity in each other and actually left right most people just want a fairer better world we've just got different ways of approaching it here here and on that note we solved everything we solved it all francis foster for president no you don't want that job we were ending on such a nice thought and you had to ruin it cut to me getting executed it's always fun talking to you guys i really appreciate it love your show you guys are cool as fuck it's always fun great to see you brother thanks it's always a pleasure mate bye everybody you