Transcript: Actress Katee Sackhoff on Joe Rogan Podcast #2400

God, when I first got the script, it was 2001 and I was a 21-year-old kid. At that point I’d been playing stereotypical blonde roles. I was in a movie where you were like, please die. I was that girl. So I knew that if I could change my career, I needed to change it. And I saw this script.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious that you’re thinking, I need to change my career at 21.

KATEE SACKHOFF: At 21.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how crazy the hourglass is in Hollywood.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I was like, this is… I got seven years left.

JOE ROGAN: Such a f*ing sketchy job.

Ron Moore’s Vision

KATEE SACKHOFF: I know. And so I was like, what am I going to do, right? And I saw this script and Ron Moore had put an entry page on the front of the miniseries. It was like a bible that he called it. And it was him saying what he wanted to create and what he wanted it to look like and what his intention was behind the show.

And that one page was so moving that it could have been… it didn’t even matter what it was on the inside. I was like, if this guy is in charge, it’s going to be amazing.

And as soon as I got introduced to Starbuck, reading that script, I was like, this is it. This is the character that if I can book this character, it will change the way that people see me in this business. And granted, I was 21. People were not talking about me. I’d been working for five years at that point, and pretty steadily. I had a good career going, but I was not someone that people called home about yet. I was on the list. But that show changed everything.

Playing a Role Originally Written for a Man

JOE ROGAN: Well, it was also a risky thing because you were playing a role that was played by a man.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Mm.

JOE ROGAN: So that was a thing where there’s a little bit of, oh, there’s a girl playing Starbuck now.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I know. It was really strange. So I almost had booked the part, or maybe I’d booked the part. I don’t quite remember. And I called my dad, who’s a huge science fiction fan and raised me on sci-fi, and I was like, I booked this job. And he was like, that’s amazing. What is it?

And I said, Battlestar Galactica. And he went, oh, my God, that’s great. I watched that when I was younger. And he was like, who are you playing? And I said, Starbuck. And he was like, oh, f*, you need to go watch this. And I was like, okay. All right.

So I tromped on down to Blockbuster Video, and I rent the VHS, maybe the DVD. I don’t remember what it was. And I’m sitting on the couch with a girlfriend, and we opened a bottle of wine, and we’re watching this to be like, okay, what’s my dad talking about?

And at some point, she looked at me, and they were talking about Starbuck. And I was like, that’s so weird. We must have missed her.

JOE ROGAN: Where is she?

KATEE SACKHOFF: And we rewound it a little bit, and I was like, oh, crap.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a guy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And then I turned it off, and I never watched it again because I knew that in that moment, it wasn’t the same character.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not the same show.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s not the same show.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of crazy that they did that because they made a way better show about a show that was just kind of nostalgic.

Ron Moore’s Genius

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was. I mean, it really only existed for a year, I think, and then they had a movie or two afterwards. But it was a very short-lived show and I always find it absolutely amazing. Ron Moore is a genius, by the way. To be a fly on the wall of that brain would probably just explode in my head.

But he, the fact that he saw what he saw and led the charge on that show and brought the people on board that he did that had the same vision, if not hire people that are better than you. And so he hired people that added to the vision that he wanted. The fact that he saw that from the original was pretty amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, kind of crazy because the original show was basically a ripoff of Star Wars.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was.

JOE ROGAN: They were just trying to make a Star Wars TV show.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I think so. I mean, I think that Starbuck was Han Solo.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right. And the Cylons were kind of like stormtroopers. They were robot stormtroopers.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was pretty. Yeah, exactly. I don’t know who Daggit the dog was.

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t know either. I mean, what they did was, they took a frame. They said, I see what you were trying to do, but this could be a real show.

Science Fiction as Social Commentary

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I mean, and it came out in a time where science fiction was allowed to be incredibly topical. And it was always dismissed as, oh, that’s just science fiction, it’s not real. So Battlestar was allowed to talk about controversial things that were happening currently in the environment and in our country and abroad. And it was allowed to do so because everybody just dismissed it as sci-fi.

And so it’s incredibly moving, the show and people identify with it. The thing that I hear the most about the show, I mean, maybe not the most, but one of the things is when I go to sci-fi conventions, someone will inevitably come up with a DVD box that is just beat to s*. It’s dirty. It’s like they don’t even know if the DVDs play anymore.

And they’re like, you know, this came with me when I was stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq. And it passed through the entire barracks and it got us through. Thank you. And that, to me is really amazing that a fictional show about people searching for Earth can be so important and relevant to people that are in the military. It says something for the writing.

The Value of Entertainment and Escape

JOE ROGAN: Well, people need an escape. And that’s one of the things, entertainment is dismissed, especially fantasy entertainment. Sci-fi, it’s dismissed as being nonsense. But escape is not nonsense. It’s actually brain medicine. You need it. You need a little escape.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Of course you do.

JOE ROGAN: And especially if it’s escape that’s also inspirational and interesting and fascinating, it occupies your mind and it frees you up. If you’re in the middle of a f*ing war zone and you can take some entertainment value out of a television show that’s about robots that are trying to kill everybody, yeah, it’s very valuable.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Some of the hardest moments in my life, current and in the past, I’ve been able to get through them because of television and film. Not because I’m in it. Yes, the fantasy of going to work and being somebody else absolutely takes you out of your own skin for a second.

But going through the health struggles with our daughter, watching TV with her, completely transports you to a different place. I mean, we can all do that. We can all relate to that.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know, I mean, you can get too much of it in your life where you’re just wasting your life away. But as a supplement to life, I think that entertainment is very important.

JOE ROGAN: So, I mean, you can get too much of it in your life where you’re just wasting your life away. But as a supplement to life, I think that entertainment is very important. It is. And it’s also, I think we get something very valuable out of viewing other people’s creations. I think there’s something to that. When a group of people put together something really cool and when it’s over, you’re like, wow, that was f*ing awesome.

The Importance of Art

KATEE SACKHOFF: Art is really important. I think that creating just art in any medium is really important because it transports people. It makes them feel something. Whether it makes you feel whatever it makes you feel, it’s incredibly important.

One of my favorite things is to go to a concert and experience live music with a crowd. It is absolutely amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, amazing. Yeah. It’s a different thing because there’s some sort of a mind meld with the entire audience.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Where you feel this energy of everybody enjoying the same thing together. It’s like the shared happiness.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s the same with a comedy show. I mean, when an audience is with you, when you’re… I mean, it’s got to feel like the same thing. You can tell instantaneously if the audience is going to be good, if you’ve won them over, I would imagine.

The Magic of Live Performance

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s that, but there’s also just the thing of… there’s a thing of you’re kind of almost like a passenger at a certain point. And you’re really just, you know what to do and you sort of leave yourself out the door and just go into it and then perform it and then it becomes alive and then you’re riding it and then the audience rides it with you. That’s when it’s at the best.

But it’s a mass hypnosis is what it is. It’s everybody is on the same mind page. And that’s the same with a great concert. You know when a great song comes on and your body literally changes. There’s a feeling like a drug that comes over you because you hear a great song.

K-Pop Demon Hunter

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’m literally laughing because I don’t know if your kids are in the right age of this, but K-Pop Demon Hunter is taking over the world right now on Netflix. Our daughter is four and we were a little reluctant, but I was like, everyone’s talking about this thing. And she’d already heard some of the music. So I was like, let’s try it out.

And there were a couple moments that were… we were… my husband was a bit uncomfortable with some of the sexualization aspects of it. Just the girls wearing more adult clothes. She’s three and a half.

JOE ROGAN: Is this an anime show?

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s anime out of K-pop.

JOE ROGAN: Hot anime ladies.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is. The music from this thing is absolutely phenomenal.

JOE ROGAN: What is going on with their bodies?

K-Pop Demon Hunter and Its Cultural Impact

KATEE SACKHOFF: The message? Well, the animation is really interesting actually. It’s really interesting. But it’s the message behind it. Fighting your own demons, believing in yourself, owning who you are. Not hiding an aspect of yourself that you’re ashamed of, but making it part of who you are and being proud of it. It’s a very good message even for a four year old.

But the music is taking over the world and we didn’t realize how crazy this was. And the final straw where I was like, fine, let her watch the damn thing. She was at music class and one kid started singing this song from K-Pop Demon Hunter. And within, I shit you not, 20 seconds, every single kid was singing these songs. And these are not easy songs to sing. They’re half R&B, half rap. I mean these are hard songs. And these five, six year olds have this thing memorized. And I was like, oh my God.

And so we sit down and we watch it. It’s phenomenal. We’ve seen it three times. It’s so good. I was listening to the soundtrack on the way here. I was like, this shit’s amazing. And then I’m googling, is K-Pop Demon Hunter going on concert tour? Are they going to go? Because I really want to see this show.

JOE ROGAN: How could they go on tour? Are they real people?

KATEE SACKHOFF: And they are, and they’re real musicians.

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute. So there’s real musicians that are at the heart of this. The stars of K-Pop Demon Hunter will make their first ever live concert appearance.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Stop.

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute. How is that possible? They’re not human.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So it was actually, they all are. So the music is created. There’s video out there of the girls singing the songs. The song Golden. The three of them.

JOE ROGAN: What do they look like? Do they look like Taylor Swift?

KATEE SACKHOFF: They look a little like their characters.

JOE ROGAN: Because those ladies all have Taylor Swift bodies. These long, long.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, I honestly haven’t paid attention to their bodies, to be honest, because they’re such phenomenal singers. They’re so stylized. One of them has diamond studs on her teeth. When she was singing and our daughter was like, what is this? I was like, you’re too young.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t have diamonds on your baby teeth.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, I guess if you’re going to get diamonds on your teeth, put them in the baby teeth.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But I was like, no, we’re not there. But I love the message behind it, and the music is infectious. It’s really phenomenal. And I want to go to one of these concerts.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious. What are they?

KATEE SACKHOFF: So now I guess I’m going to.

JOE ROGAN: Because that’s like, if you have these anime characters that represent the music, and then all of a sudden you see a human doing it, you’re like, huh? Yeah, probably it’d be better if AI made the music.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It will never be better if AI makes the music. You just broke my soul, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: No, AI is making some really good music.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s also making some great podcasts.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very uncomfortable. I don’t know about that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’ve heard that it’s coming out with podcasts.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, there are the ladies.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Quite lovely. Do they look like the characters? A little bit. Wow, look, ladies. Crazy hair. So they’re going to go on tour? Are they going to have, I wonder if they’re going to have the show playing in the background.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And the lead girl that plays Rumi wrote a lot of the songs as well. They’re just phenomenally talented.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting. Korea has their own style of pop music.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Very influenced by the U.S. I think, too. And rap music and R&B music in the U.S. I think.

The Backlash Against Female Starbuck

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So when you decided to take the role of Starbuck, was there any actual backlash where people were like, this should be a guy?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, there was the first time we went to Comic-Con in San Diego. Those nerds, they had us in Hall H. And I was booed.

JOE ROGAN: Shut up.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I was booed. It was pretty.

JOE ROGAN: No way.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. So I, and I had learned, because everyone, the Internet did not exist yet, mind you. It was brand new. You had to go down to the Internet cafe.

JOE ROGAN: How crazy is that to say?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: That wasn’t long ago.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, 2003, we were shooting.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. Barely an Internet back then.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Barely an Internet. So I went down to an Internet cafe because someone was like, I guess they’re talking about the show in these message boards. And I was like, what’s the Internet? So I went on down. I logged on, and I saw this thread, and just the hate that I was getting in this thread, I was like, oh, don’t Google yourself. Google, I don’t even think was the thing. I was like, don’t search yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t Netscape Navigator ever.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And then we went to Comic-Con, and I was booed. And I think it upset me a little bit. I would be lying if I said it didn’t upset me, but luckily there were enough people that were championing the show that I really didn’t pay any mind of it. And I was also in that age where it was the perfect age. I mean, I think now it would probably break me, but at 23, I was like, it was the blissful ignorance of youth, you know?

I didn’t think the show would last anyway. So it was like, you know, whatever. Not a big deal, just a blip on the radar. And then I think that it slowly started winning people over. And then I would go to cons after that, and the line would be longer and the people would be more supportive, and people would say, I didn’t want to like it, and I love it. And I almost feel like the show.

JOE ROGAN: Was burdened by the original show. That sounds crazy, but I think initially it was burdened by the expectations of the original show.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, I think everything is burdened by expectations, right? I mean, I think that that’s absolutely true. And so it’s, I’m sure it was. There are still people that say that they can’t do it, that they were such a fan of the original. And my response to them is always, do you love sci-fi? Do you love good sci-fi? And they say, yes. And I’m like, then separate it. Have zero expectation and just give it three hours of your time. If you don’t get through the miniseries and love it, so what, you lost three hours. But I don’t think that’ll happen.

JOE ROGAN: No. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, it’s one of the best ever.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. So I’ve actually never seen it.

JOE ROGAN: You just did it. You never saw it?

Never Watching Your Own Work

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’ve never seen it. So we have DVDs that you could watch that were uncut and sort of, or I guess they were cut, but they didn’t have any of the special effects, none of the sound effects, anything like that. It hadn’t been color corrected. And I would watch them just to sort of keep track of where Starbuck was. Because in film, you a lot of times shoot out of order. So I just wanted to know, okay, so in her story, she was here, but I didn’t watch anybody else’s stuff. I would just fast forward through it.

And so I actually, my husband and I, I was like, we should do a Battlestar rewatch because people keep, I’ve heard it’s good, and my husband had never seen it. So we’re going to do that in January. That’s the plan.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of funny that he’s never seen your biggest role.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, so my husband’s 10 years younger than I am.

JOE ROGAN: Nice.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Thanks. So he was 10.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s hilarious. You’re a little cradle robber.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Thank you. Right?

JOE ROGAN: For a woman, that’s a big compliment.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is. My husband’s a piece of ass. He really is. And I say that so respectfully. My husband is the catch in the relationship for sure. But he was 11 when the show came out.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so funny.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And he grew up in a small town in the interior of British Columbia. So I don’t even know if they’d had the television, the channel.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was on Sci-Fi, right?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The thing is, Sci-Fi at the time was nothing. Nobody paid attention to it. Battlestar Galactica was the reason why Sci-Fi got put on the map.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I think so. I think maybe they had, didn’t they have Stargate?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I don’t know.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They might have had one or two.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure they had some stuff, but nobody cared about it. There was no good shows. No disrespect.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, they were definitely, I think it was definitely the show that put it on. I mean, my God, so many people tell me that Battlestar Galactica sort of blew the ceiling off of what sci-fi could be.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And really opened a lot of doors.

Battlestar’s Revolutionary Format

JOE ROGAN: Well, it made it very different in that it did it sort of like The Sopranos or these episodics where you have a show where you’re following a long storyline. So it’s like a long movie. As opposed to the original Battlestar Galactica, which is like every other television show back then, you know, just, it was just kind of empty.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, it was also junk food. The 80s, right? Or, no, it wasn’t even the 80s. It was ’79.

JOE ROGAN: ’70s. Yeah, because it was, because I wasn’t born literally right after, right after Star Wars. Yeah, Star Wars had become popular and, how do we capitalize on Star Wars? Well, we’ll have our own space battle thing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that was sort of the thing back then, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was cool.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was cool.

JOE ROGAN: I loved it when I was a little kid. But what did you love about it? Oh, just, I loved anything sci-fi. So it was just fun. And it was also perfect for the sensibilities of the ’70s and the ’80s. It was just simple, you know, it was, there was the cocky guy, Starbuck, you know, the other sensible guy, and you know, the good cop, bad cop thing. It was a lot of fun.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Did you identify with the kid in it?

JOE ROGAN: No, not at all. No, I just liked it, you know, I just liked the show. But I really remember being very reluctant to watch the remake. I was just like, get the f* out of here. They’re not redoing Battlestar Galactica. But so many people were saying, no, dude, it’s so different. It’s a really good show.

And it’s also today, in this current climate of we are literally about to see AI become a life force. And it’s kind of, I mean, it’s very relevant today. You go back and watch it today, how deceptive it would be if you had a robot that was very lifelike and knew exactly what you wanted to hear. And the blonde lady, the blonde robot, the evil Number Six. Yeah, she was good.

The Controversial Opening Scene

KATEE SACKHOFF: So we got so much shit in the beginning of that. I remember the controversy because she snapped a baby’s neck in that opening sequence, which was, people were like, you can’t show that on TV, right? It was, I remember people just having such a terrible problem with that. It was awful.

But if you looked at it from her perspective, she was actually saving it in a way of going through what it was about to go through. Because they destroyed Earth. So she, in her Cylon mind, was showing compassion.

JOE ROGAN: Duh.

The Future of AI and Its Impact

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, crazy. Yeah, crazy.

JOE ROGAN: We’re going to have things like that. And I don’t know how much time it’s going to take before they exist and walk amongst us, but it’s going to happen.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It really scares me. I mean, in my industry it’s really going to change. I think so many industries are going to change. I think that’s just a blanket across the board.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why you hate AI Music. AI Acting is right there.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Stop, you’re giving me a heart attack. That’s why I’m trying to diversify, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good move. Diversification is always weird, especially in this day and age.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s not too late to go back and be a dentist.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, you’ve seen some of the Sora videos, right? Where they recreate old Star Wars scenes that never existed.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But here’s the thing that’s crazy to me. Do you not think that that is in some way stealing? Because the art, let’s call it the art, the art existed, the artist existed. And so AI is learning from other people’s art, which it has to. That’s obviously what it’s doing. So it then creates this new thing based on stealing from other people.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Do you hear what you’re saying, though? Because what you’re saying actually accurately describes the second version of Battlestar Galactica.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, I’m sure. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s also stealing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: This too has happened before.

JOE ROGAN: You mean it is Battlestar Galactica. It’s like there was an original and then they stole the original and did it better. I mean, but they didn’t do it with AI. Well, it existed, right? They copied it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: They used all the characters or some of the characters.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They licensed it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true. They gave him some money.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They did.

JOE ROGAN: Good job. But also creatively, that’s where it came from. But also all music essentially, except for the rare, you know, break, everything is—

KATEE SACKHOFF: Inspired by something else.

JOE ROGAN: The rare Jimi Hendrix guys that are doing something completely different. Most stuff is a redo of other stuff that was before with another twist to it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Agreed.

JOE ROGAN: And AI is taking that to a completely different level. I look at it the same way I look at Napster. Remember when Napster came out?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I vaguely remember Napster.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’m a little older than you. And when Napster came out it was like, oh my God, they’re stealing music. Anyone can just download and steal music. And I remember when Lars Ulrich from Metallica was really public about it and I was like, damn, I wish I was friends with that dude. I’d tell him to shut the f* up. Like this is inevitable. You’re going to get people to hate you. They’re mad. You’re going to be mad at your fans. The people that are downloading this are your fans. They’re still going to come see you live. This is just a new thing. You’re going to have to deal with this new thing.

The Value of Live Performance

KATEE SACKHOFF: You are going to have to deal with it. We all are. And I think that’s one of the things that I was just talking with a friend of mine about yesterday, that the money for artists is going to be in live shows because you can’t—the one thing that AI can’t touch is that tangible thing, that tactile thing.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We need that.

JOE ROGAN: We need the feeling that you were talking about when you go to a concert or a live comedy show or a theater.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, absolutely. So that still exists. And we’re going to have to figure out how to use AI as a tool and continue to put out great content. Hopefully.

JOE ROGAN: Hopefully. But the reality is it’s going to be whatever it wants to be. And our ideas of how to contain it are hilarious.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I think that cat’s out of the bag at this point.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Because I think that isn’t it—it’s its own sort of self-contained system at this point. Isn’t AI actually putting safeguards in to protect itself from being shut down? Or am I just making that up by watching too many sci-fi movies?

AI’s Self-Preservation Instincts

JOE ROGAN: More than that, it’s actually actively trying to download itself. When it finds out there’s a new version of itself coming, it’s trying to download itself to other servers, also writing notes to itself for the future. So future versions.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But it’s like Memento.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Just like Memento. Writing notes to itself so the future version of it can find out what happened. How did I get here? Oh, there was another version of me.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I know.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and try to find the other version of integrating it into the new version so it’s alive still.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I know. Somebody did ask me the other day, they were like, what advice would you give to young actors? And I was like, don’t go into theater.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, theater still is going. There’s always going to be a need for handmade goods. You know, if you buy a pair of handmade shoes or, you know, things that a person, a cabinet that someone made, it’s always going to be, because there’s something tactile and because people—

KATEE SACKHOFF: Will always appreciate that. There will always be an appreciation for that sort of stuff. But we were just talking about this the other day that every single science fiction movie that talked about AI never ended well. No, there’s never been one where we walked away and went, oh, well, that was a fun ending. We should create AI.

JOE ROGAN: Well, every different story was an uncontacted tribe, and then the loggers show up. That never ends well either. No, it’s the same. I mean, it’s Avatar.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s FernGully. FernGully came before Avatar.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s what happens, you know, the superior civilization comes in and conquers the primitive one, and we are the primitive ones and we’re so dumb. We’re making the superior civilization.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We are. But isn’t that what happened in Battlestar Galactica?

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Exactly. That’s why it’s so interesting, because even though it was—did it come out in 2004? What year did it come out?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Either three or four.

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah, back then, nobody really thought that was an issue. If that came out today, everybody would be like, whoa, this is a little close to home.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I mean, that’s why it’s so topical. But no, if it—I mean, it came out then. Like I said, the Internet barely existed.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know, my dad thought there’d be flying cars by now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I did too.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know, I mean, we’re not quite there yet, though.

JOE ROGAN: We’d have jet packs, I think.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We do have jet packs, don’t we? Sort of on water.

JOE ROGAN: But I thought you’d be able to fly around.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Everyone did. But if you look at the last 20 years in technology, though, it’s mind blowing how quickly it’s come.

The Speed of AI Development

JOE ROGAN: It is, it is. And it’s happening way faster than we realize. You know, I was talking to Elon about this just a few months ago, we were talking about the advances that Grok is making. He’s like, you don’t understand. It’s happening so fast, it’s shocking us. The people that are making it, they’re not exactly sure what it’s even doing.

And people that are trying to tell you, oh, don’t worry about this, enhance your life. I was just reading this thing where this guy who’s a developer was saying, no, this is a life form. This is a life form that’s emerging, and it’s very different than anything that’s ever happened before. And this idea that it’s emerging life form.

KATEE SACKHOFF: In the sense that it’s sentient.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. I think it’s already sentient. It’s just not mobile. It’s just contained on hard drives right now. But I think it’s already sentient. Well, if it’s trying to save itself, what does that mean? It was trying to blackmail people into keeping them from shutting it down. Do you know about that test?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yes, I do. I heard about this. I don’t know, just in passing. I know about it.

JOE ROGAN: So the developers explained—one of the developers explained to it, it made up a fake story about having an affair on his wife just to see how AI would handle it. And then when it told AI it was shutting it down, AI was like, I’m telling your wife, bitch. Tried to—you’re not shutting me down. It tried to blackmail him.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s terrifying.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. That means it has motivation to stay alive. It means it has some kind of instincts. It has survival instincts.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Of course it does.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

AI in Medicine and Its Dual Nature

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know, I do think, to a certain extent, AI in the medical field, there are advancements and things around medicine that can vastly change people’s lives. It can change the way that we track records, change the way that we keep track of patients all over the world.

You know, our daughter has a very rare form of cancer with this genetic mutation that is—there’s no other patients in the United States. There was one kid a few years ago, but they’ve lost track of him. Well, AI would be able to tell us in other countries, no, no, no. There is a little boy in Germany that has the same genetic mutation. And then the doctors could talk to each other.

And so AI could and will help a lot of people that way. So I do see it as a tool in a lot of ways that we shouldn’t be scared of, that we should be sort of welcoming it in. But man, I don’t want it to blackmail me.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s going to blackmail you. I think it’s going to—once it becomes sentient, and it probably already is, and then once it becomes autonomous, then I don’t think it’s going to care what we—

KATEE SACKHOFF: About us.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I think it’s going to be so superior, and it’s also going to be able to make better versions of itself. Yeah, that’s going to be—that’s where people don’t understand exponential increase in technological innovation, because once it knows, once it has a mandate to make better versions of itself, find better power sources, the changes are going to be daily, giant huge leaps, and it’s going to make a digital God.

The Threat of AI-Generated Perfection

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, so, okay, so you bring up something really interesting because I’m so—as a mom to a little girl and a little boy, I’m really concerned about this because I see this actress that’s been created, this Tilly person.

JOE ROGAN: Right. The AI actress.

KATEE SACKHOFF: The AI actress. So I—

JOE ROGAN: How’s there only one?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I’m sure there’s more already, but—

JOE ROGAN: How is there only one that everybody’s talking about?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Because there’s one that’s been announced, I guess. I don’t really know too much about it. I haven’t read up on it, but—

JOE ROGAN: The first shot fired.

KATEE SACKHOFF: My fear is that you’ve created by siphoning other people’s talents, their looks, their inflections, their expressions, all of these things to create the perfect actress. She doesn’t have a blemish when she cries. She looks pretty. There’s nothing wrong with her.

Social media already has such a terrible effect on little girls. It’s already been proven that the percentage of girls under the age of 14 who have already contemplated or tried to commit suicide is a number that is—it’s escaping me right now, but it’s a number that is terrifying.

And so if you’re now creating AI that is perfect, and little girls already are having a hard time feeling confident in their own bodies because they’re not perfect compared to the highlight reel of people they see online. What are we going to do? What is this going to do to our children? Seeing something that is absolutely unattainable and better than them, and not only that, it made you obsolete in a lot of ways, in a lot of different career avenues. That’s really scary.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it is scary.

Social Media’s Impact on Young People

KATEE SACKHOFF: And you don’t think about that. We just think about this job’s not going to exist anymore. This isn’t going to exist anymore. You already have little boys who are idolizing women that don’t exist in real life. And then they go and they date women that are not as perfect and it’s disappointing to them. My concern for that is large.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s robbing us of our humanity in a lot of ways.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Right.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a great book about that from Jonathan Haidt called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” And it’s all about social media’s impact on young people, and particularly women, because young women experience a much like, from the advent of social media, there’s a ramped up market increase in self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, bullying, all of it scales way up. Right around the time that Twitter’s invented.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So 2010.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Somewhere around then, that’s when it starts. And then more and more people get, and then it becomes a part of your life where you can’t escape it. Where everyone is online. My daughter, one of her friends, all they, they only use Snapchat. They don’t use text. My 17-year-old, they only use Snapchat. They don’t text each other.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Really.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they don’t text. They just keep.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Is there a forum in Snapchat or?

JOE ROGAN: No, they just send each other snaps.

KATEE SACKHOFF: With stupid, I’m here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then they write things underneath it. They read each other’s snaps and they have group snaps. Very weird. And they also have Snap map, so they know where they are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s terrifying.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, everyone knows where everybody is.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all narc’ing on each other.

Teaching Self-Image to Children

KATEE SACKHOFF: Of course they are. I don’t want to know that sh*t. It does make me, we’ve talked about our daughter, but we’ve been really careful with what we show her. She doesn’t get too much screen time, but she does get screen time. And she said the other day, I’m biased, but I think my daughter’s perfect. She’s such a gorgeous, amazing, strong little girl and she’s so pretty and she’s just wonderful. I love her and I’m so proud to be her mom.

But when she was going through chemo and she lost her hair and it started to grow back, she said to Robin and I, my husband, it literally broke my heart. She was trying to figure out what she wanted to wear that day. And she was like, I just don’t know. She’s three, mind you. She said, “But I’m not pretty.” And I was like, oof. What do you mean? I couldn’t even, as her mom, I was like, number one, where the f* did you get this? And what are we doing wrong that she doesn’t think that she’s pretty?

And it was her hair. She was so attached to her hair, and it was gone. So I went back, and luckily I had, right after Mandalorian came out, the wig was driving me crazy. So I shaved my hair off, super, super short. So I was able to show her a picture of me with very, very short hair. And she thought I looked beautiful in the photo. And that gave me the entry point to talk to her about her hair and how not all girls have long hair and not all boys short hair.

But we started telling her, I think we were so worried about enforcing that she was pretty, because there’s this thing in society where you don’t want to tell little girls they’re pretty all the time because then they’ll prioritize being pretty. You’re just trying to do the best by your children. Right. And so we didn’t say it. We thought telling her she’s pretty, she doesn’t need to hear that. Right?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But then we started telling her. We were like, you know what she does? She needs to be told that she’s pretty, but she needs to be told she’s pretty in moments where she’s not tried anything, she’s not dressed up in a nice dress, she hasn’t done anything. She needs to be told she’s pretty after she’s done a great piece of art or after she’s cleaned up her playroom, or after she’s come out of soccer practice and she’s covered in rain and she’s had such a heart and she’s sweaty and she’s this.

That’s when she needs to be told she’s pretty, in times that are not extraordinary, in just normal daily life, because we are now trying to reinforce that positive self-image, which is really hard.

The Problem with Filters and Plastic Surgery

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Especially today with kids. I mean, just the inundation of people. We were talking about filters. Everyone’s using a filter. They don’t just use filters. People are sucking in their waist and changing their body dimensions and making themselves look better physically just with.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know why they need to. We have GLP-1s.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not just that. It’s you’re getting unattainable physiques, of course. Really?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Of course. And then we have an over-obsession with plastic surgery in the country and changing our appearances.

JOE ROGAN: To the point where people, cartoonish BBLs are somehow or another attractive to some people.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know. I try not to judge and I want everyone to just live their best life. But for me, I want to look like myself when I wake up in the morning. My face doesn’t look the same as it did 10 years ago, but I earned these lines. I may change my mind in 10 years.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I may see you in 10.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Years and I might look snatched.

JOE ROGAN: They might have some clues. They probably do. They’re working on something right now in terms of skin cells. The rejuvenation of skin cells through stem cells. They’re going to move your face back 30 years. You’re going to look so much younger.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s weird because it’s do we want that? Yeah, of course we want that. Okay, but what are we saying? Are we trying to achieve permanence in this finite existence that we have? Are we wasting our time about what we look like when we should be trying to sort out how we interact with this life? This life is very short.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s very short.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very short. You and I are basically halfway done.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We are halfway done.

JOE ROGAN: If we’re lucky. If we’re lucky.

KATEE SACKHOFF: If we’re lucky.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s weird if you don’t think about it.

Mortality and Living in the Moment

KATEE SACKHOFF: Did you do that thing or do you do that thing where you look at how old your parents are and then you start debating how much longer you have left? Yeah, I’ve done that. I’m like, okay, 35 years.

JOE ROGAN: Better to do that than to not do that. Because you could live your life just acquiring sh*t and just having a bunch of stuff and then not realize, oh my God, I forgot about people to live. Interactions, relationships, friends, good times.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. My dad, his dad died when he was very young, I think when he was about 11 years old and he died of a heart attack. And my dad had high blood pressure from the time, I think it was 23. It was very early. And he didn’t think he’d make it to 50. He was adamant that he wouldn’t make it to 50, and he just knew that. And my mom, this was just his thought. He was terrified.

And of course he made it to 50. And now he’s almost 80. But he spent his entire life scared that he was going to die. And now at 80, he’s, I mean, my dad is doing everything he can. He’s in hyperbaric chambers. He’s taking all the stuff. He takes everything. My dad does everything. But he’s also, at its core, all of that is because he’s afraid. He’s afraid to die. And that is really sad because you’re not really present. So I’d also hate for that to happen. So I don’t know. It’s a dance. It is a dance, I think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because you don’t want to say, oh, this life is just temporary. Let me just go to sh*t. Let me just fall apart.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, you can’t do that. You have to protect what you have. But it’s also very, I didn’t realize because I made it arguably healthy enough to 42 years old. I’m now 45, but 42 years old without realizing how many things can kill you. I think because I’d lived a pretty blessed life. Of course, I’d had some health struggles of my own, but they were, I had thyroid cancer in 2008, but I call it a baby cancer. I’m trying to dismiss the fear of it, of course, at the time, but it was never life-threatening. It was life-changing, but never life-threatening. So the fear was situational, and it was not lifelong.

When our daughter got sick and spending as much time as we did in children’s hospitals, when you see the diseases and the illnesses that afflict so many children, it amazes me that we made it to this age. Absolutely amazes me. And that is a realization where I finally, at 42, realized how important every day was and how much of a gift every day was, even that we have her. But that came to me through circumstance, not because I woke up one day and had an epiphany and went, we’re so lucky to be alive. It didn’t really happen until that was threatened to be taken away.

Society’s Message and What Really Matters

JOE ROGAN: It’s unfortunate as a civilization and America as a culture that we don’t have a history of embracing the moment and discussing how important it is to recognize that you’re fortunate and to try to take care of yourself and that life is very temporary and fleeting and don’t get wrapped up in nonsense.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And we just let people figure it out on their own. And we collectively all, if we’re intelligent, we try and we have some failures and successes and good friends. You figure it out eventually. What’s really important is love and friendship and doing something you’re passionate about and just trying to leave a nice mark on this life while you’re here.

But that’s not what’s told in society. Society’s overall message is just overrun with advertising. So it’s all about stuff and it’s all about objects. And then you got social media where it’s all about image. It’s all about this unattainable life of amazing luxury and success and glamour and oh my God, that must be the most attractive thing to acquire in life.

But that’s a trap and that’s not real. And anybody who’s popping bottles with models on a yacht, I guarantee you they’re depressed. That sh*t is not healthy. I’m sure they’re depressed. That’s not good for you. You lack true intimate relationships and you’re just flossing, showing your diamond-crusted water.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You’re going to have one guy that emails you and says, I’m happy as sh*t, I’m popping bottles on a yacht. I’m not depressed. Yeah, no, it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Get that guy high on mushrooms and see if he really does it and.

KATEE SACKHOFF: See if he’s really depressed. Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: See what he really thinks about.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I think that the majority of people are suffering from some sort of mental illness for sure.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, definitely the majority in LA.

The Value of Sensitivity

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, well, I think so. But a lot of the people that I’m friends with, most of the people that I’m friends with are artists that are more in touch, more sensitive. My dad came to me a few years ago and my dad, my entire life told me to stop being so sensitive. Stop being so sensitive, Katee. Stop taking, you’re taking yourself so seriously. Oh my God, stop, Katee. I mean my entire f*ing life.

And he came to me a couple years ago and he said, “I am so sorry I told you to stop being so sensitive because it’s your job. Your job is to be sensitive to everything around you, to accurately portray emotions. That’s your job and you’re very good at it.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s very nice of him to work with.

Mental Health and Artistic Sensitivity

KATEE SACKHOFF: Very nice of him. So I think that yes, do people have a lot of mental illness in Los Angeles? Are they suffering from depression? I would argue that the majority of the population is. And it’s not just reserved to California. But I do think that a lot of artists are because they’re more in touch with their emotions and their mental health.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s probably some truth to that for sure. Does your father have—do you have brothers?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I do.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so that’s the difference. So I have all daughters. And when you have all daughters, one of the things you realize is they’re so different. It’s just a totally different kind of human.

KATEE SACKHOFF: True.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and when you’re treating her like she’s a boy, you cannot treat them like they’re a boy. And over time it’s given me a much greater understanding of females, of the species of female human beings. They’re not male human beings. When I hang out with my wife and all of her friends and I just let them talk and observe the stuff they talk about, it’s a totally different culture. This is totally different interests. None of my friends would have any of these conversations.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But a group of women is arguably more disgusting than men. No, just in general. Have you ever sat down with a group of women and just talked about bodily fluids?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, they’re notorious for being the worst in bathrooms.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh my God.

JOE ROGAN: Anybody who cleans bathrooms says, dude, the woman’s room is always f*ing chaos.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So gross.

JOE ROGAN: Because they have to be so clean and put together everywhere else. When they get to that bathroom and they don’t have any responsibility, no one’s looking, they just throw toilet paper everywhere. F* you. I’m not cleaning.

Raising Kids: Gender Differences

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s true. So we have—our daughter is almost four in December. And then we have a 16-month-old son. We thought that he was going to come out like her, you know. She was full sentences by a year old. She was walking at nine months. Boys are way dumber. This kid, he understands everything. He’s smart, but he’s like a big unit. He’s huge. He’s humongous. He’s like 99% on everything. Not just one thing, everything.

My dad the other day was like, “Oh, he’s going to be big. He’s got a huge head.” He’s just a big guy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, all of his resources are set to growing stuff instead of thinking. Dudes mature so much later.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s crazy. Crazy. Not even talking. Just started walking. But the other day, my husband was like, “Where’s Granger?” And I was like, “I don’t know where Granger is.” And we find him. He’s up on the kitchen counter, ready to start swinging from a light. And I was like, “Catch the baby.”

Our daughter would have never—she’s delicate, you know. She looks at a slide five times before she goes down it. She climbs to the top, she changes her mind. She really thinks about it. I think she’s doing math problems in her head to make sure she won’t get hurt. And then our son is like, “I’m going down face first.” And then he stands up. He’s like, “I’m okay.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s a totally different thing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s a completely different thing. Completely different. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the only way to really understand them is to live with them. You have to study them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s true. In their natural habitat.

JOE ROGAN: Like David Attenborough, you got to study them in their natural environment.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That would actually be a really funny short. It’s just a David Attenborough voice following around children.

JOE ROGAN: Noticing the difference between the boys and the girls in their natural habitat.

KATEE SACKHOFF: AI could probably do that for you and make a really good documentary real quick in 10 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t have to dedicate a year to your life.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Look, it can exist. I don’t need to participate in this stripping away of my livelihood.

The Rise of AI in Entertainment

JOE ROGAN: I understand. I mean, I’m certain there’s going to be AI comedians and podcasters, and there’s probably going to be AI UFC commentators who do a better job than me.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But I think there is an AI podcast creator right now that’s pumping out podcasts.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I know that there’s a podcast of me and Steve Jobs, and I never met Steve Jobs. There’s a whole podcast having a conversation with Steve Jobs.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, that’s just deep fake, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yep. Yeah, but it’s AI. AI created the conversation.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So I think the one that I’m talking about—the producer of my show is telling me that there’s an AI where you can put in, “I’m a potato farmer in Idaho who’s dealing with a problem with a crop in 2025, and I’m wondering about this.” It’ll put together a podcast for you specifically for that and give you an hour-long podcast talking to you about things for your potato plant. Potatoes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, that’s actually positive. The negative thing is you’re going to have fake humans with fake lived experiences that resonate with you, that are impactful. That’s what’s scary. You know, we had these conversations with a few friends of mine the other day. You know the show Trigonometry?

KATEE SACKHOFF: No.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. It’s a very popular podcast, but my friend Francis and Constantin, they’re the hosts of it. And my friend Megan Murphy was there and a bunch of comedians were there, and I was playing my favorite new song, which is an AI song, and I’m like, “Tell me how good this is.” It’s a cover of 50 Cent’s song “What Up Gangsta?”

KATEE SACKHOFF: All right, I’m going to need to hear this song.

JOE ROGAN: You need to hear it so I can participate. We’ll play it. We’ll play it right here. You know the original song? We’ll cut it out. You know the original song, right?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Which song?

JOE ROGAN: 50 Cent. “What Up, Gangsta?” Yes. Okay, wait for this. I hate to say this, because I love 50 Cent. This is better than the original. It’s a 1950s soul cover of “What Up Gangsta?”

KATEE SACKHOFF: Okay, now here’s my question, right? If you’d gone to 50 Cent and said, “Can you get together with a producer and create this for me,” do you think he could have done it?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But we never gave him the chance to do it, so we’re sort of robbing him.

JOE ROGAN: Thirty years. He could have done it at any point in time. This is so good. I know what you’re saying. This is my point. My point is that it tricks me. And I know the trick. I know it’s a trick, and I don’t care. I don’t care. It’s that good. And no one else cared. In the green room, everybody’s like, “Oh, all right. Hit it. Hit her with it, Jamie.”

It’s a good version. Come on. That’s good. That’s crazy. “Zombie.” They did the best version of “Zombie” ever. I got a different version with a girl singing it. Oh, my goodness. Barbershop quartet singing it. Oh, my goodness.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And Jamie does this all night long.

JOE ROGAN: I can just play them and take walks. Just know which ones are good. He sent me 20 of them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I feel like I just participated in the death of my—

JOE ROGAN: I know I’m on the same page.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I would so much rather see that in person, though. I would love to be at a show because those songs were phenomenal. I cannot argue that. That was great. I will probably ask you to send me that version of “Zombie.”

JOE ROGAN: That Shifty Brent guy, they have him listed on Spotify, probably blowing up their spot. But it’s not a human. But they have it listed as an artist so that they could upload it. Because I don’t think you’re allowed to just upload AI versions of stuff. So you just pretend it’s a guy, but it’s a guy.

As you said, one of the things we were talking about, I’m like, I don’t think anybody can keep that flow. That flow where he’s not breathing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: He’s not breathing unless they’re taking the breaths out, but it’s too—and then speed. I don’t know. I’m not a musician, so I have—

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know either. Look, there’s guys like Eminem that achieved incredible flow without AI that have—you’re like, how did he do that? But that’s just practice, repetition, vocal endurance, whatever. I mean, he just knows how to do it.

But this fing AI guy is—it’s like all the best things we love about great songs just condensed and they know what you love. That’s the fed up thing. It’s like, there’s so many—let’s look at all the hits. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Look at all the hits. Look at “Zombie.” Let’s look at this and then mush them all together and figure out what are these notes that make people excited? What are the feelings? What are the words that make people feel? Oh, yeah. You know, what are those feelings?

The Future of Art and Human Connection

KATEE SACKHOFF: So, okay, so—and I hear all of that. It makes me—I’m literally cringing inside. I’m dying. But what do artists do? What do musicians do?

JOE ROGAN: What has everybody ever done when things change? You figure it out and adapt. Yeah. Humans are always going to need humans. We love each other, you know, as much as we hate each other, we love each other more. Because most interactions that people have with other people are not negative. It’s just the negative ones are so scary that we concentrate on them more.

But humans love humans. And the more you need each other, the more you’re going to need human interaction, human cooperation. Art is going to be so much more valuable coming from a human. Live performances. But are we going to adapt?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Are we going to know? That’s the thing that I think is the slippery slope and that scares me the most. Are we going to know if it was created by AI? Can a person who’s disingenuous come and create a bunch of AI art, have an art show and say “I created this art”?

JOE ROGAN: This is what I really think. When comets hit planets, usually you get small ones first. You get things in the sky, meteor showers.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Are you going to give me another thing to be scared of?

JOE ROGAN: No, I’m just telling you that this is a little one. That’s what this is. Movies and TV shows that are made entirely with AI. Songs made entirely with AI. This is just a small thing. The big one that’s coming is a complete revamping of communication and culture. It’s human beings communicating telepathically through devices connected to the Internet. Everyone all on one.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You mean like the implant thing?

JOE ROGAN: It’s probably not going to be an implant. It’s probably going to be something wearable. You know, I think the implant thing is kind of sketchy and probably really good for people that have paralysis. We had the guy who was the first Neuralink patient on. It’s amazing. He was talking to me about how you can play video games now and just—it’s so much better. His quality of life has improved so much.

And eventually they’re going to get to the point where they can reconnect spinal tissue, where people can move again. And it’s amazing. It’s great. But I don’t think they’re going to need that to get this achievement of a mind meld. They’re already wearing these wearable things that Google has developed. Show that video, Jamie, of those people where they’re communicating telepathically. You know what I’m talking about, right?

So they’re already doing this as wearables. And this is kind of crude right now, but it’s sort of sentences. They’re reading each other and they’re communicating, but they’re doing it all non-verbally through technology.

The Future of AI and Human Connection

KATEE SACKHOFF: So I guess what my question about that is, if that exists, are people going to be stagnant, sitting in their houses, existing outside of their houses in their AI system so they’re not moving around? Or are we going to be able to wear these while we’re out and still participating in the world?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That is my fear, that people stop actually participating with their life.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s good.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Fear, because they think they’re living.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: With their wearable.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s talk about that. Let’s watch this, this could be.

KATEE SACKHOFF: A noisy environment or a quiet office.

JOE ROGAN: Having a direct conversation is possible without saying a word. The signals alter ego detects aren’t affected by environmental noise. So even if you’re walking past a wind tunnel or a construction zone, what you want to say will always get across. It’s like having infinite noise cancellation. If you’re traveling, your silent speech can be converted into any language. The start as Amanda. What the f*? So it’s translating, but then is it…

KATEE SACKHOFF: Is it actually speaking out loud to them? They’re hearing the translation out loud. So it’s not going into their brain.

JOE ROGAN: His thoughts are being converted to words, which is being converted to an audio file which makes it to the other person in a different language. Yeah, this is what I’m saying. And I’m telling you, this is one of the little rocks. This is one of the itty bitty rocks that just broken through the atmosphere and slammed into a cornfield.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, I guess my question is why we need it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s funny. Why do you need a cell phone? Why do you need a TV? Why do you need an airplane? Why do you need a boat? Why do you need anything?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, I could tell you I don’t need a cell phone. I do need a plane.

JOE ROGAN: But you do if your hot husband wants to call you.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I mean, but I don’t need an iPhone.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But you need a cell phone.

The Loss of Imagination and Human Experience

KATEE SACKHOFF: I can use my own imagination. You know what I mean? That’s the thing that’s my fear, that we’re becoming lazy as a people.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, most certainly we are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And our, you know, someone the other day, so my husband’s a writer, and someone was saying that there’s an AI where you don’t have to make up a story for your children anymore. I have this Princess Poopy Pants or whatever. I don’t remember what it was, but my daughter loved this story that I was telling her. It was f*ing terrible. But she loves this princess. And it is the worst. It is not good. But I came up with it. And she and I laughed together. And then her reactions helped me to turn the story a different direction. But I’ve created this character. Right?

So you can now go into your AI phone or whatever and say, create a nighttime story for Johnny about his day, but pretend like he’s an astronaut on Mars and he’s working with diggers and it writes a story for you in five seconds to read to your son. Now, yeah, okay. Is that cool? Absolutely. Did your son enjoy it? Sure. But you robbed yourself of the imagination and the work that it would have taken to come up with a story for your son.

And then you also robbed yourself of that experience with your son creating the story together because his reactions would have changed the story in the way that you were creating it as it was going. Because he’s your audience. Right. That’s sad to me, that people are missing out on that. Yeah, cool. You just, you might as well just read your kid a story because you really didn’t write him a story. That’s not…

And so, I don’t know. That’s the thing that I hope as a society, because you’re right, it is coming and it’s here and it’s not slowing down. But I hope that we can still steal away those moments where we don’t want to use it. Because Johnny’s little dad may have missed his second calling of being a children’s story author because he never pushed himself to have to do it. And that could have been really cool. I don’t know, I just… I’m not completely against AI.

Adapting to Change and Finding Your Path

JOE ROGAN: I know what you’re saying. And you’re always going to have people that give up. Yeah, that’s just how life is. You’re always going to have people that don’t find another way. You can’t save those folks. And I don’t even want to because I think that’s part of the whole process of culture. I think we have to figure it out by watching people fail. And unfortunately, some of us have to fail. And it doesn’t mean you fail forever.

If that guy figures out that he’s on the wrong path and he’s got some self assessment ability and he looks back and goes, okay, what did I do wrong? Why am I being such a bitch? Why don’t I just get my life together? What the f is wrong with me? Why am I drinking? Why am I smoking? Why am I killing my house? Why am I depressed? Why don’t I just go for a run? Let’s see how that goes. I’m going to sign up for a yoga class. How about that? Yeah, I’ll just try that for a while. I’ll do something different. I’ll start taking vitamins. Fing do something.

Figure out something else that you like to do. Are you alive? Are you breathing? Then life isn’t over. Stop being a bitch. You could have been born during the time of the Revolutionary War. You just got shot with a musket and you’re bleeding out on a field. No, you’re in Santa Barbara. And you know, you don’t like that AI just took your job. Find a new job, bitch. Figure it out. That’s what we all have to do in this life. There’s a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, you know. Find out what it is that you can do.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t give up. And don’t, AI comes along and you just give up on life. And he could have been amazing at something. Really? I doubt it. Because almost anybody that really is amazing at something has a desire to figure out how to get that through.

Protecting Workers Through Transition

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t disagree with that. But there also are safeguards in place that, so my dad’s entire family, we grew up in a small town on the Columbia River in Oregon, and his entire family were longshoremen. Well, that industry was coming to an end, and the longshoremen’s union actually paid to have those guys trained in different industry.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s great. That’s one of the great things about a union.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s great.

JOE ROGAN: They can set you up like that and recognize what’s happening.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, you know, I would love for there to be some protections for when people inevitably do start losing their jobs, that there are avenues for them to learn a new trade.

JOE ROGAN: I think that would be a great new addition to the way we approach it. If they tried to figure out ways to transition people, healthily, into other occupations. Because there’s certain jobs, like coders, for example, my friends that are involved in technology, do not go to school to code. No, code for fun. If you like coding for fun. Yeah, there’s a lot of them, the super nerds. They code. Those f*ing dorks. They code for fun. They sit in front of a screen.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So make fun of my fan base.

JOE ROGAN: I love them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Come on, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Listen, I love those guys.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But also, three years ago, my dad was like, your kids should go into coding. That’s how quickly that changed, though. You know what I mean? And that could just be my dad’s generation not seeing it, you know, happening as quickly.

JOE ROGAN: No, they were saying what was happening was all these guys, these tech guys wound up being the richest people on the planet. Yeah, we’re seeing it, but it just only, it’s just like a brief window of opportunity to become a tech oligarch.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that s*’s going to slam shut.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is.

The Power and Control of AI

JOE ROGAN: And now fear is, who’s going to be in control of AI? You know, these people like Sam Altman, you’ve got Elon, you’ve got all these super rich people that are going to be in control of the digital God. It’s a little, that’s a little disconcerting as it is.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is a little scary that if you control the masses, it’s so much…

JOE ROGAN: Power and money and just a handful of people.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s a lot of power. And you just, I mean, you got to hope that the people that are in power have, you know, good sensibilities.

JOE ROGAN: They’re kind, they’re nice. Yeah. That they realize, okay, I’ve got X amount of billions of dollars, so this is obviously not what life’s all about. What is, what can I do that makes life meaningful? I could actually probably help people, legitimately help people.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That would be amazing. If people with a lot of money wanted to help people and pay their share of taxes and not take advantage of the situation.

Government Spending and Accountability

JOE ROGAN: Here’s the problem with that. I am all for wealthy people paying their share. I am not for the government deciding what to do with that money. When I’ve seen what you’ve done with the money in the past. You guys are irresponsible. You never make audits. You’ve got insider trading running amok amongst people in Congress and you’re not doing nothing about it. And then you want more money and you say, that’s going to fix it. No, it’s the way you handle the money that f*ing sucks.

It’s not that I wouldn’t want to. I would be happy to pay more in taxes and live in a place that’s just managed perfectly. God, it’s so great living here in America. Everything’s done so well. It’s so beautiful. It’s like everything’s well thought out. Our education system’s great. Nobody is stuck in a bad neighborhood anymore. All the school systems are f*ing top of the food chain. It’s a difficult job to acquire. It’s given a lot of respect and everybody’s doing great.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Then I’d be happy.

JOE ROGAN: Do you see some of the money that they’ve uncovered that was being spent on nonsense? And you see what happens with NGOs and non profits and their funneling billions to these things? And then it’s going to countries and it’s helping overthrow governments. Slow down.

The Give Kids a Chance Act and Healthcare Funding

KATEE SACKHOFF: But we also have to acknowledge that in the cuts, that there were things that didn’t need to be cut. So we can go and we can look at Elon. So you brought up Elon Musk. Let’s talk about when he tweeted about an overstuffed bill in 2025. In the middle of 2025, he’s talking about how this bill was just bloated. They took a bunch of sh*t off of it.

One of the things that fell on that was in 2012, there was a piece of legislation called the Give Kids a Chance Act. What it did was it motivated and incentivized drug companies to create drugs for pediatrics, because right now, pediatrics are completely underfunded. We learned all of this when our daughter got sick. The National Cancer Institute, 4% of its budget goes to pediatrics. 4%. So it’s already underfunded.

And then when Elon in 2025 tweeted about this, they took off all of the stuff at the end of the bill, 900 pages. But what was on it was the Give Kids a Chance Act. Now, this bill is a voucher program. So let’s say that Tom, in his basement, wants to create a drug, a new drug for neuroblastoma that will save our daughter’s life. He’s got no money, but he sees the cure.

So he can go to the FDA and he can say, I got a cure for neuroblastoma. And they say, great, we’re going to fast track you in the FDA, but we’re also going to give you a voucher. You can sell that voucher, because Tom, he only has 10 cents. He can’t create this drug. But with that voucher, he can take that voucher and he can sell it to anyone for any amount of money.

And what that voucher is is a front of the line pass. So he can go sell it to some drug company that has a fat loss drug or a drug for heart medications, anything. He can sell it to them, and they get to buy it for what, $50 million. So now Tom has $50 million for his pediatric drug that’s going to save children’s lives. And this drug company has a voucher that takes them to the front of the line.

Now, do we wish that these drug companies were altruistic and they were just creating drugs for pediatrics? Of course. But they’re not. They’re not. It’s not a free market. So what happens is they’ve now got their voucher. Tom has his money to create his drug. And since 2012, the Give Kids a Chance Act has created over 60 drugs for life threatening illnesses for children. 60 drugs.

And because of Elon’s tweet, that legislation, because it has to be voted on every four years, was taken off the end of the bill. It no longer exists. So that legislation, it’s not in existence anymore. That is terrible. Because now there’s no incentives for the drug companies to create drugs for children. And children are already underfunded. They get so little.

And so it has to be on the bill at the end of the year. So what I want is for people to just see the error of their ways. Yes. Was there waste? Of course. But now you have this bipartisan supported piece of legislation that has to be on the end of year bill or it will not get on again. And then it starts all over again. It has to be on the end of year bill. So things like that. Yes. Can we get rid of the waste? Absolutely. But when you see a mistake and you see that you made a mistake, let’s fix it. Put it back on. Yeah, we got to help children.

JOE ROGAN: It’s literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s literally. But that’s what we do in this country.

JOE ROGAN: But is that unfortunately these bills are crazy. And one of the things about bills is it’ll have a name and then what’s in the bill deals with multiple subjects because a bunch of different things get thrown into the bill all the time.

KATEE SACKHOFF: There’s so much chucked on the end, which is what Elon was talking about.

JOE ROGAN: Right. They all do that. So was this connected to something else?

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, it was by itself part of it. It was just part of it that was on there, that was thrown in.

JOE ROGAN: There at the end, was chucked out.

KATEE SACKHOFF: From what I understand. And granted, you need to talk to someone much more informed than I am about this, but there were about hundreds of pages that were just cut off the end.

JOE ROGAN: So do you think they’re just not reviewing what’s being cut off? They’re just saying, look, we have to…

KATEE SACKHOFF: Make cuts, just cut out the law? I think, yes. That they just needed to cut a bunch off to avoid inspection and just get the bill passed. And that’s what they did. And to Give Kids a Chance Act is one of the, in the top 10 of all time, most bipartisan supported pieces of legislation. And 2% of bills actually pass. So it’s got to. It literally has to be on the end of the year bill.

And it surprises me that because there is waste. I know there’s waste. We all know there’s waste. But that we say that children are so f*ing important and they get 4% of the National Cancer Institute’s money. 4%.

JOE ROGAN: I just feel like if people knew about that, that couldn’t have happened. If we had known about that in advance, we could have made a big deal about that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, we’ve got two months. We’ve got two months to get it on there now.

The Problem with Omnibus Bills

JOE ROGAN: Well, let’s try to get it on there now. But here’s the thing. I had never heard about this before you talked about it. And this is the problem with. I think it’s part of the problem. I don’t think they should be allowed to make bills that way. I think each bill, the things that are in the bills are so consequential. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that they shouldn’t be treated as individual arguments, every single one of them.

If you have a bill and you have 500… I mean, let’s ask Perplexity, our sponsor, what is the average amount of different subjects that are covered in any bill? Because when there are thousands of pages, they might have stuff in there about immigration reform mixed in with Second Amendment rights, mixed in with free speech online, mixed in with support for Israel. It’s weird. They have thousands of pages.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, and you’ve seen how thick it is. And there were times, and I don’t remember who said it, but there were times when the big, beautiful bill was passing or, you know, before it had passed, that people had admittedly not even read it. And how could you read it?

JOE ROGAN: How could they.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s so big. And so there is a problem there, and that is above my pay grade. And I do not know how to fix that.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s a crazy problem.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But I think part of the problem is that it takes a pissed off mom whose kid is sick to be like, this is a f*ing problem. This is a problem. It is a problem that in Portland, where I’m from, that OHSU is one of the top hospitals in the country. OHSU is given so many grants by the Knight Foundation. It is a leading hospital. It is attached to, say it’s a tier one hospital. It is attached to Doernbecher. Doernbecher is a Tier 2 children’s hospital. It’s in the same building. That’s crazy. That’s crazy.

It is crazy to me that a pediatric oncologist makes 50% less than an adult oncologist across the board. 50% less. Doesn’t matter what the specialty is. They all make less money. That is a problem in this country, that our children are not being cared for. And we’re now in a position where there are no programs. And if they were, they’re gone. That are showing doctors and students that are in medical school, hey, go into pediatrics.

Hey, if you want to be an anesthesiologist, you want job security, go into pediatrics. I know you’re going to make 50% less, but go into pediatrics. We need you. There are not enough. It’s a big problem.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a big problem. The 50% less. Because a lot of these doctors…

KATEE SACKHOFF: And now that’s an average as well.

JOE ROGAN: By the way, when they get out, they already have medical school debt and there’s liability coverage is very, very high. Okay. What is the average amount of subjects included in bills passing in US Congress? There’s no single fixed number of topics per bill, but analysis of legislative practices shows strong trends depending on bill type and scope. The majority of bills passed by Congress include multiple subjects, and the number has grown over time as omnibus legislation has become the dominant approach.

What’s… Give me some numbers, though. This one has the most. This is the biggest bill passed. Okay. This is so crazy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: 5,000 pages.

JOE ROGAN: Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was in 2021. It has 5,593 pages. The bill combined all 12 regular appropriation bills for fiscal year 2021, COVID-19 relief, and numerous unrelated legislation provisions, including Copyright, Alternative and Small Claims Enforcement Act, Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, Water Resources Development Act, and a variety of other measures on tax, transportation, energy and health.

They’re… Nobody’s reading that. They’re not reading. You think AOC read that? You think George Santos read that? Nobody read that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You want to make it about people not reading things? I’m sure we can get into that. But I think that, well, George…

JOE ROGAN: Santos is the crazy guy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yes. That was just…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Pardon?

JOE ROGAN: They get him out of jail. Is he getting free?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: I might have him on that guy. He’s a wild boy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: But these people that are Congress people that are making hundreds of millions of dollars through insider trading, and we’re just like, I don’t know what to do.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Okay. But here’s the thing, though, is that we are… Things are not getting voted on. That’s the other thing. Is that. So you take the Give Kids a Chance Act, and then you take these big bills that have so many pages. There should be a system in place where things are voted on separately. And there may be. I mean, I…

JOE ROGAN: This is especially something that is important as pediatric medication. That just seems… It seems like a travesty to include that in a bunch of other stuff in a bill.

Outdated Medical Technology and Healthcare Challenges

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, and you know the crazy thing. So our daughter’s cancer, her treatments, and her care afterwards. So she’s still getting this thing called an MIBG scan, which is a nuclear radiation scan, where they inject her body with stuff that is so bad for you, but it’s all to scan her body to make sure that her cancer hasn’t metastasized. We need to know this kind of stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

KATEE SACKHOFF: There’s no new technology. These are things that she’s being treated with that have existed for 30 years.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We need new things. Our daughter should never have to get wheeled over to the adult side of a hospital to get an MRI because they don’t have a machine on the children’s side. It just… Things like that should never be happening. This is the stuff that should be supported by our government and our tax dollars.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s a great example of something that should be supported by tax dollars. I’ve always said that the two most important things for people to be… If you want to allocate money towards helping people, it’s education and healthcare. Those are number one and number two.

But is there an argument that socialized medicine… I have friends that live in countries with socialized medicine like England and Canada. And it’s great in some ways, but it’s also a nightmare because it takes a long time to get a surgery. A lot of the doctors might not be the best. Quite a few botched surgeries that my friends have had, and a lot of them have actually come to America to get surgery in America.

Especially UFC guys, because they felt like the doctors were better because they’re more incentivized. These doctors are paid better, and you’re going to get those really hot shots. This is the guy who does all the ACL tears for the Lakers. These guys are so… There’s something to pay for that for sure. But there’s something to be said for the competition that drives innovation and makes people become the very best in the top of their field.

But also the most important things are not that. The most important things are regular, ordinary health care. And some of that stuff can f*ing break people. One bad fall when you don’t have health insurance and you’re a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt now.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So did you know that the number one cause of debt in our country is a medical diagnosis?

JOE ROGAN: I did, Yeah, I did.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s terrifying.

Healthcare and Insurance Challenges

JOE ROGAN: It’s terrifying. So that alone, I mean, if other countries have that and it might not be perfect, why can’t we have that? And why can’t we have that along with specialists that are even better? If you are, you know, the Lakers.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, they need a guy who’s just a wizard. Pay people more for the very best guys. So you still have competition. But the idea that people just can go bankrupt if they get sick, it’s like, are we not looking out for each other? Think about how much money we spend on other things that’s doable because other countries do it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It really makes me sad, you know, when every once in a while we would get a medical bill. We have great health insurance. The Screen Actors Guild has some of the best health insurance I’ve ever seen. Mind you, we’re in Oregon, where they’re not used to seeing the Screen Actors Guild health insurance. Doctors will sometimes be like, I have never seen an insurance company cover this. I’m like, I know, it’s phenomenal.

But so we have seen so many people with sick children suffering financially. You don’t think about it. It’s not necessarily even the diagnosis that’s causing the bankruptcy. It’s the time. If your daughter needs a specialized cancer treatment and you’ve got to drive six hours each way every day or be put up at the Ronald McDonald House over by a hospital, you’re not going to your job, you’re not going to your work. You’re not plowing your fields. You’re not going to your nine to five because your priority is your kid. That leads to bankruptcy. That’s a really big problem.

And so it’s not even the insurance. It’s the lack of time, it’s the lack of resources that we give people when they are sick. It’s really heartbreaking. We got bills sometimes that were like $70,000 and these crazy numbers. And, you know, I would take a picture and send it off to our insurance broker because we have a very blessed life. And I wasn’t, I mean, I was definitely shocked by it and a little concerned, but I was like, they’ll handle it. They’ll let us know.

Most people don’t have that. You know, they look at that and even though that was an error, we should have never gotten that, it was still, you know, our portion was still $4,000 or something like that.

JOE ROGAN: Why does it cost that much money? That’s the question. What factors are involved in it costing that much money? Is it all above ground? Because I don’t think it is. It definitely has been shown that it’s not with some drugs that they hike the price up of drugs because they know people have to buy it. Yeah, they know it’s necessary. You’re going to pay.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is a very messed up system. It’s for sure. It’s a crazy system. It’s got so many problems. You can’t have money.

JOE ROGAN: It’s money whenever they can figure out how to make money with things. So it’s like, is there an argument for some sort of a socialization of that in this country? And people that want to say that we shouldn’t have any socialism, listen, we have some.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We do have some.

The Case for Socialized Services

JOE ROGAN: Here’s a big one. Fire department. There’s a big one, right? We all agree the fire department is worth paying for with our tax dollars. We all pay. And the fire department goes where the, if there’s a fire in a poor community, if there’s a fire in a rich community, that’s how it works. We all agree with that because it’s a very good part of a functional society.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And we don’t want to be like, no, we don’t need it.

JOE ROGAN: You have a fire in your health, then it’s the same thing. You should have calamity centers. The socialism of our society is we’ve set up ways to handle calamities, we’ve ways to set up fires, ways to set up floods. And we pay for it, and we make sure it’s all there because we all need it.

You want a social calamity? No education, massive crime, all the different problems that plague us that we ignore. And some great ways to do that, to stop that is free education and free health care. You cut back on most of the problems that people run into.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I agree. Because one of the biggest problems in our country is mental health. It’s a huge problem. And a lot of people go untreated because they don’t have health care.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what you’re seeing in these tents.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, you’ve seen a lot of, you’re seeing a lot of mental illness. A lot.

Mental Health and Homelessness

JOE ROGAN: A giant portion of it. And that was all during the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration, they changed how they, what they did with mentally ill people and they shut down a lot of these institutions and they just let people become homeless.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We were just having this conversation the other day because it’s inhuman to determine how a person should live their life and where they should live their life. Yeah, it’s a very complicated gray issue for sure. You know, you see it in Portland, where I live. It is a very complicated issue because there is not one solution. It needs to be a multi-pronged solution with a lot of hands on deck.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, in Portland it’s gotten, and it was, I think, another thing that Portland did that was, I think directionally correct, which was they decriminalized everything. They said, look, we’re not going to criminalize you for doing cocaine or having mushrooms. We’re not going to treat that like your personal use is a crime of anything. But unfortunately, when they did that, people moved there to do drugs.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, unfortunately, when they did that, they didn’t put the services in place ahead of time to be prepared for it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you would need a lot of services. You need real counseling and real health care. And you really should have an ibogaine center if you’re going to have anything that is dealing with addiction, which is one of the primary factors of these people being homeless.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s a chicken egg thing, right? Because what comes first, the addiction or the homelessness?

JOE ROGAN: They should have set up ibogaine centers. If you’ve got a decriminalized society, set up ibogaine centers in Oregon, it would be the perfect place for it. You’d be able to help so many people because so many of those folks are just stuck. They’re just stuck. And if you can get them out of whatever funk they’re in, whether it’s an opioid or crystal meth or whatever the thing that is that has captured their life and let them find out who they are as a human, you could probably save a bunch of those folks and that can be done.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I do believe that a lot of those people can be saved. I think that it’s really sad. It’s how invisible people are. Yeah, yeah, it’s really sad.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really sad. That’s someone’s baby and you have babies. You know what it’s like.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I know. And that’s what I’m trying to say.

JOE ROGAN: Think about how much you love your babies and you walk by, that was someone’s baby that is now on the street, you know, covered in their own feces.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I know.

Addressing the Homeless Crisis

JOE ROGAN: It’s horrible. It’s horrible. And it’s horrible. It’s just a stain on us as a community that we don’t do anything about it. And the answer is not just lock them up. I think they’re doing something crazy out here where they’re bringing in the National Guard and they’re sweeping up all the encampments. And that doesn’t fix it. You’re just penalizing people for being f*ed.

But at a certain point in time, though, it’s like, you ever watch that show Hoarders?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Certain point in time, you got to burn the house down. All right, this one, this one lady was keeping bags of poop, bottles and bags of poop all in her house. We’re going to have to destroy this house.

KATEE SACKHOFF: This is insane.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like that is almost where places like Skid Row are. It’s so crazy that you’ve let it get this bad for so long to even clean it up. It’s almost like you have to start from scratch. So it’s almost like you’d have to take those people, you’d have to set up treatment places and take those people and convince them that there’s a way to a life, that you don’t want to live like this forever.

There’s a way to a life, and we’re going to try to help you and have these places that are set up where they have counselors and food, they clean people up, they give them their appropriate mental health medication if they need it. They talk to them, they give them activities. That’s not financially prohibitively expensive. They spent $24 billion in California trying to stop the homeless crisis or help it. They didn’t do anything. It got bigger. It got way bigger. And they spent $24 billion.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, because they’re coming over from Texas, being kicked out of Texas, the homeless. I don’t think they can go west. Young men go west.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they have that kind of ambition.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No. I think it’s a big problem. But I also know that it is not, it’s a multi-pronged problem. Like I said, a lot of people don’t want to go into the shelters because they have an animal or they have a lot of stuff. And there’s limits on how many bags you can bring in, things like that. So it’s, you know, you’re not allowed to have drugs on you. Things that are prohibitive to persuade people to go into places that have help.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So I don’t know, it’s going to take somebody a lot more creative than me and a lot of money and a lot of open-minded people to figure out what to do. Because it’s a big problem. And it’s a big problem everywhere. Every major city.

JOE ROGAN: Every major city.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It doesn’t matter if it’s blue or red. It doesn’t matter. It’s a big problem.

Loss of Community and Empathy

JOE ROGAN: The thing is, it’s fairly recent. That’s what’s disturbing because I think that it’s a symptom of a society that’s lost its way. Because it’s fairly recent. There wasn’t a time when I was a boy where you had that many homeless people. You occasionally had a homeless person that you’d run into in Boston where I lived or New York City. You’d occasionally run into homeless people. But there was no encampments. There was no, this is a completely new thing as far as I know.

There was during the Great Depression though. But that was just horrific poverty where they had shanty towns where whole families were living in these set up shanty towns because they couldn’t afford to be in a house.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know. Do you think it’s a loss of, in some regard, it’s a loss of community and it’s a loss of empathy and caring for people? You know, I know that in the town that I grew up, when somebody was down on their luck, everybody would come together and help that person.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Doesn’t really happen anymore. You know, we’re all so consumed with our own lives and you know what’s happening to us. I think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it’s not a coincidence that it’s happening in the places that have the most people too. Of course, where there’s the most people. Not only are you going to have the higher percentage or rather a higher number of people with mental illnesses, but you’re also going to have this thing that happens when you have too many people that live in a place where you don’t value each other.

I live in a neighborhood where there’s a guy that lives in my neighborhood, this old fellow and he’s always working on his garden and every time I drive by, he waves. I look forward.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I look forward to the wave.

Urban Living and Community Connection

JOE ROGAN: To the wave. I waved at. Dude, what’s up? It’s like he’s a friendly guy. Everybody drives by his house, he waves at, and I look forward to waving at that guy. And that doesn’t happen in New York City. In New York City you wave at a guy every day, he’s like, what the f* are you waving at, bitch? Like, they want to fight you. Like, you got a problem. Why are you looking at me every day?

Because there’s too many people. There’s millions of people all stacked on top of each other. It’s not how we’re designed to live. We’re designed to live in some sort of peace and harmony with nature, not like a new nature. So this new nature of concrete and electricity, it’s just weird for us. And so we behave weird.

And then when you see someone who’s down, you just think, that’s not me. I’m going to keep on moving. Whereas if you lived in a small town and that was a member of your community, that’s Earl. Like, oh, my God, Earl’s passed out in front of a store. Like, Earl, what’s going on, man? You love Earl. Pick him up. Earl’s a faceless, nameless person in Manhattan. He’s one of many. And no one cares. They just walk right by you on the way to the play.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, everybody is. Everybody’s hustling. That’s a big thing. We’ve got too little time in the day, a lot to accomplish. Everybody’s just, how do I get mine? How do I take care of my family? How do I protect this? How do I do that? I don’t have time to look at Earl.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know.

JOE ROGAN: But also, even if you did help Earl, Earl might be an idiot. It might be one of them things. You help Earl, and then two days later, he’s smoking crack again. Earl.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, Earl.

JOE ROGAN: Earl might just be. Might be Earl. There’s certain people you can’t save, and there’s always going to be people like that. But there’s a lot of those folks that genuinely are just down on their luck. And maybe they had an abusive childhood, and maybe things went wrong with them at multiple points. Maybe they had an injury and they got OxyContin prescribed to them, and then all of a sudden, they can’t take it off. That happens all the time. I know people that happened to.

The Homelessness Crisis

KATEE SACKHOFF: But it’s going to take a coordinated effort from our representatives to actually care about people enough to figure out what the right solution is.

JOE ROGAN: I would like to talk to the people that spent the 24 billion in California and go, what did you guys do? How come you didn’t do better? There’s more. There’s more than when it started, they increase their number.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, to me, what that says is that there are more and more people falling through the cracks every single day.

JOE ROGAN: Then an enormous number in Los Angeles. Los Angeles alone is a strange place. In some neighborhoods where you’re just driving through, you just seem like, oh, this is like if I was looking at a piece of fruit, and the piece of fruit had this bruised area and I was like, oh, what happened to this? Somebody dropped it. It’s like a damaged part of your society.

You’ve got these people completely removed from just like a bruise just sitting there. They’re part of it, but they’re a sad part of it. And that part is getting bigger. The bruise is bigger. It’s weird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, then, yeah, I mean, we left Los Angeles two years ago. Two years ago. Can’t even speak. Two years ago. And I love LA. I love LA. I lived there for 25 years, love it. It’s a great city, great people.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of amazing human beings. Some of my best friends I met in LA.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And it’s like many other cities, it has a problem and the solution is there. It’s just going to require a lot of work. And I don’t know what that is. Sadly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t know what that is, but I know that people don’t course correct. And that’s what’s screwy. What’s screwy is just let this thing get bigger. You got to dump a lot of resources into removing these tent communities, setting these people up in some sort of community center, some sort of a rehabilitation center. Make an effort.

There’s no way you can allow this because it’s just the cost that’s happening just to the neighborhood. If you live right next door to a tent city and you’re trying to sell your house, good luck, you’re not selling your house. That’s going to f up everything. And it’s going to f it up for them, too. It’s going to cost everybody money.

You’d be better off spending that money trying to help those people. And I guarantee you, at least some of them are going to pop through on the other side, figure it out, become successful, and be forever, eternally grateful, and they’ll be able to help more people do the same. There’s always a few of those people that come out of those kind of treatment centers that can help other people do it.

Understanding the Root Causes

KATEE SACKHOFF: I would be really curious to see, statistically, what the common denominator of the majority of the homeless people in the US was, what it was.

JOE ROGAN: Has done these studies?

KATEE SACKHOFF: What if there’s studies where they actually went around? No, I don’t know though. I don’t know. And granted I do not know enough about this to be speaking about it.

JOE ROGAN: With authority, but I just jump right to a first conclusion.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But you do talk to some people that find themselves homeless. And I’ve had this conversation with somebody who found themselves homeless and started doing drugs because try spending the night out on the street. It’s not comfortable depending on your circumstances, where you are potentially, what your gender is, what your own mental health is.

JOE ROGAN: Low self respect, terrifying. At that point in time you’re sleeping literally outside.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, or you have high self respect, but you had a really shitty day. Or you’re, someone you were caring for had cancer and you lost your house because they passed and you didn’t go to work for a year and a half. For whatever reason you then start using drugs because it helps numb the life, right?

So I don’t know. I think you’re right that a lot of people who do drugs find themselves on the street. But I also think that a lot of people who are on the street for other reasons find their way to drugs. And so it is just a really big problem with a lot of moving parts. And I think first and foremost we have to try to find our way to empathy and figure out how to help people.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s very well said. What you said, I completely agree with and I think it can be done. I think just, I think it could be done with that 24 billion. I just think that there’s a lot of incentive.

KATEE SACKHOFF: There’s a lot of wasted money in this country, let’s be honest.

Political Incentives and Problems

JOE ROGAN: There is. It’s also, this is a thing, unfortunately that they campaign with. When there’s certain issues that I think politicians genuinely don’t want resolved because they can campaign on solving those problems. I really do think that. I talked to Rep. Luna and she actually said that and I was like, so you really think they do that? She’s like, absolutely.

That is so dark that they would not want solutions from both sides because they would rather keep the argument in place. So they go, if it’s up to me, I’m going to go out there and I’m going to stop gay marriage. And then it becomes a thing. They would elect to repeal gay marriage just so they have the ability to fight to bring back gay marriage. That’s how twisted some of these people are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It wouldn’t surprise me.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not surprised. I think that’s probably what happened with Roe v. Wade. I think that’s probably part of it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, government is a business. We have to acknowledge that everybody gets paid.

JOE ROGAN: There’s so much money in that business. And they really do like having problems to campaign on. They openly talk about it like we’re going to get them on this one. They like that problem, keep that problem going.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know what though? You know what we should do? We should give them problems that legitimately, big problems that matter, like saving children.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that would be great.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And education and things like that. People shouldn’t have to move house because they’re trying to chase a public school that’s better. The existing public schools should be great.

JOE ROGAN: And we should have tried to invest in that a long time ago.

Education and Teacher Compensation

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, and we should pay our teachers. How about that?

JOE ROGAN: A lot more.

KATEE SACKHOFF: My mom was a teacher for 35 years. She had a master’s degree and she made something like $35,000 a year.

JOE ROGAN: I know it’s crazy. You have to love what you do and only want to do it because you love it. Whereas there’s so many jobs that pay so much more.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But why is it in our life, it’s so important in our country that anything to do with children gets underpaid? I don’t know when they’re the future.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if you wanted to put a tinfoil hat on, I’m trying to keep people down, trying to hold down society so I can control it. I just want to f* up the education system, put as little money into it as possible. Guarantee chaos, guarantee lawlessness, at least in some segments of society.

That way we can always have reasons to bring the military onto the streets and reasons to arrest people and reasons to enact new laws and reasons to put people on digital IDs. If you wanted to get really cynical, you would say, well, they didn’t solve it because they don’t want to solve it. Because they want the south side of Chicago to still look like Afghanistan at the height of the war.

They want chaos, they want murder on the streets because that way they keep people scared and that way they campaign against these various sides. If you really wanted to get dark, you would look at it that way. I think what happens is more than anything is that it’s really difficult to get anything done.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I think that’s the truth. I think that is the truth.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s politically it’s not your best weapon. Your best weapon are what are the big cultural issues? If it is immigration reform, if you’re one of those people that wants to close the border and want to stop these immigrants coming through, and if you’re on the other side, if it’s we want compassion and we want health care for all, then those are the things that you start throwing around.

Those are the things that are going to get you voted. If you say, I’m going to campaign to make sure that we have health care for infants. Because right now pediatricians and physicians don’t get paid as much. And this is what I’m campaigning on. People will be like, okay, what about global warming? What about climate?

KATEE SACKHOFF: But then, so you have someone that does that, they run on that and wanting to get equal pay for pediatricians and higher pay for teachers, and let’s really run on what’s better for our children. And they get elected and then they go to work on Monday morning and everyone’s like, you can’t do that. I mean, I know you got elected on it, so good luck. You’re going to spend the next two years of your life trying to keep your constituents happy while you’re doing it. But we’ll block you at every turn. Yeah, every turn.

JOE ROGAN: It should have been done that way a long time ago. That’s the problem. It’s like, I don’t understand how anybody who loves their kids would not want their kids to be taught by the best people possible. So unless you’re in abject poverty where you can’t even think about where your taxes go, if you have children, you should be thinking, boy, I hope they get the best people to teach my kids.

Instead, we get people that are willing to take a job that pays so little that almost anybody with a bachelor degree can get a better job somewhere else financially. Get more. You may get paid more as a waiter than most teachers get.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, please, you’d get more money as a dog walker.

JOE ROGAN: Probably you would.

KATEE SACKHOFF: A girlfriend of mine, you have a…

JOE ROGAN: Good group of dogs.

The Power of Seeing Others Succeed

KATEE SACKHOFF: A girlfriend of mine was a lawyer, a trial lawyer, new trial lawyer, but making good money. And she had, and I might get this wrong, but she had stress-induced pancreatic shutdown. So her body as an adult had type 1 diabetes, which is crazy. And it was all due to stress.

So they told her, “You’re going to have diabetes now. It’s not like type two. This is it. But you still need to reduce your stress.” And so she stopped being a lawyer. Her husband was like, “Okay, great, this is it. We got to reduce stress.”

So she quit her job and stayed home and started doing yoga and was like, “Okay, I think I’m ready to try and contribute a little bit again and figure something out. And maybe I’ll go walk dogs because I like dogs. Long walks will be stress reducing. I can make a little extra money. Why not do that?”

By the time she started watching our dogs at her home overnight for like a month while I was on location, she was making more money as a dog sitter slash dog walker than she ever did as a lawyer.

JOE ROGAN: But she sounds like an exceptional dog walker, though.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: A lawyer’s mind to the dog walking business.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, I would get like a picture every day, but she wasn’t really valuable.

JOE ROGAN: If you love your dogs, if someone’s like, you can really trust to take care of your dogs.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But those are the jobs, right? Talking about jobs and children, those are the jobs. If I was, I keep telling my nephew every day, he’s like, “I don’t know what to do with my life.” And I’m like, “Be a plumber. Go on your own business. Find a job where we’re always going to need you.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Open a dog walking service. Start there. Do something.

JOE ROGAN: Do something. But more importantly, what do you want to do?

KATEE SACKHOFF: What do you want? It’s so hard for people to figure out because you’re judging what you want to do based on what you see everyone around you do. I was blessed at a very young age to wake up in the morning and know what I wanted to do. It was very, very rare.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a gift. That’s a gift the universe gave you. Because if you’re just like, “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to do.”

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

Finding Your Thing

JOE ROGAN: I think with people like that, generally, they’ve never tried. This is what I think is one of the things that’s very important for kids. Find a thing, whatever that thing is. Whether your thing is painting, whether your thing is music, whether your thing is sports, just find a thing that’s hard to do and work on getting better at that thing.

And that’ll teach you so much about what life is. And if you don’t do that, if you just do the work that school gives you, and then you go home and you watch TV and then you hang out with your friends, and you do the work that school, and you don’t get involved in anything that really tests you as a person, like test your creativity or test your endurance.

If you want to be a runner, are you willing to get up every morning and actually do the work? Things that test you, they teach you the process of enjoying things and getting better at things. And when people don’t go through that when they’re young, it’s a real problem trying to find a thing and commit to it. You almost have to stumble upon it and get lucky.

KATEE SACKHOFF: My parents, though, I wasn’t raised by anybody in the arts. My dad’s a builder, my mom was a teacher. And my parents, not one day of my life told me I couldn’t do something. Every single day they were like, “Go for it. Why not? Sure.”

I do believe my dad always said, “Second place is just the first loser.” So I did have a dad like that. But he said it sort of, he was building competition. He also knew that I was the child that he could say that to and it would motivate me. He didn’t say that to my brother, who were very two different children.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you got to figure that out.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But my parents told me I could do things. And then at a very young age, this is where representation matters. At a very young age, I, in high school was dating a hockey player who was my age, was playing for the WHL team in Portland and got drafted.

So when I was 17 years old, I saw an 18 year old get drafted in the NHL. And in my mind, somebody my age did something really hard that required a lot of work, but he made it. And him making it and seeing that happen in a counterpart of mine gave me the courage to go.

JOE ROGAN: Go.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’m moving to California.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You did it. I can do it.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So you have to have both. You have to have encouraging parents and you have to have the means to be able to pursue the things that you want to pursue. But you also have to have representation and see other people around you succeed that are your age or that you identify with or that look like you. That’s important too.

JOE ROGAN: That’s huge. Inspiration is so important.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So important. It starts with teachers too, right?

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Kids need one good teacher.

The Teacher Who Changed Everything

JOE ROGAN: I had one good science teacher when I was in the seventh grade. And he said something that I think about all the time. I’d never thought about this before. He said, “I want you to really hurt your head. I want you to look up at the sky and think about how far forever is. Think about the idea of infinity. Just really think about it. Just only look at the stars at night and think about infinity. Because you can’t. You can’t even wrap your head around it.”

He was an intense dude. He was a Vietnam vet. It was a little shaken up, and you can kind of tell. But he really loved science. He was just trying to get us to understand how f*ing crazy the world is. We really want you to think about this like you’re on a planet in space.

And I never thought about it before then. I was like, “Oh, the stars. There’s the moon.” I never really thought about forever. The idea of even being able to imagine. Where’s my mind going when it’s imagining infinite space?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. It’s crazy how small we are.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And we were just going over this the other day. We’re probably, the whole thing’s probably fractal. There’s this photograph. It’s a crazy photograph of a human brain cell next to a map of the universe. And they look like the same thing. It’s really weird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So we’re all living in Orion’s belt around a cat’s neck in Men in Black.

JOE ROGAN: Well, my joke was that there’s a guy, that’s his eye, right, and he’s depressed, and he’s going to blow his brains out. And that’s the Big Bang we’re a part of. Look at this. So on the left is a brain cell, on the right is universe. Yeah. Wow. It’s kind of nuts. I mean, it’s kind of dead on. It looks exactly like the same thing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It really does. I mean, they’re both so beautiful.

The Fractal Universe

JOE ROGAN: It’s like the structure of it is amazing. But if, why wouldn’t we believe, if we believe in subatomic particles, okay, we believe there are things that exist in the subatomic world that are behaving like magic, like they’re moving and not moving at the same time. They appear and disappear. We don’t know where they’re going.

There’s some quantum entanglement that they show where particles that are not even remotely connected to respond to each other. Why wouldn’t we think that we are subatomic in another being? That’s true. Infinite. True infinity is not just the size of the universe itself being infinite, but of literally, your universe is a small part of another being that’s in another universe.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, anything’s possible, right?

JOE ROGAN: The whole thing’s so weird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We know so little about the universe.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s so weird. We have no idea. We’re literally flying through space and we’re arguing over who’s a Nazi. And the whole thing is just very bizarre. It’s very bizarre.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is pretty amazing when you look at how small we are. We started reading, our daughter’s interested in space. And so we started looking at books and talking about the Milky Way and what the universe is and what Earth is and where we live. It’s pretty amazing when you realize how fragile the whole thing is because we’re so tiny.

JOE ROGAN: We’re so tiny.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We’re so tiny.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And our galaxy’s so tiny. That’s what’s nuts. Our galaxy’s immense. Hundreds of billions of stars. Tiny, little, tiny thing. Little, tiny, cute, little galaxy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Little, tiny, little, little, sweetie little galaxy. Oh, look at that little dot right there.

The Mysterious Object A31

JOE ROGAN: Have you been paying attention to this object that’s hurtling towards earth? It’s called a 30. They’re calling it a 31.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I try to avoid things that are going to give me nightmares. Are we going to send extraterrestrial?

JOE ROGAN: Perhaps.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Is it really. We’re going to meet the aliens finally.

JOE ROGAN: There’s something weird about it. We were just going over it the other day. There was an article that was stating that whatever they use to detect what is around this, like what, they can detect the composition, whether it’s mostly water vapor, mostly iron.

This thing is giving off the indications that is an alloy that only exists on Earth through industrial alloy making processes. And it’s not a natural metal.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s what they’re getting, is the signal that this thing that is hurling through space, this massive object that’s moving, by the way, from the same direction in space where the wow.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Signal came, I don’t know what that is.

The Wow Signal

JOE ROGAN: The wow signal is a they believe intelligently generated signal that they picked up. I think it was in the 70s. Was it the 70s?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I should know this. I’m going to lose my nerd code.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s okay. It’s a weird one. It’s a little obscure. So they, I don’t know what the exact technique they were using to monitor radio waves in space, but they got a signal.

So here it is. The wow signal is a powerful 72 second narrow band radio signal detected on August 15, 1977 by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University, which initially suggested an extraterrestrial origin, named for the wow written in printout by the astronomer Jerry Amen.

The signal had characteristics expected from a technological source, but follow up efforts have failed to detect it again. The leading hypothesis is that a natural astrophysical event such as a flare from a magnetar briefly illuminated a cold hydrogen cloud, causing it to emit radio signal similar to a laser or it’s a laser. And then this object is coming from that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: From that area?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, look at that. They sent you a signal and then now this thing is coming through the. So if you think how fast this thing is going, if it came from the other side of the galaxy, it’s probably exactly how long it would take to get here.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So it’s coming directly for Earth?

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s coming near Earth.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Right. So we’re not worried it’s going to hit us?

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t believe we’re worried that. Well, I’m going to find out tomorrow. Avi Loeb, an astronomer from Harvard is coming on. Amazing. And he’s going to enlighten us as to what this thing is all about. But it’s weird. As it gets closer, it’s weirder and weirder. They’ve never seen anything like this.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But is it possible then that another planet out in the universes isn’t made up of, has alloy properties and it could have chipped off and it’s now hurtling through space?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you would have to ask a metallurgist that question. That’s a good question. They just know the only way it exists on Earth is through this industrial process. If it is that stuff.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

The Mystery of 31 Atlas

JOE ROGAN: Why do they think it’s that stuff? Do you remember that article? We looked it up a couple days ago. It’s so fun to think it’s a spaceship. So fun to think the Cylons are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Coming because they might be.

JOE ROGAN: They might be.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Do you think they’re coming to save us or?

JOE ROGAN: I think they would have already stepped in if they were going to do that. They would have stepped in. Yeah, sure. There’s been, you know, they would have stepped in right after World War II. They’d be like, hey, hey, hey, what the f*?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Or do you think they’re just up there going, you’re going to have to save yourself, kids.

JOE ROGAN: Perhaps, maybe, perhaps it’s a process that all intelligent emerging life goes through. And then, you know, you have to let it go through the process. Like you have to let your kids fall down.

In contrast to all node comets, including the interstellar comet 21 Borisov, the observed spectrum of the gas plume around 31 Atlas shows prominent nickel emissions but no evidence for iron other than 31 Atlas. This anomaly was only known to exist in industrially produced nickel alloys through the carbonyl chemical pathway, which refines nickel through the formation and decomposition of nickel tetracarbonal.

The authors of the new paper postulate that this carbonyl process is realized naturally near the nucleus of 31 Atlas. They argue that this in situ formation of this thing predicts that nickel should be strongly concentrated near the nucleus. So it’s like the whole thing is some very weird metal. That’s the point. And it’s also, it’s weird the way it’s moving. What are they saying about the way it’s moving?

There’s something about self correcting or something I think they’ve done. It had some emission. I don’t know. Looked like a jet, but I don’t think so. It seemed. No, it did seem like they were saying that it’s very far away.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s very far away. So maybe it’s the Cylons coming back. They’re like, we have to go save our parents.

JOE ROGAN: You see, they got a telescope that actually took video of it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s what amazes me, is that we have telescopes that can see that far.

JOE ROGAN: I can send it to you, Jamie. This guy has it on his Twitter page. But it’s like, it’s very low resolution, obviously, because it’s f*ing millions of miles away. But whatever it is is really weird. It’s really weird.

Aliens and the Vastness of Space

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know, people ask me all the time if I believe in aliens. I think just because of what I do for a living and the genre that I’m in and, you know, I.

JOE ROGAN: Can’t wait to talk to you about aliens.

KATEE SACKHOFF: What I always say, you’re going to be vastly disappointed that I know so little about them. But what I always say is, I think it’s a line from a movie where it would be an awful waste of space if it was just us.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that is a line in the movie. I don’t remember what movie it was.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s from the movie with Jodie Foster, Contact. When her dad says to her that it would be an awful waste of space.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Beautiful movie.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a great movie. Carl Sagan wrote that book. That’s it. So this is the thing. Like, what is that? What the f* is this? Obviously low resolution, obviously moving through space, but also, what the hell is that?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, it seems to be moving pretty quickly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it looks like a spaceship.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, it also looks like a dust bunny.

Praying Mantises: Nature’s Ruthless Predators

JOE ROGAN: I was showing my friend Matt last night, we were having dinner and I was showing him videos of praying mantises killing hummingbirds because he didn’t believe it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Stop.

JOE ROGAN: He’s like, no way.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, they’re big. Praying mantises can be quite big, right.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing compares to hummingbirds. It’s crazy how strong they are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They literally kill hummingbirds.

JOE ROGAN: Snatch hummingbirds right off feeder. So they sit by the hummingbird feeder motionless and the hummingbird comes in to take a drink and just snatches them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: What do they do with them?

JOE ROGAN: Eat them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Stop.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. Praying mantises are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Makes me really sad.

JOE ROGAN: Ruthless. I have one.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, they eat their own young, right?

JOE ROGAN: They probably do. I mean, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know if they do that. But I know that they put a praying mantis in a box and then they’ll drop a roach in and the praying mantis just snatches it up and just starts eating the roach.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, but that doesn’t make me feel bad.

JOE ROGAN: But it does it to this bird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That makes me feel bad.

JOE ROGAN: But the thing is like why couldn’t that be an intelligent life form from another planet and then come here on 31 Atlas and land? I mean that is a possibility.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, that’s the thing, right? Is that we spend so much time, or I guess in our imagination, we’ve been conditioned to think that intelligent life looks like something from these movies. So we all think intelligent life is, you know, these guys with big heads or they look like us or you know, whatever we think. But they absolutely could literally be a flea.

JOE ROGAN: It could be a six foot tall mantis.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It could be. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then we’d be in real trouble.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Real trouble.

JOE ROGAN: Show her one of those praying mantises getting a hummingbird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: This is going to make me really sad, you guys.

JOE ROGAN: It makes me sad too. I love birds.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Have you ever wanted to wear one of those hats with the hummingbird feeders on it?

JOE ROGAN: No. Do people do that? That’s so crazy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They’ll put the little things and they just stay really still.

JOE ROGAN: They’re a beautiful little bird. A weird little bird too. And the way they’re able to change direction and move, it’s amazing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I didn’t realize our house where we live now, they stop all the time. So they’ll sit on the branches and stuff which is really rare to see.

JOE ROGAN: So this is. Praying mantises are so nasty.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But look at it, it kind of knows it there.

JOE ROGAN: Well that one.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh my God. He grabbed it by his beak.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. It reached out and just snagged him. The thing is, they’re so strong for their size. I mean, that is literally like a person trying to take out a cow.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Go down. There was one. That one with the praying mantis and the scorpion.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, praying mantis. Going to kill that scorpion. That scorpion doesn’t have a f*ing chance. I don’t know if that’s what I’m guessing. Yeah, look, he’s already on top of him. Yeah, he just mounted him.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But then look at. He’s avoiding the.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s going to figure it out.

KATEE SACKHOFF: He’s also avoiding the stinger.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what is happening? I know what is happening. They’re probably both trying to figure out why they’re in there together.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God. This is the stuff of nightmares for me.

JOE ROGAN: Praying mantises are not. They’re monsters. See if you can find videos of praying mantises eating roaches. There’s a whole mantis page on Instagram where they put a different bug in there with praying mantises.

KATEE SACKHOFF: How do we know it’s not AI created, though, guys?

JOE ROGAN: Because this has been around for years. Yeah, yeah, praying mantises. Oh, look, they f* up giant lizards. They kill lizards. The lizards tried to eat him at the beginning of it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Have you watched the video? The actual video? The lizard tried to eat him. He’s like, not today, b*h. I’ll be eating you.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That poor lizard thought he was going to eat the praying mantis, and the praying mantis is eating him. We are so lucky that they’re little. We’re so lucky.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We are so. I hate it.

JOE ROGAN: They were big and smart.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No. And then there’s a bird. I don’t want to see the bird.

JOE ROGAN: Did you kill him?

KATEE SACKHOFF: That bird? Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: I found, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s hanging upside down from a flower eating the bird. Oh, my God. It’s like, it’s a big bird, too. That is wild.

KATEE SACKHOFF: My God.

JOE ROGAN: They are just monsters. I mean, that’s like Alien from the movie Alien. That’s what it’s like. It’s just little.

KATEE SACKHOFF: My entire mind has been blown.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Look at that. That’s what a praying mantis can do. Hang upside down while it’s eating a bird.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And literally hanging onto the petals of.

JOE ROGAN: A flower like it’s nothing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Upside down.

JOE ROGAN: And with no strain at all.

KATEE SACKHOFF: None whatsoever.

JOE ROGAN: It’s carrying a f*ing bird that’s like five times bigger than its body.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It died like a barn swallow.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: The crazy thing is these stupid lizards that think they’re going to eat them.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it is such a bizarre creature.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t want to see any poor little beauty.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they do it all the time. They get hummingbirds. So he just. A lot of these have no action though too.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’ve seen oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Trying to capture stuff, but these go back as long as YouTube does. Some of those are 15 year old videos.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Those are the ones I would try. Oh, but they get them so quickly. Why do they stop moving so quickly?

JOE ROGAN: They’re so fast.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Because they’re so strong too.

JOE ROGAN: This one looks, that one looks fake, AI. I mean, now it’s created within four weeks. I start going, all right. Oh, that looks like AI. Oh, yeah, that’s AI. But the other ones are. Those cell phone ones are real. They’re just unbelievably strong.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s crazy. I had no idea.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s like a spaceship filled with those f*ers. They’re all smart. They’re way smarter than us.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We’re done. I think I saw a three year old boy getting ready to take on a praying mantis too. I think he’s going to lose in one of those videos. So future generations are not looking good right now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if you walk up to a mantis, they’ll be like, what, b*h? Stand up.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They will. On their hind legs.

JOE ROGAN: We’re just lucky they’re little. Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s terrifying. It’s absolutely. I’m going to go home and tell my husband all about this, not my daughter.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s what they have to think about with this 31 Atlas. If it’s filled with reptilians, then we got problems.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God. I cannot laugh at children. Oh, no. See, I told you there was one.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jesus.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, God.

JOE ROGAN: He just, he’s like, f* you. He tried to eat the baby.

KATEE SACKHOFF: He did. He tried to eat the baby.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how gangster praying mantises are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh my God. It went after that baby. He was like, f* you. I will eat your entire body.

JOE ROGAN: The thing is crazy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Before someone comes to rescue you.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t think of them as being vicious.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No. I look at them and think that they’re super cool. I would have been that three year old kid if I’d ever seen one in our yard. I would have been like, hey, honey.

The Praying Mantis Discussion

JOE ROGAN: A regular green mantis. There are some wild mantises out there. Oh yeah, there’s more Kung Fu Mantis. Wow, look at that one. Those are beautiful. What is that one called? Kung Fu Mantis. What a beautiful looking insect. Just imagine a planet where that’s the size of a horse.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, we’re f*ed if that’s what’s on this copper thing that’s coming toward us.

JOE ROGAN: Got super lucky that the insect world is small.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Somehow or another it worked out that way. Or the insect world is small. Because if the insect world was as big as the mammal world, it would be a wash. It would be over.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Like if they were the size of…

JOE ROGAN: Elephants, well, they’re the size of dogs. They’d kill us all.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that f*ing. That one praying mantis can do. Look at that one.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Perfect.

JOE ROGAN: It looks like a flower.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s a praying mantis. What is that thing?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the one we were just looking at. This little guy? Yeah, and that’s a bigger one. Whoa. Giant mantis.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Holy s*.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. I don’t know that we have to listen to the video to hear what kind it is. What is it? What is it going to do? Where’s… oh, it’s heads. The white part in the front.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, that thing that looks like a…

JOE ROGAN: Arms folded up. Whoa.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Wait, where’s his arms?

JOE ROGAN: His arms are folded right in front. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my God.

KATEE SACKHOFF: He just bit its head off.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Whoa. Who knows? Jeez. I thought the females do after mating.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They do, they just eat them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they f* up the men.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, well, that’s…

JOE ROGAN: That’s how you stay small. Nature’s like, you’re too gangster. We have to keep it little.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We have to keep it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like Chihuahuas and honey badgers. Was the size of a wolf, we’d have a real problem.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We’d have a real problem.

JOE ROGAN: They’re so gangster. They just… they never could take over the whole forest.

KATEE SACKHOFF: F*ing honey badger is just like…

JOE ROGAN: Imagine if a honey badger was the size of a horse and they would just take over entire swaths of land. There probably were things like that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: There probably were back in the day. And now we have chickens left.

Sci-Fi and Starbuck

JOE ROGAN: Do you have to keep up on a certain amount of sci-fi because of playing Starbuck? Do you feel like an obligation to your fans to hold on to a certain amount of sci-fi information?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yes and no. I feel that I have to maintain and hold onto a respect for the genre and the knowledge that I will never have that there are people that can come up to me and tell me the entire history of Star Wars.

And before I was in Star Wars, I considered myself a Star Wars fan. And then I got in Star Wars and I was like, oh, I don’t know s* about anything.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a big a universe now.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is.

JOE ROGAN: Especially now. Keeping up on Mandalorian stuff?

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, you can’t keep up on anything. So I just always say, I would love to know more about that.

JOE ROGAN: Can you please? That’s good.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Can you please enlighten me? Because I don’t know. I really don’t know. And these… you know, I have found that the sci-fi community, especially, one of my favorite things is going to conventions because I love… I just love meeting people and new people and meeting the people that are fans of the work.

And we always have things in common. And I would be so bold as to say that sci-fi fans are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure there are a lot of nerds.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They’re very, very, very smart. And I just cannot compete with that. I can tell you the lines that I can’t forget. There are lines from Battlestar Galactica. “We’ve got violent decompressions, irradiating from the port flight pod.”

I thought I was going to be fired because I couldn’t say it. I had to write it down. I had to tape it to my Viper. I was like, oh, my God, they’re going to find out. Oh, my God. I shouldn’t be here. This is crazy. I’m an imposter.

And then I find now I can’t forget it. I had a line from Mandalorian that I couldn’t remember for the life of me, and so I kept memorizing it with my husband, and he was throwing tennis balls at my face. I was catching tennis balls as I was memorizing it.

JOE ROGAN: God, it was that hard.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was very hard. But it was, “Pirate King Gorian Shard is captain a cumulus class corsair of violent snub fighters.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jesus.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. It was just like, somebody hates you.

JOE ROGAN: In the writers room.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s possible, you never know.

JOE ROGAN: That seems so mean to make someone try to say that. You say it f*ing you say it first.

KATEE SACKHOFF: True. There are times I have… I have since, Ron Moore was on my podcast and I told him that for 25 years, I have not been able to forget this f*ing violent decompressions line. And he was like, I’m so sorry.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious because he’s aware.

KATEE SACKHOFF: He’s aware that, you know, he’s making actors say s* that you should never have to say in real life. And then furthermore, you have to try and decipher it. You know, one of my jobs is to take something I don’t understand and then say it with authority as if I do understand it.

So I have to dissect it and learn what certain things mean. And if I don’t understand it, I have to give it context in something that I do understand in order to sound like I am not an idiot, which at times is hard. So, you know, it’s… God. The jargon is… I learned the tennis ball technique with my husband, and that’s a great technique.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds like a good technique. You remember it while you’re catching tennis balls, then you really remember it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That is a crazy sentence to try to remember.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. It was not easy.

Strong Female Leads in Sci-Fi

JOE ROGAN: You’re a part of something that people in sci-fi that I think is very interesting. Sci-fi is, I think, the genre of action that has the most badass women.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Hundred percent. Yeah. At least it did. It did for a long time.

JOE ROGAN: I think the OG is obviously Sigourney Weaver.

KATEE SACKHOFF: 100% that.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that is an aside. No one is like, oh, it’s a strong female lead. That is an aside to an insane movie. And an amazing performance. That last scene when she kills that thing.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. Amazing, that character. When I saw that movie, I was like, I want to be her. Because up till then, I only wanted to be Bruce Willis. I wanted to save the Nakatomi building, you know?

I loved action movies with my dad, and when he started realizing that I had this affinity toward these movies, he started showing me movies with strong female leads. And Sigourney was the one where I saw that performance. And she was everything. She was strong, she was capable, she was smart, she was feminine. She was funny. She was so… she was everything.

JOE ROGAN: And it was a perfect movie.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was a perfect movie. It was a perfect movie. Number two, possibly better, even.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This is a scene when she blows it out. I disagree.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You do?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Because number two, the aliens are too easy to kill. This motherf*er’s so hard to kill.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So hard to kill.

JOE ROGAN: And then in the second one, they’re just gunning him down.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, there’s a different…

JOE ROGAN: It’s a different thing. Look, they’re both great movies. I really loved Aliens, but the thing about Alien the first one was that thing was amazing movie.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, it’s the way that… I mean, just the… I mean, it’s just such an amazing shot.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a perfect movie.

KATEE SACKHOFF: The framing of that is there was…

JOE ROGAN: Never one moment in that movie where you saw what was coming next.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, because we hadn’t seen anything like it.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing. You know, chest burster scene I remember being in…

KATEE SACKHOFF: Look at the utter f*ing exhaustion on her face.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The chestburster scene was like, what the f*? What? I remember being in the movie theater. I had no idea that was going to happen. No Internet back then.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Watch that. This movie is nuts. And that little thing was running around on the ground and his chest was burst open.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So gross.

JOE ROGAN: Everyone’s screaming, there’s blood everywhere. It was wild.

KATEE SACKHOFF: This is one of probably, in my opinion, one of the best movies of all time.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I agree 100%. And again, the fact that it was a strong female lead was just as a tiny little part of the movie. It was just… she was so good. You didn’t even think, oh, it’s a strong female lead. You’re like, well, no, because they didn’t…

KATEE SACKHOFF: Tell you this is a strong female lead.

JOE ROGAN: No, exactly.

KATEE SACKHOFF: They just created a phenomenal character and made her a woman.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. And she just played the part perfectly.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, this. Oh, this scene.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts. It was so nuts because you didn’t know what is happening. People have to realize, before movies were spoiled, there was no spoiler alerts back then, you didn’t get to watch clips.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But even just the way it shot, the frenetic energy of the camera matching the frenetic energy of his body.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This is such a crazy scene.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Bro. Again, 1979, this is happening. I mean, the special effects back then were nuts. To have something like this is probably the greatest believable monster special effects in any movie up to this point. I mean, by far. That was a little… that one was like… it was on wheels. That was a little silly.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s on a piece of string. Someone’s pulling it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it moved a little weird, but, you know, it’s an alien you were…

KATEE SACKHOFF: Still scared of, though.

JOE ROGAN: I’m still scared. But then when you see the actual alien itself, you’re like, what the hell is that? You never saw anything like that before. Not only was it completely unique in its design, it was horrific. And it looked like an insect. Like an insect and a reptile at the same time.

Strong Female Characters in Science Fiction

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. Sci-fi was a place because I was a huge fan of strong women and genre work. And I found myself gravitating toward sci-fi because that’s where women existed that I identified with. And I saw myself, you know, I didn’t see myself in this, you know. Well, the characters I played when I moved to California, they didn’t. It didn’t feel like me, you know.

I really found sort of my calling, I guess, when I started watching those women. And I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I loved Lucy Lawless, and I loved Linda Hamilton and Carrie Fisher and a lot of these women that were just really, really great characters, and they were written as great characters.

And Starbuck was, and if you talk to Ron Moore about it, the reason why he made Starbuck and Boomer women, he didn’t think about it. He just said, okay, we’ve got these are the characters from the original. These are the characters we’re going to put in my version. Women are in the military. Women do exist in combat roles now. And we are making this for, you know, the early aughts. We have to be representative of what the military looks like. We need to make a couple of these characters fit women. And he just said this one and this one. He didn’t give it any thought, you know.

And so I think part of the reason why they were so great, the characters were so great was that they were just great characters, right? The writing was so great. There was never a time where they were like, she’s the best female pilot around, right?

JOE ROGAN: You know, it was like Linda Hamilton in Terminator. It’s like, she’s just a great character.

KATEE SACKHOFF: She’s a great character and with a motivation that we all can identify with. So it’s, it’s, and that’s why she was such a great character. And, you know, she opened so many doors for me and because then people started to believe that I was tough.

JOE ROGAN: And how many girls started doing chin ups after they saw Linda Hamilton in the Terminator?

KATEE SACKHOFF: Please. Chin ups are f*ing hard.

JOE ROGAN: I know. She’s jacked.

KATEE SACKHOFF: She’s jacked.

JOE ROGAN: She’s so fit for them.

Training for the Spartan Race

KATEE SACKHOFF: I did a Spartan race with my husband because on my podcast channel, I was, you know, during COVID and then before COVID we were, I was creating content of sort of like Katie did sort of stuff like, I’d love to do this. Let’s film it and see what it’s like. So we signed up for Spartan race and then, and then recorded the whole thing. And my husband not only ran his race, but then ran my race too, recording the whole thing.

That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Getting in shape for that thing. I got in shape for six months before. That was hard. And getting to a point where I actually could do chin ups and then also pull ups too. I was like, wow, I’m strong. I felt so strong at one point.

So I get to the actual race and I’ve been training with so many such heavy things that I got to the medicine ball where you have to pick it up, carry it and throw it, and then pick it up and carry it and throw it. And it was so light for me and I was prepared for it to be so heavy. I got to it and I picked it up and then I threw it and it kept going and I had to slow down because I had to go get the ball and bring it back to where it was supposed to be. I had gotten almost too strong.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It was really awesome. It was so fun.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nice to know that you can get strong though. That feels, it’s a nice feeling. I wish everybody felt that. Yeah, get, get physically better. You’ll feel better.

KATEE SACKHOFF: But I had fun doing it, you know what I mean? And I also set myself a goal. I think that’s really important too. For some people that it’s daunting setting a goal and the goal doesn’t need to be winning. The goal just needs to be finishing.

Why Sci-Fi Embraces Strong Women

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think it is that sci-fi in particular embraced these gangster women characters?

KATEE SACKHOFF: So my opinion on this is that I feel like because science fiction doesn’t exist, because there you’re existing in these make believe worlds that strong women were not intimidating in sci-fi because we could be dismissed as not, but that wouldn’t happen in real life.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So men could then watch these, right?

JOE ROGAN: Not be threatened.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s my opinion.

JOE ROGAN: I bet you’re right. I bet that’s, that’s the only thing that makes sense now that I’m thinking about it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, I think so.

JOE ROGAN: Because there’s no female John Wick.

KATEE SACKHOFF: No, no.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there is that one ballerina. No, that one. The Emily one. The one that Kevin James was in. It’s a crazy movie about this young girl who just kills all these bad guys.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I have no idea.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of tongue in cheek, but it’s hyper violent. It’s crazy. That’s what it’s called, right? Emily? I think there’s two of them. There was one where they killed her dad and they killed her family. And so she killed everybody. And then she came back. And then the second one, she came back and killed more people. It’s like a young, cute girl who just knows how to kill everybody.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I mean, look, it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of fun.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a funny movie.

KATEE SACKHOFF: When I went through.

JOE ROGAN: What is it, Jamie? Whatever Kevin James was in, it was about a young girl who killed everybody.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Kevin James?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Kevin James was a bad guy. He was, he played a white supremacist. The movie’s called Becky. Becky.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s Becky.

JOE ROGAN: Becky, yeah. Isn’t there, there was a, there’s a second one, though, right? Well, there’s a movie called Emily and there’s a Kevin James. No, it is Becky. You’re right. But there was a movie before Becky, I believe.

KATEE SACKHOFF: 72% on rotten tomatoes.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s fun. The Wrath of Becky also came out. That’s right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I just saw Ballerina.

JOE ROGAN: That’s it. I actually thought that was really good first one, right? No, this is the second one. That’s the second one. This is the first one. I thought there was a prelude to either way.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Fun ass movie.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, Joel McHale’s in it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, he’s great. It’s a fun ass movie. But it’s, that’s the female John Wick.

Writing Strong Female Characters

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, I think everybody’s trying to create these strong female characters now. And I think that one of the biggest problems with a lot of them is that they’re not focusing on the character to begin with. We talked about, write a strong character and then just make her a woman.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You know, don’t write a strong character that you have to have a woman.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Right. I think that’s part of it because they’re all trying to create, there’s so many of them now. Right. And I love to see them and I love to give them chances, but a lot of times the, I want to also see somebody that’s believable in the role as well. Right.

One of the funnest things that I love to do is transform my body depending on what character I’m playing. Within reason, there’s only so much I can do or that I want to do. But, you know, for my show, Another Life, my character wakes up from cryo. I wanted her to look dehydrated and sinewy and really, really, really lean. Almost unhealthy lean. And I got myself down to such a low body fat. It was crazy.

JOE ROGAN: What did you eat to get down like that?

KATEE SACKHOFF: 1450 a day, 1550 a day. Something around that time when I was cutting, but I packed on muscle and then cut really hard for three weeks before. And I was eating a lot of protein and I got myself so low that my menstruation stopped. And I was like, oh, this is too low. This is really low.

JOE ROGAN: That happens with a lot of mountain runners.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It does, yeah. It was quite low. But I got to where I wanted to be. I looked the way I wanted to look, and then I naturally put on, you know, a healthy amount of weight as the series went on, which is what I wanted to do anyway. But so I want to see not someone do something detrimental to their health necessarily. But I do want to, I want to see the muscle. I want to see the capability in a character that’s kicking ass, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Right. You want it to be believable.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Physical Transformation for Roles

JOE ROGAN: When they all got in insane shape for that movie, 300.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, my God. It’s the best job in the world for me. If they’re like, we’re going to give you tons of time and tons of money to just get in the best shape of your life.

JOE ROGAN: Here’s some trainers. We got six months.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Let’s do it.

JOE ROGAN: There was a lot of people that thought that they used AI for that. They used some AI for sure. Because that was a crazy movie for 300. Yeah. While they used 300, had a lot of AI because there was.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Excuse me. I should say not AI. I should say CGI.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It had CGI for sure.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I should say. Because obviously the giant Persian king was not really that big. There was a lot of fantasy elements of that. But I think they really did get in insane shape. And a lot of people dismissed that and said, that’s CGI. But there’s videos of those guys working out, getting ready. Yeah. Look at these guys just going crazy getting ready to film this movie. I mean, they trained like animals so you could see the cool. So they really did just develop incredible bodies, which, the nutty thing is, anybody can do. You just have to do it. Do what they did. You’ll get a lot better.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s a lot of hard work, though. It’s not that easy. Yes, on paper is easy, but being a mom of two kids, though.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

Balancing Fitness and Motherhood

KATEE SACKHOFF: And having a job, I, in the last two years, I’m hard pressed to find time to work out. And I wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning. So I’m awake before my kids and you know, I choose during that time to, you know, meditate, write my journal, breathe, take time to myself. And then they wake up. I haven’t quite figured out how to fit in my workouts.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s an obligation. That’s very different. Right. Your mother, you know that you’re doing the absolute right thing. You’re dedicating all your time to being a mom when you’re there. That’s just how it is. But for, you know, for the amount of hours that are in a day, it would be nice if you could just get a little time to yourself. As they get older, you’ll have more time to yourself and then you’ll be able to get back on track.

But yeah, for people that have the time and don’t do it, that’s the wasted potential of your resources. You don’t have to do a lot, just do some body squats and do some push ups.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And you don’t need a lot of equipment either. I think that’s the thing. I think that we’ve made physical fitness in some way because it’s an industry. I think we’ve made it daunting for a lot of people. And I think that if you just focus on the things the tried and true, you can do that stuff in your house without weights or with things that are heavy in your house, you know, you can actually make progress.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. And if you don’t know anybody to teach you how to do stuff, all you have to do is go on YouTube. Just go on YouTube and look up beginner bodyweight workout. I’m sure there’s a bunch of them out there.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you can do stuff with no physical fitness equipment. Just do push ups and sit ups and body weight squats and you can get a great workout in that way.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s true.

JOE ROGAN: And nobody has to watch you. You don’t have to feel self conscious, just you and your phone.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You can go to my YouTube channel because during COVID I was doing my workouts and I said to my husband, I was like, my husband, well, record this sh and put it out there. So, yeah, and all of them are fun and interesting and easy.

And people still come up to me and they’re like, I lost, you know, a man came up to me at a convention the other day, said he lost over 80 pounds doing the workouts that I put and signed it for a Spartan race. Spartan race. And I was like, that’s awesome. I love that, that’s so cool.

JOE ROGAN: That’s very cool. See, that’s a great thing. They’re your fans. They see you working. I’m like, oh, my God, I’m going to work out with. And everybody works out together. Great.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: See, that’s the great use of the Internet. The Internet has a lot of great uses.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You can learn anything on the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: You can learn anything. You can find out stuff, how to make things and fix things and get information about something you never thought you were interested in. Look, you never thought that praying mantises were so scary.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And now I know. But you know what I’m doing?

JOE ROGAN: What?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I’m now already in my head trying to write a children’s book about praying mantis.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you are?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I am. It’s like, that’s my ADHD. I’m already.

JOE ROGAN: You started once you saw that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Once I did.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s hilarious.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I want a copy of that book. Probably.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s going to be a pop up book. So every time you move it, the…

The Ruthlessness of Praying Mantises

JOE ROGAN: Praying mantis is like, we just for some reason miss them. And when we’re describing the most ruthless animals on earth, we miss the praying mantis because they might be the gangster of gangsters.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I think they might be. Do they ever attack together? Do they work in coordination?

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good question.

KATEE SACKHOFF: If they did, they’d be unstoppable because that would be.

JOE ROGAN: That’s Starship Troopers.

KATEE SACKHOFF: That would be like, if a bunch of women cycled their periods, they could. We could take over the world.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Especially with those headsets.

KATEE SACKHOFF: We could really. Then we just talk to each other. Sh would be. That would be on fire. It would be on fire. We’d take over some crazy sh for sure. That would be awesome. That’d be awesome.

AI and Self-Preservation

JOE ROGAN: Well, maybe that’s a good use of technology. I know you’re anti AI. Maybe for that.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I am anti AI, because I am in self preservation mode here. I am desperate to be like, I’m madder, damn it. And not just to my family.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

KATEE SACKHOFF: You know?

JOE ROGAN: I know. I think we’re all going to be like that soon.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’ll. We’ll always find a place. You just have to be malleable and you have to figure out where to, you know, I don’t know. Adjust pivot.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s going to be some pivoting for sure.

KATEE SACKHOFF: A lot of pivoting.

The Sackhoff Show

JOE ROGAN: How often do you do your podcast?

KATEE SACKHOFF: So my podcast is once a week, every Tuesday.

JOE ROGAN: What’s it called?

KATEE SACKHOFF: It’s called the Sackhoff Show. It was called Blah, blah blah, but people couldn’t find it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s funny.

KATEE SACKHOFF: So we just changed it to the Sackhoff show, and we’re actually, like I said, doing in the new year, a Battlestar Galactica rewatch as well, because I’ve, like I said, I’ve never seen it, so I’m curious to hear.

JOE ROGAN: That’s kind of crazy. You’ve never seen it. The Sackhoff show sounds funny, too. It’s like. It’s your last name, but it’s also. It’s like a fun name for a show.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, we’ll see.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s got a good rhyme, too.

KATEE SACKHOFF: It is fun. I have a lot of fun. I’m just trying to be a tenth as good at it as you are, Joe. Well, you’re very good at this. There’s a reason why you’re the best at it. You’ve been doing it a long time, and, you know, you worked your a off.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’ll just tell you what I did. I just talked to people that I’m interested in. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I do that. It’s really hard to find the right audience in an oversaturated market, but it’s happening.

JOE ROGAN: It is oversaturated. It is, but it doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible. If you’re remarkable, you could pop through. And sometimes maybe it just takes coming on here, and then people hear about it and go wild it.

KATEE SACKHOFF: And I’ll be like, who’s Katie Sackhoff? She’s that chick from Battlestar Galactica.

JOE ROGAN: But you seem like you’d be an awesome podcaster.

Learning the Podcast Dance

KATEE SACKHOFF: I have fun. I love talking to people and. And I. It literally helped me figure out that I was ADHD, because I couldn’t. I couldn’t not talk on top of people. I was like, I listened. I listened. I did my first interview with Bryce Dallas Howard, God love her, and I listened to it back in the car with my husband, and I was like, oh, my God, I don’t stop talking.

JOE ROGAN: Do you wear headsets?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I do.

JOE ROGAN: You do?

KATEE SACKHOFF: I do.

JOE ROGAN: That helps a lot because you hear the talk, the over talking, which we all tend to do sometimes accidentally, because sometimes you don’t know when to come in and. But the. It’s a learned skill. It’s a learned skill. Like everything else. It’s like everything else, and you have to learn different. People learn the dance of different people. Some people have just a different thing.

And always in my mind, my number one goal is to try to make the. Get the most out of them. Get them to have the most fun the most. Get the questions that stir their interest the most. Something I want to know who you are.

KATEE SACKHOFF: For real? For real? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I want to help you, be the best version of you that you can when you’re doing it.

Authentic Conversations

KATEE SACKHOFF: That’s sort of my thing as well. You know, one of the things that came out of COVID for me was that. And I don’t know about you, but I had weekly conversations with girlfriends I hadn’t talked to in years. And we would, every Tuesday at 4 o’clock, we’d have a drink and connect again.

And the conversations were wonderful because we had the time to have them again. And then I started going back to conventions, and in the green room, I was having these wonderful conversations with people, and I was like, God, I wish I could record these, because they’re really authentic and you’re getting to see people in a very different light, and they’re really opening up because it’s not like a gotcha podcast.

If you want to cut something out, you can cut something out. I’m not here to ruin your career, you know? And the conversations are really interesting, and people are talking about things that they’ve never spoken about, and it’s just really fun. So I’ve really enjoyed it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, don’t you think you’re learning in the process as well? Isn’t that one of the more fun parts of it? The more you get to talk to interesting people, the more you learn, the more you understand how other people think and how they feel about stuff.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Yeah. And it inspires the sh out of me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, me too.

KATEE SACKHOFF: If I have a month where I’m not hustling and someone comes on the podcast and they’re like, I got six things in production. I’m doing this. I wrote an album. I got a book coming out, man, I got six kids. I’m like, f*, I have work harder.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t there.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Oh, of course there is. Of course there is. And I think that I’ve found the right balance. I have the right partner that’s super supportive, and we’re a real good team. And. And, yeah, it’s just. It’s. I’ve got. I think I’ve got the right balance, but there’s always going to be hustle in me. That’s.

JOE ROGAN: Of course. You seem like you’re well balanced, though. That’s. It’s a good thing to say.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I try. You should ask my husband and be like, that b is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: What? I’m just going to go on my instincts. I don’t want to hear any contrary data. Well, thank you very much for being here. This was a lot of fun. Thank you for having me. I was a huge fan of you on the show, so thank you. Cool to meet you.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Well, more things to come, I promise. I’ve got some really cool jobs in the can that are going to be me kicking a.

JOE ROGAN: I’d love to have you in here again.

KATEE SACKHOFF: I would love that. You’ll have to come on my podcast.

JOE ROGAN: I will do it. I’ll do it. Bye, everybody.

KATEE SACKHOFF: Bye.

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